Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / World of Bullies #3: Unveiling the Invisible Enemy - Confronting Family Bullies
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions, those involving someone with a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host, bill Eddie. Speaker 2 (00:22): Hi everybody. Speaker 1 (00:24): We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute based in San Diego, California where we provide training, consulting, coaching and methods and programs and classes all to do with high conflict. In today's episode, we are in our third installment of the World of Bullies series and today is all about bullies and families. We'll break down one family story from a listener and see if a bully is involved and what we can do about it. But first, let's have a couple of notes. Send your high conflict related questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or on our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast where you'll also find all the show notes and links. So Bill, we've talked for a couple of weeks about bullies and your brand new book, our New World of Adult Bullies. I just got my copy last night, so it's very exciting. It's just fun to look at the cover. Tell us about this cover. Speaker 2 (01:29): Well, the cover, there's a story. The cover tells the story. You see the little fish on the right being chased by the bully fish, but all the other little fish got together and put together, they look like a bigger fish and they've come up and they've scared the bully and the little fish is getting away. And so that's really the fundamental message is we often have to get help to set limits on the bully and we can, there's more of us than there are bullies, and it's to get the best out of bullies while restraining their bad behavior. Speaker 1 (02:07): Excellent, excellent, excellent. So this bully, this one little fish down here can be a bully in a family. This probably happens a lot because, and I would think that a lot of bullies and families are hidden. Is that true? Speaker 2 (02:23): Yes, and one of the things throughout I found is bullying is mostly hidden. And so the examples I've used, many of them were public examples as well as some cases that I had that are disguised. People don't realize how much bullying is going on because it's hidden and families may be where there's the most because families can the most easily hide it. Speaker 1 (02:48): And I think in families too, that the family becomes so used to it, it's just so normalized in a part of their everyday life that they don't even recognize it as bullying. So they're probably feeling low self-esteem and disempowered and just think it's normal. Is that normal bill Speaker 2 (03:06): That's very common. The whole family adjusts and that's one thing I learned as a family counselor is that families work as a system. And so if someone in the family say has a disease, they're sick with cancer or something, the whole family reorganizes around that person. Well, if someone's a bully, the whole family reorganizes around that person. And there's been a lot of research like in the alcoholic family if someone's an alcoholic and the roles people play, but bullying is really significant and especially since the pandemic, it's gotten worse because people are taking out their frustrations inside their family. They couldn't go anywhere else for a couple of years, but now that's still continuing to some extent. Speaker 1 (03:57): Wow, that really brings up a potent point during the pandemic. If you're in a family with a bully and you're locked down with that person, that was probably a pretty rough time. Speaker 2 (04:09): Absolutely. And we know domestic violence went up during the pandemic and people couldn't leave. The bully didn't go to work, the victim didn't go to work, and so people are kind of trapped with each other. And I was getting requests to write articles, how do you cope with a domestic violence perpetrator if you can't leave them? And I don't like to teach people how to do that. I gave some tips, but ultimately it's safest to be able to get away. So families are hard and for kids even harder, they don't really have places to go. Speaker 1 (04:47): Right. I think the pandemic really put the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, of many marriages, particularly those that did involve a bully or maybe other situations depending on the role in the family. But I've heard of so many divorces that were blamed the people involved in them blamed the pandemic for and being locked down with a bully for the divorce. The target of blame that we talk a lot about on this show is the person who gets targeted by someone whose pattern it is to blame others for everything or just about everything. I would think with a bully, is it common for them to have a target of blame? And if so, is it the weakest, most vulnerable person that is the target, or would it be, is it equal opportunity? Speaker 2 (05:40): My belief from everything, my practice experience as a therapist, lawyer, mediator, as well as what I read, is that bullies try out bullying on everybody that they don't really discriminate at first, but then certain kind of succumb to the bully. And so in a way it may be the least assertive person, the most distraught person that bullies don't bother whether there's a lot of pushback because they want to dominate somebody. That's the theme. They want to dominate or destroy another person or their reputation. And so to fulfill that theme, they can't do that with somebody that pushes back as hard as they pushing. So when people are assertive, now that's different from aggressive where you try to punch the bully or something, I don't recommend that, but assertive is saying, you can't talk to me that way or I'm going to end the conversation. Things like that, as long as it's safe to even say that, but they tend to get the weakest link. But what's interesting in terms of kids for example, is they often form an alliance with one of the kids against another one of the kids or even with the kids against their spouse. So it's not absolute, but I'd say tendency is to pick on the weakest link. Speaker 1 (07:09): Makes sense. It makes sense. So we have a story from a listener. I'll read it here and get your take on it. Is there a bully? Is there a pattern? And then we'll talk about what to do with it after we take a break. So my sister lives with our parents and as they've aged, she's become their caregiver. She handles their shopping medication dispensing food preparation, house cleaning, driving medical appointments and finances even while they were still able to do a lot on their own, they stopped doing those things because she made the stop and then they just sort of resigned themselves to a life of being bossed around by their ongoing child and stopped doing the things that they were capable of doing. She spent their limited amount of money on cat food for over a hundred cats. So they were often left with threats of maybe their electricity being turned off for non-payment and lack of food and things like that. Speaker 1 (08:06): She whined and complained to external family members about their poverty state to get them to feel sorry for her and send money to the social media world. She posts beautiful pictures of scenery and wonderful quotes from books and thought leaders, always offering to pray for my dear aunt or my sweet sweet neighbor, while at the same time refusing to let her family us, her siblings, come into the house and even visit our parents or talk to them on the phone. We believe most of this is because her hoarding had reached untenable levels and refusing to take our mother to the doctor for her increasingly worsening medical conditions that were life-threatening for over two years because she wouldn't let the home health nurses come to the house to treat the condition. I'm pretending to be lovely in front of people while we occasionally walk up to the door unexpectedly, we can hear her berating our nearly 90-year-old parents. Speaker 1 (09:05): She tells everyone who will listen that she's such the victim and they all think she's a saint, mostly because she also has physical disabilities. I financially supported my parents and my siblings have as well and supported our sister for decades and sorted out all of their many, many crises. She lies and lies and lies and lies and people just believe her asking for zero proof to back up her lies. She has even tried to turn our own grandchildren, her great nieces and nephews against us, their parents and aunts and uncles, and has exceeded in turning siblings against each other. She laughs if I bring anything up and mocks me. There's no reasoning. I've walked away from the whole mess, but feel awful that my parents are living unprotected from this bully, but I see no alternative. Are there any, so Bill bullying, I guess it's rather obvious, but what you wrote in your book about all the powers of bullies, what do you hear in there? What powers are happening here, if there are any? Speaker 2 (10:12): Yeah, no, I put in 10 powers of bullies and I hear several in there and what I have to say is I can't believe how many stories like this I've heard in the last couple of years. Speaker 1 (10:27): As you're writing the book, people are telling you these stories. Speaker 2 (10:30): Well, partly with writing the book and partly just I do a lot of consultation and family. It used to be mostly divorcing spouses, but now it's that, but also more with elderly parents and competition among siblings. And if there's a bully in the family, it might be one of the elderly parents or it might be one of the siblings. You're hearing these things. So the first thing I want to point out really is the isolation. That there really is an effort to isolate the targets or victims and to keep everybody else out so that they're isolated. One of the powers I say is emotional repetition. That's the heading for a chapter, the power of emotional repetition. But in isolation, in isolation, people's go down. So the victim's self-esteem go down, their ability to be assertive, which I said at the beginning, people should be just vanishes. Speaker 2 (11:36): And it's like this in many cases like this, in domestic violence cases, child abuse cases, parental alienation cases, as the targets of this just get weaker and weaker and everyone goes, why don't you just get out? Well, especially elderly people physically, it's harder to just get out of the situation, but over time emotionally they get worn down. So this borders on or is elder abuse and that's one big area of bullying, but another is the playing the victim. And I have a chapter on that projection and playing the victim and we see bullies doing that a lot. And that gets them other people to feel sympathetic for them. And that's another chapter is the other people become negative advocates. So there's all these, what I call hidden dynamics that are hidden in plain sight. Once you know about them, say, okay, where's the negative advocates? Speaker 2 (12:42): Who are the negative? There they are, okay, how's the isolation going? Yep, there it is. How about playing the victim and telling the world how wonderful I am? I'm a hero. The bully's story is there's a terrible crisis. There's terrible people, either other people or the people themselves. And then I'm the hero and they teach the world, they're the hero and the world goes, oh wow, what a good person taking care of her elderly parents without knowing the story. So we've got what about five or six boxes checked here? So definitely you have a pattern and the pattern's not good and the pattern often is progressive so that their sense of self, the parents goes down and goes down unless somebody intervenes and people are stuck and trapped. And so many stories like this today. Speaker 1 (13:42): Yeah, it's very sad. And there was more to this story here, I'll read the rest. In our case, a medical caregiver eventually did intervene, like you were just saying, bill and reported this whole situation to adult protective Services where it was investigated. However, this person, the sister, was able to get the adult protective services worker to completely be on her side. So is that a negative advocate? V? Speaker 2 (14:15): Yes. That's what happens. People get emotionally hooked and bullies are good at persuading people. That's where I get the bully story. There's a crisis, there's an evil villain, and I'm the superhero that can be very persuasive if they can control all the information and they pour on the charm. And that's one of the characteristics of bullies is that they can be very charming in public while they're very bullying and private. So often people don't know. They don't know what's with their neighbors. They're always so friendly, hi in the morning, how you doing? And you find out they've got, they're holding teenage girls hostage in their basement. There was that case in Cleveland I think it was, who knows? But what's sad is that even a lot of professionals aren't really able to look for these contradictions and to probe and ask questions and to expect that there's bullies out there and they're going to try to you. And it sounds like they convinced the a PS person that maybe everything's okay or that this is the protective person, Speaker 1 (15:36): Right? We have that a PS person then becoming a negative advocate and then the bully continues to wreak havoc sometimes. And it doesn't matter what kind of family situation it is, they want to turn people against their targeted blame. And so that can be really difficult and isolating for anyone who is being targeted by a bully. Speaker 2 (16:04): And one thing I think you hinted at is that the target of the bullying may be like the parents, but also other siblings who may be starting to speak up and show concern neighbors. So they also become targets, especially at if they're dealing with professionals like adult protective services, they may say, and my sister, you got to make sure if you talk to her, she's going to just lie through her teeth to you. She's really dangerous. I think she's a sociopath, don't listen to her. Whatever she says, she hates me, so don't believe a thing she says. And so they set up the person to come in mistrustful of people who really do want to help and who really are honest. And so they create this kind of little universe that's upside down. And it sounds, this story sounds like it has that, and many of the stories I hear have that and it's very tricky. Speaker 1 (17:09): Yeah, it's tricky and it's very sad, like you said earlier, just very sad. So let's take a quick break and then when we come back we'll talk about the bully as a gatekeeper and children being bullied. So we'll be right back. Alright, we are back and we're going to talk more about bullies as gatekeepers to children, to elderly parents, to other family members, maybe to financial information, a lot of different things. So Bill, is this common, the bully being the gatekeeper? And maybe explain if you would first what a gatekeeper is. Speaker 2 (17:51): Sure. And yes, it is very common. This is one of the key things that bullies do to isolate. So gatekeepers are kind of stand in between, and especially in families, they stand between people who should be able to have a direct relationship. It's like in the alcoholic family, let's say dad's the alcoholic and mom's the codependent. And mom says to the kids, don't talk to your father, talk to me, go through me and says to dad, don't talk to the kids. Go through me. Well actually this is a team. Then the gatekeeper is the codependent. But in many cases the bully in the family tries to control information. So in a parental alienation case, in a divorcing family, the one parent's a gatekeeper to the children and says, dad can't see the children unless he jumps through these three hoops or mom can't see the children, dad says if he's the gatekeeper, unless they jump through these hoops. Speaker 2 (18:57): But as you also said, financial, so even intact families, you may have a bully who wants no information to leak out. I'll give you an example. I think of an intact family with domestic violence where the husband was actually the victim and the wife was occasionally be assaultive and he was a fairly meek person, but she controlled all the finances. He had no idea. He came to my office to quietly find out about divorce what you have to do. And they said, well gather all the accounts and get the account numbers and banks and take pictures of account statements. He says, I don't know where they are and I don't know what they are. And I'm sure she's hidden stuff far away. He was just really helpless about financial information. So you get bullies this way. And when you think about elder abuse, like the example you started out with, we see financial control, family control, controlling the household. Wherever one person can control another person's life, bullies might slip in. And that's why I want everybody to be aware of this. There's bullies out there, maybe five to 10% of people, you just don't realize it. So have your eyes open. Notice these kinds of patterns. Is somebody isolated? Is somebody being victimized? Speaker 1 (20:33): And if they are being victimized, if they are being isolated and we do finally get our eyes open, then what do you do? Because in so many cases, because of the isolation, it's hard to do anything or to even know about it. But let's say you do know about it and what leverage do you have? A lot of people are afraid to, number one, stand up to a bully for whatever that means. And number two, there are just some cases where you just don't really have any leverage If you can't get people to believe you that true bullying is going on. Speaker 2 (21:07): What has to happen? It's like the picture on the cover of the book. You've got to go to other people. And it may be if you're a sibling and you've got let's say four other siblings, and one of them's the bully controlling the parents is go to the other siblings and give each other support to intervene or go to professionals, have a consultation with a therapist or a lawyer and find out what are my options here? What's really interesting is there's some terrible situations that people have tried to expose and had trouble and end up in the news. I did a lot of reading of news articles in writing my book, and there's so many situations where there's like a dozen people covering up and justifying, but a journalist exposed the story and now they're getting attention. And suddenly a whole division of a government agency might be exposed as colluding with a bully or just being incompetent and not recognizing this is a bully situation. That's one reason I always teach professionals. You always have to have three theories of the case. What you're being told might be true, but what you're being told might not be true at all or maybe partially true. And if you don't always think about that when someone tells you there's a crisis or a person in trouble, you may be on the wrong side, on the wrong team and helping someone get hurt and bullied rather than helping someone that needs help. Speaker 1 (22:50): And that's a tragedy. It's a true tragedy because so many are being marginalized and it's very disempowering and the opposite of having a fulfilling life. And so yeah, you just have to check things out, always check out whether this could be true, might not be true. So let's switch now to children being bullied. Can children be bullied or do we call it abuse or is it both? Are they the same? Speaker 2 (23:19): Well, bullying and abuse are pretty much the same thing. Child abuse, domestic violence, bar fights. If somebody's really harming another person is bullying. I think we think of abuse with certain categories of bullying that have become familiar and repetitive. So we think of child abuse could be hitting the child, could be sexually abusing a child could be neglecting a child, so they're starving, they're not getting fed and emotional abuse in all of those situations. It's bullying. Somebody's harming a child and it's a pattern. And that's the thing with bullying, it's a pattern. It's an unequal relationship that's being taken advantage of. And so yes, children are one of the prime people that are bullied because they're smaller, they're physically smaller, they don't know how the world works, they don't have resources outside their family. So children are some of the people that are most abused and no one knows in some cases Speaker 1 (24:28): It's so soul destroying to think of that in families, the people that are supposed to love each other, particularly love their children and protect their children are sometimes the biggest monsters. Just over the weekend I was reading some adoption stories and people who were put in a cage and fed dog food and things like that. So there's different levels of bullying and like you said, and to get to that level. How does this happen? It Speaker 2 (25:04): Happens first of all because there's bullies. And bullies have a drive to dominate or destroy other people to create win lose relationships. And my theory is that bullies are an ancient personality that's still part of our personality gene pool because it has succeeded in different times and places, and some people are born this way, antisocial, bullies, antisocial personality disorder is the most genetic, one of the 10 personality disorders. So people are often born with it and they really are born without a conscience and don't develop it. Part of that's why, but also people were abused as kids and now as adults, they abuse their kids and other personalities or they were indulges kids and allowed to get away with harming and picking on other people. So we have to understand those people exist maybe five to 10% of society. And the goal isn't to get rid of them, it's to set limits on their bad behavior because they can contribute. Speaker 2 (26:14): Many have positive things to contribute. So we have to recognize this exists, let's say five to 10% of families and households. And so we need to have some eyes open. I'm not wanting to teach people to spy on their neighbors like they do in China or did, well maybe they are again, I'm not sure, but you get a repressive culture where everyone's spying on each other. That's not the answer. The answer is to just have an awareness. So if something comes to your attention that sounds strange, that you don't discount it and that you don't believe everything that people tell you. I always say we shouldn't believe anybody more than 95%, even ourselves. We never know when our brains are playing tricks on us and want us to someone we shouldn't like or dislike someone we should. So I think a lot of it is just a lack of awareness by outsiders and bullies getting away with it. They have control of their children. But another thing I wanted to add is we have smaller families now, and so when there's only one or two children and maybe parents are separated, families are much more able to hide abusive behavior than when people had four and eight and 12 kids and aunts and uncles lived in the house. Speaker 1 (27:43): That's a really good point. Yeah. Interesting. So I guess to wrap this up, it's sad, but if you're in a family and you are being bullied, there are a lot of resources. We'll have some of those in the links and the show notes if you're confused, if you're feeling down about it and let's say you're on the outside, try to connect those dots. Don't just believe everything you're told if you confused about something that might be a yellow flag or even a red flag that's meant to be explored a bit further. So medical professionals, adult protective services, child protective Services, everyone needs to be trained. And I'm sure there's a lot of training out there, but it's important to understand this. Speaker 2 (28:29): Let me add, and I put this in the book too, is there's a lot of examples of bullies getting stopped. And in my book, I have more examples of bullies getting stopped than bullies getting away forever with their behavior. So it is possible. I want to give people hope, and just because Child Protective Services and Adult Protective Services exist is a good sign because we didn't have that 30 years ago or 60 years ago. And so there's a lot of hope, but people do need to be much more educated. Speaker 1 (29:04): Yeah. Thank you for that. That's so important. It's not hopeless, right? Yes, yes. We can be hopeful. So thank you. Next week we will talk about bullies as leaders in companies and other organizations and profit and not-for-profit. In the meantime, send your questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or submit them to high conflict institute.com/podcast. We'd love it if you tell your friends about us, your colleagues, and give us a thumbs up or somewhere, wherever you're listening to this and keep learning and practicing skills. Be kind to yourself and others. Set a lot of limits when necessary, and we'll all try to keep finding the missing piece and keep the conflict small. It's all Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts@truestory.fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.