Setting Limits with your emotions

The past two weeks for me have been quite difficult. My boss has really stirred up some drama and I suffered, but then I learned. My plan is to set limits with my emotions.

I have made no bones that I work for a person with Borderline Personality. Borderlines act in terms of "Drama." They start it and keep it going.

With drama there is a triangle of interactions between three people. There is a perpetrator, a victim and a rescuer. The roles are interchangeable between the three people.

Within a triangle of drama there is emotion, childish anger, and indirect expression of feeling and an absence of direct problem-solving. To stop it, you must clearly state your emotion and act like an adult.

I have decided that there is no integrity in drama. I have decided one of the problems with borderline personalities is that they have no integrity and that they have no insight that they have a character defect that includes no integrity.

I have been noticing my boss make comments that put her in a victim role.

• "I felt like I was jumped in there. You need to be on my side."
• "Now I am being made to look like the bad guy."
• "Why is he doing this to me?"

I have also been noticing comments that put her in a rescuer role.

• "I am working hard to save this department."
• "This is causing me a lot of work to fix things."
• "This is the cutting edge."

Now, she will be in total denial when she is in the perpetrator role. She is the perpetrator role quite a bit when she yells and makes abusive comments to groups of people. When I confronted her about making fun of me--she went into total denial and did not apologize. In fact she never apologizes.

I think in the recessionary times, we are more likely to let things slide. We are afraid to confront all the more as we are afraid of losing our jobs.

Without going into all of the detail of the past two weeks, I have been drug through the mud with my boss's drama.

I have to meet with her tomorrow. A major change is being made in one of my departments and the staff under me have a number of questions. She is acting like a victim when she really is the perpetrator.

My boss has made this repeated victim claim of being "jumped" in meetings when the staff ask good but tough questions. I made an effort to get the questions in writing first and I emailed them late Friday.

She wrote an e-mail response fairly quickly that indicated she was most bothered and that "We need to talk." She still feels jumped--borderlines do not like challenging questions--they can dish it but they cannot take it--again, they have no integrity, and as a result they create drama.

I will talk to her first thing Monday. She is likely going to make statements that make the staff look like perpetrators with all their questions, and that I am not rescuing her enough.

MY PLAN: I plan to put her emotion back on her.

I have decided to use an approach similar to Motivational Interviewing. In that I am going to repeat back to her what she says. If she says "I felt jumped in there, you should have backed me up in there." I am going to say something like "They jumped you" with a different inflection.
Then I will likely say "What is it about their questions that made you feel jumped?"


I have previously not said anything. The time has changed.

If she says, now I am made out to be the bad guy. I plan to say nothing, or at best, say "you feel you are the bad guy?"

I have decided that borderlines try to make others responsible for their emotions. I have learned lately through my time in the mud, that my borderline boss has been stating things only in feelings as to whether she is rescuing or she is a victim.

I expect this to be a very subtle approach and that this is the first line of defense. It is at best a Soft skill. It will be a lot of work, but I am going to have to start here. I do not think that she will have a clue what I am doing at first.

I think that it is tough enough coping with the economy as it is. I think that in this day and time we have to work on only owning our own feelings, and not those of someone else.

While we would like to empathize, many borderlines are willing to throw themselves out there as victims, depicting whether they are a victim of you or someone else. Things are not always safe out there.

For my boss, she needs to be responsible for her emotion. She probably never will be, she probably would die first. My plan is that I do not take responsibility for what she will not. Previously, I had gotten stirred by her emotion--it is time to start setting a limit--her emotion does not have to be my emotion.

Trying to maintain a sense of integrity and emotional intelligence

The past few weeks have been one of survival and reflection.

There have been office games that I have been trying to avoid, but they have caught me anyway. The games are a product of working for a borderline. I have found myself asking myself many questions this weekend.

First, let me talk about the dynamic at work. I feel marginalized from management . . . period. I would really like another job now.

The assistant vice president has isolated herself into exec-u-land and I have only seen her through the glass door of the main conference room. I still have had no desire to talk to her due to her abuse and now my boss has now stepped back into borderline mode.

My boss told me on Friday at a meeting called under what are at best false-pretenses not to build my team at her expense. The meeting was supposed to be called “rounding.” The first question was a rounding question . . . the rest of the 50 minutes consisted of my boss's emotional immaturity.

For those who work at hospital organizations currently paying money to the Studer Group, “Rounding” is a management technique of communication where a manager asks subordinates what is going right, and ask what the subordinate would like? It is supposed to be a positive meeting where the boss is listening to the subordinate trying to make the workplace more pleasant.

After the first question, my boss talked about how she did not feel part of the team in one of my departments for the rest of the session. She talked about the one subordinate who has not been doing his work. She talked about the other subordinate who had been enabling the lax one. She told me that she did not want to build my team at her expense.

She repeated the part about “her expense.” From what I understood, she did not want me forming such a tight bond that I would get sucked into the team and turn against her. Can you say paranoid?

She wanted to know my opinion, and every time I gave it, she responded with criticism or some statement that she was hurt by it. This was not rounding.

She used what she called an “AA” term, “signing off on each other's sh*t.” I looked that up on Google. I found nothing. Her intent seemed to be calling that enabling. I asked an old soul at my church about his impression of it. He told me that it meant “not to take someone else's inventory.” Again, this was not rounding.

I called and left a message for my old boss, since she is big into AA and Alanon—surely she would know about the term. She has not returned my phone call, and her husband curtly dismissed me on the phone today when I called a second time. I wanted her to tell me her understanding of the phrase. I think that she is just too connected to my assistant-vice-president and my boss—but then I can only guess.

I think that I would have been better off just going to a local AA meeting and asking someone if they had heard the phrase and what it was supposed to mean?

Okay, well, so I have the boss trying to play expert here and she is greatly failing. I think now at this juncture, what the phrase means does not matter any more. This is now survival in a tyrannical situation.

Working for a borderline.

I have been reading some business management communication books lately and as I read them, I think that the authors are missing some things. From reading many of the case vignettes in those books, I have decided that many of the problem coworkers and tyrannical bosses are borderline personalities. I have stated elsewhere that I think that the occurrence rate for borderline personality disorder is much higher than research states.

The point is that many of the tyrannical bosses (males or females) are borderline personalities, especially in mental health agencies and hospitals.

Borderlines are not about order and process and principle. The borderline boss is problem-focused and controlling. They micromanage and their subordinates do not feel successful in their work as the boss only talks about the possible crises and what was wrong versus whether anything was right. Borderline bosses are never satisfied with things.

The borderline bosses are focused about themselves and their insecurities. The borderline will focus about things outside of their control. They are guarded, critical, moody, and emotionally tyrannical in their dealings with their subordinate. They will rage and say abusive things. They are on constant edge.

They do not say hi to people in the hallway unless they have an agenda,which is another form of emotional abuse. They will look angry, and subordinates who do not know the distance run and hide.

Well, that is what I am dealing with now. One more thing, my boss said in the meeting of false pretense that I have been caught in the middle of things. She was right about that. I have pretty much been able to stay in the middle successfully because I have done drama management, and it has worked so far, but I question how much more it will work?

Drama Management

Borderlines stir up drama. They cannot help themselves.

In drama, there are usually three people and at least two of them are angry. Someone is the victim. Someone is the perpetrator. Lastly, someone is the rescuer. The roles are interchangeable amongst the three. The perpetrator can all of a sudden become the victim if the rescuer goes to far. The victim can become the perpetrator. The rescuer becomes the perpetrator when the rescuer goes to far. The communication is usually indirect, highly charged and someone is hurt.

I have looked at the different events in light of that. I think drama management has at least nine principles

1. Choose very carefully what you repeat—you actually risk furthering the drama by saying something.
2. Be direct in communication when you have to talk.
3. Determine what the problem really is and work to resolve it if there really is a tangible problem.
4. Let stuff die if it really is not a tangible problem.
5. Be mature and adult in your words and tone of voice.
6. Educate people about drama management where appropriate.
7. Repeatedly tell yourself that you have power in the situation by what you do or not do.
8. Integrity in all matters.
9. Things are perfect neither are things total disasters.
   

My boss has repeatedly attempted to stir drama. My boss would make statements that someone said something inflammatory or cheap about me. I decided not to say anything. I let much stuff die. When it has come to dealing with my boss and the problem subordinate underneath me, I have sought to talk in a calm and mature tone. I have tried to impact the people around me with integrity and principle—I have repeated my philosophy of work to my subordinates and I have tried to walk it like I talk it. To the few that I judged appropriate, I explained my philosophy of drama management. It has worked for the most part and I have verbalized it as such.

What I think that has changed is that my boss is going to make drama happen regardless and I am not going to have a challenge as to how to manage it. As far as I can tell, she has tried to pit me against the other two subordinates. If I am not against them, I am against her. If she cannot pit me against anyone, she will transfer my problem-subordinate to another department and will create drama in the target department.

Integrity

I have decided the literature about borderline personalities has missed that they do not have integrity. They (in a Freudian sense) they lack the inner ego strength to have integrity. They do not have integrity within themselves and lack insight into their own contribution to their own problems. It is all about them, and if integrity does not work for them in the moment, they will distort, lie, back-stab, rage, cause a scene, withdraw, and abuse to control their fragile little realm.

My boss did not demonstrate integrity on Friday. In fact, she has demonstrated very little integrity for the two years she has been in the job. She especially did not call her meeting with me in the name of integrity. She had an agenda that was about her and her control. Was there a modicum of valid business concern in her meeting? Yes, but she was not straight forward and it is difficult to tell where the real matter lies.

I am not going to discuss what my plans are exactly tomorrow, but I have a plan where I am going to focus on maintaining integrity and principle. I am still at this time unsure whether or not is the right thing and whether I am going to follow that course of action because it is difficult.

Integrity in this day and time is difficult. When you are trying to survive and pay the bills, the temptation is there to do what seems to be needed. Sometimes that “need” is not moral or legal. But there is a generalized excuse in group-think that “everyone is doing it.”

Each of us is in charge of our own life. Sure we look to role models and mentors to guide us. But there are at least 10 tests we can ask whether something is going to help us maintain integrity. Any of them may cause pause to reconsider a planned course of action.

1. Is this going to get me fired?
2. Is it against corporate policy?
3. Is this illegal in the laws of the state or nation?
4. Does this violate any religious or moral code?
5. Is this good professional practice?
6. Is this of good principle that I can do again without getting burned?
7. Is this something I can look back on and say it seemed to be the right action at the time?
8. Is there going to be a consequence if I do not do it?
9. Am I crossing an interpersonal boundary and trying to do something that someone else really needs to be doing?
10. Does this actually feel right?

These are not perfect, but they are questions that we can ask to test whether I am maintaining integrity in matters. I am admit that I am feeling tenuous right now as nothing is perfect.