Below you can read an exclusive excerpt from Matthew Sharpe’s latest book, Stoicism, Bullying, and Beyond.
Beyond mere coping, this revolutionary book embraces the opportunity for personal growth amidst adversity. Uniting Stoic principles and powerful resilience exercises, it addresses the widespread problem of bullying and 'mobbing'. With a primary focus on the victims, it imparts invaluable guidance on effectively managing negative emotions and making wise decisions in what is often perceived as life's ultimate challenge.
Sharpe understands the terror of being mobbed at work, he captures that terror in engaging prose, and he draws from Stoic philosophy practical ways of recovering the joy of life. Few books this profound are as easy to read as this one. It will do a lot of people a lot of good.
—Kenneth Westhues, Professor Emeritus, University of Waterloo
Stoicism, Bullying, and Beyond
How to Keep Your Head When Others Around You Have Lost Theirs and Blame You
In Book 11 of his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius recommends to himself nine gifts from the muses, to assist him with dealing with insults. In this vein, let me now proffer six gifts from the Stoics, to assist those dealing with workplace bullying.
I. Dealing with insults: one experience all bullying targets will share is that of being insulted, slandered and misrepresented, whether openly or behind their backs. Stoicism’s emphasis on keeping your head when others around you lose theirs saw them developing powerful philosophical strategies for dealing with these experiences, as William Irvine’s invaluable A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt–And Why They Shouldn’t in particular has explored. Stoicism’s practices for dealing with–and taking the “teeth” out from–insults and false accusations, key weapons in bullies’ arsenals, are too-little-known tools which bullying targets can draw upon when their colleagues continue to bait them, hoping to cause distress and anguish.
Each of these exercises—Marcus’ nine gifts from the muses—turns upon distinguishing between what others have said about us, and how we respond to it. As he writes:
Say nothing more to yourself than what the first appearances report. Suppose that it has been reported to you that a certain person speaks badly of you. This has been reported; but that you have been injured, that has not been reported.
(Meditations 8, 49)
To the extent they assist targets in not biting back, because they no longer feel the intended injuries being directed at them, these strategies disempower the bullies, as well as affording the target greater resilience in the face of slanders.
2. Preparing for difficult encounters and conversations: as long as targets choose (or feel compelled through material need) to stay in their workplaces, and the bullying is not stopped, they need to maintain a functional level of peace of mind, to be able to work productively in a hostile environment. Stoicism’s practices of premeditating adversities, to prepare for even the worst eventualities, is an invaluable practice here. We often cannot avoid meeting difficult people, and targets are often compelled to meetings with managers, in whose capacities and justice they have no faith. By visualizing the worst that can happen, and also recalling what powers we still have even if the worst unfolds, the Stoic practice of premeditating of adversities can enable targets to minimize their anxiety about these meetings, so they can perform as well as possible facing possibly very difficult conversations.
4. Reclaiming boundaries: bullying or mobbing has been described by Swedish sociologist Heinz Leymann in his classic work Workplace Mobbing as Psychological Terrorism: How Groups Eliminate Unwanted Members as a form of “psychological terrorism”. Being targeted by bullies is an experience in which the boundaries of the individual’s sense of self are challenged: their professional self and capacity to work, their social self and right to recognition, and their personal selves, in cases where their privacy is withdrawn and their private lives are discussed behind closed doors or mocked to their faces …
Starting from the dichotomy of control, it asks us to respond even to situations in which many things we have taken for granted are taken from us, by recognizing that we still have agency: our thoughts and choices remain ours, no matter what others can take from us.
Stoicism is a philosophy which stresses the importance of knowing what is in our control, and what is not in our control, and taking ownership of the difference. Starting from the dichotomy of control, it asks us to respond even to situations in which many things we have taken for granted are taken from us, by recognizing that we still have agency: our thoughts and choices remain ours, no matter what others can take from us. This powerful, difficult insight is echoed by such survivors of the very worst humans have visited upon each other as Victor Frankl to Edith Eger, both of whom endured Auschwitz and built new lives after the war. It can assist targets of workplace bullying too, as their present work role, professional reputation, and sense of self is challenged.
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