Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

The Podcast:

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

All right. Thanks a lot for being here today everybody. This is Bullying Prevention Podcast number 13. Thanks for being here, Mr. Alden Moody. We appreciate you being here again for our podcast.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Of course. Happy to be here.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. Thanks for being here today, sir. Now, what we’re going to cover today is going to be one of my favorite topics which people don’t cover a lot is bullying adult to adult, so when you’re over 18, you’ve graduated high school, how adult bullying happens. And what we’ll talk about to start off with is since you’re in college about bullying between teachers at an adult level. You’ve got teachers that are professors and you guys in college, and how that actually happens. How would bullying happen there? And the difference between bullying and teachers that are just not good teachers.

Mr. Alden Moody:

There’s a few different levels going on there. When you have a teacher, especially a professor, there’s an age difference. A lot of professors tend to be much older than their students and they have this given authority, right? They’ve been given the title as teacher and they’ve been given authority over a classroom of students. They’ve been given pretty much godlike powers to decide how passes and who doesn’t pass. Generally-

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

We’ve met one requirement of bullying. They have an imbalance, I’m writing this down, of power. They do have that for sure, right? A professor automatically has an imbalance of power between you and them.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Oh, yes. The moment you walk in. Heck, they could be younger than you. You could be going back to college at 56 and you could have a 30-year-old professor and already that title already makes them up here compared to you. You’re like a little scrub compared to this person.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Sure. Sure.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Exactly.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

They determine your grades, right, so it doesn’t matter if you’re older than them. Sure.

Mr. Alden Moody:

They control the social power and the actual physical control over you in a way, right?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah.

Mr. Alden Moody:

There’s that. And then there is if we’re talking about bullying between a teacher and a student, there’s a variety of ways that that could be done. It could be kind of humiliation, so if I’m a teacher and let’s say you ask me a question, it could be legitimate or it could be kind of a dumb question, and a teacher could go, “We just went over that. Were you not listening? Were you not writing anything down?” And this could be… Even from the teacher’s point of view, this could be a legitimate… You could just have this frustration. You’re not necessarily trying to attack this student. But maybe you did cover it. Maybe you did think that this is how you’re going to teach the student how to do it. What really happens is you’re humiliating them in front of their entire peers and again, this could be just a bad teacher, or it could be a teacher that is actually intending to harm.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Usually when we’re talking about bullying, especially when it comes to kid-to-kid, peer-to-peer, to become bullying usually there’s an intention to harm. But here it can be a little grayer in those lines, right?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. I guess it’s interesting you say that because there’s so many times. I remember being in college and even in training and other adult training, or in a manager-employee situation, automatically there’s an imbalance of power. You’ve automatically got that happening. One third, one of our three bullying prevention requirements is happening, and what you said is exactly right. Is it an intention to hurt or is it just bad communication or bad teaching skills? And sometimes it may be intention to hurt and then that’s a different thing. If it’s bad communication skills, I guess as the student you got to just live with it. Maybe I’m being embarrassed, I’m being humiliated, it’s because the teacher’s bad. They’re just not a very good communicator.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

But sometimes these teachers kind of get power or they get some-

Mr. Alden Moody:

They get a little overzealous and-

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Or they get their own corporal reinforcement. They like it. They like making the students feel bad. Or managers, when we’re talking adult in the workplace, a manager might like the power. They might like to make their employees feel bad because it makes them feel good. I see this with people that aren’t very well developed and they have… Sometimes with people with personality disorders or some other issues, they might want to make other feel lesser, and that’s an intention to hurt, so that… There’s some reasons why this might be intention to hurt. And so-

Mr. Alden Moody:

They’re at the first level of morality at that. What’s that one guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I’m talking about.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

The first level of morality?

Mr. Alden Moody:

Well, it’s the first level is you’re not doing the correct thing. Second level is you’re doing the correct thing but only because people expect you to. Third level… It’s The Stage of Morality or something like that. Very smart guy wrote it.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Okay. We’ll look that up. We’ll add this to-

Mr. Alden Moody:

Yeah. We’ll have to add that later. Anyway, and then we get to the second level of bullying, so after the imbalance of power, which is… Remind me what exactly that is called.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Well, imbalance of power, intention to hurt, and then it’s whether it’s repeated over time.

Mr. Alden Moody:

There you go. Repeated over time. Well, the third part. Intention to hurt is that second part. The repeated thing, so this could be a teacher who repeatedly grades hard on your papers unjustly, repeatedly refuses to see you in office hours or refuses to give you good advice, repeatedly humiliates you in front of the entire class. And this happens. I’ve seen it happen. And not all of it’s with intention to hurt sometimes, but a lot of it is. A lot of it is just you’re bitter and you don’t like this one student, or you don’t like all of them and you just keep doing it.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. I guess you could be bullying all the students. I mean, it could be the type of teacher or the type of manager, I think this is really important because it could be in a work environment. The manager could be bullying everybody. It could be repeatedly embarrassing, humiliating, sending messages and not being a very good manager or being a very good educator to everybody, and if their intention is to hurt it’s different. I guess the thing is let’s talk about solutions in a little bit, but the solution, if they’re just bad at it, they’re bad, they’re not doing a good job because that’s how they were brought up and-

Mr. Alden Moody:

They’re not necessarily trying to hurt the other person but they are, right? That’s what we’re talking about.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. If their skillset is so limited that they always sound like they’re embarrassing somebody and they have such a limited skillset that that’s how their professor talked to them, that’s how their manager talked to them, or maybe they’ve got other problems in their own life. They’ve got horrible life at home. They’re getting divorced. Their whole family is going terrible and they don’t have any money. They could have all kinds of other problems, and so when people ask questions, and they’re in a bad mood, they snap back at them. Managers could do that, too.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Oh yeah.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

That doesn’t mean immediately it’s bullying, although it usually… It’s this thing. If it’s repeated over time, it’s probably not they’re just having a bad day. Teacher comes in and-

Mr. Alden Moody:

Yeah. That’s not bullying. That’s just snapping at someone, which is a problem, but it’s not bullying.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. It’s a different solution. It’s a different problem than if a manager is doing a bad job, or a manager is having a bad day, a professor’s doing a bad job, a professor’s having a bad day. Professors don’t always get as much training on how to be a teacher and how to educate people as they could. We know that because that’s… Part of their job is research. And same with managers. Managers don’t always get the support they need to be managers.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Of course.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

If it is bullying, though, if it is bullying it puts the person getting bullied into a conundrum, because now how do I fix this when it’s my boss? How do I fix this when it’s my professor? When we were talking about kids you had somebody to go to, which was your teacher or your parent. But if it’s your boss or your professor, who do you go to?

Mr. Alden Moody:

And it could be like the department lead, or it could be the manager of that manager, or something like that, but sometimes there’s not those cases, right? Sometimes it’s just that is it. That’s the highest you can go.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Well, one of the situations, I’ll give you a couple scenarios. One situation, let’s say you’re working for a small company and the person you’re working for owns the company. Who are you going to complain about bullying to? You could complain to the human resources director but the person that owns the company is the one that’s bullying you.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Yeah. You’re given not many choices in that regard.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. And even if it’s a more hierarchical company where the manager has a manager, if you go to the boss of your boss and they don’t handle it well, so you go to your boss’s boss and they don’t handle it well. You’re kind of at risk and now your boss is going to be upset with you from then on. If you go to your boss’s boss and the boss’s boss comes down and yells at your boss because they’re not necessarily handling it well, oh boy. Now work is going to be really pleasant.

Mr. Alden Moody:

It’s the consequence of I don’t want to say snitching. Telling the truth to the next level up, right? Because then there are consequences.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. And it’s not always easy. One of the things that I think that is… Yeah, let’s draw that out. If you have a boss’s boss, boss, and you, this is not always an easy situation. And this could be professor, this could be the dean, something like that, and student in a college situation. This puts you in a really difficult situation. Now, here’s the secret to this and the secret is that it’s not a secret that this is a complicated situation. We don’t have a magic pill for this situation. That’s where a lot of times when we get asked this. Well, okay, so what do I do? And people want us to give them like a one or two line answer and there isn’t a one or two line answer.

Mr. Alden Moody:

A one size fits all sort of just bare bones, yeah.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah.

Mr. Alden Moody:

No, it doesn’t work like that.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. As if we have a magic script you can go to the dean and say, “Well, here’s the thing I need to tell you,” and that’s going to magically tell this guy to tell the dean to tell the professor to act nice, and then the professor is going to automatically act nice to all students from then on. If I had that, we could solve all the world’s problems. We’d have world peace. It doesn’t work that way. That’d be pretty nice.

Mr. Alden Moody:

That would be very nice.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. Everything would be great.

Mr. Alden Moody:

We’d make a lot of money of that, too.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Maybe. Or we’d all be like chill and regular.

Mr. Alden Moody:

No, I know. I was just kidding.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. We probably could make a lot of money off that too. But it isn’t realistic. Now, what could happen is, don’t get me wrong, we do recommend if it gets severe obviously we would like to be able to talk to the professor. But in a bullying situation, if they’re truly intending to hurt, if my manager… Here’s the manager or the boss. If the boss is truly intending to hurt then this is very difficult to do. The movie Horrible Bosses is a good example of that. Mr. Moody, I know you remember that one.

Mr. Alden Moody:

I actually was thinking about bringing it up but I’m glad you did.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. It’s not a PG-13 movie for us to play a clip from for this show, but if anybody’s listening and they’ve watched that movie, that would be a good example of Horrible Bosses. None of those bosses could have been reasoned with or discussed with because it’s bullying. What can help everybody from this is understanding the difference between bullying and maybe miscommunication and bad management. Is it bad management, bad teaching, miscommunication, or is it bullying? If it’s bullying this is where you have to… First, you could identify it and not identify it wrong. In one of our earlier podcasts we talked about the difference between bullying and conflict. It’s conflict if there’s not the imbalance of power. Now, you could have imbalance of power with it, but if it doesn’t have the three characteristics: imbalance of power, intention to hurt, and repeated over time, if it’s not those three things then you’re better off because it’s a conflict situation. As long as the other person’s reasonable, which may or not be true. There’s situations that may not be true.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

I mean, if it’s your boss, you may have to just do what they want because-

Mr. Alden Moody:

They have authority. Yeah.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. You may not agree. Your professor, if you don’t like the assignment, it’s too bad. But if it’s conflict, it’s a different strategy. So, in this case is it bad communication? Is it a miscommunication? I’m sorry, let’s call it this. Better way to say this. Is it bad skillset? Maybe the manager just has a bad skillset. That’s not your job as an employee to fix. You can’t fix that. Sorry. That’s not something you can fix. But at least you can identify that and then work around it. If my manager has a bad skillset, get a different job if you need to, but you can then understand that and work around it. It’s not bullying.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

If it’s a miscommunication, that’s something you could work with. Is it bullying? Then we know maybe I have to do something else. That’s the first part of resolving the situation. Which of these boxes does it fit in and then I can try to figure out what to do. The problem for many people is… Sorry, go ahead.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Oh, no. I was just going to say and I think you would agree with this, one of the major problems and why this is so complex and complicated is that many of the times, especially in work environment, like a professional work environment or when you’re in school and you have a professor, it’s not necessarily something you could just walk away from.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Sure. Could be your dream job.

Mr. Alden Moody:

You may need the income. Yeah. It could be you got the whatever, working for Tony Stark. I don’t know. Whatever you’re doing. Yeah. And you can’t walk way or this is it, this is what you want to do, or you’re a student, you’re taking a class, and this is the only professor who teaches that class and you need it to graduate. You’re stuck there and that happens a lot. There’s only one professor who teaches a class and you got to take it, so you suck it up. Because in a school, peer to peer, you can diffuse, and you take that person, and you go away. But you can’t really go away.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. In one of these built-in imbalance of powers, and you may also be realizing you’re stuck there. That’s why it’s important to know what, at least first level, is it they have bad skills, it’s a miscommunication, or is it bullying? If it’s bullying, at least then I can try to figure out what the next step is. Now, what would I do if I go talk to the boss? When we were talking about kids, we talked about the difference between tattling and telling. Believe it or not, this applies here too. If you go to your boss and say, “Hey, I’ve got a whole bunch of bone to pick with my direct boss,” or the boss’s boss. If you go to your boss’s boss or you go the dean of the college and make a big scathing report about your professor, that’s going to get your professor in trouble. That’s going to get your boss in trouble. They’re not going to be very happy with you. You have to be very careful about how you approach this and I think the tattling versus telling thing is really important.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Am I trying to get help for myself or am I trying to get somebody in trouble? And I know I was talking about kids when I talked about this before, but I don’t know about you, Mr. Moody, but when I talk to adults, most of the time when I hear them complain about other people they want to get the other person in trouble a lot of times.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Not necessarily something serious serious, serious is going on. It’s just-

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

It could be that it’s serious or not, but when they’re mad they want to tell me why the other person’s a jerk. They don’t want to just try to get help for themselves. Truthfully, if it’s bad skills or a miscommunication, have at it. You can probably tell somebody that they’re a jerk or that they’re not very good. But when it’s bullying especially, they were intending to hurt you. They actually were trying to do so. If you really have identified that they were trying to hurt you, you have to go to the person you’re trying to get help from and you have to try to get help. So, you have to get help. Your main objective is not to ask them to get them fired. Your main objective isn’t to get them in trouble. Your objective is boss of my boss, I’m having trouble working right now because of these reasons. I would like to have some help in my current work environment. Well, what’s going on? This is what’s going on. I’m having trouble with this.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

So, now it’s an I statement. I’m having trouble. Then at least you’ll have more of a shot because you weren’t going in trying to get the other guy fired. You weren’t going in trying to get them in trouble. And it still may work that way because what you can’t control is that the boss’s boss isn’t also a bad manager and beats this guy up and goes and yells at him. It’s unfortunately something you can’t control. You can do the best job you can. Same with the dean. You don’t know that he’s not going to come down and bully this guy, bully the professor, and get him in big trouble. It’s a delicate situation. The best thing to understand is complicated situations, which is this, are going to have complicated solutions. Don’t expect it to be a simple solution.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Step one, figure out what the actual situation is. Is it the three things? Intention to hurt, imbalance of power obviously is, and is it repeated, so you can confirm that it’s bullying. Or is it one of these other things? Bad skills, miscommunication. If it’s one of the other things, handle it differently. If it’s bullying, then make sure you tell not tattle like we told the kids. I know that sounds a little sophomoric because we’re talking about adults, but make sure you’re just communicating with trying to get support and help for yourself.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Anything to add there, Mr. Moody? You’ve been a great help on this.

Mr. Alden Moody:

No. Not particularly. But well, I would like to say let’s go back to earlier. Let’s say you’re in a small business and your boss is running the business and they’re in charge. You can’t really tell on somebody, so what would you do in that situation? What would be one of the things that you could do? Not necessarily the thing that would always work, but one of the things that could work potentially.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

That’s a great question. You’ve got a boss and you. This is a scenario. Might only be you. Could be a two-person company. It’s the boss and just you working for a boss, and that’s not an uncommon situation. And this guy, look, I’ve been in this situation where I’ve been the boss and this is a very stressful situation. That doesn’t forgive somebody for bullying somebody else. First thing we do is it communication, is it bad skills? Lot of times it’s bad skills. This person doesn’t know how to be the world’s best communicator because they’re worried about making lawn furniture or whatever the company makes. So, understand which of those boxes is it and what should I do.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

The rule still applies. When you go to them you ask for help and support, not complain. Help and support. I’m having trouble doing my job and I’m struggling at work because of this. What I would really like is this. I need some help with this. It changes the communication pattern with the boss versus, “I can’t stand it anymore that every time I come to work you complain that I’m late but I’m not late. You said that I was late by two seconds.” Again, watch the Horrible Bosses movie if you want an example of that if you can stand that movie. It’s kind of a little bit-

Mr. Alden Moody:

It’s a little bit on the risque side.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. A little bit-

Mr. Alden Moody:

But it has a lot of really good examples of unescapable situations, almost.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Unescapable bad bosses. [inaudible 00:22:30]

Mr. Alden Moody:

Yeah. Unescapable for a variety of reasons, right?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah.

Mr. Alden Moody:

One of them is the small business one. One of them is one of these. And one of them is more of kind of a threatening blackmail sort of thing, and the other one is… It’s situations that you can’t get out of, really, and you just want to. And in that movie, they don’t solve them very well.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

They do not use the best solution. They try to murder-

Mr. Alden Moody:

They do not use the best solutions. They do-

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

We’ll spoil a little bit.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Spoiler. They do try to kill their horrible bosses. Luckily, they don’t-

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Right. And it’s not for kids so we don’t recommend-

Mr. Alden Moody:

Yeah, it’s [inaudible 00:23:06] kids. Don’t watch it with little Jimmy and Sally.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

You could watch Office Space, which I don’t-

Mr. Alden Moody:

Yeah. You can watch Office Space but don’t watch Horrible Bosses. But if you yourself are of the age and you want to see examples of terrible human beings running things-

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. Now, those guys wouldn’t have… You could do anything you want with them and they wouldn’t have helped.

Mr. Alden Moody:

They’re unreasonable. You could not go to them and say… Yeah, for again, a variety of different reasons. The bosses are bad in their own different ways. It’s not like cut and pastes or anything, but yeah, it’s bad.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

I’m going to say this again because it’s worth mentioning. Complex problems require complex solutions. Nothing that we’re showing on the podcast, or going to be in our book, or anything like that is going to be a simple solution to a complex problem. People try to do this. People want simplicity. And I understand that because I like simple solutions. I’d like to give you guys a cookbook. You do this when somebody’s bullying you and it would solve the problem every time. It doesn’t work that way. And that’s why-

Mr. Alden Moody:

It’s that two cups of niceness and…

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah, exactly, right? Yeah. It doesn’t work. We want to make sure that you understand what to do but the best shot you have is ask for help and support and be in that kind of language instead of, “I can’t stand it when you do this, and you do that, and you do this,” because that puts people in a defensive nature. You’ve got to change the communication pattern you use with people so that you can hopefully have your best shot at keeping them from bullying. Now, if they’re really, truly intending to hurt you, intending to cause problems, this is a decision you’ll have to make. That’s one of your other options, which is to not work there anymore. But as Mr. Moody said, it might be… Maybe it’s your dream job. Maybe it’s the only type of job. Maybe it’s the only place you can get a job in that location and you want to live in that location, so there’s a lot of reasons we understand why you may need to stay at that job and it may be ideal in every other way, so it’s a difficult decision for you to make. It’s not as easy as just quit the job if the boss is giving you a hard time, so we want to help you solve that problem.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Of course. And this help and support, when you’re going to your boss, is once again a diffusing action. You are not going and escalating this. You go in guns blazing saying, “I can’t take this anymore when you,” blah, blah, blah. Rather, go in there like you said, “I have trouble with this specific thing.” Completely different reaction. People will be much more willing to help you, even the people who are bad communicators and bullies. In this case your boss, right?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. Very well said. All right, well with that we can kind of finish up today. I think this has been a really good podcast and a really good summary. All the other stuff that we’ve podcasted about in bullying applies here in the adult situation. We wanted to take some time with the adult bullying to be a little bit more specific because of this very common situation of imbalance of power. Now, one of them that we didn’t really address too much we ought to talk about a little bit. This can happen in peer-to-peer situations and it can also happen within social groups. There could be social groups at organizations, within church groups, not that church groups would have bad organizations, but I was just thinking of a group of people within clubs, within-

Mr. Alden Moody:

Any organization that would ever exist could have this problem.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. Any group of people.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Oh yeah.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Any group of people. It can be a husband and wife, a couple. I do a lot of work with couples and one of them can imbalance of power because maybe they make more money than the other one, so now it wouldn’t be the boss and you. In the couples situation it could be the highest, the income earner and the no income earner, and that puts an imbalance of power here because one person earns more money and the other person is in an imbalanced power situation. It doesn’t mean they want to leave the relationship, necessarily, but it just means that there’s an imbalance of power. So, this model has to follow in all these cases. Now, of course if you can get mediation from a third party, that’s also a helpful situation, so I would recommend that in some of these scenarios.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

But this can be any kind of group, in peer-to-peer, and so a lot of the things we talked about in the kids section of our podcast and our writing here that we’re doing in our book is going to apply in adult bullying prevention, and we can certainly expand on this a little bit later. Anything else to add before we wrap up, Mr. Moody?

Mr. Alden Moody:

No. Not particularly.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Okay.

Mr. Alden Moody:

The only thing I guess I would add is that unlike peer-to-peer when we talk about kids, it gets a little bit more complex, like you said, when you get older, when you’re now an adult, bullying is now happening when you’re an adult. Even in peer-to-peer situations it doesn’t have to be boss to… It could be your fellow coworker who’s maybe a little bit more experienced or popular than you. And it still can be the same situation where you can’t leave.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Absolutely.

Mr. Alden Moody:

You can’t leave. It’s not even your boss that’s the problem it’s your fellow coworkers and maybe they just don’t like you.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. With a kid situation, in theory, there’s always other parties that are managing the kids, which is the teacher, your parents. There’s always governing third parties that ideally are supposed to watch out for you.

Mr. Alden Moody:

And in those situations those teachers who are supposed to watch out for you kind of have even more power than your boss when you’re at a job, because you have your unions and whatever, but you tend to have a little bit more power when you’re an adult employee rather than a child who’s bullying another child. Because the teacher can go, “Okay, you’re going to ISS. You’re going to timeout. You’re getting expelled.” Can’t really do that with adults, you know what I mean?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yeah. The levels of consequences can be different for kids, and nowadays there’s some argument that kids can’t get the level of consequence that they used to be able to, and it’s changed over time, but at the same time you’re exactly right that with kids in theory there’s this shell that’s governing the kids. Whereas with adults, it’s kind of a free for all. And built in is almost always this imbalance of power. Even if you’re let’s say a consultant and you’re an independent contractor, and you’re self-employed. So, you’re self-employed independent contractor. You don’t report to anybody. You’re your own employee. Well, guess what? You’ve got people that you contract with, that you consult with, and they could absolutely bully you because now if you don’t get the work done in time, even though they want stuff that wasn’t in the contract and they’re being completely unreasonable, what are you going to do? You want to get their business. And they could abuse you. There’s all kinds of stories about that.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Adult bullying can happen in lots of different ways and lots of different situations. My mom was a nurse and she could tell stories about the doctors, and she was a nurse, she was born in the ’20s. So, she was a nurse, would have been in the ’40s, and so can you imagine in that day and age? Doctors were… Not that they’re not high status now, but in the ’40s it was a big difference in power and doctors just ordered nurses around whenever they wanted, so there’d be a lot of bullying then. Gender difference and status difference in that situation. So, it was quite a difference there, so there’s a lot of scenarios with adults that the complexity of the power dynamics can be huge. And then what do you do?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

And again, complex problems require complex solutions, and we’re not unfortunately solving all this today. But hopefully in this podcast we’ve illustrated how to break down is it bullying, is it a communication issue, is it a bad skills issue? And in all my work with couples, a lot of it’s really bad skills. A lot of it’s bad communication. A lot of it’s bad skills. Most of the time, truthfully, people aren’t intending to hurt. But if it is, then you have to use different strategies.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Conflict resolution rather than-

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Well, conflict resolution won’t work, but conflict resolution will work if it’s bad communication. Conflict resolution will work if it’s bad skills. Conflict resolution strategies won’t work if it’s bullying because now the other person doesn’t need to resolve the conflict because they have an imbalanced power. I’m your boss. I don’t need to resolve conflict. Just do what I say. So, conflict resolution won’t work then, so what you need to do is hopefully get some third party, and if there’s no third party, then as we’re talked about you’re kind of on your own. In that case, you do the best you can to try to get the bullying to stop and you’ve got to work with that person yourself, so it’s a more challenging situation. It’s like you’re a kid in school. Somebody’s bullying you and you’ve got to only deal with that kid. It’s a very difficult situation.

Mr. Alden Moody:

And you can’t just punch them.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

And you can’t punch them. And you really can’t. You can’t punch them in any of the situations.

Mr. Alden Moody:

No, especially when you’re an adult.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

It doesn’t work in any of these situations.

Mr. Alden Moody:

No, it does not.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Even though that’s what we train people to do and sometimes people talk about that fondly, like they think that would solve all your problems. It would make things worse. We do teach people to… We teach a whole bunch of people how to punch really well and it would work in times of serious injury or death. If that’s the case, that’s what you do. But not in these cases because it wouldn’t work.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Nope. We teach self-defense. We do not teach aggressive attacking as a first step.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Aggressive attack [inaudible 00:33:38] bully.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Yeah. No. We don’t teach that because that would be… It would just be bad. It just wouldn’t work for anybody, right?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yes, sir.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Not you or the bully.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Yep. All right, sir. Well, thank you very much.

Mr. Alden Moody:

All right.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

I really appreciate your time today and great job on this podcast.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Yeah, no problem.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Thank you.

Mr. Alden Moody:

Yeah, no problem. Have a good one.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Okay, sir. Bye-bye.

Check out the Podcast!

Dr. Moody is also a licensed psychotherapist and maintains a practice at Integrated Mental Health Associates (IntegratedMHA.com) where he specializes in couples therapy and mens issues.