40 september 2019
counselling agency in Vancouver,
Canada. The end result, however, is
typically the same in all instances of
harassment: harmful relationships and
potentially dire effects on the victim’s
mental and physical health. “Emotional
abuse is the most invisible form of
abuse because it is less tangible than
the others—yet it can cause trauma that
gets carried into adulthood,” explains
Shalini Anant, a psychotherapist who
runs a private practice in Mumbai.
Thankfully, there are strategies for
dealing with intimidation.Identifying Bullies
Simply put, bullying is a systematic, re-
petitive abuse of power. When we think
of classic examples of harassment, such
as children being bullied in school,
power is often derived from physical
strength or higher social status. The vic-
tims are usually people who are seen as
weak or different. But bullying doesn’t
always follow this stereotype, or auto-
matically stop once you age. “Children
lack the tools to respond, but adults
also get bullied in workplaces, by their
families, spouses or parents-in-law.
Even elderly people may be bullied by
their kids,” Anant says.
“A person is rarely born a bully,”
says Balasundaram. “These tenden-
cies arise out of insecurity—from a
need to feel heard or wanting to feel
important about themselves.” When
bullies take aggression out on their
co-workers, the intimidation tends to
be more overt. The typical notion of aworkplace bully is a boss who continu-
ally berates employees in front of their
peers. “From a hierarchical position, it’s
easier to bully a subordinate,” she ex-
plains. “But in my experience, bullying
can also be from a peer-to-peer level as
well as from the bottom up.” Jacqueline
Power, a management professor at the
University of Windsor, says employees
who are uncooperative, openly defiant
or insulting, might believe they have
leverage because their boss falls into a
less privileged category—perhaps they
are younger, female or a visible mino-
rity—or because they feel their superior
is unqualified or ineffectual.
Bullying within families on the other
hand can often fall into a grey area, ac-
cording to Anant. It can be deliberately
subtle, such as withholding affection
or questioning someone’s intelligence
or life choices. Another example is
exerting control in a relationship by
constantly insisting that your partner
is misremembering key moments or
lying about them, to the point where
they start to question their own sanity,
a practice that has come to be known
informally as ‘gaslighting’.Facing The Problem
There are ways to push back against
bullies. If a person constantly belittles
a colleague’s ideas in meetings, for ex-
ample, the victim should first step back
and take inventory of their feelings,
says Dorothy Kudla, a Toronto-based
facilitator who runs workshops on
organizational effectiveness at FullReader’s Digest