Workplace Bullying - a lens to understand

A very good video on workplace bullying.... which is what occurs in many cultic situations - like Shasta / OBC....  under authoritarian leaders like Kennett or Eko or so many others.  Let's call a spade a spade.  Drop the holy stories about skillful means and crazy wisdom and tough love.... these cultures are based in toxic behavior..... watch the video. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAgg32weT80

some other good videos on the same topic:

https://youtu.be/tlB1pFwGhA4

https://youtu.be/nXcU8x_xK18

great idea to create a topic on suppressing the koan.  See what others have experienced. 

In the case of Shasta and other authoritarian personality cults - the bullying is made holy, anointed, seen as the ideal way to behave - and in a culture where literally no one is in touch or even consciously aware of their shadows and unmet needs, what a circus of toxicity!!!!!   This disconnect from reality is truly astonishing.  What you imagine and believe you are doing is literally the opposite of what you are actually doing.  And there is no room anywhere - at any time - for any one to stand up and say, "What?"  or "Stop!"  Zero feedback allowed.  No sane oversight.  No way to stop this continuing train wreck.... except by leaving.  So the bully is seen as the saint / sage / buddha and anyone who questions or stands up to this is cast as the defective failure, the one who rejects or kills the Buddha.

this falls under the category "Toxic workplace" - so it goes beyond bullying - or we could call this "Toxic culture."  Of course, many people who belong to spiritual organizations or live in spiritual communities don't think of themselves as employees or their environment as a "workplace."  So there is the unwholesome behavior that comes from above - from superiors, seniors - and then there is the horizontal culture - where many people participate in patterns of destructive emotions or actions - including bullying but also - as noted in this piece - willful neglect.  If the culture is based on some version of the one true way to think and behave and humiliation is a valued teaching method - than deliberate neglect can be even worse than emotional bullying or a physical slap on the face.  In these cases, the goal is to diminish the person, smash their ego, send them the message that they are nothing, irrelevant, their feelings and experiences do not matter - all in the name of some higher good, but harmful nonetheless.

The story / concept that spiritual groups are somehow better or more holy or above "worldly" organizations, corporations, workplaces, colleges, is now clearly absurd.  All the evidence proves they are no different.  All of it.  When humans gather together they form a culture - and the core syllable there is "cult" - and any collection of folks is subject to human nature and behavior, politics and personality issues and group-think.  Just because you have a religion or something you call spiritual doesn't mean you are better than others or your group is now immune from the laws of human nature.  Calling salt sugar does not make it sweet.  And being blind to shadows actually makes the situation worse.


Ignoring Your Co-Workers Is Worse Than Bullying Them

By Paul Bisceglio • May 30, 2014 • 9:44 AM

A new study finds that a harassed worker is better off than a neglected one.

Tired of that [banned term] boss who keeps making fun of you at work? You’re not alone. In the past decade, research has established bullying as a prevalent problem among working Americans. A survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute earlier this year found that more than a quarter of adults have suffered some form of harassment at the office, most often from superiors. The effects on employees were severe: anxiety, depression, and, in extreme cases, even post-traumatic stress.

As damaging as office bullies’ unwanted attention appears to be, however, a group of researchers believes they’ve found something even more harmful to workers: no attention at all.

For a recent study in Organization Science, the University of British Columbia’s Sandra Robinson and her team analyzed surveys that juxtaposed the consequences of workplace ostracism with workplace bullying—alienating co-workers, that is, rather than abusing them. The results suggest that the former is a lot worse.

“We’ve been taught that ignoring someone is socially preferable. If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all. But ostracism actually leads people to feel more helpless, like they’re not worthy of any attention at all.”

Two of the study’s surveys asked a diverse set of American workers to rate their sense of belonging and well-being at work, as well as the extent to which they’ve felt ostracized and harassed by co-workers. People whose colleagues often neglected them—left them out of conversations, ignored them in the hallways, etc.—felt unhappier, disliked work more, and even more frequently left their jobs than people who were bullied.

This response is striking, the researchers say, because ostracism is seen as far more socially acceptable than bullying. They even conducted an initial survey that found workers consider ignoring their colleagues more appropriate than harassing them.

“We’ve been taught that ignoring someone is socially preferable. If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” Robinson says in a press release. “But ostracism actually leads people to feel more helpless, like they’re not worthy of any attention at all.”

The researchers speculate that exclusion has a particularly powerful impact on workers because it cuts out the possibility of any sort of positive social exchange with their peers. Ostracism’s “primary impact is to disconnect and to isolate, not to involve,” the researchers write. It “disengage[s] the target … from social interaction” and “inhibit[s] the target from responding to this form of mistreatment.”

Robinson and her team note that ostracism in the workplace need not be intentional to be harmful. In some cases, busy or exceptionally aloof co-workers may have no idea they’re being cruel by neglecting one of their colleagues. But they’re still severing the thread of human connection that seems, above all else, to matter most for happiness at work—even if that thread jerks people around a bit.

“There are many people who feel quietly victimized in their daily lives,” Robinson says. Despite progress in combating workplace bullying, she contends that “most of our current strategies for dealing with workplace injustice don’t give them a voice.”




Editorial Fellow Paul Bisceglio was previously an editorial intern at Smithsonian magazine and a staff reporter at Manhattan Media. He is a graduate of Haverford College and completed a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @PaulBisceglio.

Truly bizarre behavior - from any spiritual group - but especially from one that trumpets compassion and kindness.  Elsewhere on this site, we have talked about this behavior before.  I shared a story about my going to the hospital and how I was also abandoned - by Kennett's direct orders.

This cruelty is/was a very strange aspect of Kennett's shadow that infected the organization.  Infected is the right word.  What I think this is - is that Kennett and only Kennett deserved attention and love and caring.  If anyone got sick, it was seen as some call for attention - and no one was allowed to receive love except Kennett.  Also, it as seen as some kind of weakness - in everyone, except Kennett.  And if they gave the sick person any care, it would feed their ego or some such story.  But it is absurd and mean and heartless and really stupid.  Truly. And contrary to the basic teachings of the Buddha. 


“He who attends on the sick attends on me,” declared the Buddha, exhorting his disciples on the importance of ministering to the sick. This famous statement was made by the Blessed One when he discovered a monk lying in his soiled robes, desperately ill with an acute attack of dysentery. With the help of Ananda, the Buddha washed and cleaned the sick monk in warm water. On this occasion he reminded the monks that they have neither parents nor relatives to look after them, so they must look after one another. If the teacher is ill, it is the bounden duty of the pupil to look after him, and if the pupil is ill it is the teacher’s duty to look after the sick pupil. If a teacher or a pupil is not available it is the responsibility of the community to look after the sick (Vin.i,301ff.).

Enida, I believe you completely, and still struggle to understand how this could have happened. Leaving a sick person alone, without food or anyone checking on her - how did they not see this as wrong? I wonder if they still treat novices this way or was it one particular person's cruelty (the infirmarian's) and no one else knew about it or thought to ask about you?

Why are some depressed, others resilient? Scientists home in one part of the brain.
By Meeri Kim, Published: June 5
Wash Post

Many of us find ourselves swimming along in the tranquil sea of life when suddenly a crisis hits — a death in the family, the loss of a job, a bad breakup. Some power through and find calm waters again, while others drown in depression.

Scientists continue to search for the underlying genes and neurobiology that dictate our reactions to stress. Now, a study using mice has found a switch-like mechanism between resilience and defeat in an area of the brain that plays an important role in regulating emotions and has been linked with mood and anxiety disorders.

After artificially enhancing the activity of neurons in that part of the brain — the medial prefrontal cortex — mice that previously fought to avoid electric shocks started to act helpless. Rather than leaping for an open escape route, they sat in a corner taking the pain — presumably out of a belief that nothing they could do would change their circumstances.

“This helpless behavior is quite similar to what clinicians see in depressed individuals — an inability to take action to avoid or correct a difficult situation,” said study author and neuroscientist Bo Li of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. The results were published online May 27 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Because there is no true animal equivalent to the depression that affects humans, researchers instead model certain symptoms of the disorder, such as despair and, in this case, helplessness.

In his famous 1967 experiment on dogs, American psychologist Martin Seligman discovered that helplessness can be learned. He put a dog into a box with two chambers divided by a barrier that could be jumped over. When one chamber became electrified, the dog ran around frantically, finally scrambling over the barrier to escape the shock. In later trials, evading the shock becomes easier and easier for the animal until it would just stand next to the barrier waiting to jump.

But the outcome is much more grim if a dog first learns that electric shocks are uncontrollable and unavoidable. If animals are repeatedly shocked while tied up beforehand, then later placed in the same box free to roam, most didn’t jump the barrier. Instead, they lay down while whining and taking the jolt. Subsequent trials showcased the animal’s same passive, defeatist response.

Seligman formed a theory he called learned helplessness. It occurs when an animal or human has learned that outcomes are uncontrollable and thus fails to take any action in the future despite a clear ability to change its situation.

Learned helplessness has been observed in human experiments, such as subjects enduring a loud, disturbing noise if they had been taught that it wasn’t under their control. Since then, the theory has been used to build up the human spirit. (Seligman set up a resilience-training program for U.S. Army soldiers to do this.) Before President Obama banned the practice, the CIA used sleep deprivation, stress positions and sometimes multiple methods while interrogating detainees in order to create a “state of learned helplessness and dependence” in them.

In Li’s experiment, mice were put into a two-chambered cage with a door between them that at first was closed. For one hour, they were subjected to inescapable foot shocks in an unpredictable manner, giving them the impression that nothing could be done to prepare for or avoid the jolts. This learning period occurred over two days. On the third day, the door opened to allow the mice to escape by running into the other chamber that was not electrified.

After a few trials, most mice avoided the shocks by standing near the door, waiting for it to open and running through to the other chamber. But about 20 percent developed learned helplessness.

“They sit in the corner and just take the shock,” said study author and biologist Zina Perova, who worked on the study in Li’s group as a graduate student. “It’s this belief of ‘No matter what I do, it won’t change anything’ — it’s hopelessness.”

The team investigated which part of the brain lit up during such an experiment by using a genetically modified mouse whose neurons glow green when activated.

After the learned-helplessness trials, the researchers extracted brain slices and found that neurons were tagged with green in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Then they looked closely at these tagged neurons, searching for differences among the two groups of mice. Li and his colleagues discovered that the neurons from helpless mice had more nodes of connection and mice that showed determination had fewer. They presumed that this could mean an increase and decrease, respectively, in how active those neurons were.

To verify that, the researchers artificially boosted activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of resilient mice — those that easily escaped the shocks. The mice suddenly became helpless. A switch seemed to flip in their brains, and the previously strong rodents lost their determination and failed to avoid the painful jolts. Although learned helplessness can be overcome through antidepressant drugs or if an experimenter shows the animal how to escape, the researchers had never seen once-persevering mice turn helpless before.

Next, Li hopes to investigate whether the switch goes the opposite way — whether inhibition of activity of these neurons makes helpless mice strong — and suspects that it may.

If so, the results would be consistent with deep brain stimulation, a treatment for depression that uses electrical impulses to inhibit neuronal activity in a targeted brain area.

The study “tells us pretty clearly that the medial prefrontal cortex is important in anxiety and stress behaviors,” said neuroscientist Amit Etkin of Stanford University, who was not involved in the study. “There’s a lot of interest in doing deep brain stimulation in that area.”

In addition to emotion regulation, the medial prefrontal cortex has been implicated in such tasks as decision-making and memory retrieval.

“It’s thought to be an area important for understanding your environment and how you fit in,” said neurobiologist Ronald Duman of Yale University, who also was not involved in the research. “So disruption of that may alter how you feel about yourself in that environment.”

Duman notes that other areas of the brain have been associated with depression in prior studies as well, such as the hippocampus and amygdala. Our complex brain circuitry — how all these parts interact — likely complicates any easy translation of this switch mechanism to humans.

“To really understand what’s going on, we have to get down to the level of how [the medial prefrontal cortex] is talking to other brain regions,” Etkin said.

Kim is a freelance science journalist based in Philadelphia.

Enida, what a truly terrible state of affairs that you describe. It is clearly not an isolated incident because others have described similar reactions to their illnesses. This is of course just simply abuse. It is a pity that the FTI investigation did not have a wider remit. One can only image their reaction to something like this.

I have had some time recently to think about the regime at Shasta and this has come as final confirmation of the appalling state of affairs there. I have reluctantly come to view that Shasta needs route and branch reform assessed by some organisation like Faith Trust, and if not Shasta should be closed before they do real damage to more people or even kill someone. This is not some game where Shasta are the guardians of the keys to the truth, this is real life with real consequences. So Shasta needs to stop abusing people, sexually, physically, psychologically and spiritually and face up to their responsibilities or pack up shop. Their response to the FTI report is finally inadequate and superficial, and they have not even looked at any other matters.

Horrible story Enida
I can not look after my mum so easily at the moment,I do not feel right about the personal hygene parts ,so I have her looked after ,the girls who care for her and others suffering from dementia are fantastic,aged from I guess 17.They are local Cornish girls and so lovely,they ahve natural kindness,and are simply wonderful.