The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com, and Amazon.com.

Right now, we're going to go to the phones and speak with Mike. Mike, welcome to the show.

Hi. How are you?

Very good. Tell me what's on your mind.

One of my co-workers, he's giving me a lot of grief at work, and all he does is whine. He's very paranoid. He's accusing me of influencing other people to give him a hard time. He gives people a hard time, and then he turns around, and that's not a problem. But when people—not give him a hard time, but lightheartedly tease him, he goes right into the office, talking to the boss, saying that we're harassing him, and the boss says that he has issues and that we should just be nice to him all the time. So the boss isn't helping the matter either.

I don't know exactly what his, in quotes, issues are. I want to make it easier for you, though. Is this a job that you love?

Yeah.

What do you do?

I'm a mechanic. I've been there for 25 years.

So you have a vested interest, and the boss likes you, appreciates you, yeah? And is this a new kid on the block? Is this someone new that actually…

I transferred from another facility, so he's been at this facility longer than I have.

It's amazing how one person can make a big difference in the job.

We had a new guy that transferred from the facilities that I was at. This guy came with nothing but rave reviews, and within a month, this guy is nothing but trouble. He tried to get his way on his word. And I mean, the boss believes him and doesn’t believe us.

Now, what did he accuse you of doing? Harassing him in what way?

Staring at him all the time, telling people to tease him where he can—you know, he can go around and joke with all of us. But when we joke with him, it's offensive to him. It's harassment.

What I'm hearing is that you need to speak with the boss about this, and it sounds like you need to do this as a group. Sometimes you have more success with a few people who are suffering under his behavior. This one guy—what's his first name? You can give a fake name—the guy that is doing it.

Yeah, Tony. If you went to the boss and said, "Listen, I know that this has been a problem since we've come here, and we want to work with you. We want to figure out a way to make peace here." It's not… and what did the boss… well, you told me that you went to the boss the first time, and you said he has issues, right?

We've been at the boss many times. He's trying to tell us that we're the problem. Why does he think you're the problem?

I'll give you a perfect example. One day, the boss was questioning me on stuff, saying that I should grow up. So I explained my differences to my boss, and then that afternoon, he brought Tony in, and Tony told him what his problems were. And what did the boss do? The boss took out a pen and a paper and wrote down what Tony's issues were. And the next day, he had a service talk to all the employees about Tony's issues.

So what we say… and what were Tony's issues?

Oh, that we should be more courteous to him. We shouldn't talk to him the way we talk to him. We shouldn't joke around with each other. We should just do our jobs, and a bunch of little issues like that.

I don't know why the boss is so invested in Tony, whether Tony's a good worker, whether Tony's a family member or a relative…

He's not, he's not a good worker, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I can work circles around the guy. So can everybody else.

Can you find another job because you've got such a wonderful history? Can you move to another location or go back to your original location?

If I went to any other location, I'd be back on nights. Yeah, I was on nights for 10 years, and that's the reason I went to this location—so I could be on days and have a family life again.

Yeah. Is that working out for you?

As far as my home life, it is. It's just putting up with Tony. Just putting up with Tony.

And is it aggravating?

I come home, I'm stressed out. I've taken a couple days' stress leave just to get away from it. As a matter of fact, I took my wife on vacation last week to Cancun, and I was still thinking about work. And then I was in another country.

How so?

Other guys were ignoring him, not talking to him, and it's all my fault. I had nothing to do with work. Last week, I was in another country.

Okay, but what happened at work?

Well, another guy is not talking to him, and it's my fault because I'm influencing him. This is the boss's words. I'm influencing these people to do this to Tony.

You know, I recently went to a conference where you can hire—not you, but the boss—can hire an outside psychologist. There are people in this neck of the woods who do this professionally. They come in as mediators, and they work in a business to try to work with different factions, to try to get them all on the same page and to try to troubleshoot.

We have—I work for the government. I work for the post office. We have, which is like a psychologist, but the boss is afraid to call him in because he thinks Tony is going to go over the edge.

If that's the case, your boss is totally wrong. Because if you have any fear of that happening—where he could lose it and be a harm to you—you've got to call on somebody in advance. You need to be preemptive. You need to be able to anticipate a problem in advance. And if you're a good manager or a boss, you need to get that help in advance if you know that you cannot manage it. And if you're just telling everyone to turn the other cheek, then you will have exactly what you're talking about—the absenteeism, the stress leaves, the tension, the continued conflict, the factioning of different groups. And that's not healthy for anybody, including the boss.

Like last year, in October, Tony had called, I don't know, the CEO or whatever, some person from the main headquarters in Providence, to come down. And all he did was complain about me—all these accusations that he made against me—and half of them, half of them weren't even my doing.

Tony, you're probably not the first person. If Tony has worked there for a long time, you're probably not the first target, meaning the first person that he's had issues with, right? And so he's probably made quite a record for himself if he's as on the edge as you're describing and he has some history, some dossier. So I would recommend going to your boss and seeing if you can get human resources involved, seeing if you can get the psychologist in there to deal with this and take it seriously. I don't think this is something that you guys should sidestep, and I don't think continuing to tease him or say anything—whether you know that it must be very tempting to do that when you feel that frustrated.

It's not, because we ignore him, and he gets upset because we ignore him. He gets upset when we talk, when we don't talk to him, and it gets so…

It's a total no-win situation.

Yeah, it is. It can be very provocative to ignore a person. I once had a babysitter who ignored me, who refused to speak with me for an entire day. That was more painful than babysitters yelling at me. So feeling invisible is something that you don't want to use against somebody who could be a danger to you, but you need to address it at not just your boss's level. If your boss is unwilling to do anything, you need to go over his head. But I would try to go over his head through his head, meaning saying that this is too much. If you have three or four guys who work as mechanics or who work in the post office, have them all go over to the boss with examples of exactly what happens. And use a contrast—compare it to what didn’t happen at the other post office that you worked at—and say that we got along well there. This person is a problem, and I don't think enabling him, keeping him in here, is doing anyone any good, including himself. He needs professional help, and it is way too disruptive on the job for all of us. And I think that we can't just turn the other cheek here. We need to address this head-on.

Listen, Mike, I hope that helps you. Thank you so much for calling.

Thank you, and thank you so much.

Mike, bye, bye.

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Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by Dr. Ellen Kenner:

A big romance destroyer is emotional repression, which is a psychological defense mechanism that prevents painful emotions from entering into conscious awareness through a standing order to your subconscious: "Don't feel." This works in the narrow sense in that it is possible to not let yourself feel emotions. The result, however, is a deadening of your emotional vibrancy. The mechanism of repression is a Trojan horse. It seems to benefit you, but in the end, it works against you. Why? Because the standing order "don't feel" cannot discriminate between positive and negative emotions. It can only block emotional responsiveness as such. Thus, a repressed person becomes an emotional cripple who cannot fully experience feelings and therefore does not show much emotion at all.

You can download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com, and you can buy the book on Amazon.com.