When you work with a potentially triggering sociopath…

What do you do when you face emotional abusers in your workplace?

How do you react when you can see a manager or colleague in the same patterns as your domestic abuser (or 2)?

I feel pleased I can spot it, almost laugh at the familial patterns and have strength in the knowledge, but seeing the trite attempts to make me feel stupid, triangulate as a power play with colleagues and turn on the charm when cold eyes are the norm, have an effect.

In another week of being gaslit and faced with bone faced lies from my boss in her pathetic aim to discredit me and make me feel small, I was offered a free anxiety and coaching session.

How timely was it. 

Very. 

Talking through the plethora of things on my plate right now, it clicked, or rather it was shown to me that my chronic backache is a reaction. A reaction to feeling trapped and insecure, that my body is showing me that it doesn’t like this place, this place where I am receiving emotional abuse again. I remembered that the day after husband no 2 and I split up, my chronic back ache lifted, that even in the hungover crushing daze of reality of imminent divorce, one part of my body recognised I was free.

I have only a few weeks left in this contract, and I am 100% sure that within days my back will be mobile again, probably replaced with financial panic but I will be free….

In the session we also touched on my sobriety, that I could only reach it when the lego blocks of healing had built a strong enough structure for me to face reality, and the day to day ordeal of parenting children who have been sexually abused. She put it so well in the session, and 100% concurred that when people say you are ‘self sabotaging blah blah’ it should be acknowledged that you are in fact SURVIVING. I know it to be true, but I have had to stand very tall at times when I have felt very small to try to explain it to the people around me.

It was also a relief to meet a coach who has had PTSD, not that I would wish on anyone, but unless you have lived it you can’t understand that at points you are surviving minute by minute, working out strategies to take you to the next hour.

It reminded me too that my resilience can’t be underestimated. After being in Court for 4 days last year, playing Alicia Florrick by representing myself (with some fuck ups), these things don’t phase me. I can be gaslit and still turn on the charm 2 mins later with clients - and I take great pleasure that it must really get to boss witch.

As a final note, my serendipitous day, ended with being sent a review of Robin Ince - Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal. I will be buying it for me and my daughters (so it is not just me championing their brains).

One excerpt struck me. I had forgotten about ‘justice sensitivity’ as a common trait in the neurodivergent. It has always been me, and I can see so clearly in Lola too. He writes ’neurodivergent people are for more likely to say. “I don’t see why the world has to be this way’ and pursue that logic.

And that is what I will do. 

So when we fight, neurodivergent or not, it may take a toll on our bodies, our time, our mental health but the power of being heard can be well worth it.