Dear Purple:

“The bullies made me question my own sanity and my own character. One question which was always in my head – ‘Am I the bad person here?’… Everybody was pointing fingers at me… Also the confidence displayed by my bullies, about being justified in hurting me, about being so sure and convinced that I was the bad person and deserved it, was what made me question my own reality and become smaller in front of them, to the point that I slowly started disappearing even in my own conscious. My perspective disappeared and their perspective took over my conscious“-

– you explained bullying so well here: only a true victim of real-life bullying/mobbing can explain it so well. EVERYBODY pointed the finger at you, pointing at you as the bad person.. and because they did this every day for long enough.. you believed them. When you believe that you are a bad person, you want to.. get rid of that bad person (yourself) by making yourself as small as possible- in your own mind. This is what happened to me as a result of being bullied by my mother: my perspective almost disappeared and the perspective that she confidently and angrily presented to me- took hold.

“All the bullies started questioning me…. They start pressuring me to talk about the other ladies’ stories… At this point, someone else from my team… asks me what I feel about my ex after listening to their stories… That Lady has been listening to the whole conversation all the while, and is now angered by my statement about my ex… “- all these work colleagues… did any of them do the job they were hired to do at the workplace? It reads like they had a whole lot of spare time for meticulous, time-consuming bullying…

“Whenever they made me out to be the bad guy, I tried defending myself saying, ‘I am not that kind of person’. To which they always replied, ‘So are you saying that ‘I’ am that kind of person?‘, with the same confidence in their gaze and tone. I now think that they were projecting onto me because they didn’t like admitting that they were the ones in the wrong here”-

– the response I boldfaced is one of the logical fallacies/mind games/ crazy-making tactics that people use to not address the substance of an attempted conversation (which was the real-life situation where a coworker blamed Purple of being “that kind of person”), and shift the focus to an imaginary, made-up situation where Purple blamed the coworker for being “that kind of person”. I am sorry that you went through such mental torture at the time and that currently, you are suffering from flashbacks.

anita