I woke up this morning with a recently past boss lingering in my dreams. This isn’t a good thing for me, because of my depression and the fact that my past boss was/is a micromanager and emotionally abusive. It practically sets the tone for the day. You can say I was micromanaged out of my job. I spent a year in that relationship and the reason I am calling it a relationship because for those of us who have been verbally and emotionally abused in our personal life , we can be susceptible to them in our working environments also.
So sitting here at my computer, mulling the ‘why’ of waking up and having this past boss there in the forefront, I began to think about the ‘light bulb’ moment that I had a week or so ago when I came across an article explaining and discussing the behaviors of a micromanager (Aha, that describe the ex-boss to a ‘T’). And then I had another light bulb moment this morning as I was rereading this article and others about micromanagers and I realized that there is a fine line between being a ‘regular’ micromanager and one who is emotionally abuse on top of having to control everything else.
I have been in emotionally abusive relationships, I’ve been told I was stupid, that I didn’t deserve the affection that I needed, and so forth and so on. And in that same vein, I was told early on that I didn’t deserve a raise because there were some issues with my performance and behavior (I had just received an excellent yearly review) all the way to my last day at work when I was told ‘I was a detriment to the organization.’ And unfortunately for me, having a supervisor that is a micromanager and emotionally abusive further ramped up my depression and anxiety and left me an emotional mess almost 6 months later. I began to understand that, at least for me, leaving an abusive relationship, no matter how much I understood it as such, still makes leaving difficult. It was a job I liked to do, it had the hours I liked, I was able to meet people and help them, and the organization itself was one of those small but good ones. I started the relationship off with open arms, telling the ex-boss that I looked forward to working with them, and to trust in their expertise. When all was said and done, I had worked for a year with this person and just like being in an abusive relationship, the abuse didn’t start full force, it started out small and insidious and grew from there.
And for me, that’s where a lot of the articles about micromanagers fail. They give tips on how to deal with a micromanager, but what they don’t deal with are the psychological effects that these people can have on their victims. There are probably many, many of us who struggle everyday with the past effects of being in an abusive relationship, many effects that lie dormant until someone like a micromanager comes along. Because micromanagers can be insidious in the way that they function, it can take the employee months to realize what is going on and in my case, I had to quit my job due to the stress. Even my therapist didn’t see the signs. No one did, not even me until months after I had quit.
Admittedly I’m emotionally struggling with this, it haunts me, seeps into my thoughts, some days more than others. There are days I think I have a handle on why I had to quit and then there are days that my anger at being a victim drives me to feelings of worthlessness, fear and mental immobility. And because I was the only employee, and the people that my ex-boss reported to aren’t in the office, no one really saw or heard what was happening, but me. And maybe that’s what a lot of victims go through; the feeling that no one will believe us, that we have no recourse, that we can’t fight back. We are supposed to let the universe turn and hope that those who abused us will somehow be found out or ‘get theirs’ through some cosmic force.
We are supposed to ‘let go’, process the anger and move on, but what if we can’t? How do we do that when we haven’t been taught how? How am I, a middle aged woman who has more than her fair share of bad bosses and relationships get through this? These last few months feel like when one of my romantic interests broke up with me with no explanation at all, left me hanging. I remember it took me months to get over that person because I couldn’t figure out what I had done to cause the breakup. That’s what leaving this job feels like in some ways, only worse, because I know why I had to leave, but there is also the feeling like I didn’t do enough to protect myself or to handle the situation like all the articles tell you to do when you work for a micromanager. I had again trusted someone, and that trust was used against me. And there is the feeling that the ex-boss won’t ever have to be accountable for what they have done. And there is anger because the people who the ex-boss reports to also didn’t give a rat’s ass that I left, just a simple generic, thanks for your years of service, don’t let the door hit you in the ass email.
Here is one article I found that does talk about micromanagers as bullies, because like I mentioned earlier, there is a fine line between a basic micromanager behavior and one that is a bully and abusive. It is quite possible that a abusive micromanager does see their employee as a threat, but it’s very little comfort to me and others after the fact. Somehow though, I keep waking up in the morning and try to get through another day of more emotions.
The Emotional Female 