HotNews.ro spoke to Denisa-Maria Petriš, a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, to find out what effects insults, harassment and other violent behavior at work can have on employees and what measures can be taken to prevent such a toxic environment.

Workplaces can become real minefields when people can’t engage in dialogue with the colleagues they see there every day. It can be even worse if the employer himself exacerbates the conflicts.

Harassment at work or, as it is also called, mobbing, is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon at the European level. A 2010 study by the European Agency for Health and Safety at Work shows that 6% of people working in Europe have experienced some form of violence at work.

The abuse came either from colleagues (2%) or from employers (4%).

According to the same study, our country had one of the highest rates of violence or threat of violence at work. For example, Romania was third in Europe after Turkey and Portugal in terms of employee concerns about bullying or aggressive behavior at work.

Behind these numbers are stressed employees who are trying to cope with the emotional states they are experiencing due to the violence.

Denisa-Maria Petris is a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, and she helped us understand the methods by which employers force employees to stay in an abusive workplace and how we should treat victims of workplace violence.

Learned helplessness, exhaustion, and the belief that you won’t be good enough

Emotional abuse, wherever it occurs, has a negative impact on victims. In order to have control and an imbalance of power, the employer will many times try to tell the employees that they are weak and should not trust their own opinions.

“Furthermore, the society we live in places a high value on performance and productivity, and this becomes very apparent to us very early in life because of the pressure placed on us to do well in school.

Due to the fact that achievement is super rewarded and failure is severely punished, we learn that the value of our personality depends on how effective we are in areas such as school or work. And when the dynamics at work are an endless series of punishments that nullify our skills and efforts, it becomes difficult to consider ourselves valuable people,” the psychologist continues.

Additionally, an abusive workplace creates fertile ground for a variety of feelings that reinforce our belief that we are not good enough. Among them is “learned helplessness”, a feeling that arises when a person goes through certain difficult situations from which he feels that he cannot find a solution.

When this happens to employees, they end up feeling like there’s not much they can do to prevent violence, it just happens, regardless of their efforts, knowledge or skills, Petrish continues. Learned helplessness can pave the way for burnout or other types of mental health problems.

Ways employers can prevent burnout

PHOTO: Panthermedia/ Profimedia

We hear more and more about people experiencing burnout, but we know little about what solutions are in place in the workplace to prevent it. The main elements of burnout are emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a decrease in the level in which we perceive ourselves as competent and able to be effective at work.

“Work can become a dehumanizing experience when employers treat employees solely in terms of what and how they offer, and create a space where employees’ emotions, mistakes, and human needs are not allowed, and where employees struggle every day to find some meaning in what’s going on. they do it by tiptoeing around abusive bosses,” adds the psychotherapist.

The lack of boundaries and the inability of employees to say no at times due to fear or other reasons are two things that abusive employers take advantage of.

According to the psychologist, there are several methods by which employers can prevent burnout, and all of them should focus on the needs of employees. We can talk about specific needs such as:

• vacation;
• Money for a balanced lifestyle;
• Time to take on other roles, not just that of an employee.

There are also more abstract needs, but which the therapist considers just as important, such as the need for validation, esteem, or meaning.

Can the presence of a psychologist in such premises reduce the risk of moral oppression?

To meet these needs and for counseling, a psychologist at work seems like the best idea. Even if in theory the psychotherapist’s contribution to employee or employee-employer relations would be beneficial, in practice things would be somewhat different.

Various strategies can be employed to manage the disproportionate power dynamics or to manage the emotional states mentioned above, but all this is only possible if the psychologist, in turn, does not depend on the employer.

“A psychologist has an ethical obligation to respect such principles as beneficence and harmlessness, that is, to act for the benefit of the people around him, and when this is impossible, to act in such a way as not to harm anyone. .

But when a psychologist works in a company (since the good of the employer and the good of the employees often exclude each other), we talk about a role conflict: whose good do I contribute and how should I navigate a situation when the good that I can do in the employee’s life is to the detriment of the physical or to the legal entity that pays my salary?”, explains the psychotherapist.

But why do people stay in these jobs?

As in other situations of violence, society needs answers from the victims, who are often blamed for staying in these situations. The question “Why do they stay?” occurs very often.

“Besides the obvious financial dependence on work, which is a reality especially for vulnerable people or those working in unskilled positions that make them relatively easy to replace, there are certainly some psychological aspects to think about,” continues the psychologist.

One of these is dependence caused by abuse. This is manifested in constant criticism, verbal abuse, violation of the boundaries of employees, their control, which is manifested in an intrusive form. Eventually, employees come to believe that they cannot do without their bosses and that they are lucky to work there, even if they are constantly abused by them.

Another form of psychological violence is gas lighting, which nullifies everything that person feels or thinks. In the workplace, this can happen when your employer or co-workers try to convey the idea that nothing you feel is real and that “it’s all in your head.”

“The effect of prolonged exposure to gaslighting is that it becomes extremely difficult for us to understand what is real and what is not, what is justified and what is not,” Petrish continues.

Lovebombing is a technique an employer can use when employees are trying to quit.

“Although this sounds like something that happens in a romantic relationship, love bombing happens at home, at work, during election campaigns, that is, in any context where the abusive person (1) needs something, (2) it becomes obvious , that they can no longer get it because of hostile behavior, and it (3) loses control,” explains the psychotherapist.

Suddenly, employers are ready to raise your salary, transfer you to another position or offer you a favor. If you’ve been working in a hostile environment for a long time, it’s very likely that this tactic will catch on very easily and make employees stay.

Emotional exhaustion that occurs in the case of burnout can be another barrier to workers wanting to leave an abusive workplace. Often moral bullying is combined with other types of violence or even sexual harassment.

“The only thing victims should do is what makes them feel safe” When victims are faced with such situations, psychotherapist Denisa-Maria Petris believes that it is not their duty to act in a certain way. Rather, we should make room in the public space for discussions about sexual harassment in the workplace and the ways in which we try to reduce the experience:

“In order to be able to discuss ‘what victims can do’, we also need to discuss what is valued, tolerated and sanctioned at a social level, as this extremely limits the range of actions that victims can do safely.

However, in general, I think we should normalize that at the end of the day victims should only do what makes them feel safe and preferably deters them from future abuse. And that can mean anything from action to inaction, and that’s perfectly fine.”

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