Emotions that shape our world - shame, bullying, and mobbing

Standing up against bullying is important. No one likes to be bullied.  In this episode, tune in to connect the dots between bullying, shame, and some our murkiest workplace encounters. Listen in as  Delia talks about some of the emotions that bubble up in bullying. 

Checkout Our Blog called Tune-In for episode recaps and more show notes.

Chapters

• 0:27 Episode Intro: October is National Bullying Prevention
• 5:27 First experience with shame
• 7:45 What about work?
• 11:37 Real-life scenario
• 14:29 Defining a mob
• 19:00 Bottomline impact
• 22:47 Unpacking a real-life scenario
• 27:07 Nature vs Nurture - we can be different
• 32:54 Old School vs New School thinking
• 37:35 Seeking help and taking responsibility
• 39:24 HR, kudos and not kudos
• 41:45 What you can do
• 45:09 Episode Wrap Up

Transcript

 (00:27): Episode Intro: October is National Bullying Prevention
Hi everyone, I'm Delia Grenville. Welcome. So glad that you can make it. We had an event scheduled for 1:00 PM today, but we are promptly starting at 1:30. There were some technical difficulties. As you guys all know, this happens a lot in this world and I think they're all sorted now. We're able to hear and see each other. So I'm so glad that you all could make it. First of all, this month has been a busy one for most of us. If you're here in the northern hemisphere, we're the beginning of, or the middle of fall, beginning of the cooler weather. There's been a lot of prep for that. There's some people who've already experienced snow. I personally am not ready for snow at all, but some folks have already had to deal with that. And we are well into the full swing of back to school.

(01:17):
And this month, October is also National Bullying Prevention Month, which I think is great timing considering that it is back to school. Most of the kids now are back on their school grounds, their school campuses and interacting with one another. And I think it's really a good timing that we have this designation and opportunity at the beginning of the school year here to help kids and help kids reset. So I believe that was part of the reason why October was chosen. But bullying and why we're here today doesn't end in high school. It actually is something that many of us as adults are dealing with in our home lives, our respective workplace situations. There's a lot of group aggression behaviors that are not managed or spoken about as we come into the adult world and we're not prepared actually to deal with them. And I have a passion around this particularly because I think there's a lot of shame in this space and anywhere where there's shame as a coach, many of you guys know that I am a coach, a certified coach from New Ventures West and we look at life from an integral perspective.

(02:40):
So we need to have all of our pieces of our lives functioning in order to develop and go to the next level. So that's our spiritual life, our physical life, our emotional life, our romantic life. All of those things have to fit together. And I think one of the hurdles for many of us is the places in which we are dealing with shame. We don't talk a lot about bullying as adults. I know that many of you, if you're like me, you work in corporate America, you have had those online video training and the type of bullying that we tend to talk about is some one to one personal bullying or the stuff that happens when people are dealing with really egregious, obvious individual situations, whether that be some kind of sexual proposition or something like that. But there's a lot of hidden behaviors that happen in group settings that just don't get talked about.

(03:44):
And particularly I believe this happens again, and I'm gonna bring this word up many times, is because a shame people do not wanna admit that they're being victimized or being targeted in a place where they're supposed to be safe. And a lot of corporations right now really focus on this idea of psychological safety and focus on the ideas of inclusion, but not really looking at the behaviors that might distract from that in depth way. And particularly not looking at those behaviors in a way that causes them to reexamine some of the processes and the systems already in the workplace that might be leveraged in a way that perpetuates the same behaviors that all of us agree shouldn't be happening. So the topic today is rather deep <laugh>, but I think it's important for us to focus on that. And you'll hear me laugh a lot cuz generally I think I'm optimistic and laughter is my sort of nervous diffusion and this is a tense topic. So I wanna make sure that we're not so sucked in to the depth of it, that we're not sort participating in the wholeness, what we're trying to have the conversation about. So let's take a pause all of us and take just five seconds to collect ourselves before we talk more deeply.

(05:26):First experience with shame
So I mentioned at the beginning of this the word shame. And I think that's an important place for us to start because many of us probably have a first recollection of when we felt shame for the first time or identified what we were feeling, shame, there was probably some authority figure and something that went wrong. Whether we created this thing that went wrong via some little transgression that we might have had, taking something that we weren't supposed to or dropping something that we weren't supposed to drop or an accident or whether that accident was physical with our bodies, our emotional with our words, we felt alone. We felt like, oh we did something wrong and we were told that we did something wrong that wasn't acceptable. And typically that's our first type of scenario with shame. And it happens when we're young in our smallest bodies and our littlest self cells.

(06:32):
And we identify with that behavior as being little and maybe powerless and not really completely understanding what was going on at the time. And now as we get older and experience shame, for a lot of us, the first memory of it is in our littlest selves and our least powerful selves. And that also lives in our expression of shame. And I think that is really one of the pivot points or the inflection points for discussions about bullying. Because if we have to represent our adult selves or larger selves through an emotion where we are actually funneling or filtering through our smallest self, just think about that for a minute. How is that really going to work? You're not really leveraging the most developed part of yourself to get the conversation going. And that is where we have opportunity and that's where we have these conversations to help us figure out how to do this.

(07:45): What about work?
So you get into the workplace, there are a lot of people coming in with their own individual perspectives. We've got the company that needs what it needs to be done. We have the shareholders, we need what they need to have done. We've got demands from customers, we have, some of us are in the service industry. I mean the stuff is coming at us on the daily. And so I wanna make sure that even though lots of this conversation that I'm having is for people who have been targeted, people who have been victimize, I wanna say that I don't think any of this improves unless we're completely empathetic about how much it is we actually take on in these scenarios. How much we actually take on when we're working and how much we have to filter. And then we have our personal lives going on in the background and there's all the stuff going on in the world that we're addressing.

(08:42):
So we're inundated that we live in a busy, we live in worlds and not all of us have had the opportunity to work through how we're gonna work through tough problems. Not all of us have had the opportunity to look at and think about how we're interacting with others and how to interpret the interaction of others. I know as a coach I spent a lot of time working through these details and I'm still always learning. I mean if anything coaching has done for me is it shown me how much work is required? And there's a lot, you cannot make assumptions. You meet someone, they seem silent. Do you interpret that as them being aloof? Do you interpret that as that being, as them being shy? What is it? And our interpretations and perceptions of one another really play into our whole day to day interactions with each other.

(09:46):
The other thing is what we learned in our families of origin. Some families had a way that helped the adult that we know now figure out how to work Harmon harmoniously with the people around them and that people have higher tolerance levels or lower tolerance levels for friction interaction group work, et cetera. And all of that's coming from the individual. And then we have conflict which we are bound to have. That's sort of a human statements. So we have conflict. Someone wants to do the project slower, someone wants to do it faster someone thinks someone else should take responsibility, someone else doesn't. All kinds of things. We have ego. I think ego kind creates a lot of conflict. You have someone new come into the situation and they either are outpacing the other people who are working there or they're making the team go slower or whatever.

(10:51):
Whatever the situation is. And people need to know how to do deal with that conflict. And we all know that there are healthy ways to deal with conflict, but what we don't talk about is how much folks encounter unhealthy ways that conflict is dealt with, particularly when the culture of the organization supports it or the management is not able to have visibility or control over the team. Or quite honestly, people just allow it to happen because they figure it's not their problem. So what do we do? And lemme give you a couple of examples of what I mean by that. So a lot of times in the work situation,

(11:37):Real-life scenario
I'm gonna tell you a scenario that I witnessed in a restaurant, <laugh>, it was something to behold. Apparently there was a new server who came on board on the team and there was sort of a circle gathering.

(11:54):
I don't know who was the Ringwood leader, but somebody was. And they were talking about the fact that this person was not managing the tip scenario appropriately and how were they going to deal with that? And I think in some ways we might say, and it's very possible that that conversation could go incredibly positively. The group gets together and they have a focused conversation and they talk about the things that they like and they don't. And they think about how they're gonna approach the new person with the spirit of making sure that this person can be included in the team and they all find a way to work well together following whatever the status quo rules are of the group in the team. So in this case the servers. But my sense was the conversation that I overheard that day, it was not gonna go down that way.

(12:50):
Whoever that server was going to get her paces, <laugh> in terms of how to work, how the others were going to include or not include in the team. And I think that's an important little story, a little vignette because there's some of those key elements that happen that can go either way, the group forms, they can have a conversation, they're the existing group, there's someone else is coming in, they like their status quo, they don't want it to change. This new person's coming with a different idea. How do they bridge that gap? Sometimes as we know there's some leadership there that can help with that. So you can go to leader, you can say, hey, this isn't working on that case, the restaurant manager, whatever or whoever's the head of the servers or whatever and have a conversation. Or you can go to HR and have a conversation with them, but we'll put a pin on the HR question and we'll talk about that more in a sec.

(13:54):
Or someone can be designated to have a conversation with this new person and if everything goes well then that's good. And I mean that's how we figure out how to get along. It's when things don't go well and what does that look like? So the don't go well scenario ends up being no longer a group trying to figure out how to expand the group to include this person. But it shifts into what they call in the literature a mob.

(14:30): Defining a mob
This bunch of folks end up information targeting one individual. And it's not healthy, It's not healthy. Oftentimes it's undetected because there's ways, as you know, to have those make those comments to make the situation difficult to ostracize and to report in a way that is disingenuous that it doesn't include all of the information and then create a situation where the goal is to humiliate the target and to make them uncomfortable and cause them to go away <laugh>.

(15:16):
So the status quo could may be maintained. So the only winner usually in the whole thing is the status quo, right? Cause I like to believe that the folks that are doing these behaviors don't really feel a hundred percent great about them. If they did, why would they do them undercover? So they're in their shame space. And then the person who is experiencing the behaviors on the other hand might be the server that I overheard who for some reason is annoying people about the tips. But I think they should tell her what she's doing. And if it's like so off the cuff crazy, she's taking all the tips and not splitting them and clearly that's the rules in the handbook, then that's a whole other situation. But I feel like if that were exactly what was going on in that conversation, they would go to management or something like that.

(16:09):
So there might be a reason she's getting more tips or doing whatever I was even dropping, but they were also talking badly. But there might be a reason that that's happening so that she's not aware of. So dealing with that might be another way to help. I'm sure when she's told either she's like, if she's wholly confident in herself, then just take the feedback and everything will be fine. And even if she's not, probably still take the feedback and there might be a little bit of shame, you know, don't wanna be doing well every, you don't wanna be doing badly at your job. Nobody wants to be doing that. Certainly you don't wanna be annoying everybody, that's not fun. But if it's handled correctly, we we're able to, most of us get back on the path and do what we need to do. So hopefully that that's one way that it could go down. But definitely from what I was listening to with this group of folks, that was not the plan. The plan was to target the person.

(17:26):
And that's just so frustrating, <laugh>. Cause you know, think about it from part of me as a coach and as part of a corporate management, you bring these people in and you screen them. You want them to work with a team, you've invested, you teach them, you do all these kinds of things, you're just not expecting them to get chased out. And I think we've just been too accepting over time that a certain percentage of people must experience this. And I was thinking is this, wait, what are we knowledge workers? Is this the 21st century? This is not like us in the 18th century or whatever coming out of cottage industry and figuring out how to work together in our little knitting factories or whatever. Come on. I think we could do better than that. We know people aren't cogs. We know that we have a whole spectrum of things and emotions to deal with.

(18:28):
We can expect more. And yet we sort still believe and enforce a lot of these sort of ideas that well that'll separate the sheep from the goat, the wheat from the chef, the oranges from the apples. That's the way it is. The tough love kind of approach to things. And I don't think that's right. I don't think that's working.

(18:55): Bottomline impact
I think it causes a lot of damage emotionally in the world, which can't be a good thing. And I think it affects people's bottom lines. You just can't have people come into work you training and then you've lost the employee and then you have to try to figure out how to do that all over again. So what do we do and how do we get people to get along?

(19:22):
All right, that's a good question. I'm not gonna say that I have all the answers. <laugh>. Nope. I think one of the reasons why we have to be concerned too is I have some stats here with me and you guys know that I'm a little bit of a nerd on the details, but victims of bullying reported significant negative impacts on their health. One poll found that those who've been bullied as an adult 71% suffer from stress 70% experience, anxiety and depression, 55% report a loss of confidence, 39% suffer from sleep loss, 26% have headaches, 22% experience, muscle intention or pain. And 19% reported a mental breakdown and 17% noted the inability to function day to day calling in sick frequently. And I don't know what I have to say to say this better to folks but this isn't a problem of targets toughening up and learning to get better with the culture and learning to get along with the organization and what's wrong with you, if you are, they must be targeting you for a reason.

(21:02):
I know that's the conversation that we've been having now for decades. That's what keeps the person who's being bullying and targeted in the shame space. But listen to those statistics. This is crazy. This is is ROI. This is the money that the corporation's trying to save. This is, even if it's just a small little shop, you can have one person who honestly is 17% of 17% of the time, folks have reported the inability to function day to day calling in in sick frequently. And I mean that's just one of those what, seven or eight statistics. So there's a reason to be invested in this that isn't like, oh my gosh the victim is a winery or there must be something wrong with that person. There's something wrong with the system. <laugh>, right? There's something wrong with our set of beliefs about how we're supposed to get along with one another and that's really what's challenging us and causing these difficult situations to occur.

(22:28): Unpacking a real-life scenario
So let's go back to that server situation and think about why that particular pro person, she's new, they all must have been new at one point. So it can't be something we just do to new people.

(22:52):
From what I could hear and what I could tell, I mean it didn't look like she was doing her job badly. So I don't think that's the problem. <laugh>, that's a whole different set of behaviors. I think what we see a lot of times we don't wanna talk about is we get a person who is performing and the group decides that that person is actually performing <laugh> and they don't like it, they don't like it one little bit. And you see this sometimes in sports too. I'm not gonna bring up any names, but I'm a huge tennis fan and you could see that when a new dynamic kind of player comes into the sport and they change the rules of how the game's being played at first awe and then there's jealousy and then there's that whole media thing that happens and then some of the people who are already in the sport also join in and they turn it around and that person becomes a target.

(24:00):
And there's this whole sort of mobbing that goes on because they're openly, aggressively as a group targeting that person and shaming them, victimizing them, humiliating them, doing all kinds of off the cuff kind of comments and all kinds of things to make them uncomfortable and get them out of the space. This is how we do this is how we do, where do we learn it from? <laugh>. Yeah, that's a good question. Unfortunately a lot of what's happening is happening evolutionarily. Yeah, I like to give the example of just watch any of those nature movies or whatever you'll see there's a packing order hierarchy, all kinds of things going on there that sort of drive these behaviors. And I guess it's a good example, although some people might in the comments say, Oh my gosh, what did example? But you know, watch Disney Monkey Kingdom 2015. It's my all time favorite in nature mobbing. Can I have a favorite with one of those?

(25:15):
Okay, well it's such a great example. And those hierarchies in that situation, you're sort of born into the hierarchy and everyone knows that you are going to be the one who you are gonna be the particular monkey that troop who doesn't line up to the status quo. And because of that everybody, even the smallest monkey is gonna pick on you and you're gonna be to the one side, you're gonna be away, you're gonna be held apart, you're gonna know your place that way. And it's so interesting, this group behavior. So part of it must have been for survival, but a lot of what they say, part of it is because when we wanna do these exclusionary things, I'll go back to the way I interpret it. We wanna be able to sleep at night. So if there's a group then we don't have to take on all the shame and so runs away or so and so gives up or what's it say here, statistically 19% of the so and sos are gonna have a mental breakdown.It's not our fault somebody here caused that problem, but we didn't the ones.

(26:41): Nature vs Nurture - we can be different
So I think that is a really a huge thing to process that we're at the place now in our own human development that we can start looking at things that are hardwired to do evolutionarily and rethink because we have all this technology and artificial intelligence and video and all of these interventions that can help us to find different ways to interact and then we can just, we're at the place now make choices to learn to do things differently. I mean it's some work, but ganging up on somebody is such a schoolyard behavior and yet we still finding it turning up in the workplace. And I definitely witnessed with those servers the beginning of what I believe was gonna be a type classic ganging up scenario.

(28:00):
I think another reason why we talk about this  is bullying is thought to be a problem that only children face. But there's plenty of literature and everything out there that new findings show that bullying and its subsequent impact on mental health and physical health continues long into adulthood, often in the workplace home and educational setting. And I said before, mostly my passion is around helping targets and victims of this. But having said that, I do have empathy and compassion that some of the folks that are participating either explicitly or not in some of these group aggression scenarios, they might just be being pulled along by the ring leader in that server situation that they aren't fully themselves healed from something that have impacted them in their childhood. Cause when we listen to this again, typically bullying is thought to be a problem. Only children face that new findings show that bullying and its subsequent impact on mental and physical health continues long into adulthood, often in the workplace, the home and educational setting.

(29:33):
So let's go back to my premise around shame. So we're bullied, let's say someone's bullied when they're a kid and who knows why. Could be a physical attribute, could be anything. We've all been on the playground, we know how that whole environment is. So they carry that around and they're good. They're in their jobs now. They have their life, they're married, whatever, but they also have their insecurities. And some of that comes from when you first experience shame. Like I said, you are small, the smallest you've ever been in comparison to the adult that you will are destined to become. And you don't have a mechanism for processing that. I'll say this about shame, at least my experience of it is it feels bigger than you are so right, You feel sort of enclosed by it, I guess would be the word I would use.

(30:37):
So you feel sort of like, whoa it feels bigger than you, especially when you're little. I think it could be administered in a way that can overwhelm you. And I think that kind of feeling as well, okay, here's a weird example, but how they say when you have a puppy, a German shepherd or something that's gonna dog that's gonna grow up to be a very huge canine, you should take it what it's small and hug it and show it from those small ages that you can totally enclose it. And so that sort of in the perception stays the same. Even if the dog grows to a hundred pounds or whatever, they would always think that you can do that to it. And I think that's analogous to the same experience with shame is a lot of times when it's administered and do are small, it is overwhelming and it feels really overpowering.

(31:46):
And so as adults we tend to shy away from it and we don't wanna deal with it because we don't wanna be overpowered like that. Cause nobody really likes being overpowered, I don't think in that way where they don't have any control. And so we've got people then who have been bullied, who don't wanna experience shame and don't want that feeling of being overpowered. And we have those people on both sides of the group aggression equation in the workplace. Check on both sides. You're gonna find out that the aggressors have been bullied and the victim has been bullied. And that's what makes it challenging. That's why these conversations are necessary.

(32:37): Old School vs New School thinking
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Boy, I don't know Eleanor, it's a way of thinking. I get it way back when, way of thinking. But that also still sort of puts so much of the onus on the person who's being victimized, right?

(33:04):
Yeah, whatever. I don't not gonna explore that more. I'm just gonna leave that out there and say I don't think that's the philosophy for today. Not with all the formats of bullying and group progression that we have. We've got cyber bullying the physical bullying, the prejudicial bullying, the relational aggression. We have sexual bullying, we have verbal bullying, we have all of these things. So we've got all these elements coming at you. Plus someone's gonna say that no one can make you feel in inferior without your consent. I get it from an inner strength perspective, but I don't want anyone to take away from this conversation that that's the mindset. I think there's more to be done for us as we talk about shame. And I'm gonna call her name and you guys are gonna know who she is. <laugh>, I mean she's one of the preeminent shame researchers in the world, Brene Brown. But I think that so much is tied to this one feeling and bullying needs to be talked about in that perspective. And so does this group aggression.

(34:34):
I've seen now that I've sort been even more aware of this word of mobbing in the last two decades of this kind of competition, not to be one-upped that also if you flip it on its other side has that shame component to it. So someone again comes into the new situation, they're outpacing you don't like them, you don't wanna be one up, the boss thinks they're better, they're the boss's pet. The group's threatened by that. What do they do? I'm ashamed the group is, or we are ashamed. But they don't talk about their shame, but they talk about is that person's disrupting us, that life is better before they came. That's what they talk about. They don't talk about their shame. So I'm not the preeminent shame researcher like Renee Brown, but I do think that I'm one of the people who was gonna stand up and talk about how this is manifesting because I'm not a researcher, I'm working in a corporation.

(35:46):
I got my little, what's this called, side hustle influencer thing going on. I'm out there in the world. I'm parenting, I'm doing all the things where even though I was teaching Zumba, all kinds of different stuff where this comes up and that gives a point of view, right? In saying no, this is not just a research study, this is not just certain amount of people came into the lab and we followed them for some amount of time. They did a survey. This is living in the real world, in the corporations and the teens dealing with all of the drama, all of the politics, all of the pendulum swinging. We're centralizing, we're decentralizing all the things that teen corporations do. And saying, Hey, you know what? I have never once had a corporate training on shame. Mm-hmm A lot of the training trainings look more like the Eleanor Roosevelt theory. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Please do report what you see.

(36:53):
It's so funny to me. You know, gotta be victimized, you gotta be reporting, you know, you're in control of it all and yet you're in control of nothing. It's bizarre.

(37:06): Seeking help and taking responsibility
So I think that need to come to some conclusions here and before we ever talk about this again by saying how do we help? We do have a lot of responsibility for ourselves and we do have responsibility for others.

(37:32):
And we are in a situation, a lot of them just situations work. The bus stop, whatever it is, the servers I saw in that restaurant that day, we're in a situation. So what do we do and what can we do? One of the things I'm hoping is as I continue to talk about this in different forums, et cetera, is to raise awareness. We do not have to walk through this world the way the folks walk through the world before us.

(38:08):
We have the opportunity to change the way we walk through this world. And I think there's a certain awareness that we can have right now about shame.

(38:18):
And I'm hoping that I helped with that as a coach and as coworker and as you know, have folks that were interacting through social and all of that. But we need to clue into that what is that feeling? And it gave a lot of clues. It could be feeling overpowered or feeling loss of control or all of those kinds of things. When those things happen to us, what do we do? Do we follow on with a ring leader and join a group and aggressively harass our coworkers?

(39:02):
Like shoot or suddenly harass our coworkers? Or better yet, because I did say I was gonna come back to this, but use the HR system to harass our coworkers. What I'm saying, oh my gosh, there's so many of those folks who are been become incredibly skilled and astute at using the reporting that is supposed to be there to protect all workers really as a way to further their mobbing goals and group aggression and bullying.

(39:35): HR, kudos and not kudos
Which is really, I like to say, I like to believe, I wanna believe that HR can take this, but I just don't have that level of innocence. I just think we're so accustomed to things being this way that we just assume there's really nothing we can do. And again, if we go back to the sort of philosophy, that person, the victim should have had inner strength that we're just sort of like, well it's not the system's fault that the system is showing that the person's of inner strength. So maybe, and I just don't want to go down that path. I do wanna say that kudos to the HR folks who are digging deep and trying to figure out what's going on and not kudos <laugh> to Gen Z kids. So not kudos to the ones who aren't doing that, who aren't doing that deep work.

(40:35):
And I know I've spoken to so many HR professionals now and it's just amazing cuz I can tell you so far, I've only heard of one who has actually even heard the word mobbing in America. So that psychosocial group behavior that allows companies to either innovate and do well as they take in new ideas or have the new ideas crushed. They had not heard about it. And I think, wow, so many of the companies tell you their goal is to innovate and to make more money and to do better and to be more efficient. And if the people are taking care of, people aren't looking at the behaviors that can stop that we should be concerned.

(41:27): What YOU can Do
So what can you as an individual do?

(41:31):
Be thoughtful. Know what you're participating in and not participating in. Check in with yourself. What do you do if you find yourself as a target?

(41:48):
There's a lot that can be done, but most specifically for now, because I always try to cap these at about 45 minutes. You have a vocabulary right now to know that this is not only happening to you. So you're gonna have the typical fear responses, be aware of that, but also know that you're working in a bigger system, in a bigger dynamic. So you're gonna have to make some choices. And they're all kinds of the typical choices that we all hear. What do you want? Where do you wanna get to? What are willing to put in this? How emotional? What are you allow? What do you wanna take from this emotionally? What's the goal for you? So that focus on yourself is really important. And then I think lastly, what's important is all that mental health stuff. And whatever I spoke about, I came on here today to say this is happening.

(42:49):
It's happening in the world. And when I talk to people who have been victimized in the workplace who are working through modeling scenarios or whatever, I can't tell you how many people, and I've talked to them about, they go, 'Oh, this happened to me' or 'it happened to my cousin,' or 'I witnessed this' and it's just all kept under the rug. And I wanna make sure that maybe the most important thing that we say here is that, hey, you know what? Don't let the shame overpower. You. Remember the first time you felt shame, you were a little was probably administered in a way that was way too much for your little body, but you're not little anymore. And because of that, you really have the opportunity to realize that this is a group behavior and it may have nothing to do with you. Sure, it will be couched as though you are the cause of it. Because that's the group's capacity to deal with conflict, to deal with change, to deal with disruption to adjust to someone coming in and creating a new status quo. But that isn't you. So as long as you're being true to yourself and you are not provoking the situation, but coming in there and being the best that you can be. And having said that, I'm not saying anyone's perfect. There's always opportunity to grow ourselves. God knows I'm reminded every day I have kids.

(44:28):
As long as you're doing your best and whatever. I don't think that anyone should expect that a mob is a normal scenario or a response to dealing with how we work together to create better situations that everyone can be included in.

(44:51): Episode Wrap Up
So that's what we had today to talk about and I'm so glad for those folks who could join. Sorry about the technical difficulties at the top of the hour, but we did work our way through many thanks to my assistant Jenny in helping with the challenges and my other assistant husband <laugh>, who is also helping with the technical challenges. If you have any thoughts or comments about this when you listen through it, please do reach out. You can eventually be on the podcast so you can mail in at the podcast to live list, email address, or drop a note in the Facebook comments.

(45:38):
Or you can catch me on Instagram. I'm in a lot of places on social and I'd really love to hear from folks about what impact and these messages and these ideas had on them. And for those of you who are out there feeling alone and feeling stressed out and saying, Hey, why is this still happening? I was adult. Just remember that this kind of thing can happen to anyone and it can happen at any age. So I don't want you to feel like somehow you brought this on to on yourself because that's some of the gaslighting that happens in this scenario. And even though we can all improve and there's ways that we can change, there's also ways that we can all find that are better ways to interact with each other. So if you're out there and you're experiencing this please I'll make sure to find a number that you can call and put that inside the post so people have that. And either reach out to us here on the page and hopefully we'll be able to help you or direct you to some kind of a

(46:54):
Support. All for now guys. Thanks everyone.

Musical Intro/Outro (47:01):
Don't wanna miss this tune in. This is to live this. Don't wanna miss this tune in. This is to live this.