Let’s imagine a purely hypothetical situation: you have a bully at work. He’s been after you for years and years. When you threaten his power, he reminds you in many ways that he is a man capable of subduing you. He places his hand on your shoulder when he wants to get a point across or change your mind about something. He makes disparaging remarks regarding your professionalism, your competence, your sanity, and your work ethic. He always makes sure that you are alone with him and never answers your emails, because he knows better than to leave a digital paper trail or involve witnesses. When he makes comments about your appearance or stands too close to you, you don’t dare ask him to back off; the last time you did that, he retaliated by ignoring your requests, belittling you in front of coworkers, and increasing his attacks on your character.
Imagine that you dared run against him for an important position; you notice that you are losing friends, that people who used to chat with you avoid you. Eventually, a kindly colleague informs you that you have been painted as a lunatic (paranormal investigator becomes psychotic unhinged witch; an interest in the metaphysical means that you need to be institutionalized) and an incompetent fool. The road back from this ugly slander is a very long one, indeed; you must endure years of isolation as a result of these attacks, and eventually, other colleagues (all women) step forward into the privacy of your office with their own stories of harassment. Vulnerable people in the organization tell you about their own abuse, some of it criminal. Let’s say you make the mistake of reporting this to your superiors and it gets all the way to the Human Resources department.
Imagine that the result of you doing the “right thing” is that your bully gets a slap on the wrist and decides to REALLY bring you down. He takes over projects that belonged to you; he leaves you out of important meetings; he schedules you for conferences you cannot attend–he knows this, because you wrote to him about it multiple times, but he never answers your emails–and when you don’t show up for something you told him you could not attend, he makes notes that you “refused” to work on a required project, or seminar, or whatever that important thing might be. He piles up demerits against you, and you have no idea what is happening because he never tells you anything. He never responds to your entreaties for information. You don’t know what is happening, ever, because he has cut you out of his loop and is carefully overseeing your downfall via machinations that you couldn’t have imagined.
Imagine that karma catches up to your demon. He attacks the wrong person. He is discovered stealing a project from you. His evil plans crumble as one by one, people start to see through the superficial charm to the relentless narcissism that lies beneath. So, let’s say that your bully has to go away for awhile, and someone else steps up to run your department. Joy! Relief! Problem solved.
But not for long. Because like all attachments, all demonic entities. he returns. Not riding the coattails of victory, but because nobody wishes to run against him for a position with some power. And just like that, he is back. People scatter like rats on a sinking ship. Some head into Administration to escape his department; others quit outright; still others hunker down and get ready for the coming storm. And there are those who find alternate employment. Some decide that the only way to avoid another bruising and punishing round with this minor devil is to perform their work remotely.
Now, imagine that you have opted for that last option in order to save your soul from torment. You write the emails to the right people, you consult lawyers, you state your case, and you even beg for mercy. And the deafening silence engulfs you like a wave of futility and pointlessness. People just want you to go away; they don’t want to deal with this situation or even think about it. When you turn to the Department of Last Resort, you are told, finally, to ask for disability status and request an accommodation. For that, you need a medical professional to attest to the fact that you cannot currently perform your job due to a disability that could be either physical or mental.
In other words, in order to be protected from this demon, this pathological entity, you must say that you yourself are the sick one, not him; not it. You have cracked and broken and can no longer perform your job in person due to YOUR PERCEIVED INABILITY, your deficiency, and your “issue” that you simply cannot manage. It has nothing to do with the fact that you have been tormented for years by a bully; no, it’s turned into YOUR problem that you need assistance in managing. Just like the person who can’t lift more than ten pounds, or the person who can’t stand for too long, you are unable to perform your work duties because you are limited in some fundamental way that requires, for example, remote work.
Imagine that people have asked you to file a formal grievance and start a long process of dragging your bully into meetings where he will be confronted with his execrable behavior, his macho posturing, and his gender-specific power plays. Imagine that you spend the next several nights unable to sleep, drenched in panic, struggling with migraines, bleeding hands from self-inflicted wounds, stomach pain so intense that you can’t get off the floor, and a creeping depression that threatens to keep you trapped in bed. This demon didn’t keep a paper trail; he never responded to emails or requests for this very reason: there is no hard evidence against him when nobody else dares to come forward. His confrontations were in private; his accusations were never documented. His power plays and manipulations were just on the razor edge of permissible, barely allowed, not recommended, frowned upon, yet not strictly “grievable”. He knew the ins and outs of the company policies so well that he could quote chapter and verse of all the employee handbooks, so he also knew how to subvert all the weaknesses in our contracts. He learned how to retaliate without anyone being able to prove it.
When he finally got caught, he learned how to up his protection game, how to never allow it to happen again.
When you report someone like him, he learns from the experience. He learns more about your weaknesses, your fears, your deepest anxieties, and he takes note. He figures out how to become even more difficult to pin down, he ups his defenses, and he makes sure that no matter what, it will boil down to “he said, she said”, and he will win. In the end, that’s all he cares about. The devil, the bully, the attachment, the lower-level demon, the narcissist, the sociopath, they want to hurt you because hurting you is fuel for their psyche; it feeds them to see you in pain, to witness your desperation, your fear, your puny desires that justice be served.
Maybe in the end, in some cosmic sense, justice will be served. And how I wish that I could be the superhero of this story, the one who revealed the banal evil that exists in all institutions, in all places humans gather for whatever purpose. But sometimes, when you tangle with a devil, a bully, a very bad man, you lose.
And then you file for disability and admit that, in the end, you were bested, beaten down, and defeated. And all you can do is wake up screaming and and carry your diagnosis into that dark night, knowing that your accommodation is a far cry from justice, but it was the best you could do to save your soul.
Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD
International Society for Paranormal Research 