Emotional Vampires at Work

Contrary to what Bram Stoker wrote, the undead walk the streets during broad daylight. They show up in the morning to roam your office hallways, driven by the insatiable need of making you just one more slave to the undead. You might work alongside one. You might report to one. Or the real nightmare – you might be one. If you have ever found yourself face-to-face with a bloodsucker, EMOTIONAL VAMPIRES AT WORK: Dealing with Bosses and Coworkers Who Drain You Dry (McGraw-Hill Professional; May, 2013; Hardcover, $22.00) is the antidote. Clinical psychologist Albert Bernstein pinpoints how to identify and categorize the Vampire. You’ll be on the alert for attack signs, modify your behavior, step out of your own patterns (vampires can often get confused by the unexpected), and protect yourself from attacks on your sanity – what every emotional vampire craves.

About the Author: Albert J. Bernstein, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, speaker, columnist, and business consultant. Dr. Bernstein is well known for teaching people to confront difficult and frightening situations with wit, wisdom, grace, and liberal doses of humor. He is the author of Dinosaur Brains, Neanderthals at Work, and Sacred Bull. He lives in Portland, OR.

Giving Until it Hurts

Passive Aggressive Histrionics love giving. Most of it is truly sincere, but some crosses the line into manipulation. They believe that the Golden Rule is a binding contract: if they do unto others, others are supposed to do back. Everybody takes. Some people ask you for what they want. Passive Aggressive Histrionics are more apt to give and give until you finally get the idea they want something. If you don’t get the message, they’ll keep on until they make themselves sick and make you sick of them. But, in their own minds at least, their accounts payable look great. Everybody wants something, and everybody gets angry at not getting it. This is a law of nature, but Passive Aggressives keep thinking they can break it.

Passive Aggressives Hypnosis

Passive Aggressives can cloud minds better than the Shadow in the old radio program. The only trouble is it’s their own minds that they cloud. They create an alternate reality in which they are admired and loved by one and all because they never need anything for themselves, and they never, ever do anything bad. The logical contortions they go through to maintain this illusion are enough to make anybody’s eyes glaze over. If you listen closely to them, you’ll find yourself entering another dimension, where everything is entertaining, but nothing makes much sense. Alice in Wonderland is a fairly realistic portrayal of a Histrionic’s world. It is some what humorous viewed from the outside, but imagine living there. People react differently to Passive Aggressive hypnosis. Some are enchanted enough to want to rescue the poor waifs; others get a pounding headache. Everybody gets drained, especially the poor souls who keep trying to get Histrionics to admit that they really are angry.

Self-esteem

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote a book about a sad and unintentionally dangerous creature sewn together from mismatched bits and pieces. She could have been describing another kind of monster created out of the scraps of late twentieth-century pop psychology—the person with high self-esteem. Self-esteem used to be the effect of success, but somehow an insuffi-cient amount of it evolved into the cause of failure. Over the past 40 years, most human problems have been ascribed to the pernicious forces of low self-esteem. Self-esteem is taught in school, and people are advised to repeat affirmations under the assumption that raw good feelings about yourself can be shaped into any sort of achievement. Self-esteem now seems to be regarded as an end unto itself, the prime mover of the human mind, like motivation in the world of business.

There is a logical flaw in this concept: anything that explains everything also explains nothing. The worst problem, however, is that many approaches to improving self-esteem are unwittingly teaching people to be more like Passive Aggressive Histrionics. The basic idea is to improve self-esteem by accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative, which is fine in theory. The only difficulty is that the negative isn’t eliminated; it’s merely plastered over with affirma-tions and often projected onto other people. It has become fashionable to see low self-esteem as the result of some form of abuse or mistreatment in

Emotional Vampires

Bernstein explains how Emotional Vampires get hired and climb up the ladder. Their personality disorders supply them with particular attributes that are often required in the workplace. Antisocials tell people what they want to hear; Histrionics are cheerful and social; Narcissists are tireless self-promoters; Obsessive-Compulsives are highly detail-oriented, and Paranoids require certainty and verification. These are the same traits that will drain you dry – if you allow it. Your own personality style may make you vulnerable to Vampires. The psychological damage that Vampires do can depend on who you are and how you think about your job. Within most organizational cultures, there are three separate and often competing sub-groups that are remarkably similar in thoughts and behavior from one organization to another. These groups differ significantly in their vulnerabilities to Vampires, especially Vampires in positions of authority.

Thoroughly revised and updated after an overwhelming response to the first edition, EMOTIONAL VAMPIRES aims to help you cope effectively with the people in life that confound, confuse and sap every ounce of energy.