The Dark Side
The Dark Side
Many times on the news you hear a report about a shooting, killing or violent incident and the person at the heart of the incident is passed off as mentally ill, and the society reacts by creating additional laws to protect themselves from the mentally ill.
What many in society still do not understand or realize is that there is a dark side to many of those shootings and violent incidents, there is a dark side that society would rather not have you know about. A dark side that happens masked just below the public’s eye and awareness, but that is often very real and traumatizing for the Targeted Individual.
In many of these cases if you look deeper into these incidents you will often discover that there was more to the story. Before the target had a history of “mental illness”, the target often had complaints of mobbing, bullying, or harassment of some kind. Often times the Target might not even have a term to go with the form of harassment that is happening to them. They often describe individuals around them, or even complete strangers as being mean, taunting, doing little incidents to provoke them. Many of these targets have complained for years about the targeting, but with each successive complaint their actions are often passed off as mental illness. Their very real concerns that some type of organized or systemic harassment, is happening around them often goes unheeded, unheard, and the target might even be forcefully committed by concerned family. When the reality is that the target has been exposed continually overtime to a psychological operation of harassment and provocations, that would be capable of breaking down most of the sane of individuals.
Recently society has become more familiar with terms such as mobbing and bullying.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing
Mobbing in the context of human beings either means bullying of an individual by a group in any context, or specifically any workplace bullying.
Though the English word mob denotes a crowd, often in a destructive or hostile mood, German, Polish, Italian and several other European languages have adopted mobbing as a loanword to describe all forms of bullying including that by single persons. The resultant German verb mobben can also be used for physical attacks, calumny against teachers on the internet and intimidation by superiors, with an emphasis on the victims’ continuous fear rather than the perpetrators’ will to exclude them. The word may thus be a false friend in translation back into English, where mobbing in its primary sense denotes a disorderly gathering by a crowd and in workplace psychology narrowly refers to “ganging up” by others to harass and intimidate an individual.
Research into the phenomenon was pioneered in the 1980s by German-born Swedish scientist Heinz Leymann, who borrowed the term from animal behaviour due to it describing perfectly how a group can attack an individual based only on the negative covert communications from the group”.[3]
Mobbing is also found in school systems and this too was discovered by Dr. Heinz Leymann. Although he preferred the term bullying in the context of school children, some have come to regard mobbing as a form of group bullying. As professor and practising psychologist, Dr. Leymann also noted one of the side-effects of Mobbing is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and is frequently misdiagnosed. After making this discovery he successfully treated thousands of mobbing victims at his clinic in Sweden.
In the book MOBBING: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace, the authors say that mobbing is typically found in work environments that have poorly organized production and/or working methods and incapable or inattentive management and that mobbing victims are usually “exceptional individuals who demonstrated intelligence, competence, creativity, integrity, accomplishment and dedication”.[4]
UK Anti-bully pioneers Andrea Adams and Tim Field used the expression workplace bullying instead of what Leymann called “mobbing” although workplace bullying nearly always involves mobbing in its other meaning of group bullying.
In the following article some stories of workplace mobbing are shared.
Mobbing
members.shaw.ca/mobbing/mobbingCA/workplaceviolence.htm
Workplace Violence:
Why it happens. Why it will continue.
“The tiny percentage of mobbing victims – like Pierre Lebrun – who lash back in violent attack would probably have lived out their lives peaceably and productively had they been spared the excruciating pain of relentless humiliation.”
~ Prof. Kenneth Westhues,
At the Mercy of the Mob: A summary of research on workplace mobbing
We’ve all seen the news reports. A lone gunman returns to his workplace or former workplace to exact revenge for harassment that has gone on sometimes for years. We learn