Elise Hughes

Passive aggressive swipes can get a lot of mileage from ambiguity. The more comfortable you become making people explain what they actually meant, the less room there is for them to take liberties and hide behind it x

Being able to tolerate tension is such an underrated social skill esp around dominant people who have become so used to everyone adjusting around them. And we need to be careful about confusing dominance with strength…someone being louder, more controlling or more just willing to make a room uncomfortable does not automatically make them strong. Sometimes it’s their position within the group has simply grown because everyone else has become just reluctant to challenge them.

If keeping things harmonious is really important to you, you may find yourself smoothing those moments over too quickly. Give yourself enough space to actually observe what’s happening. You don’t have to rush in and make every interaction pleasant.

Stop being so quick to smooth over the moments that are showing you something important to you x

Everyone is a mirror x

You can get so used to making sure you aren’t slipping back into old ways that you forget you are also here to bloody live.!
You feel more alive when you let yourself just want again, get excited about where life could take you and give yourself room to be expressive, change your mind or occasionally be a little unhinged…
And with your self-awareness, you can recognise an old pattern without treating every unpredictable part of yourself like a problem.
You can know what makes you tick and still surprise yourself as well as take the inner work seriously and have a full appetite for life.. 🫶🏼

Emotional pain can force you to develop abilities that other people may never have needed to build. That doesn’t make the pain a gift, and it certainly doesn’t mean you ignore the wounds, patterns and triggers it left behind. Those deserve to be worked through. But there can also be an edge in what you learned..an instinct, resilience and wisdom that came from navigating things you never should have had to navigate. You don’t need to glorify what happened to recognise what you became exceptionally good at because of it x

At some point, when you have been raised by an emotionally immature and jealous mother, you do have to make peace with the fact that she may be seriously unhappy with the choices you make for yourself. And yes, that takes a lot of unlearning when you’ve spent years trying to keep everything emotionally manageable. You can still feel guilty for choosing what’s right for you when you know she won’t be happy about it, and letting someone you love have feelings you’re no longer willing to fix can feel deeply sad.

Her own history deserves context, but so does yours. Understanding what shaped her can bring compassion while also helping you understand the impact her emotional immaturity and jealousy had on you growing up.
You can understand what shaped her without minimising what it was like to be her daughter. What she never resolved doesn’t have to become yours to take on. ♥️

If you look back and think why was I soo reactive around that person? Or you’re living it now and wondering why they can get such a rise out of you..well the context matters.
Slow-burn bait is seriously destabilising. Over time, you start anticipating their next move, trying to pre-empt it and reacting from everything that’s already happened. Add convenient innocence and you can start questioning your own read because everything has an explanation.
Being repeatedly pushed towards breaking point and then blamed for breaking can leave you carrying shame around reactions that just need context.
Yes take responsibility for your reactions, just don’t judge the past version of you through the awareness you have now.

There is a different level of awareness in someone willing to really look at what shaped them and understand what it left behind.

Once you see the mechanics, you can clock the bait earlier and choose how you respond.
That changes how you move ♥️

In a dysfunctional group, everyone has an unsaid role to play, and somehow you can end up being the one expected to carry everything the group refuses to look at…

Once positioned as the issue, the group has somewhere to place its tension, something to bond over, and your reactions become easier to focus on than the behaviour happening around you.

That’s why numbers can feel so convincing when you’re standing alone in it.

You start thinking, they can’t all be wrong?!

But in enmeshed and hierarchical groups, people can and will indeed reinforce the same pattern, protect their place within it and follow unwritten rules they stopped questioning a long time ago.

And the person who thinks independently, questions what doesn’t add up or refuses to accept their assigned role can become a serious disruption to that system.

Mean girl behaviour in the workplace is very real and when on the receiving end of it, a lot of what makes it insidious is how small or silly each incident can sound on its own.

Tbf it makes my blood boil!

Passive aggression, exclusion, belittling, little digs, having your competence undermined - there’s a lot going on when you’re dealing with that kind of targeting while still trying to remain professional and actually do your job.

Looking back on the experience, it’s easy to focus on where you struggled and completely miss how much you were actually handling at the time!

Maybe you did handle that mean girl energy far better than you’ve ever given yourself credit for 🔥

We’ve all met her, right? 💔

Covert bullying can be hidden and out in the open at the same time which is confusing in itself. Other people may witness parts of it but you are the one experiencing the full pattern at work.

You’re dealing with the atmosphere, anticipating her next move and trying to carry on with your job while so much of your attention is being taken up navigating this person.

And then you try to explain what’s happening and somehow it doesn’t sound as horrible as it feels to experience it. Just feels silly. Each incident can appear trivial when you pull it out of the wider pattern and none of it can quite capture what it’s like to be on the receiving end of it day after day.

So if you are experiencing covert bully, start writing things down and include the context around what’s happening to you, not just the incident itself. Even if goes no where … the pattern on paper can help you stay grounded in what you’re actually experiencing x