This is my story:

HOW I SURVIVED A TOXIC BOSS

How a girl in her early twenties got into the corporate world, been under a toxic boss for almost 6 years and came out as a winner. 

How Everything Started

It was the year 2014, the early beginning of the year. I was at the end of my journey of being a student, I was about to complete my master’s degree. Life was good and joyful but one thing seemed to be missing… 

I needed to feel useful and get some affirmation from the outside world (not college) that I was actually competent. I was full of energy and ready to start earning money and get my first real job. 

One day I got a message from a friend saying that there was an opening for 2 positions in a company she liked and that we should apply together. Since I was about to finish schooling, I decided to apply. My friend and I, we would dream about working together in a company even during our college years so I was determined to get in no matter what.

I practiced interview for days, I was even walking down the street pretending I was talking on the phone when I was actually going over and over every question I could be asked. 

I was interviewed by my toxic boss who, at that time, seemed to be a very nice human being. Little did I know back then, in my early twenties, that people can pretend very well if they want something for themselves.

The interview was very successful. Very soon after that, I got a call to come and work for the company. Other “great” news was that a friend of mine got in as well. We were so happy, I remember jumping around my room, not believing we both got a job. 

In that office only 2 women were working, one was my toxic boss and the other was a woman who was some kind of secretary of hers. Later on, we would slowly reveal that the other woman was actually an obsequious worker who agreed with everything her boss said, no matter what.

Every condition for new workers to feel undervalued was satisfied.

But in the beginning, it seemed like a regular job…

My First Year With a Toxic Boss

The first year was full of mixed feelings.

In the same manner as I wanted to succeed in landing a job, I was determined to thrive and grow in my workplace. For everything bad which was happening to me, I got to have an excuse to think that it was my fault and I needed to get better. I needed to be super perfect.

As you may guess, that kind of thinking can’t be good for your inner health.

Every time I made a “mistake” at work (even a little one, even something I didn’t suppose to know in the first place) I was called out and put on severe interrogation “Why did you make that mistake?” as if you could possibly have a proper answer for that.

My toxic boss and her secretary would value every answer we made. Every move in the office. Every word we used.

One day, my toxic boss went out, bought a notebook and put it in the center of the office. She made us get up every time we made even the slightest mistake and write a date, describe a mistake and put our signature below it. It was very humiliating. My friend and I called it “a book of shame”.

We were bullied but we didn’t know it. We often blamed everything on ourselves. This job was slowly beginning to change our lives and starting to grab and occupy our after-work life as well.

Like everything in life, you can not simplify things. Not every day was a complete disaster. There were good days and bad days. So I couldn’t see clearly as I do now that I needed to leave that job ASAP. But I didn’t, I stayed there and that job completely changed how I felt in the years to come.

Passive Aggressive Communication

Passive-aggressive behavior or communication is a difficult issue, because the negative things that are being said or done are often subtle and may not be seen as overtly aggressive, offensive or confrontational. However, the person on the receiving end of the communication repeatedly feels neglected or treated poorly and to the point that the relationship is damaged.

Communication with my toxic boss was very bad and broken. 

Since we had Skype installed on our computers, every time we had a question for her we needed to ask her for permission to approach first by sending her a question via Skype (even though we were all in the same small office). She told us that she had very important things to do and she needed to decide when we could ask her a question.

But that was not the end of the agony of asking.

After I would send her a question asking if she was free, I would wait and wait for hours for her answer, even though I heard her talking with her mom on the phone, watching videos, passing by my desk… She loved to pretend she had all the power, even the power to let us know when we were permitted to approach. Since we were all in the same small space, that kind of weird communication grew into great negativity which would deprive us daily from our energy.

My toxic boss and her secretary would often get together in the other office and talk, then get out and interrogate us in a hostile manner about the job that needed to be done, once they were even both standing silently behind our backs and monitoring how we were working. 

They were “best friends” and her secretary enjoyed the protection of the toxic boss in every sense. She was allowed to make mistakes and not work as hard as we did. In return, my toxic boss would get unconditional, absurd support from her. Her secretary praised her every move. She would thank her when we would receive a paycheck or when we get the day off as like it was her goodwill. 

Since these kinds of bosses can’t hold the power feeling to themselves, she used to bully her secretary as well. Once, her secretary responded in a group chat before consulting her (even though the reply was as simple as Ok, thank you so much for everything). She started yelling at her asking her if she noticed that she was present and that she needed to ask HER for a consultation. Her secretary just stood in front of her, shaking with fear. Till the end of the day, her secretary was sitting behind the desktop quietly sobbing.

My toxic boss loved to talk about her childhood, how smart she was back then, how every professor was amazed by her wittiness. Her ego-centered mind made her think she was great and powerful and above everyone else.

But, in reality, the truth is that these people are very fragile. If you know how to deal with them, you will end up winning every argument. It took me a while to realize this and build powerful tactics that actually work.

Other People and My Toxic Boss

As time passed by, my toxic boss and her secretary were making a path for their perfect job. They were slowly transferring all the work to us and presenting to the main office in Italy the other story. They were assuring them that we were all working for the prosperity of the company.

She had all the connections and we didn’t know anything about our superiors. She liked to be in control of everything. Even the soap or toilet paper in the bathroom needed to be the specific one, the one she liked the most. We didn’t get to choose and have opinions of our own.

Besides me and my friend, our office tried to assume more people in the time frame of 5 years.

But, as you may guess most of them didn’t stay there for a long period of time.

Many of them stayed for a week only and couldn’t take it anymore. It’s kinda crazy to explain it, but the strong negativity was in the air. New employees who were coming there to work felt anxious quickly, later on, they told us they were crying every morning and vomiting before coming to our office.

 Nobody wanted to stay.

Anxiety and Vicious Circle of Fear

I started to change. I was always a happy person, someone people enjoy to be around. After being 8 hours, every day in a negative atmosphere of that office I felt completely de-energized. My friends would call me to go out, but I would rather turn their invitation down with the excuse that I was tired. Actually, it was not an excuse, I was indeed very tired.

In the mornings, I felt an urge to vomit. I didn’t want to go there. But every time I went. I was living for the weekends and was fearful of Mondays. 

I started to feel anxious and have panic attacks.

In the mornings, on my way to the office, while commuting, I was feeling like I was going to faint out and severe feeling of fear was going through my body. I needed to get off every time I felt that feeling. Even though the ride lasted about 15 minutes, it felt like an eternity every time.

I was so unhappy but at the same time, I couldn’t quit and start a new job. I felt like I was incompetent to do anything else. I was stuck.

As someone who was always great at everything, I was asking myself: 

How did I get here? How can I move on? When will it all be over?

If you are asking me, How does it feel to be anxious? 

To be honest, that feeling was a complete shock to me. I couldn’t believe that I was anxious. Anxiety happens to you and you have no control over it. I used to think that anxiety wasn’t real, that it was some kind of modern age sickness, not a real problem. Until it happened to me.

It’s like something isn’t quite right, although oftentimes you don’t know exactly what that something is. 

I would spend evenings crying and feeling unhappy and if you would ask me why I was crying, I couldn’t specify what was bothering me. Being in the office was a hard thing. Your body feels like burning and your thoughts won’t calm down. It’s like there is an evil voice inside of you, to whom you are talking to and trying to tame it. But it just won’t listen. You feel helpless on so many levels. 

If I needed to go to the doctor, dentist or get my hair cut, I questioned myself if I could sit through the process. I was constantly thinking what if I got a panic attack or what if I fainted out, what would those people think about me. 

At work, every morning I would write down how many hours were left until the end of the working day. I would write 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, e then, as hours would pass by, I would cross the last number and I would tell myself: if you made it for an hour, you are able to do it for one more, and so long… This technique actually worked well to get myself together. 

All of those things were happening inside of me, so many explosions and acids going all over my body and mind but on the other hand. 

That was the year 2016 and I was determined to fight anxiety and win.

I started researching how to fight it and the same day one YouTuber who I was following, Mimi Ikonn, released a video How I overcame Depression and Anxiety, link here. I was watching the video and crying, I related to everything she went through. I recommend you watch it if you are having the same experience.

Here’s the tricky part. With these kinds of mental diseases, there is no specific medication or treatment. You must figure out by yourself what works for you. I am a firm believer that you must work and be consistent if you want to get your life back.

At those moments, I didn’t know how long that dark period would last.

Our brain is good at thinking only about the bad outcomes. Due to the brain’s “negativity bias”, I was thinking that it would last forever. But it didn’t, that was just a phase from which I succeeded to grow stronger. 

Again, like everything in life, I needed to build a specific meccanisam which would work for me and help me fight that thing. Good outcomes take time. My dark phase lasted for 2 years.

But somehow, all along the way, I was sure that the anxiaty was just a lesson for me. And it turned out it was just a piece of the puzzle. 

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

– Steve Jobs

How My Dots Connected

Even though you can not see it in the moments of bad times, but if you think about it – what are the moments in life when you felt the happiest? 

Those moments came after some time of suffering and hard work. When things are easy, levels of dopamine don’t go up, you need to overcome the hard times to feel the pleasure afterward. 

This actually means if you are miserable at your job, you are on the right track. I know, things in life are not always so obvious. You got the hard times, now, the next move is to find the right strategy and come out as a winner. You should think about yourself as a hero in a story.

Make the story spectacular. 

The part of this story which I didn’t mention to you is that during my anxiety period (which turned out to be just a piece of the puzzle), I spent many hours on the computer researching. I was reading, learning, expanding my base of knowledge. I had a hard time to go out and be with people, so I reverse engineered my weakness into my advantage. The time I would usually spend with my friends, I spent it on the computer, learning about obtaining financial freedom. 

You may achieve many things in life only by reverse-engineering the bad staff. Even during the periods of recessions, many people came out as rich. So, the biggest opportunities are where most people wouldn’t expect them to be. And that’s what actually makes them great. 

Other part of the puzzle was the motivation. I was so miserable at my job which made me so hungry for power and salvation I just couldn’t stop learning and trying. I heard someone saying, If you are good enough, nobody is stopping you. That became my daily mantra. None of the things happening to me would stop me from becoming successful and fulfilled, proving my toxic boss wrong. 

I got so much energy from that dark place, my motivation was at its peak. I believe none of this would happen if I had some great job straight from the beginning. I would probably never gone through this revealing path of my purpose in life. 

YouTube and Google have become my source of knowledge. Little by little I was becoming aware that there are many, many ways out of that situation of mine. People who have cracked the code and made it shared their stories online and I was thrilled by them.

My dream was to leave the corporate world. When you work for so long for someone who is much less capable than you are, well, you start thinking you can do much greater things in life than just obeying orders. 

I started to reveal many parts of my personality. I have forgotten how creative I am. I have forgotten how good I am with people. I have forgotten how passionate I am. I have so much to offer to this planet and none of these things are useful in a corporate job. 

We, human beings, are so much more than our job. I have truly forgotten that.

One young woman may have an enormous impact on others. I have forgotten that.

The process is slow but you will get there. I always thought that these things happen to others, that I will probably be stuck forever at this miserable job. Despite these thoughts, I kept on pushing forward. 

I was pushing constantly until one day something changed.

I made my first money by freelancing.

I just could not believe my eyes. I was refreshing and refreshing… But the money was there. I can not describe you the amount of happiness I felt that day, I felt like I was on the top of the world. 

Soon I was able to earn enough money to survive and quit my job.

When the decision day had come, I told my toxic boss I needed to tell her something important. She wanted to delay our conversation but I was very persistent to talk to her and she had no choice but to agree. 

I told her I was quitting my job. She just stared at me and said Ok. She prepared all the papers and let me off the same day.

She was mad at me for leaving my job, I can’t say it was a comfortable decision to make but I was so happy, after many years of suffering I finally knew I was doing the right thing. That night, I fell asleep with the great sensation of satisfaction and victory. 

Even though I am uncertain about my future, I have so many things ahead of me, so many new things to learn and unconditional freedom to use my time on this planet on my own terms.

What’s next?

If you made it to the end of this story I guess you can relate. Since a toxic relationship with a boss is such a common thing, I needed to share my story and tell you that you are not the only one with this problem.

I learned a lot about bad management during my toxic boss’s tenure, and I think those lessons helped me become a much better leader. Leader to myself primarily, I led myself on a mission of becoming a better person and earning the money all by myself. 

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