Effects of Bullying (Part 1 of 3)

From Jim: This is eleventh in a series of seventeen blog posts on workplace bullying and related topics running Monday, July 2, 2012 to Sunday, August 12, 2012.  
Events and people depicted are fictionalized composites from multiple sources.  Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental.  

A pastor is mobbed by the leadership in his congregation.  They couldn’t just ask for his resignation, they thought they could play dirty and get away with it.  And they did.  Over a period of weeks, months, and years, in incremental increases leading to openly destructive actions, their statements and behavior take a toll.  The pastor becomes a shadow of himself.  He can barely function.  He’s lost his ability to interact creatively with the scriptures and so preaches re-tread sermons hoping no one will notice.  He has trouble making decisions.  He sits at his desk and does the same things over and over again.  He is stuck in a rut and he doesn’t know why.  He’s got to move forward but he can’t see a way. 

The storm with the deacons has come to a head and the worst is over.  But the damage lingers on, and he knows he needs a change.  He’s got to snap out of it.  Move forward.  He needs to jump-start his life.  What can he do?  He asks people he trusts and learns of a well-regarded eco-tourism company offering a range of adventure packages.  He’s always wanted to try rock climbing and so he picks a course and signs up.  Maybe that will break the cycle of sadness and he can begin to move forward. 

The course begins and he comes prepared.  The five-day course follows a progression and for the first couple of days he is okay.  But then comes rappelling and something isn’t right.  He’s terrified, actually.  Irrationally so.  He isn’t even afraid of heights and yet he is paralyzed by fear at the moment of decision.  He can’t do it.  He withdraws from the course.  He goes home, blaming it on the instructor, his equipment.  Some weeks later, he reads about the following study. 

In 2009, the journal Science published a study demonstrating the effects of chronic stress that impact decision making ability and the very structure of the brain.  Lab rats were exposed to a well-established stress paradigm that combines different stressors in an unpredictable manner to prevent them from recovering. Twenty-one days of stress exposure impacted rats physically and mentally. 

Rats were trained to press a lever for either pellets or sucrose.  Two groups of rats, the stress group and the control group, were measured for their ability to learn behaviors that led to a reward.  At first, both groups of rats had similar settings and learned to press the lever for a reward at similar rates.  The control group rats (the ones that were not subjected to stress), learned quickly to stop pressing once the action stopped being rewarded.  But the stressed rats kept pressing the lever long after the reward was taken away. 

Stressed rats failed to choose the action that was necessary to obtain the outcome.  Instead, their behavior was simply out of habit.  Scientists demonstrated that previous exposure to chronic stress biases decision-making.  They investigated the effects of chronic stress on the structure of the brain, specifically, cortical and striatal circuits known to be required for goal-directed actions and habits.  The effects of chronic stress suggest a loss of neuronal connectivity and atrophy in the part of the frontal cortex (brain) that affects decision-making. 

For the pastor, a light comes on.  Now, it is apparent that the deacon couples not only damaged him professionally, socially, and emotionally, but their cumulative actions were nothing less than a physical assault, and on his brain, no less.  Now he is mad.  Dammit, they’re not going to get away with this.  He is determined to recover. 

Have a story to tell?  Email me. 

Note: You can read the full study, Chronic Stress Causes Frontostriatal Reorganization and Affects Decision-Making online.