I was the abusive boss

A reader writes:

I found your site a few months ago after receiving an angry, almost violent letter from a former employee of mine.

I used to own and operate a small bed and breakfast in a resort community. She was a maid, cook, and sometimes bookkeeper.

I have always known that I’m a difficult person and would warn new employees that they were on probation for them to get to know me as much as for me to get to know them. I have always found those who can’t handle me to be weak or too sensitive. When I got her letter, I was shocked, angry, hurt, defensive, and ready for war. However, after taking some time to read through your past letters, I now don’t know how to feel or what to think.

This employee worked for me for a little over six months and ghosted one day, never to be heard from again. She was a good employee and at first I thought she was one of the few who didn’t take my personality personally. At the time I received her letter and for years afterward, I found her to be childish, immature, angry, and emotional. Why not come to me to tell me she had a problem? But reading your blog has made me aware of the fact that I was probably considered an abusive boss — and to be honest, an abusive person overall.

Her letter outlined bad treatment from me and how much it impacted her. She reminded me of almost every slight from the time I screamed at her for getting up out of her chair while I was training her on some software (she needed a pen to take notes and it annoyed me that she wasn’t ready to learn) to the time I reprimanded her for using what I found to be a too-small wad of paper towel to clean a mirror. She reminded me that I got upset at everything and anything. She called me petulant. She reminded me of guests I was unkind to by linking to bad reviews online. She told me she wishes her departure caused trouble for me. She told me I deserved the online hate from past guests of my B&B (I didn’t have a good reputation on Yelp). She told me it took a long time to get over how I treated her and sending me this letter was part of how she chose to heal.

At first, I was very defensive. I wanted to write back and tell her she was a child, sensitive, and obsessive. That she must not have a fulfilling life if she felt the need to write to a long-ago boss.

However, each time I consider writing back, I realize she can counter everything with fair evidence that I was, in fact, a monster to work for. She’s right. I’m not different now, but I am no longer working. I am retired and live in a different state. I no longer have reason or opportunity to treat people like I treated my employees and guests. I had to close my B&B after too many years of trying to make it work.

If you were me, if you had made these mistakes and really were as bad as my old employee said, what would you do here? Would you write back to apologize? Ignore it and try to move on?

It would be an act of incredible graciousness and growth to write back, thank her for her honesty, and apologize how you treated her. You could acknowledge that your initial reaction upon receiving her letter was defensiveness but you sat with what you she wrote and you see the truth in it, and you were indeed terrible to work for. You could tell her that you’re no longer managing anyone, and that you hope she has landed in a better place. And you could thank her for the self-reflection her letter prompted.

Because it is a gift for someone to give you such an unvarnished look at yourself — and I also believe it is a gift to you from yourself that you were able to see the truth in it. You could have gone on feeling defensive and blaming the employee and thinking she was overly sensitive, but something in you pushed past that.

Can you go a step further and really grapple with what you’ve realized (not in the letter, but on your own)? That could mean exploring why your natural default was to the type of behavior you described (for example, did you grow up with a parent who was hyper-critical and punitive and that was your model for how to relate to people? or in an environment where extreme control over every detail was the best way to survive, and you carried that onward after it was no longer serving you? did you learn growing up that anger was a default state of dealing with the world?) and what the impact of that has been on important relationships to you throughout your life … and what it would look like and feel like to do things differently.

There can be incredible liberation in dropping your defenses, accepting feedback, and committing to doing things differently. If you don’t let yourself go into denial mode (which is a form of self-protection), it can even feel good to confront that stuff — not good like “eat your vegetables, they’re good for you” good, but good like chocolate is good. (Both, really, but people tend not to realize the almost physical pleasure there can be in facing hard things head-on in the service of moving toward a more peaceful place.) If you are willing to do that work, it can dramatically change the kinds of relationships you have in your life, the amount of peace and happiness you feel internally, and your day-to-day quality of life.

Which is why I say you should write back and thank your former employee. What she offered you is a gift if you want to take it. She most likely didn’t intend it to be one, but it very much can be that if you choose.

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