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January 29, 2006, 12:00 pm PST
Gaslight!
Quote From: juliebggNo, you are definitely NOT alone and NOT going crazy. There are plently of gaslighting bosses around. What I am referring to is one of my favorite movies "Gaslight" where a husband does things to make his wife think she is going crazy. That is what my boss tried to do...make me doubt myself, make me think that parents aren't happy-that one backfired because the two she was trying to let on that they were unhappy both told me that they liked what I was doing for their children. I did lessons almost identical to the ones I did in previous years that got excellent ratings, and she would find ridiculous faults with them. All this happened many years ago, but I saved all my documentation (which is a good idea for anyone to do who is going through this) because you never know if you may need it someday. When I left, I gave quite a letter to the superintendent, in which I cited incidents taken directly from my documentation. While it didn't affect my principal's job status, it was very embarrassing for her. She retaliated by blackballing me, I wrote to the superintendent and told him he needs to get her to stop or else they would both face legal action. She left me alone after that.
The WORST thing of all is what it did to my self-esteem. For a while I almost believed everything she tried to "Gaslight" me into believing about myself. But I got a new job very quickly and was once again appreciated and treated well. My self-esteem began to recover at that point and i began to see that SHE was the crazy one!!!
If you need to vent more than write again and I'll respond!! I knew I had heard of that situation before...gaslight...that's it! I thought of that so often while I was working there...before my boss went away on vacation, she bought 10 binders with dividers and told me they were to do up reference binders for the Board of Directors. She even told me the topics she wanted listed on the dividers and I wrote them down. I set them up while she was on vacation, but when she came back and I told her they were done, she said that's not what the binders were for! I asked her what they were for, and she just said "never mind, don't worry about it". Another time we spent quite a bit of time looking for a file. It was one of my feeling crazy moments wondering where I had put it....turned out she had mislabeled it...I had filed it properly according to the way she labelled it. Wow, I'm glad I'm outta there.
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