Workplace Bullying: What Therapists Need to Know | Andy Regal

Andy Regal: We can’t sleep. We can’t eat. We can’t keep down food. I used to throw up in a waste can by virtue of the anxiety that I was feeling. And the people that are most often bullied are not the apathetic ones, Patrick, not the ones that come to work late, leave early. It’s the people that are most devoted, most loyal, who really care about their jobs and care about how their bosses feel about them. Those are the people that are targeted for bullying and those are the people that feel the most harm by virtue of that abuse. Where you find people at work, you’ll find bullies at work. It’s everywhere because there’s conflict and there’s egos and there’s hierarchies in almost every business and then you have abuses of power. So this is not a story about television. This is a story about the workplace civility and incivility and how we want to be treated and how we need to be treated. And resilience is great, but over time it’s going to damage you. And so those are the things that I would be thinking about when somebody comes in or having that antenna up as a therapist. Shame, self-blame, and why me? What’s wrong with me? That kind of thing.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: What if I told you that workplace bullying is still legal in most of the United States? Not toxic leadership, not yelling, not public humiliation, not psychological intimidation, but legal. That’s why I’m excited to have my expert guest on today. His name is Andy Riegel, and he’s a former executive who spent nearly three decades inside a major media organization, CNBC, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and despite raising to the top, he endured what he described as a systematic degradation. We’re talking about power, trauma, HR protection culture, and what therapists need to understand about clients who whisper about their jobs in session. So as therapists, oftentimes it would be easy to miss as we’re doing assessments, as we are doing our usual therapy protocol to go through questions about employment and the week, and oftentimes we can miss some of the nuances, the nuances with things like workplace bullying, right? How someone feels in the workplace, what kind of relationship they have with their superiors, with their peers, with administration line staff, even the consumers and clients they serve. So I’m really excited to have our expert on today because he has 30 years in the business and he has firsthand experienced what it’s like to be on the receiving end of workplace bullying. And he’s going to educate us on some of the things we should consider as therapists, what it’s like to be in that position as a victim and how as therapists, we can really hone in on those things and make sure we’re giving space to it and being trauma informed. So really excited to have Andy Riegel on the show today. Andy, welcome to the Mental Health Toolbox.

Andy Regal: Patrick, it’s a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Oh, thank you. I was just saying, like I, you know, my hat goes off to you. you have 30 years of experience and executive roles in the media industry, top-notch, big names. So I can only imagine the things you have seen and then things you have experienced in that world. I can only venture to guess, other than what I see on TMZ.

Andy Regal: Right. Well, yeah, team, in fact, I worked with Harvey Levin. I know Harvey very well. So I’m not to drop a name, but you mentioned TMZ and Harvey.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: That’s exciting. I’m in the LA area. Not that I get to fly with area.

Andy Regal: No, big fan of Harvey’s?

Patrick Martin, LCSW: I don’t think most of what happens in Burbank, right?

Andy Regal: Yes, true. Also true. So yeah, there’s so many aspects to workplace bullying and I’m so pleased to have the opportunity to get into it with you and your audience because it is ubiquitous and in my view pernicious and legal. And by that I mean that unless you’re part of a protected class, and we’ll define it here, obviously a protected class, there are civil rights codes that protect people, race, creed, color, gender, sexual preference, disability, age, things like that. If your boss says, hey, old man, we don’t need people like you around here with your old ideas, yeah, you’ll likely have a lawsuit. But that’s not really how workplace bullying works. People are smarter, bosses are smarter than that to say those things. And therefore, if you can’t identify that you’re being discriminated against, bullied, because you’re part of a protected class, you have really very little if no options or recourse to fight it off. And so in my experience, I was bullied for much of my career in different ways and I got promoted. I was well paid, but that’s not what this is about. This is about my definition of bullying. There’s a number of good ones, but just to put it out there is repeated and targeted behavior or conduct that has no benefit to the business or the employee. It’s that simple. And throughout my career, I experienced bosses treating me that way. And the people that are most often bullied are not the apathetic ones, Patrick, not the ones that come to work late, leave early. It’s the people that are most devoted, most loyal, who really care about their jobs and care about how their bosses feel about them. Those are the people that are targeted for bullying and those are the people that feel the most harm by virtue of that abuse.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: So the very nature that makes them good employees, right, considerate, compassionate, maybe passive, right, in the sense of putting themselves last, right, being sacrificial is the same thing that puts them at risk for being hazed or bullying hazed as Skull Crusher calls it. Thank you for correcting me on that.

Andy Regal: Yes. right. And hazing in fraternities, which may be my next book, is very similar kind of legal abuse. It happens all over the country, in campuses all over the country, and nobody does anything about it. And it’s another form of legal abuse, but I don’t want to get off the topic of workplace abuse, which happens in every industry. When I first started writing my book, I’ll have a book coming out in a couple of months called Surviving Bully Culture. And when I started writing the book, It was more a memoir of sorts. And I really thought that I had asked for it. And by that I mean I wanted to be in television. I wanted to be in New York. I wanted to do journalism. And I ended up doing live television, which by its very nature is very tense. High anxiety, lots of problems occur in live television. And I thought, this is what I wanted and this is what I got. And then when I started researching and I got away from my own story and I realized that I wanted to do something broader than just my story in television. In fact, I’ll be honest with you, one of the first people that read the book, or it was a manuscript at the time said, Andy, it’s a nice story, but nobody cares that much about you. And so I took that to heart and I said, well, I’m a journalist. I’m going to look at this issue a little bit more broadly. And I did, and I started interviewing experts from around the world on this issue. And frankly, in the United States, we’re way behind the rest of the world on this issue. And what I found was it’s not about television. Workplace bullying happens everywhere. It happens in healthcare. It happens in education. It happens in technology. It happens in nonprofit. And I like to say, where you find people at work, you’ll find bullies at work. It’s everywhere because there’s conflict and there’s egos and there’s hierarchies in almost every business and then you have abuses of power. So this is not a story about television. This is a story about the workplace, civility and incivility and how we want to be treated and how we need to be treated. And by the way, I would say this, that it’s not just for the human being, right, the employee. And this is the work that you do on a daily basis is talking to people, listening to people and trying to help them understand what they’re going through. And by the way, I have to also acknowledge right away, I’m not licensed. This is about lived experience. So I’m not licensed. I’m not trauma informed. I’m certainly not a doctor. But I know this issue from lived experience and I’ve studied it now for six years. And this is something that we need to understand. Therapists talking to people who are experiences need to understand how alone people feel and that we can cope and heal, but we need to create dialogue, awareness, and demand change in this regard.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Yeah, absolutely. It makes me think about culture. You know, we’re talking about culture in the workplace, right? And Some organizations have a really buttoned up process for how to file a complaint if somebody feels something’s inappropriate, right? And they have channels. Whereas it seems like, and this is just me as an outsider, because I’ve primarily, when I have worked, I work for government agencies and they’re very, I know they happens there too. I’ve seen it, but you know, at least they have put some things in protocols to try and protect the culture of the staff and the experience. But when it comes to maybe non-governmental agencies where there isn’t as much oversight, if we’re looking at nonprofits or we’re looking at the business sector, it seems like the same rules don’t always apply. It seems like in some work cultures, it’s almost just kind of like expected as par for the course. I mean, and I don’t know if that’s just my impression from watching certain movies and films and kind of what it’s been put out there in the media, or if there’s some truth to that.

Andy Regal: Well, it’s really interesting you bring that up. There is so much pop culture about bullying, if you think about it, and workplace culture. I think the most popular one right now is Severance. I don’t know if you’ve seen that show, but it’s elevated show. Have you seen it?

Patrick Martin, LCSW: No, it’s on my watch list.

Andy Regal: Okay, well, very simply, the whole thing takes place at work where people completely lose their identity. And there’s not where it’s a very complicated structure. It’s sci-fi. But there are so many different, you know, Back to the Future, if you want to go back that far, the Michael J. Fox movie, his father is bullied in high school, and then his bully in high school becomes his boss. And there’s a great scene where I think it’s Biff, I think is his name. And he’s an adult now.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: McFly.

Andy Regal: Yeah, right, McFly, right, exactly. And he is bullying now Michael J. Fox’s father, he’s an adult. And he’s telling him, you know, I want this paper done by this weekend and you have to work late and all this. And he’s bullying him and he’s taking it. And what happens is that bullying ends up on Broadway, it ends up in film and TV, and it makes headlines. But then, and there’s a reason because we all relate to it in so many different ways. And yet it stops there. And what I’m trying to do is say, yes, we see this in pop culture over and over again. But it never moved to the next step of saying, well, why is this so popular in pop culture? Why does it resonate so much with people? But why aren’t we looking at the reality of the nonfiction part of this, which is this is affecting millions and millions of people? In fact, Patrick, the latest data, which came out late in 2024, identified 75 million people in this country, fully 52% of workers identified as being affected by bullying in the previous 12 months when they took the survey. So it affects so many people in so many different ways. And some of it is not so extreme, like sarcasm can be a form of bullying. You could be in a meeting where somebody’s rolling their eyes at what you’re saying or interrupting you, all the way to what I think is the most extreme. in my experience, and I’ve experienced it all, is being ostracized or isolated. And I’m sure as a therapist, and I’m sure you have patients about the worst thing that can happen to you other than physical harm. And again, I was never beaten up at work. Nobody threw a stapler at me. I wasn’t bleeding because that’s assault. That’s against the law. But the kinds of harm that occur in the workplace are the kinds of things that harm you from the inside. You get depressed, you have hypervigilance, anxiety. I had all of these digestive problems and harmful thoughts because you completely lose your self-esteem. And what I wanted to address with you is you worked in the government. Usually bullying happens from the top in all circumstances, or at least a position of authority. And You may have some guidelines, although most companies have no guidelines whatsoever about civility and workplace bullying, none. And you may even have some kind of loosely held codes of conduct. But if the CEO, if the number two, #3 are the big rainmakers, so to speak, at work don’t abide and everybody else sees that they don’t abide by that, they rule their fiefdoms, then those codes of conduct, if they even exist, are meaningless. And we can talk more about this too. And HR, and this is a big issue for me, HR should be the place that you can go. But in almost every case, HR departments are feckless, not because the people don’t care. The people in HR go into that field of work because they care about people. It’s because they have not been given the authority or the autonomy to investigate these claims because what? It’s usually the guy signing the checks. who’s the bully. So they’re not about to go to the corner office, the chairman’s office and say, you got to stop this bad behavior. So it is, again, as a therapist and with an audience of therapists, you have to understand what a lonely, lonely feeling it is to be being mistreated when you care so much and you have nowhere to turn.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Well, especially when you consider sense of identity, sense of belonging is such a huge component of our satisfaction, how we show up in the world to feel like we belong somewhere, we’re accepted. And I think about whether you’re a kid, you’re a teenager, or you’re an adult, in work, school, that is where you spend most of your time. That is where, I mean, especially in the Western world, most of our identity is tied to our workspace, right? It’s where we’ve invested ourselves in the idea of even leaving or changing sometimes the fear of the unknown is worse than the known, right? And so it’s quite a quandary, a catch-22.

Andy Regal: Oh, it’s just awful. And it’s awful if you’re a freshman in high school and you’re sitting alone in the cafeteria or even worse. And I know having my own kids, especially with girls, being ostracized is a common occurrence in high school and there’s nothing worse than I just heard this story the other day of a young girl, a daughter of a friend of mine who walked over and all the girls got up and left. And it’s no different if you’re 8 years old being bullied on the playground, although again, that can often be a physical thing. And I also say in the first couple pages of my book, I say, there was 0 tolerance in my kids’ school for bullying, zero. And in the workplace, in my experience, there was 100% tolerance of bullying. But the fact of the matter is, It’s such an inherent human experience to want to belong. And I’ll give you an anecdote if I may. And I’ve got a bunch of them. They’re all in my book, but this is one of them. I worked on a television show. It was a talk show. It was called the Dr. Keith Abloh Show, and it only lasted for about a year. It was a kind of Dr. Phil knockoff, if your audience knows, you know, Dr. Phil.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: And how’s that working out for you?

Andy Regal: Yeah, not well. Yeah, right, That’s the famous thing for him. And this, in fact, you’ll find this interesting. This show was supposed to be all based on empathy, whereas Dr. Phil kind of wags his finger and it’s kind of very patronizing, if not patriarchal. This was supposed to be all about empathy. Well, it was the most toxic workplace I ever worked in. But what I want to say is my boss, who I loved, was fired, let go. I adored her. One of the few good bosses I ever had. They brought in a woman and I knew of her. She knew of me. And it was the first year of the show and we were working 14 hour days. and coming in on Sunday. So I’m there on a Sunday morning and this new boss comes in. I hear her talking to my staff outside. I have an office and her office is like 2 doors down from mine. On a Sunday morning, she comes in at 11. I’ve been there since 8. My team’s there working on a show coming up. She walks right by my office. She’s the new boss. She walks right by my office. She’s putting her coat down. I can hear her keys and she’s logging into her computer. She walks back, my door’s open. She walks back across, back towards the staffing area, never says hello to me. We’re there for 14 hours on a Sunday, never said hello to me. Now, again, you could say, well, what’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is it feels awful. And I’m not, you know, I have a pretty good self-esteem and I’ve been a leader. I was an executive producer for 25 years. And that kind of treatment hurts so much and just damages your self-esteem and makes you start to wonder what’s wrong with me. And that’s a huge part, which I’m sure it is with the work you do. I know you do a lot of work with kids. You’re always wondering, you know, what’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t anybody like me? What do I need to change? And this self-blame, as it pertains to all kinds of isolation and ostracizing, but in my case, in the workplace, it destroys you. It really is the most damaging type of management, or in my case, or in my terms, mismanagement.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Well, absolutely, because, you know, what are you left at? Your imagination will run wild. You know, if someone isn’t following what you’d expect to be social norms, right? To acknowledge, especially your staff that have been there, on a weekend working at that, even if it was a Monday morning at 9 A.m. I know I feel that way. If my coworker walks by and they don’t acknowledge me, if my supervisor, admin, whoever walks by, and that’s the same reason I make it a point to acknowledge everybody in a room as I walk by, because I know what that feels like. Nobody wants to feel invisible. Why would, because then their imagination will fill in the gaps. Like, did I do something wrong? Or like you said, those automatic negative thoughts, what’s wrong with me? You might start labeling yourself. You might start future tripping or catastrophizing. And then that’s what happens to your productivity at work at that point. You know, now you’re all in your head. your focus takes a nosedive, and then your satisfaction at work, is in question. And it snowballs over something that would have been as simple as just acknowledging your peers, your staff, right?

Andy Regal: Yeah. And you know, as I thought about it, and I also did a television show, I created a television show with a southern sheriff out of Central Casting. And he ran a jail down in North Carolina. And it made me realize, In your life, who has more power over you than a boss? Your parents when you’re young, maybe a judge. Judges have almost complete autonomy and they make a lot of decisions that can ruin your life. So they have a lot of power. A southern sheriff or anybody running a jail, a warden kind of person. But on a day-to-day basis, most of us don’t end up in jail. So we don’t have to worry about that for much. We hope we don’t end up in court. I think I’ve often thought that if you can avoid going to court most of your life, you’re going to have a good life. But a boss, a boss controls your self-esteem, controls whether or not you’re popular at work, controls your salary and therefore your ability to pay your bills, to save for college. All of these things are so important on a day-to-day basis that managers, and again, for people that are dealing with this issue in therapy, I think that’s something that, again, I’ve been in therapy, but not a therapist, but it’s so important to understand that dynamic, that power imbalance, I should say. And every day you experience it. Every day I would come in hoping to please the boss. That’s what I wanted to do. And again, it wasn’t completely magnanimous. I wanted to please the boss so I could move up. I wanted to become an executive producer, but by the same token, and I grew up, and I’m sure you deal with this too, I grew up in a very functional family, a loving family. And as a son, I did everything I could to make my parents proud. Never gave them any, didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink, played sports, played the trumpet, got good grades. And I thought going into the workplace that it would be similar. All I got to do is do the right things, work harder than everybody else, work better than everybody else, and it will come back and my bosses will love me. And if there’s any self-blame to be had, and I have a coaching business where I work with people who have been bullied to help them cope and heal. And the first thing I say is no self-blame. Patrick, in the history of the workplace, nobody’s asked to be mistreated, but 10s of millions are. But all I wanted was to please them and to make the boss be proud that I was part of the team. And when it didn’t happen, it was crushing and it blew away my core values, the values that I grew up with. And so I think again, in therapy, this goes much deeper than just, I got a bad boss or, this goes so deep in my estimation. And I believe I’m right about this. It goes back to your core values. And I’ll tell you one other quick thing, which I think you’ll find interesting. I coached someone who came from a terribly dysfunctional family, terribly dysfunctional, as bad as you can imagine. And so when they went to work, They thought this is a chance for a second chance family.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: A corrective experience, right?

Andy Regal: Correct. Okay, good. I guess that’s the corrective experience. Good for you. And of course, it was horrible because your workplace is not your family. You’re not going to find love there. If you do, you’re one of the very few very lucky ones. So we came from completely diametrically opposed experiences, but came to the same conclusion that this was a chance for love. And if you come into it, and again, I’m totally against self-blame as far as the victims, the bully victims are concerned, but that’s the thing. Don’t think that your work or your boss is gonna love you. If somehow that happens, good for you, but it’s very rare.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Are you spending your Sundays creating therapy handouts instead of recharging? Hey, I’m Patrick Martin, an LCSW, and I’ve been there. That’s why I created the Mental Health Toolbox. It’s a complete done-for-you library of psychoeducation resources. So stop recreating the wheel and get your time back. Elevate your practice today. Get instant access to the entire library with the All Access Pass. Scan the QR code on the screen, click the link in the description, or simply visit mhtgear.com. manage your expectations. in therapy, we talk a lot about rules and assumptions, right? Our rules are often made by our lived experiences. The way we grow up frames what we expect from the world, right? Our love map or whatever you want to call it, right? How the world reciprocates, right? But depending on your upbringing, you make certain assumptions about the world, assumptions like everybody’s well-intentioned and deserves the benefit of the doubt, or everybody’s got an agenda and an angle and they’re out to get me. But to your, props to the person you’re talking about who didn’t have the great lived experience background, that frame of reference, and yet they were still hopeful, still optimistic that, hey, now that I’m in this new chapter of my life and I have this new environment, I’ll try again. And then it’s what a tragedy it is for someone who puts their best foot forward despite their lived experience and is hopeful and optimistic and then gets, slapped in the face for it. And that to me, that is the biggest tragedy because most people don’t get to that point. It takes a lot for someone to rally up themselves and still try and still be optimistic and when that happens enough times, it can really shatter somebody’s, schema, their paradigm of how the world works and how they fit in and how they relate to the world. And that’s where you oftentimes see situations like this really just put them on a downward spiral into depression, because then what’s the point?

Andy Regal: And it becomes very difficult. I’ve counseled and coached people who cried all the way to work. I’ve counseled and coached people that didn’t go to work because they couldn’t. Counsel people who the dread, and I’ve had all these things, although I don’t recall crying on the way to work, although I may have, but the dread that builds over the weekend and builds to a crescendo on Sunday evenings when you’re dreading going back in about what might happen. And I would say too, this notion of hypervigilance, you know, look, The bosses I had were not terrible bosses every day. They didn’t yell and scream. In fact, it was often much more subtle, but what I will say is the specter of the scorn, the specter of the hostility, the specter of the threats, that’s what really over time harmed me and harmed so many other people because you’re just, you don’t know when the next text or the next phone call is going to be and what it’s going to be. I don’t know if you use this in your work, but in my work we talk a lot about psychological safety. Now psychological safety, there’s a lot of different references to it as it pertains to the workplace. In fact, I just read an article about psychological safety whereby you may be having something terrible, you’re getting divorced, someone in your family is sick, and you come to work and the companies, organizations, businesses, should be more aware that people may not feel safe because of what’s happening outside of work. In my work on workplace incivility and degradation, I think of it as not feeling comfortable sitting at your desk or your cubicle or in your office, that at any moment something could happen that’s going to destroy your ability again to function, to take care. And when I was bullied, I had a newborn when I was doing this Dr. Keith Ablow show. I was not a good partner. I was not a good father because I was just so brittle after coming home from work. So these are the kinds of things that when you lose psychological safety by virtue of what’s happening to you in the workplace, and it’s almost that cliche kind of tap on the shoulder where you’re waiting for them to say, hey, come with us. And if I may, Patrick, make this point too. I am not arguing for, lobbying for bosses to be nice. That’s not what this is about. This is not, I was an executive producer for years and years. And you know what? I’m not proud to say that I raised my voice. I pounded on some tables. I interrupted people. I did all of those things. In fact, when I was writing my book, I thought, oh my gosh, I may have been a bully boss. As I’m writing and I’m learning about it, I’m like, Now, I certainly was not a perfect boss, but I talked to the founder of this work. His name is Gary Namey. Dr. Gary Namey is a psychologist, and he established the Workplace Bullying Institute about 35 years ago. And he’s kind of a mentor of mine, and I quote his work in my book. And he said to me, well, Andy, and this is an important point, and I mentioned the definition earlier, but he said, Andy, how often Did you get angry or did you have low blood sugar, lose your patience? I said, well, maybe once a month, maybe a little bit less, a little bit more, was it always at the same person? Well, no, it was in the moment, and he said, was it repeated to the same person? No, it was, and he said, how’d you feel when you got home? I felt awful if I was wrong or if I reacted. And he goes, what you doing? Well, I apologized the next day, of course. And I looked to repair the relationship and let the person know I was having a bad day. He said, you’re not a bully boss. I had the worst bully boss I ever had. I worked for him for 6 1/2 years. And he never once apologized. And until his very last day, he left the company before I did, because he got bought out, he had never complimented me. And I made him millions of dollars, millions of dollars. So I just want to clarify that I understand this is the workplace. I understand it’s a place of conflict. Look, if everything went great at work, that would be a nice thing, but it doesn’t. And that’s when managers, we need to be better. We need to be our best selves when things are going wrong. It’s easy to be nice and friendly and fun when the bonuses are coming, we’re all making money. So I’m not arguing for 24 hour, seven day a week civility and niceness and putting your arm around everybody. I’m really working towards people understanding what is acceptable and what isn’t and how to treat your employees. And final thing on this point, let’s even assume as a boss, you don’t care about your employees. You don’t care about them. You know what? All the data shows that if you don’t treat your employees well or one person doesn’t, the productivity goes way down. that there’s a massive cost to your bottom line when you don’t, they leave, you have to rehire, you have to hire third parties to interview people. People spend time at the water cooler complaining about the boss, complete lack of productivity. So it’s good for everybody to treat people in the way they should be treated.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Absolutely. Amen to that. But I think it sounds too like anyone can kind of fall into the trap of being human, right, under stress. But there’s a difference between that and complete lack of empathy.

Andy Regal: Absolutely. And in fact, most of us bully targets suffer from being empathetic. You know, we’re empaths. And that makes us more vulnerable because I used to think, and again, this is a self-blame thing, Patrick, I literally, I would start new jobs because in television, my roles usually lasted five or six years and that was it for whatever reason. And again, I made mistakes in my career. I absolutely, I was not a perfect employee, but I was good and I was hardworking and I was loyal and devoted. But what I want to say about that is we need to understand what’s happening and we need to Again, in the advocacy work I’m doing, and we alluded to this, but I didn’t get to it earlier, and I hope you’ll allow me. We can solve this problem. I think the kinds of people that come into your office, you can’t have one session with somebody and be like, great, go to it. can take weeks, months, years, right? I love this issue of workplace bullying for a couple reasons. One is Anybody can be a bully. Well, you have to have authority and leverage and power. But let me put it another way. Anybody can be a bully victim. Any race, creed, or color, any socioeconomic strata, you know, you can be well-paid, low-paid, you can be mid-management, you can be lower management, whatever it is, anybody can be subject to that. All we have to do And anybody listening to this, and I know this goes a little bit away from only the therapist in your audience, but if you’ll allow me, all we need to do is at the top levels, the CEO on down has to agree to a code of conduct. We all, in almost every job we have, we take sexual harassment training, which we should. And then we sign a form that says, I’ve watched the video, I’ve read the information, I understand what it is. and I won’t do it. And we should do that. We should do the same thing for how we treat one another in the workplace. There should be a codes of conduct, which you can go on AI and then you can get a list of 20 things that you don’t want and 20 things you do want. And companies can do this tomorrow. The CEO signs it, everybody signs it, every new hire signs it. And then when somebody doesn’t abide, They get called aside and HR can look into it because it’s part of the codes of behavior, codes of conduct. Everybody’s agreed to it. It’s codified. And then if the person continues that behavior, then there’s ramifications. They lose a bonus. They get demoted or they’re asked to leave. It’s that simple, but it has to start at the top and it has to be something with teeth. And there’s one other thing that I think is really interesting. There’s a thing called the brilliant jerk. And I worked for a brilliant jerk. This is another circumstance where I loved my boss. He got fired, let go. And then I worked for a guy 10 years my junior, had no video experience. And he looked great in a suit, handsome guy, very commanding, very smart. You know, bully bosses are usually the most charming. They get to a high level because they’re smart and they’re cunning. And He was the brilliant jerk, and yet he was bullying all kinds of people, including me, and hurting us and hurting the company. So the brilliant jerk makes a lot of money, may bring in a good amount of money, but ultimately the harm that they do way overwhelms the benefit of having that person in a position of authority.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Right. Poisons the whole company.

Andy Regal: Yeah. And I’ll tell you an anecdote, if I may, about him. I had been working for him, one of his direct reports for about a month. And I could tell that there was something wrong. He wasn’t really working with me. So I thought, you know what? I’ll ask him to go to lunch. You know, we’re colleagues. We’ve been working together for a while. I mean, and he hadn’t been my boss, but I had been there for a year and a half and now he’s my boss. Let’s go out, have some lunch, talk over and not necessarily even clear the air, but just kind of get out of the office and talk over some things and see if we can find common ground. Believe it or not, and again, I was probably 40. He was probably 30, 32. But he was a star at the company. He was the number three guy in the company. And I respected him for that. Just wanted to do a good job for him. Just wanted him to work with me. I needed his signature on stuff. He was going to prove myself. Went to his office. Four or five times he wasn’t there. Fifth time, sixth time he’s there. And I said, hey, You got time for lunch, just love to talk to you about a few things. He was looking down, looked up to me kind of scornfully and said, and I won’t say it because he used negative and I’m not sure it’s appropriate in your podcast, but he said, Regal, we don’t need to break bread. You just need to do your ****** job. And he looked back down and basically dismissed me. Now again, now again, was there any benefit to the organization that he did that? any benefit to the employee, to me, how did that help me do my job better? That’s bullying. That’s bullying. And then we never talked ever again. The company got sold. I was there for another three or four months and we never spoke again. Chilling effect. One of the worst things that happens through incivility. I was in the communications business. I can’t tell you how often I experience a chilling effect where people stopped collaborating, stopped cooperating because they were scared to speak up. And then turf wars begin because everyone’s fighting for the little bit of something that the boss isn’t giving. So yeah, terrible, terrible.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Yeah, absolutely. It comes kind of every man for himself, right?

Andy Regal: Yeah, that’s what happens.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Yeah. And that’s the thing is, there’s a saying, he sells seeds of discord, right? Causes dissension among the ranks. And I think, I don’t know if that’s intentional or unintentional, if it’s subconscious by people in power that act that way, if it’s, if there’s even that insight into, you know, if it’s a matter of their ego and it’s an insight and it’s a power play, or if it’s, you know, if it’s more like a personality thing and they just, there’s just aloof to it, you know.

Andy Regal: I’m so glad you brought that up because you’d be much better at this than I. don’t spend much, if any, time trying to diagnose bully bosses or even really trying to understand why they act the way they do. I mean, it could be that they’re sadist. It could be that they had a fight with their partner on the way to work. It could be that their mother wasn’t nice to them. I don’t know. I don’t understand it, but what I do know is this. I believe that people that comport themselves this way in the workplace go home and sleep just fine. Whereas the rest of us who are experiencing this kind of abuse, we can’t sleep, we can’t eat, we can’t keep down food. I used to throw up in a waste can by virtue of the anxiety that I was feeling. I had recurring nightmares of a bully boss kind of as a half man, half monster in a boiling cauldron, literally attacking me. Recurring dream. And then the top half, it was him. It was his face, my bully boss. So, you know, they go home and they sleep just fine because they just, I don’t think, have any idea of the impact that they’re having. And they’re probably over it, right?

Patrick Martin, LCSW: The boss is over it in a matter of like, they said it’s over with, but they don’t realize that’s lingering, that’s having a residual effect, like on the people they’re treating that way. They’re losing sleep over it, they’re having nightmares, they’re dreading work on Monday. They’re, like you said, probably one of the worst things is it disempowers people when they’re treated that way. And I could see what, I mean, that would probably hurt a company as much, if not more than anything, because then people stop reaching for their potential because they stop taking acceptable risks because they’re afraid that everything is going to be scrutinized.

Andy Regal: Yeah, And even when you’re doing good things, right, you’re still getting abusive behavior. And then it becomes, and what it really comes down to, and again, this notion of psychological safety is and I’ll make another point. This is, and I should have made this point earlier when we were talking about, the bully boss and you can always have a bad day, low blood sugar. What it really comes down to is, even if your boss is kind of stern, if you believe at the end of the workday, let’s call it, that the bully boss has your back, cares about your future and is glad that you’re on the team, You don’t really have a bully boss. You might have a bully boss that’s stern, more direct than you would like them to be. We can all be better leaders. We can all be better managers. We can all be more empathetic. But as long as you feel that the boss has your back, and in the circumstance where I said to you, Patrick, and explained that he said, just do your ****** job and go back to work, I was convinced that not only didn’t he care about my future? I think he wanted to damage my career, damage my future, damage me. And I had that, and the woman who walked by my office, I felt for sure that she wanted to hurt me, hurt my career, hurt my ability to support my family, hurt my self-esteem. And that’s really what it’s about. But if you can look back at the end of the day and say, no, I know he cares about me, cares about my future, or she cares about me, she cares. It may not be an ideal situation. You might want to look for other work if it’s bothering you, but that’s not the kind of bully that I’m concerned about.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Yeah, and I think people can feel a difference.

Andy Regal: Yes.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: You can feel the difference.

Andy Regal: Yeah, because in that case, you’re going to have psychological safety. You may be worried that you’re going to hand something in the boss and say, this is not good enough. Go back and do it again. You know, and you may not appreciate that. You may think it’s good. But then when it’s finally good, the boss says, hey, way to go. Nice job. Thanks for sticking to it. There might have been other ways to handle it, but then you’re going to have psychological safety for the most part. You’re going to feel safe that the boss isn’t just out to hurt you.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Yeah. Really good stuff. And I really appreciate you sharing, Andy. Would love to deep dive on more of your background and stories and what it’s been like for you working in that industry. Being bullied is not unique. Sounds like half the population experiences on some level. I’m sure your industry is riddled with that kind of stuff too. What I’m particularly interested in with the 10-ish minutes we have left is from your perspective, If you were to come into a therapy office and maybe you’re not seeking therapy under the guise of workplace bullying, maybe that’s not your presenting complaint. Maybe you’re coming because you’re feeling anxious and losing sleep and feeling depressed, but maybe it’s not as obvious that that’s the issue. As therapists, what do you think we can do to make sure we don’t miss something? Because a lot of clients won’t necessarily want to lead with that. They may not have the insight. That’s where their angst is coming from. There might be some shame around that if this is something that’s even worthy of talking about. And a lot of therapists, especially new therapists, you know, they just they’re going through the checking the boxes, right? What can we do to be mindful and make sure we’re not missing anything? What should we be thinking about? What kind of questions do you think we should be asking? as someone who’s experienced that yourself.

Andy Regal: Yeah. So I think, and we again touched on this earlier, that this is such a kind of inherent core issue. And I think so many of us look and just like, and there’s so many different forms of therapy, which better than I, Patrick, but because therapy deals with the core people in your life, starting often with your parents, at least in my experience, that many of us, I think most of us go to work and we’re the child and the boss is the parent. Now, I’ll tell you, some people, and I had one friend who was a producer and he was really tough. Nobody would bully him because if they tried, he’d attack back. So those aren’t the people that get bullied. And so some people are built in a different way. So I think not everybody’s a bully target, but when they come into your office, especially if they’re talking about their workplace experience, I think, and you named it, shame is such a big part of it. And especially amongst men. Women can feel it too, but men, and I write about this in my book, I say, It was like being, that old idea of being tied to the tracks and the locomotives coming over the hill and you just don’t know how to get yourself untied before it runs you over. I did not know how to deal with it. Just like many patients of yours maybe didn’t know how to navigate their familial experience or friends, whatever it is, this is a core relationship 8, 10, 12 hours a day. And so I think that I would listen to and listen for shame in the therapist’s office. And I also, and again, not being a therapist, I don’t know quite what to say, but what I would listen for is the self-blame. Those are two things. When Dr. Namie, I spoke with him, the founder of the Workplace Bullying Institute, that was the first thing he said. He goes, I know you. I go, no, I just called you. We’ve been talking for two minutes. He goes, I bet you’re devoted, hardworking, loyal, productive. He named, you know, he named me, name me. But it was almost like a soothsayer or a mind reader because I’m the model bully target. And the way he immediately alleviated decades of harmful thoughts and lack of self-esteem was saying, Andy, you didn’t ask for this. Stop with the self-blame. Sure. But that’s where I would start with anybody who’s having a difficult circumstance at work where they really feel like they’re doing everything that they can and yet they’re not getting the response. They’re being mistreated, spoken to harshly. And yet they’re trying so hard. And I say to a lot of the people that I coach and counsel, it’s you, not them. It’s the bully boss who’s having some kind of issue. They’re tense, they’re anxious, the company’s not doing well. Again, they had a bad mom. It doesn’t matter the reason. It’s them. Now, if you’re not doing assignments and you’re coming in late and you’re disrespectful, then you probably should find another job or the boss should be working with you to get you better or let you go. We’re talking about people that care and are hardworking and do good work. So those were the things I think that I would focus on. What are the feelings that they’re getting from the circumstance, from these interpersonal relationships and to try as best you can as a therapist to alleviate that notion that it’s something about them. and this in therapy, it may be that you remind the boss of somebody that was mean to them in high school or that a teacher, who knows.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: That counter transference, right? They’re projecting onto you. Yeah.

Andy Regal: Right. But what I would also say as somebody who’s suffered for a long time and now, and I’d like to talk real quick if we have time about coping and healing with this stuff, is I only wish there was somebody who could have explained this to me. The only thing I knew was resilience. And resilience is great, but over time, it’s going to damage you. And so those are the things that I would be thinking about when somebody comes in or having that antenna up as a therapist. Shame, self-blame, and why me? What’s wrong with me? That kind of thing.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: I love that last piece about resilience, right? Because resilience is a term, almost a term of endearment, right? And even with ourselves, I’m A resilient person. It sounds empowering, but resilience can also lead to resentment. And if you’re starting to feel resentful, you probably waited too long, right? You do something about it. So that’s fantastic. I’m so glad you touched on that, Andy. And I’m really excited for your book. You said, when does this come out?

Andy Regal: Yeah, so the book’s coming out in April. It is my story, and thank you for asking. It’s called Surviving Bully Culture, a career navigating workplace bullying and a guide for healing. It’s my story, but I interviewed dozens of experts from around the world. And the main thing, Patrick, for therapists who might learn a lot from my book, it’s not a memoir. It’s not just one thing after another about how I was bullied. It really gives context and understanding to why this happens and who this happens to. And then the last probably 50 pages of the book is basically my 6 tenets of coping and healing. And what that is, my approach. I wrote this before AI, so I promise you I didn’t get this from AI. I wish I had AI, but I wrote the book a few years before. AI and it’s coming out now. But there are ways because you can’t make the bully boss your best friend. You’re not going to change the bully boss. Hopefully my book, maybe some bully bosses will read it and realize what they’re doing to their business and their employees. But the point I want to make is you can cope and you can heal better than I ever did by virtue of focusing on yourself, your psychological safety, your ability to find joy in life no matter what the bully boss is doing. You can still find purpose in your work, in your life. You can find happiness. You can even find joy and positive self-talk is a big part of my 6 tenets of coping and healing because we bring the boss home with us. We bring the boss in our mind and on our shoulder. And that is so debilitating. And then the final part of my 6 tenants, which I work with my coaching clients on, is forgiveness. Forgive yourself and over time, you don’t have to do this in person, but over time, forgive your bully because it’s them, not you. And so we don’t have to go up to them and say, I forgive you, although if you want to do that, you can. But let them go because it doesn’t help you continually being angry with them. And it really is them, not you. They’re dealing with something. They’ve got problems. They’ve got issues. They’re taking it out on you. And that’s what my book’s all about. I use my story as the microcosm. I think people will enjoy some behind-the-scenes stories of television. It’s not all bullying, but I worked with some people that people will definitely know, famous people I worked with on television. But this is, I loved being in television, I loved being in journalism, but this work has a lot of meaning for me. For me, this is more meaningful than my career in television. And all I want to do is help people and really almost like start a movement like Me Too or Black Lives Matter. I’m not saying they’re on the same spectrum necessarily, but I believe we can make change and really help people in a short amount of time who really deserve not to go home and feel as though the world is crashing all around them.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Well, you’ve got my vote, Andy. I’m right?

Andy Regal: Thank you, Patrick. Thank you so much.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: I love the mission. I love what you’re about. I’ve seen what it does firsthand to my loved ones. and how it’s really just created such unnecessary harm and angst and anxiety. And it really is a poison and it’s unnecessary. And I’m with you. I’ll get on the wagon with you. know, it’s changed the culture of workplace bullying and the unnecessariness of.

Andy Regal: We can do it. We can do it. And I’d be remiss for giving me one final ugly plug, self-aggrandizing plug. The book is available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon now, and it’s called Surviving Bully Culture by Andy Riegel, R-E-G-A-L. And if I may, people want to reach out to me if they’re looking for coaching or any kind of guidance, they can reach me at my website, AndyRiegel.com.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: So AndyRegal.com. I see all your stuff up here. How to find your book, media, contact information. Be sure to link everything up in the show notes, Andy. I really appreciate you. You’re always welcome back on the show. I’d love, love, love to just have a session exploring an episode, just what your life has been like in the industry. And I love what you’ve taken your hurts and turned them into triumphs here. And you’ve been able to find a way to turn that loss into meaning. And that’s really the best outcome. So thank you for the work.

Andy Regal: Thank you. You’re a terrific interviewer. And thank you for the opportunity to be with you and on your show. Thank you so much.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: My pleasure. And you have a great rest of your evening, sir.

Andy Regal: Thank you.

Patrick Martin, LCSW: Thank you for being on.