bus and stepped right into the monsoon drain. Several men on the bus managed to jump out without going down the monsoon drain and were able to rescue the soaking wet young woman who spent many minutes coughing up dirty water. Besides the worry of us children drowning, my mother also was wary of millipedes. One time, walking down to the bus, she got bitten by a millipede. I remember that it was very painful for her.

When the monsoon season was not upon us, we would see the now empty monsoon drains along side the path, that we would walk to and fro from the bus stop. My mother’s new anxiety was that I would fall down into the concrete ditch and break my arm or leg. Constantly she would tell me to walk away from the monsoon drains. I have a vague recollection of sliding into one once and of my mum being really angry at me. Luckily, I didn’t break anything unlike the boy who lived across the road. I came home from school one day and found out that he had broken his leg by falling into the monsoon drain. He was off school for many weeks.

One day, my mum took us shopping. We didn’t go to the market this time although we frequently did. I loved going to the market with its unique smells of Chinese cooking which made my mouth water, the unusual sounds of animals squealing and people speaking frantically in Chinese, and seeing all the local native crafts. This time, we must have gone to a department store. I vaguely remember the coolness of the store, the spaciousness and order. Inside the department store, my sister and I spotted these ornamental kangaroos with heads that bobbed up and down. We were totally fascinated with them and spent a long time watching them. We were absolutely delighted when mum said that we could get them for being such good girls that day.

We came home in the car. I was so excited to play with my kangaroo when we got home – at least have it on our table or window sill and touch its head so that it would go up and down. As we turned into the road that lead to our road of Jalan Belibus where our house was, my mum made a gasp.
“I forgot to get a present for the boy across the road!” She exclaimed. She paused momentarily and then said “Penelope, would you give your kangaroo to the boy for a gift?”
I gulped. My stomach lurched. I didn’t really want to give my kangaroo away. I hadn’t even had time to play with it yet.
‘Penelope?’ Mum probed.

When this happened, I felt great shame and humiliation.
 
I took a step way outside the box when I applied for another position at work.  Gladys had decided to leave the company.  She did the job of two people so there were two positions open.  I didn’t have the qualifications to review contracts, but I did have the ability to make sure all the documentation was in place and set up projects and new customers.  I got the job and they employed a part-time lawyer to review the contracts.
 
My boss told me that this job was my baby.  As time progressed, my job evolved into more than just setting up projects and customers and I became a glorified coordinator.  All contracts were sent to me.  If they were outside of our written contract format, I sent them out for review to the lawyer.  Otherwise I sent them for signature from both the client and from the signer in our company; found out who was going to run the project; made sure that the credit check had been done on new customers; ensured that we had all the legal documents in place including the purchase orders and continued to follow up on these things until we had them all in hand.
 
I closed projects out in a timely manner; followed the ‘exception to the rule’ protocol; identified situations where work had started without the proper paperwork; helped set up a way to track the amount used on a blanket purchase order as well as identify situations where work started without a purchase order or where the purchase order had been exceeded.  I started to develop a way where we could track our bid estimate on a project against the actual results so that the engineers could see how accurate their bids were and make the required adjustments in future bids.
 
I made all this visible to management and operations via a Sharepoint list.  Management liked it.  I worked closely with Sales, Operations, and the Finance Department.  I received bonuses and a lot of praise for my work.
 
Then a year and a half later, my boss called me up.  “I wanted to tell you, before someone else told you, Gladys is coming back.  They are firing the lawyer and she will be reviewing the contracts.  The CFO didn’t want her to come as she had left the company twice, but our boss wanted her to come back because the lawyer isn’t able to look at the operational impact of the contract and so she has to do it and the turn around time is too slow”.
 
My heart instantly lurched into my stomach.  Gladys and I are very different.  I am very detailed orientated; Gladys liked to cut corners to get things done on time and hated to have to do anything extra.  She also didn’t make the sales people accountable and would move ahead without the proper paperwork in place.  I knew this because I had often found myself in a position where a work order had to be invoiced without any pricing in place.  Gladys also hated SharePoint.  
 
When I took on the job, I was given instructions to create different processes and to gatepost certain things; this I did.  In developing the new processes, I found out from all the departments what their needs were.  To do this, I set up meetings to discuss their requirements and develop processes that would work for everyone and with which my managers approved of.  Everyone seemed really happy or so I thought.
 
My boss said that he would have no trouble saying something to Gladys if she didn’t follow the processes and would keep her in check even though she was going to work directly with his boss and not him.  I was really nervous about the situation but thought that if my boss would keep Gladys in line, then it would be manageable.
 
Gladys was going to start just after Christmas.  I tried to forget about the changes that were going to happen over the Christmas period. I was on vacation over Christmas and tried to keep busy so that I didn’t have time to think.
 
All too soon, I had to return to work and face this new dynamic.
 
It did not start off well.
 
Gladys didn’t want to know about the new processes.  She started doing the work that I did and I had no paper trail to know what was going on.  By the end of the week, I was told that she was going to be my boss.  Her boss said that we would make a good team.
 
It had taken me a long time to get the confidence of my colleagues. Gladys had been well liked.  I didn’t do things the same way as Gladys did.  I was firm in keeping the processes as I had been requested to do.  The processes kept people accountable.
 
Gladys started to run me down in emails to colleagues saying that I didn’t know what I was doing; she wouldn’t follow the processes; she told me that Sharepoint sucked.  
 
She and I were duplicating the work and it was annoying the departments.  I lost my authority as everyone paid more attention to what she said than following the processes.
 
She called me up and asked me to talk to her about the friction that I was feeling.  As I started to explain the processes, she talked over me and yelled at me to shut up.  ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’  She yelled.
 
I realized that this was not going to work; she was now in charge of my baby.  I was being put back into a position of being ‘just a processor’; to take orders. I rang her boss up and said that this was not going to work.  She said that she was aware that there was a problem going on and had an idea about another position for me.  She just had to get permission from the CFO and HR before offering it to me.
 
She received permission and I was offered a job as the Sales Tax Accountant.  She asked me to attack the job with my usual enthusiasm.  I can’t say that I was very motivated;  I was humiliated by the whole situation.  I was embarrassed; I was grieving a job that I had enjoyed so much and had put so much effort into.  I wondered what I had done wrong.  I knew of no other way to handle the situation; I had felt powerless.
 
I was now in a corner.  I was being trained to do sales tax by a bully who was very controlling, wouldn’t answer my questions, wanted me to do things by rote rather than by understanding, put me down all the time, criticized me, talked down to me and demoralized me.  I was now on a team that was reactive rather than proactive and didn’t want new ideas or any contribution to improve processes.  I was also in a situation where I was micro managed.
 
I totally understood why the company needed Gladys’ expertise.  However, bringing Gladys back totally ruined my career.  I was surprised that they created a new position for me.  The whole situation left me very confused for over a year.
 
I am finally over my grief.  I keep my head down.  Do my job.  Don’t interact much with anyone.  My writing now provides the creative outlet that I had in my previous jobs.
 
However, I still wonder, as I did throughout the grieving process, whether the whole idea to bring Gladys back again and the way it was handled, was a poor decision by management or what?  
 
What are your thoughts?

This is a little more painful to write about; fast forward one more year. I am now a third year senior at Fareham Park Comprehensive School, which now has some newer buildings. The dance and drama studio is built. The music rooms are ready to go. The gym is built. We have an all weather pitch, a track, tennis courts and many more facilities for physical education. We have a building for art, woodwork, metal work, sewing and home economics. A far cry from the one building and a couple of modular classrooms that we had two years earlier.

Now that we have a home economics room, we have cooking on the schedule. This is definitely not fun for me.

The time that stands out most is the day that we made bread. I have little recall of anything else so I assume this is the one time that we cooked and the rest was book work, but I could be very wrong there.

A prelude to the bread story are the images of crowded hallways and stairwells where all the students of the school were changing classrooms, using the toilets, getting stuff out of their lockers. The stairs in particular were a source of consternation. Those girls would wait for me at the top of the stairs, As soon as I started on my way down, they would home in behind me and start to push me down, all the time laughing their heads off. It was hard to keep upright and not slip. I hated it. I had no idea what to do to help myself and to get out of the situation. It may only seem like a little thing, but I felt helpless. There were no teachers around.

These girls were in my tutor group and they were also in my cooking class. Cooking became a big nightmare. There the girls would use wooden spoons to hit me when the teacher wasn’t around. They would laugh in a mocking way. Any type of reaction exasperated the issue. I felt stymied; powerless. So it was in this atmosphere that we had to make bread.

There are just a few things that I remember about this bread-making activity. I remember the mixing bowl. I remember the yeast. This wasn’t dry yeast. This was fresh yeast. I remember that it looked dark and grey and pretty gross. We had to add it to our flour and use our hands to mix the dough mixture together. Then we had to knead it until the yeast was all absorbed.

As I write this with an adult's perspective, something feels off about that yeast. So I read around and now understand that fresh yeast should look firm and moist, cream-colored and cool to the touch. If it is crumbly, dryish and dark in places it is stale. Apparently to use it, it must be added to liquid and mixed into the dough straight away. Here is what I also found on the internet concerning fresh yeast and the processes to activate it:

https://m.wikihow.com/Activate-Fresh-Yeast

In this article it demonstrated that yeast needs to be broken up into smaller parts. I was told to put my yeast and water straight into the bowl. I don’t remember it frothing up. The teacher was hurrying us along. I was taking longer than the others - not a natural cook, I’m afraid. I was kneading away. The yeast was not becoming absorbed into the dough.

I think the teacher was pretty frustrated with me. She didn't listen to my explanation that the yeast was not amalgamating with the dough but she did come and help knead the dough and got it into the pan.

At last the lesson was over. What a relief. My bread looked really pretty. Despite the events of the day and the ongoing bullying, I was pretty chuffed with my cooking success.

At home, I was so excited as we were going to eat it as an accompaniment to our dinner that evening. I eagerly watched as my mum cut into the loaf.
“Eww! Yuck!” My Mum exclaimed as she cut the loaf in half.
My heart sank. “What’s wrong?” I mumbled.

“Look!” She said. She turned around from the kitchen cabinet where she was cutting, holding the two halves of the bread in her hands. I looked. Inside each half of the loaf there sat a dark gray piece of yeast. My mum started to laugh. I let her know how I had trouble mixing that yeast into the dough and how the teacher had helped me. I then laughed with my mum although my insides were empty.

When I could, I left the room and went upstairs to my bedroom where I closed the door and cried.

My daughter is a master bread maker. She makes the most gorgeous and succulent bread. Her favourite receipe is found at:

https://weareeating.blogspot.com/2008/01/whole-wheat-bread.html?m=0

Here is the receipe that my friend gave me a few years back. I usually use this one when I make bread now:

There were two hundred children in my year at senior school. As I have mentioned before, due to the school being built up around us, for cooking lessons we travelled to Fareham Technical College. As there were so many of us, I only remember having two cooking lessons there - probably one in the first year and one in the second year.

The day that we were being taught to cook cauliflower cheese, was the day that my cooking skills rose to the highest level they would ever obtain. We were in a different room than the one where we made our fruit crumbles and I wasn't with anyone that I knew.   I remember the room being much lighter, however, my anxiety in this situation was not very light.

I was relieved when the cauliflower was in the saucepan. One thing down, one to go. I began the rue sauce. My heart was pounding as I began the process. I could follow directions, what was so hard about this? Was it because I didn’t know what the end product looked like? Was it because it was one of my first exposures to doing this myself? Was it because I was in a strange and unfamiliar place? I was relieved when the rue sauce was thick. I added the cheese and it melted.

However, I was stuck. My cauliflower had not cooked. Everyone had their cauliflower cheese in the oven. Mine was still simmering away in the saucepan. I poked it with the knife. Still hard. The teacher came over and poked it with the knife. “Give it another five or ten minutes,” she said.

The others were taking their cauliflower cheeses out of the oven and letting them cool before we went home. Mine was still boiling happily away in the saucepan. I poked it with the knife. Still hard. The teacher came over and poked it with a knife. “You’ll have to finish this off when you get home. Drain it off. Put it in your casserole dish. Put the cheese sauce over the top. Wash up.”

For some reason, this cooking exploit felt like a colossal failure. I felt like my faux pas had been exposed in public. The tale does not end here. When I got home, I explained about the ‘cauliflower who couldn’t’ to my mother. She said, “Well, we will finish cooking it in the oven’. On went the oven. An hour later, she took out the cauliflower cheese. She poked her knife into it! Yep, you’ve guessed it - hard as a rock!

To this day, I do not know why the cauliflower couldn’t, wouldn’t cook. Maybe this experience is why I tend to always overcook cauliflower now? It is now a standard joke in the family, as are my mad cooking skills! However, it is good to have something to laugh about, right?

It one were to say that I was renowned for my cooking skills, it would be an understatement.  I am the queen of cooking flops.  Even my children still laugh at the memory of pork chops setting off the smoke alarms, not just once but several times.  
 
Being the first year through Fareham Park Comprehensive School, we attended school as it was being built around us.  We didn’t have the home economic facilities until we were third year seniors (aged about thirteen) so, before that time, our cooking classes were outsourced to Fareham Park Technical School. 
 
The school employed a seven day time table so our class schedules had a nice long rotation.   Some things like music lessons, embroidery club, after school sports and so forth practiced the usual five day week schedule.  
 
We walked to school.  Every day we had our satchels ladened with our books, homework, folders, paper, pencils, rulers, slide rules, pens and our lunch. Some days we had to carry more: freshly laundered PE kits, musical instruments and music, embroidery projects, and there were those days, when we also had cooking class and had to take to school all the fresh ingredients for the recipe and the dish to bring it home in.  How the heck did we do it?
 
Cooking did not start off well.  One of my first cooking lessons was making a fruit crumble.
 
I was feeling so grown up on the day that we went to Fareham Park Technical College for a cooking lesson.  Ladened with plastic bags containing a Pyrex dish, a large tin of rhubarb, a bag of flour, a bag of sugar and some margarine. I followed the others into a large room with ovens, cupboards and white, horizontal tables arranged in groups of three.  I was assigned to sit with two boys, Robert and Fritz.  Both boys assumed that because I was a girl, I knew how to cook.  This lady cooked toast and cereal and that was about it.  They sought my advice from the get go.  It was kind of nice to be looked up to.  So I winged it.
 
The first thing that we did was to get all our ingredients out on the table and our recipe.  Some people had tins of peaches, others tins of pears, My mum had given me a tin of rhubarb.  We were shown where we could find a bowl to mix the crumble, spoons, tin openers, colanders, and how to preheat the oven. 

The second item of business was to undo the tin of fruit that we had bought and strain off the juices.  Tough stuff this cooking!  Not wanting to waste anything; I commented to the boys that it was a shame to waste the rhubarb juice.  Their eyes lit up.  “We’ll have it!” They exclaimed.  “Are you sure?” I asked.  “Oh yes!”  They said.  So I shared the juice out between them in some cups.  They doused it down and I put the rhubarb into my mum’s Pyrex dish.
 
We got on with our crumble, weighing out the flour, sugar and margarine.  We began rubbing in the marg into the flour.  The boys started washing their hands with some urgency.  ‘Are you finished already?’ I asked them.  They looked at me quickly and rushed out of the room.  I felt a little abandoned.
 
I continued to rub in the margarine.  It wasn’t very fun as I got my hands dirty.  I added the sugar, stirred it in, and put the crumble mixture on top of the rhubarb.  About ten minutes after they had left, the boys ambled back into the room.  My crumble was ready to go into the oven.  By the time I got back from the oven a few yards away, the boys were running towards the door again.
 
“What were they doing?”  I started cleaning up the table and getting the bowls and other utensils that I had used, washed up whilst I waited for the crumble to cook.  It would take just over half an hour.
 
The boys sauntered back in again looking a little ashamed.  The teacher told them to hurry up and get their crumble done; they got back to their bowls.  When I had finished washing up, I sat down at the table.  With nothing to do, I watched the activity of the boys.  They looked up and whispered ‘Rhubarb juice’.  ‘Rhubarb juice?” I questioned.  “Yes, we will NEVER drink rhubarb juice again!”  Suddenly the penny dropped and I suppressed a giggle.
 
So first lesson in cooking:  
 
1.  Know the properties of your ingredients; 
2.  Don’t share your rhubarb juice if you are trying to impress male friends;  
3.  Only give your rhubarb juice to your enemies.

Rhubarb Crumble
 
Ingredients:
One tin of Rhubarb;
4oz butter or margarine;
6oz plain flour;
2oz caster sugar
 
Method:
1.  Heat the oven (Gas Mark 6, 400 degrees F 200 degrees C);
2.  Drain juice of rhubarb (and be cautious who you give the juice to);
3.  Put rhubarb in the bottom of a pie dish;
4. Rub the butter or margarine lightly into the flour until I resembles coarse breadcrumbs.
5.  Stir in the sugar.
6.  Sprinkle evenly over the fruit and press down lightly.
7.  Sprinkle the top with sugar and bake in the centre of the oven for 45-50 minutes.
8.  Service with hot custard!

During a trip back to Minnesota last year for training on my new job, my trainer whispered conspiratorially, that she thought our manager gave her work, she believed  her manager should do.  “I’m not the one who has to write the reports”, she said.  Earlier in the day, she had spoken to me not so quietly, that the previous payroll person was just awful at the job.  “I always had to correct him”, she exclaimed.  “He just couldn’t do it.  I had to keep telling him the same thing over and over again!”  She also told me that the new payroll person, wasn’t picking up the role as quickly as her past experience indicated she could.
 
I didn’t respond to any of her comments; I should have come back with something a lot stronger than silence; my mind wasn’t so quiet.  I knew the previous payroll person;  He had left the company because of the way my trainer had treated him for the past eighteen months.  She had been demoralizing him and criticizing him constantly; in a state of anguish, he finally resigned.  He had told me that he really liked the company and the other people that he worked with, but just couldn’t take any more from our trainer. She had made his life unbearable and caused him so much stress and degradation.  I was quite astounded that she would also say something about her manager; I believed they were pretty cozy.
 
I learned a long time ago when I lived in Climping (outside of Littlehampton in West Sussex) never to believe what another person tells me about someone else.  I was serving in a church leadership position and needed to find someone to oversee the homemaking meeting for the ladies at church. I felt inspired to suggest a particular lady’s name; I will call her Lynn although this is not her real name.  Lynn accepted the call to serve as the Homemaking Leader and I worked closely with her.  When she was called, I was approached several times about Lynn, with people telling me to be careful as she was a terrible gossip and very unreliable.  This information did affect my relationship with her at the beginning.  However, I learned very quickly that she was not like that.  She was such a sweet lady and would do anything for anyone; she also never talked badly about anyone in my presence.  After this specific learning experience, I vowed that I would make my own mind up about people and not listen to what others say.

On that trip to Minnesota, I had been working twelve hour days without a break.  The day before I flew back home, I took a lunch break for an hour with one of my friends from work, who had been brought into town at the same time.  It was nice chatting with her and catching up with each other’s news.  When I got back to my desk, I grabbed some papers that I wanted to scan in, so I had access to them when I got back to Utah. Whilst I was at the photocopier, I heard my trainer say to my manager in a surreptitious manner, “She’s back!”  That just confirmed to me that the trainer was also talking behind my back, in a derogatory way, as she had done about our manager and the two payroll people.
 
This behaviour is a good example of duplicity - when a person talks about somebody who isn't present, in a critical and demeaning way - but wouldn’t dream of saying the same things to the person if they were there.  It is guaranteed that an individual who exhibits this type of behaviour with you, will be saying things about your weaknesses or other untruths to someone else, when you are not there; this is the opposite of integrity.  Having integrity means being loyal to those who are not present.  In these types of situations, one should defend those who are absent.  When you defend these people, you build trust with them.  My husband is a very good example of this.  Him and his first wife are divorced but he never says a bad word about her; he never runs her down.  I know that he will never talk badly about me to someone else, even if we have had a disagreement.

In an earlier post, I talked about the acronym of ‘HARD’.  This stands for:
 
Honest
Appropriate
Respectful
Direct
 
I spoke about how it was hard for me to be ‘Honest’ and ‘Direct’.  I particularly find confrontation and speaking about my feelings difficult.  This amounts to dishonesty as I am not being honest due to omission; it also leads to being just like my trainer.  I won’t tell the person that I’m upset with them, but I will vent to my husband or a close friend.  I do not see much difference between that and the behaviour of my trainer.
 
I am a great fan of Stephen R. Covey and reading his book ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,’ about sixteen years ago really helped me put all of the pieces of the puzzle together.  He says in this book that ‘Integrity includes but goes beyond honest. Honesty is telling the truth - that is to say, conforming our words to reality.  Integrity is conforming reality to our words - namely, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations’.  He further extrapolated “Integrity  also means avoiding any communication that is deceptive, full of guile, or beneath the dignity of people. ‘A lie is any communication with intent to deceive,’ according to one definition of the word.  Whether we disseminate with words or behaviour, if we have integrity, our intent cannot be to deceive.” (Pg 195 and 197).
 
Instead of remaining silent when my trainer was sharing information about my manager and the payroll personnel, there is an alternative choice.  Stephen Covey puts it like this: ‘... Suppose you were to start criticizing your supervisor and I basically told you that I agree with the content of some of the criticism and suggest that the two of you go directly to him and make an effective presentation, on how things might be improved.  Then how would you know, what I would do, if someone were to criticize you to me behind your back?”  This is something for me to seriously consider doing when these circumstances present themselves again.  That way I will be ‘honest’ and ‘direct’.  This will take great courage but it will help me to be congruent with myself.  This is what I need to aim for.

It is easier to take the course of least resistance: to belittle, to criticize, to betray confidences, to gossip about others behind their back.  This is also a form of pride.  One form of pride manifests itself when one seeks to build oneself up by pulling another down.  Belittling, criticizing and gossiping function to knock the person it is aimed at down; at the same time aggrandizing the perpetrator.  Pride is really destructive and possessing, it is the means of destroying an individual, a family, and a society.  When one is seeking to build oneself up at the expense of another there is no respect for the other person; there is no love.  Stepping all over someone to gain respect or success is detrimental and self-sabotaging.  How can one trust a person who does this?  
 
The way in which you treat a person says a lot about you.  It shows whether you can be trusted or not.  What I learned from my parents was to have values and to make choices in my life based on principles.  When I interact with any people, I need to do so by maintaining the same set of principles across the board; I wish to be a person who has integrity.  There are some cracks in my armour as I have just discussed and my goal is to close up these weaknesses by learning to be honest and direct with those that I associate with.  It is a work in progress, but the most important thing is to be moving in the right direction.

                          apenelopewren@gmail.com

The decisions that were made affected my work description and processes, so not really something I should have been left out of.  It would have been nice to have been involved in the discussions, but if that wasn’t the plan, then I think it was quite essential to have been informed about the decision, rather than finding out accidentally and realizing that others knew and I didn’t. 

Being included in the discussion would have been beneficial for me, because I am a team of one, as they told me when I started this job a year ago.  “We would like you to run with this job, with the same enthusiasm you have, in all your other positions,” they said.  ‘It’s your baby and you can do whatever you need, to be able to do the job.”  So changing my responsibilities and processes without my involvement, totally didn’t meet with my expectations.  This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me; I have worked in this company long enough to know, that the exceptions to the rules are the norm.  However, to me these two types of communication are conflicting and confusing, as well as embarrassing and upsetting.

Besides being hurt and disrespected by being left out of the conversation and not being told of important decisions that affect my processes and how I interact with others, with regards to those processes, I felt invisible, unimportant, humiliated, frustrated and demotivated.  Since I am intrinsically motivated to do my work, these feelings work against the sense of ownership of my job and, therefore, my efficiency and production. 
 
Having experienced events that my former manager said ‘really stank’ last year and then the emotional abuse from my trainer in this new job, for about ten months, these more recent communication issues lead me to jump to those thoughts again, believing it is a set up to make me leave.  Unfortunately, the sum total of these events have almost destroyed my confidence and have left me wondering what is wrong with me - hence my decision to visit with a therapist to get a reality check and to arm myself with tools to move forwards.  If I don’t learn these things, then these situations will follow me wherever I go.
 
I have been unable to see my therapist for a few weeks - she is pretty popular!  So being distressed about these events, I turned to ..... the internet.  Yes, I know, not always the most reliable source of information!  When I read things on the web though, I do try to be discerning, discovering who has sponsored the article and look to see what truth I can gleam from each one.  I also like to see if the accounts match my principles and values and are inline with eternal truths, that I find in the scriptures.
 
I came across two articles about ‘being kept out-of-the-loop:
 
•  “The Hidden Dangers of Leaving Someone Out of the Loop” by Heidi Grant Halvorson.
•  “Are you being paranoid about being left out of the loop at work?’ by Allison Hirschiag.
 
I resonated more with Heidi’s report, than I did with Allison.  I felt minimized by Allison’s words, perhaps because the title and contents of of her writing talks about paranoia and I need validation and an understanding of the situation.
 
To summarize Heidi’s article:  First of all it identified that my feelings are reasonable and normal.  ‘You [can] expect the excluded person to be, at the very least, a little annoyed’.  

She said research shows that leaving someone out of the loop, undermines the four fundamental needs:
 
1.  The need for belonging and connecting to others;
2.  Self-esteem;
3.  The need for a sense of control and effectiveness; and
4.  The need for meaningful work.
 
I would probably extend the definition of these four fundamental needs using the six needs of ‘certainty/comfort;' ‘variety;' ‘connection;' ‘significance;' ‘growth;' and ‘contribution’ identified by Derek Doepkoer in ‘The Healthy Habit Revolution.'  These needs drive our behaviour by giving us emotional rewards.  In essence:
 
1.  The need for belonging and a connection to others;
2.  Self-esteem/significance;
3.  The need for control and effectiveness or, in other words, certainty and comfort;
4.  The need for meaningful work which includes variety, growth and contribution.
 
Studies also show that this leaving someone out of the loop communicates rejection.  ‘Human beings are acutely sensitive to social rejection and ostracism’, writes Heidi.  It also generates a perception of low status or standing within the group.  Along with the rejection and the perception of low status, the behaviour has the following consequences:  
 
•  A loss of trust;
•  A loss of loyalty;
•  A loss of motivation; and
•  A loss of connection between a boss or colleagues.
 
Heidi further expounds on whether or not leaving someone out of the loop was an intentional or unintentional act, a person may still feel ostracized because if they were respected or important to the other person, they would have remembered.
 
Heidi advises managers to think long and hard about these issues.  If they plan to intentionally leave someone out of the loop, they should assess the risk of short-term gains, over the longer and more damaging psychological damage that behaviour inflicts and the resulting loss of trust, cooperation, loyalty and motivation.

As much as Heidi addresses the manager’s responsibility, in choosing what action to take regarding this phenomenon, Allison focuses more on the recipient.  She advises them to step back from the situation and to reassess it from a different paradigm.  She suggests that the receiver takes time out, to make sure they are physically fit and emotionally in control, so that their outlook is not distorted.  I think this is good advise as one doesn’t want to act in the heat of the moment.  It is better to be proactive than reactive.
 
Once time has been taken to assess one’s outlook, if the circumstances seem to be the same, Allison recommends talking ‘to a confident at work (or a career coach) ‘ to see if these incidents should be investigated further.  Allison proposes that an option could be to talk to your boss, but with discernment, as to what you should bring up.  Alternatively, one could let it go and learn to live with uncertainty.  I think that the latter is pretty hard to do, as it violates the need for a sense of control, effectiveness, certainty or comfort.  One has to continue to work in a psychologically damaging atmosphere.  Finally, Allison proposes that the recipient has a backup plan and prepares for engagement in another job.
 
In Allison’s article, there was only one affirmation for the recipient’s concerns, regarding being left out of the loop.  She cited that ‘studies at Harvard University have shown, that anxious thoughts can have a negative impact on your productivity - which could lead to you actually losing your job’.  However there were four negative pronouncements.  She states that the recipient should leave paranoia at the door.  To me, to address the recipient’s feelings as paranoia is not very validating.  Yes, one becomes anxious in these situations, but to suggest that one has a mental disorder due to poorly executed management techniques, seems to be adding insult to injury. 

The word ‘paranoia’ is a very strong word with highly negative connotations.  Allison states that leaving people out of the loop, is a common trigger sparking paranoiac behaviour in the office.  She quotes Dr. Menard, who says that recipients ‘expect others to judge them as harshly as they judge themselves, yet they’re almost always wrong.'    Being told that what I feel is wrong or that my perceptions of the situation are not valid, is degrading and demeaning.  
 
On the other hand, I think that Allison is trying to allude, to the extremes one’s thinking can go, especially if one is a perfectionist.  Since I am a perfectionist, you can see an example of this, when I jump to the idea that the whole thing is a set up, to make me leave. 

I also feel that, in my case, being excluded from discussions for process and job changes, that were in the sphere of my responsibilities, devalues me as a person.  It demonstrates that management does not think, that I could come up with a solution to the problem and that my opinions or insights lack value or are meaningless.  It leaves me with a feeling that I don’t belong.  I find the contrast between Allison and Heidi stark on the the reaction of the recipient.  Heidi is saying that it is normal for a human to be angry in this situation, whereas Allison is saying when the recipient reacts, they go to the level of paranoia.
 
Allison winds up her thoughts by concluding ‘If you consistently do good work and add value to the company, there’s often not much more you can do.  For example, layoffs can happen for any number of reasons, few of which are directly related to your individual performance.' This really sums up the powerlessness a recipient can feel, when their managers make a habit of keeping them out of the loop on important decisions, meetings, changes to processes, etc.
 
So having read these two articles, what did I learn and how can I apply it to my situation?  I think that I rejected the paranoiac concepts.  I actually think it is bad manners to not keep someone in the loop;  I don’t care who it is.  I also think it is poor management, creating a divisive atmosphere in a team. Good communication creates unity and increases productivity.  As a recipient of the behaviour, I have zero control over the situation, except to exercise total responsibility for my behaviours and to prepare myself for different employment.  Contesting the issues creates more conflict, especially when one is criticizing one’s own managers, who do not acknowledge their weaknesses or do not want to change.  I fear drawing appropriate boundaries would probably lead to the need to seek other employment, but would leave one’s self-respect intact.  As a leader and teacher in my family and also at church, I can make sure that I try to implement the good practice, of keeping those I interact with in the loop; I can focus on the good in others.  I can respect individuals and our diversity.  I can value all efforts that people make and can emphasis people’s potential and ability to grow.  If I unintentionally mess up, then I can strive to make sure that the person I left out, feels respected and valued.  In my efforts to keep and maintain unity in my family and within my church family, I can expect a high degree of bonding, loyalty, motivation and an effectiveness in our efforts to work together.

                           apenelopewren@gmail.com