Thanks, Amos.

There may be a way to shift this man from manifesting cold-hearted and deliberate nastiness, but I never got any inkling of a desire on his part to even recognise his own nastiness or negative effects on other people. It's highly likely IMHO that some major, long-term things happened to him - probably as a child - but I can't see him changing for the better in the near future. I can't imagine a trigger big enough to make him see the need to re-think himself and his life. It's a bit of a Catch-22 in that way, because if he was physically or psychologically threatened in the extreme it would sooner or later reinforce his current way of dealing with life and other people. The bullied often resort to becoming the bullies themselves.

It is nearly a year since he bullied me out of that job, and I saw him briefly a few weeks ago. He is still adamantly defending his "rightness" and my "wrongness" in the whole situation - mostly because he is probably (IMHO again) in total denial about who he really is.

I never naively believed that everyone is goodness and light, but I used to think that I could rely on my analytical abilities to figure out what makes people tick and what I could do to be able to have reasonably useful interactions with them, or just to realise that they were on a totally different wavelength and that there was probably very little commonality between us.

This man is exceptionally good at pretending that he is sensible, and rational, and that he is *truly* trying to work towards real and worthwhile outcomes. Meanwhile it is all a major cover-up of his own abject terror of being caught out doing something or making a decision that he can't defend when scrutinised. Because he is flying by the seat of his pants in all of his managerial decisions he is constantly putting himself in jeopardy of being scrutinised. The irony is that he is a high level manager in a large local government org and gets paid very good money to make these decisions and to withstand the resulting scrutiny. (There is nothing worse than having to defend your decisions against an onslaught of local councillors and other council managers, plus members of the community and of local businesses, not to mention the risk of having it all hung out to dry in the media.) Why he has chosen to be in this job at this level I will never know!

So, because of his fear of taking risks he finds a target within his own section and takes out his frustrations and terror on the victim, bullies him/her out of the job, finds another victim, the cycle begins again.

I wasted more psychological energy than I care to think about, during most of the first year that I was there, trying to work out a way of working constructively with him. It took a long time for me to realise that he was deliberately working against me and it wasn't just communication problems.

Helen