The Psychology of Your Triflin' Workplace Haters

Each month, I will share the latest findings and research on the psychology of workplace trauma to help you better comprehend the what, how, and why of your high performer workplace trauma.

If you follow me on TikTok, you may recall some of my early posts that explained how you were being traumatized by the micro and macroaggressions you faced as a high-performing Black woman in the workplace. I also made a few posts urging you to stop helping/rescuing undeserving coworkers who were most likely reveling in your misery while being secret co-conspirators against you. The American Psychological Association published its study results in the Monitor on Psychology, October 2025, confirming my warnings. The studies conclude that your coworkers “experience both empathy and (what they refer to as) schadenfreude” in response to observing your workplace abuse. Further, “people who observe workplace mistreatment react as strongly as those who experience it, but some observers show a surprising amount of schadenfreude or pleasure at another’s pain, according to the Journal of Applied Psychology. Researchers explored different forms of mistreatment, including abusive supervision, injustice, incivility, and sexual harassment, and found that “third-party observers were impacted to a similar degree as direct victims of the abuse. However, while observing your mistreatment often induced anger and empathy, it also brought about schadenfreude alongside negative evaluations of and behaviors toward victims, such as undermining actions and gossip.”

This research also lends itself to a better understanding of a uniquely cruel kind of workplace trauma, a sort of black on black workplace crime…”skin folk” who you discovered are indeed not your “kinfolk”. Some of you’ve expressed in the comment section of my TikTok posts about how completely devastating it is to be traumatized or abused at work by somebody who looks exactly like you, i.e., a black female supervisor or black male boss. Now you know with certainty that they not only willingly participate in your torture, colluding corruptively with your detractors, but also derive pleasure from it. When I watch it in action, I have been reminded of what’s been called the “crab pot syndrome”. It’s when there is a pot on the stove of boiling crabs, and those strong enough to grip the sides of the pot to leverage escape are pulled back down into the pot to their inevitable deaths by their own kind. Sound familiar?

Beloveds, I hope that you will use this evidence from the field of psychology to ground your understanding, allowing you to identify more quickly those who are covertly against you so that you don’t mistake their feigned empathy for loyalty or trustworthiness. I’m talking specifically about your black female colleague you’re trying to help as she kikis in your face, pretends to commiserate with your pain and rage at the injustice in your workplace, but secretly loves every second of your pain inflicted by jealous, envious, low-performers, who want nothing less than your humiliation and complete destruction. 

Lastly, a Journal of Occupational Health Psychology research study suggests that when envious coworkers ostracize top performers, the high performers may sabotage team productivity. In the first survey, employees rated their proactivity and job satisfaction, and the extent to which they experienced envy, coworker ostracism, and negative emotions. In the second survey, employees evaluated their own intentional underperformance. The researchers found that “teams with higher rates of envy were more likely to ostracize high-performing employees, and that the targets of this exclusion were more likely to dial back their efforts at work.” This is peer pressure (workplace trauma) designed to force you to drop down to your performance “low beams”, reducing the pressure that your high-performing black excellence exerts on mediocre performers, lest you experience additional micro-aggressing punishment, i.e., “ostracism, exclusion, and manufactured criticism”. As a trauma-informed clinician specializing in workplace trauma, I refer to this “macro” aggression, trauma-inducing dynamic as “workplace emotional blackmail”. 

(If you found this update helpful, check out this week’s YouTube video on this topic-https://www.youtube.com/@AuntieTherapist)

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