Work revenge fantasies: I want thems

August 5, 2023 1:06 AM

If you're angry at a former employer, what's your petty revenge fantasy? Tips for letting go?

I have a bitter, deep rage towards my shitty former employer (an academic institution, surprise surprise). I quit after years of being treated like a second-class citizen, and now I find myself extremely resentful for having put years of my life and lots of unpaid caring labor into this place. Yes, I'm seeing my therapist regularly. But some days I'm still seething and fantasizing about stealing office chairs.

If you're in a similar situation, with a deep wellspring of anger towards a former employer (whether you quit or were forced out, academia or not), do you also have some dark fantasies? If so, will you share them (especially if they're creative)? and how did you learn to not fixate on the situation? Please be assured I will not do anything dangerous, illegal, or unkind, in reality. Also if anyone knows of books or writings specifically about dealing with anger towards this kind of situation, I'd be interested in checking them out.

posted by anonymous to Human Relations (28 answers total)

Mod note: Please Note: While this skims pretty close to chatfilter, OP is interested in various techniques for avoiding or overcoming fixation, and "dealing with anger towards this kind of situation," including source material.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:09 AM on August 5, 2023

I found psychedelics made me stop fixating on revenge.
posted by wheatlets at 1:24 AM on August 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

It took years of rinse & repeat, but I finalised realised that with when I kept getting fixated on the last person who wronged me (stole from me, abused me, manipulated me, etc) for months or more at a time, I could seemingly only let that go when there was something newly negative to fixate on instead.

Once it became a conscious awareness that I couldn't let go of whatever the recent issue until I had a new negative to focus on, it enabled me to work on being able to let go of the latest and more, without a new negative fixation instead.

Sure they all come back to mind occasionally; I dwell, get stuck in some negative spiral thinking, link and associate the repeating patterns of where I went wrong, try to learn from so it doesn't repeat, etc.

And although it can take just a moment for me to fall backwards and get stuck in a negative thought spiral again, and then hours of effort to find the right mind release and distraction to break free of that rut again.
Each time it gets easier and faster, and practice is helping me not get stuck so deep or for so long each time (mostly).

For me, it's always a quick fix out to feel better once I find it, but it still takes a lot of time to find that quick fix. Those ways out can also come from anywhere.

One very memorable fix, was when someone I was recounting to of a well trodden story of ongoing abuse by someone years earlier, and they replied with the phrasing that the experience I'd had sounded 'traumatic'.
Just that simple word was the beacon I needed. I don't know if anyone else had used that word to describe it before, but if they had, I hadn't heard it.
This time though, finally identifying the abuse as a trauma suddenly made sense why it had been so hard to let go, and then weirdly, knowing it was incredibly hard to let it go, made it suddenly far easier to let it go.

Other times it may be tidying up a counter top that's been cluttered, seeing beauty in something random in nature, or finding a single moment of gratitude for something (and I do have a lot to be grateful for). There's no single fix for me yet, but I have an increasing tool kit of methods that might work in the right direction.

These last few years I glad to spend far more time out of those negative head spaces, than in them.

I hope you can find your head space release from your former employer soon too!
posted by many-things at 2:18 AM on August 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

I feel you. Eventually, it will pass, but what I did to begin with was to start to write a novel. I haven't finished it yet, but I still might. I set the entire thing I had gone through in my local supermarket rather than a university, but used the real (first) names of my tormentors. One of my friends who is an actual acclaimed author advised me to write it, let it lie, and then revisit it after 10 years, and I'm basically following his advice. (So in two years, I may publish a novel!)

This is not unprecedented, but somehow I can't remember the examples of people who did this successfully.

The other way I have dealt with this is parallel to how one deals with the end of a bad relationship: be succesfull in a new relationship. For me this isn't easy, because I deal with PTSD for other reasons, but I have found some succes in a new line of work, and it pleases me to see that the people who bullied me and stole my job are less succesfull, with one even being demoted recently. The whole point was that they couldn't do the thing, so they had to use nefarious strategies to get me out instead, and for some reason management listened to them rather than me. But they still can't do the thing.
posted by mumimor at 2:34 AM on August 5, 2023 [8 favorites]

Not to abuse the edit window: the point of both my strategies is that I am actively doing something, rather than passively feeling angry.
posted by mumimor at 2:36 AM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Buddhism has some good stuff to say about this! I'm no Buddhist, but I've really appreciated some of Pema Chödrön's writing on the topic of letting go. Here's an introductory article with plenty of links to more in-depth resources.
posted by quacks like a duck at 2:39 AM on August 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

how did you learn to not fixate on the situation?

Via an ongoing process of deliberately escalating the kinds and frequencies of ill fortune I was wishing upon those who had done me wrong until they became so baroque and so far beyond what was physically even possible that they just made me laugh.

Watching a lot of Wile E Coyote helps. Ren and Stimpy too.

I think the single most effective technique I have ever learned about maintaining mental health in the face of insuperable odds is trying not to fall into the trap of taking myself too seriously. Life is random and wild and heartbreakingly beautiful, and allowing systems of oppression to make us forget that this is so is to let those systems win.
posted by flabdablet at 2:44 AM on August 5, 2023 [13 favorites]

I got something better to fixate on. Just repeated to myself that they already had as much free brain space from me as they were going to get and went back to fixating on an epic road trip and a new puppy. A kitten would probably also work.
posted by Bottlecap at 3:12 AM on August 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

I don't know about letting go (do you want to? I don't know if I do! Having a deep wellspring of rage to dip into when required can be useful sometimes), but making aggressive songs about these fantasies can be cathartic.
posted by Chrysalis at 3:43 AM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Watching the “I love you, Sheriff Truman” clip from Twin Peaks. Imagining myself giving the speech to the person who has pissed me off. Flattering myself into imagining my humiliating work situation is actually part of my choice to become a naysayer against aggression in the company of Gandhi and King.
posted by johngoren at 4:08 AM on August 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Years ago, I went to see a musical as part of a university program that was written by someone who seemed like she was just really, really angry about her PhD program and decided to trash everyone on stage (she got her PhD elsewhere). It was a pretty bad play, and I left at intermission, but my director friend who stayed also thought the play seemed like her revenge. One of the few things I remember about it is that one of the professors was a Marxist who stole toilet paper from public places. There were song lyrics about that.

I don't remember her name, and I won't name the play - she might have ended up regretting it and may still be in academia (and I can't find it on Google), but writing about a bad experience and getting it published - or staged - is a time-honored method of revenge, one I fantasize about myself. Even if you don't get it published, just writing it might help. And if it's fiction, you can go wild with what you say about these people. You can take the bad things and really exaggerate them - or you might prefer just to give the unchanged, awful truth. Or you can try both and see how it feels.

I don't know if it's really any kind of revenge, but Josh Ferris' novel Then We Came to the End is a very good and funny novel about the idiocies of a corporate workplace. Lucky Jim sends up academia, but I read it in the 80s, and it's possible there's sexism that would seem really bad now.

As for getting over that kind of anger, I find that just letting time pass is what helps the most. I was really angry at a massage therapist who caused me huge problems by pretending to be a psychotherapist as well - I even tried to file a formal complaint, but he moved and the new state's licensing group wouldn't even tell me if he was there. I felt really destroyed by that whole experience, but years later, I don't have any strong emotion when I think about him - I just think "what a jackass" and move on.
posted by FencingGal at 5:12 AM on August 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

This may not apply to your situation, but I was in this place once with a former employer and I had some pretty deeply-held desires about what I was going to do to get back at the employer. (I wanted to throw a cake against a plate glass window.) The thing that stopped me from carrying out this fantasy, and eventually removed the allure of the fantasy, was thinking about the negative effects that the revenge would have on other people who, like me, were suffering from the job but unlike me had not yet decided to leave. (I didn't want my former coworkers, most of whom were lovely, to have to clean up the cake or deal with questions about what had happened.)
posted by Night_owl at 6:15 AM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Living well is the best revenge" sounds cheesy, but years later, I can vouch that it's true.
posted by Alterscape at 6:52 AM on August 5, 2023 [14 favorites]

Have you tried witchcraft? Hexing people is very satisfying regardless of whether it actually works.
posted by Jacqueline at 7:35 AM on August 5, 2023 [10 favorites]

I had a job from hell many years ago. I had been through several rounds of interviews for an entry-level position at a large, prestigious company when I received a call from a former boss (Susan) who I had really liked working for, and she offered me a position working with her at her new job. She really talked up the company, the brilliant CEO and the growth potential of my position, and after probably not enough consideration I accepted her offer. Prestigious company offered me a position soon afterwards and I turned them down.

At my new job I got off on the wrong foot with the administrative assistant of the CEO (let’s call her Kate) for very minor reasons, and she had it in for me from then on. The CEO himself (Stan) was very young, immature and inexperienced and he was very much under the influence of Kate. So because Kate didn’t like me, Stan didn’t like me. Even though I wound up covering for Susan for several weeks while she was on medical leave, and successfully handled several unexpected crises during that time, Kate got me written up for an extremely minor “mistake” (something that could be argued hadn’t even been my fault at all, and regardless I fixed the issue within 10 minutes.) But Kate continued bad-mouthing me to Stan, and when Susan came back from medical leave she realized that I was on the verge of being let go. She withdrew her support from me behind the scenes, as well as distancing herself as far as the friendly relationship we’d had before even though I had done nothing that should have offended her personally. Very deliberate snubs and exclusions, as if she did not want to be tainted by being perceived to be a friend of the person who was about to be let go. I already had all my shit packed in a box the day she called me into her office to fire me.

Looking back on that time, I am angry that Susan turned out to be a truly shitty friend, and that Kate was allowed to get away with being just a terrible person… mean, unprofessional and vindictive to many people, not just me. I am still angry at Susan for luring me away from what might have been a career-making position at Prestigious company, and of course mad at myself for letting myself be lured by Susan’s “friendship” and her claims about how great the company was.

As crappy as it all was at the time, I don’t actually think about what happened very much at all these days. It was a long time ago, which is definitely a factor in how little I think about it. Occasionally something will make me think of it and I might indulge in a few minutes of grudge-nurturing, but I tend not to dwell on it for long. There just isn’t much to be gained from going over it at length. If I find myself starting to dwell on it, I just find something else to think about. Read a book, watch a show, go do something fun, whatever.

I also don’t have any of what you might call “revenge fantasies”, mostly for the following reasons:

1. I feel that fantasizing about bad things happening to others is bad karma (for lack of a better word.) Feeling satisfaction at the thought of another person suffering a genuine misfortune would make me feel ugly on the inside, and that might color and shape my outer reality in some way.

2. I am the type of person who often involuntarily feels bad for the suffering of bad people. Imagining bad things happening to one of my nemeses would quickly turn into feeling sorry for them, and I don’t want to have to feel sad on their shitty imaginary behalf… lol.

3. The biggest thing that keeps me from ruminating over the situation is having moved on from it in reality. The hit on my self-esteem from what happened at Hell Job made the next job search more difficult as I had lost some confidence, but I eventually found something and since then, I’ve had other, better jobs where people have appreciated me and treated me much more respectfully. So there really isn’t any reason for me to dwell on a crappy experience from like 20 years ago that turned out to be pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. (I’d probably feel differently if it had ruined my life or career in a way that I was never able to come back from.)
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 7:35 AM on August 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I agree with everyone who says do something creative with it, but remember the "serve cold" maxim. Make it a side-plot or so subtle only you know, because if you center the whole thing around the vengeance it can be a snoozearama for the audience. (Unless you get sufficient distance from it and make something amazing and clever and sneaky, that is, in which case I hope it finds its way to Netflix. All the delicious revenge in Better Call Saul made that show irresistible to me. The Kettlemans subplot! Chef's kiss...)

This is several thousand orders of magnitude less traumatic than your trauma, but:

I had a sortof friend--we were housemates with a third friend whom we both genuinely got along with and liked, so we were trying to be friends with each other just because it made everything easier, but we always rubbed each other the wrong way, and it wasn't really working naturally. She wasn't evil or anything, it was just that she was always really clear about her preferences for thirdfriend and really slapdash about concealing the fact that she thinks I'm kinda dumb. (She's Ivy and a poet [third friend is also a poet], whereas I went to a state school and write fiction. Prickly friend has that poet thing that is like my chemist mother's hard-science thing: the brilliant prodigy's disdain for fiction like the brilliant prodigy's disdain for the life sciences. It's annoying to have to accommodate this attitude all the time when the social contract prohibits you from just slapping the shit out of the offender.)

So we stayed in this uneasy dynamic for years until finally one day years and years into it she stabbed her tidy little toe over the line one time too many, and I said to myself, "This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear," and decided she was dead to me henceforth. I kicked her off the Christmas card list and forgot her phone number, and when I wrote a story recently featuring a real-life anecdote about the spectacularly salacious and messy and sloppily enjambed behavior of a real life person and I needed a name to protect that person's identity, I named her after the poet. I named another bad actor in another story after a former boss who was a vicious tyrant. It's harmless, nobody knows what you're doing but you, and it won't bore the audience.
posted by Don Pepino at 8:04 AM on August 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

I had sort of a rough go in my PhD program (by no means a worst case scenario, I was just really lonely and anxious) and it was the kind of thing that would get me riled about The System for a while after. My impulse, as it usually is in such situations, was to try to improve the world by helping other people who were unhappy and wanted a way out. I joined an online community for academics who wanted to explore other options and was pretty active there for the first few years after my degree. So, you might find that acting to prevent similar harms coming to your peers would feel satisfying.

The other thing that helped was finding success in a new field. Ironically I wound up back in academia, but in a different role, and one that permitted me not to attach identity to the job, but instead to my skill set, which will come with me if and when I leave. It was six years for the PhD, and six years after that, I finally felt done with it. I hardly think about it now.
posted by eirias at 8:06 AM on August 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

So the good news is that the universe takes care of its own. I recommend Jacqueline's approach of witchcraft or other spiritual practice.

I was abused, gaslit, and ultimately let go by one former employer, and my preexisting PTSD was only made worse by working there for so long. But within a week of being let go—for following my conscience and publicly standing up for what was right in a historically difficult situation, I might add—I had a new job, which had its dysfunctions but overall was much healthier and more lucrative for me.

The CEO who pushed me out of that first job? Oh, he ended up going bankrupt during the pandemic.

Someone who harassed a friend of mine in the workplace ended up getting laid off. I'm reasonably certain karmic justice is headed for another workplace harasser I know.

Something similar happened to the boss who gaslit and harassed my former partner at a former job—he ended up committing some indiscretion and getting shipped off to another city and demoted. (Which is a bit reminiscent of the Catholic priest treatment, unfortunately, but still, it was a small bit of justice.)

Be patient. The universe has your back. Also, in the earthly realm, in the U.S., it's legal to talk about bad things former employers did—nondisparagement clauses were recently ruled unconstitutional. So you're free to talk about it!
posted by limeonaire at 8:18 AM on August 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

I also wrote my way out of ruminating on revenge -- but not fiction, more toward the overthinking bloggy side of things. It took the form of "WTF just happened?" mostly. I like to pick apart fiction and drama plots, so extending that tendency toward my own life drama only made sense.

Once I felt I understood what had happened, and everyone's part in it including my own, the urgency that drove my rumination wore off.

Many other excellent suggestions in this thread as well. I hope you find something that helps you.
posted by humbug at 8:41 AM on August 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

A piece of advice that I got from my dad when in a similar situation was to "write a memo for the file." You write a memo to whoever, airing all your grievances and saying everything you wish you could/had say. Then put the memo in a "file" online, written out and in a folder. It feels good to get everything off your chest in a concrete way and it did help me process all sorts of feelings.
posted by brookeb at 10:35 AM on August 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

A little fixation is a good thing. It’s very entertaining, and as long as you don’t reach for the anthrax, downright therapeutic.
Here’s how I got over my rage at the entity who fired me. I’m a typewriter nerd anyway, so I typed out sheet after furious sheet about how I would chain the bosses together, line them up against a brick wall, and machine-gun them at the waist, perfectly perforating them. Most gratifying!
Time will heal the wound. I saw the big boss’s obituary in our local paper a few months ago, and jumped, literally, for joy.
Write, write, write the most heinous punishments you can think of. It really does take the rage-edge off, and you’ll be ready to manage the rest of your life.
posted by BostonTerrier at 11:29 AM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Creative writing: write a short story with a thinly disguised version of your boss/advisor/phd mentor as the villain. Don't actually publish it or anything. Just enjoy writing it.
Musical catharsis: I spent a lot of time imagining my perfect breaking up with academia playlist.
Reading quit-lit novels: Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou will make you feel so seen. And it's hilarious.
posted by EllaEm at 12:30 PM on August 5, 2023

I sued them and won.
posted by shock muppet at 12:49 PM on August 5, 2023 [22 favorites]

I have actually made people who wronged me into characters in my published fiction, but I always make sure any physical attributes are the opposite of reality, and add one really gross/problematic characteristic that nobody would want to own up to.

The one time somebody did start to call me on whether or not I had written about them, I asked the tall blond man why he thought he was the short brunette woman in my story, since her dominant characteristic was [disgusting habit]. Watching him back down was almost as satisfying than writing and publishing the story itself.
posted by rpfields at 3:03 PM on August 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

Letting go is probably the best bet. Anger begets anger.

If you have not already talked this out with friends and family or whoever, then do so. Then move on.

They were wrong. You were right. And that in the end that makes no difference in the world at large or to the bad employers.

If you want to fantasize, think about living in another time, living on a fictional magic island, being able to talk to animals and breath underwater. Whatever gets you out of your head for a while.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 3:35 PM on August 5, 2023

I like to funnel my rage into productivity when possible. I had a truly terrible boss once and it motivated me to be above reproach in every way so that she just looked like a total idiot if she complained about me. I also started focusing my career growth questions towards her boss instead and ended up working directly for her instead eventually. I never complained about the terrible boss at work and I think that helped. I know your question is different since you've moved on, but maybe the "I'll show them" attitude might get you closer to something you want now.

Ymmv with witchcraft, but I'm Wiccan and I definitely agree with Serene Empress about karma and wouldn't curse anyone because I know myself and that would make me feel really terrible about myself.
posted by Eyelash at 6:07 PM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Petty revenge fantasy: signing dude’s email address up for newsletters from unsavory businesses / websites

Letting go: I ask myself if there’s anything else for me to learn from the situation. Did I miss a red flag? Why did I let it go on for so long? What did I do to get out of it? Usually hashing over it from a more detached perspective helps me let go, or at least remind myself of some useful lessons I learned rather than being all grar about it
posted by momus_window at 8:05 AM on August 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mod note: From the OP:

Thanks to everyone who replied and shared stories and thoughts. These have been very helpful. I particularly appreciated Serene Empress Dork's point that I would end up sympathizing with my ex-work nemeses. I also really liked the advice to put my experience into fiction or "write a memo for the file" which I think will be useful. Other than that I'll just wait for karma to do its thing. Thanks everyone!

posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 11:59 AM on August 6, 2023 [4 favorites]