Asklemmy

43947 readers

766 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

204

what would be the best way to tell your supervisor to stop inquiring about your personal life and mobbing you into opening up? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by sarah2653@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

55 comments fedilink hide all child comments

my supervisor is an extrovert, whereas I'm an introvert. She feels insulted if I don't share my personal life with her and ridicules me before other coworkers because I separate private and work life and prefer to keep to myself.

I wrote mobbing because that's what it feels to me: a ritual of hers is to always eat together, a time she uses to ask me questions I don't want to answer. I usually answer very vaguely, which is not enough for her. If I eat alone, she'll complaint about why am I being so unfriendly.

She doesn't understand I need time alone to unwind.

She is convinced she is doing me a favor, but the opposite is true. It makes me dislike her even more.

I simply cannot win. It's tiring being blamed and shamed for preferring to read a book instead of talking about dogs or sex.

It makes me want to quit.

I don't know if I go to HR with an issue like this, because they may label me the odd one, the one who's not a teamplayer and use it against me.

Most people are extroverted and react angrily to somebody who keeps to himself and I've been bullied several times for this. Extroverts don't seem to understand that not showing interest in their sexual lives doesn't mean disrespect, but simply that I don't care about it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Beacon@fedia.io 4 points 2 months ago

I didn't read your whole comment, but from what i did read I can say this is basically the correct answer. The only thing I'd add is to also include nice sentiments and productivity explanations.

Like:

"Hey [person's name], do you have a couple minutes? I wanna have a quick chat. I wanna let you know that I'm a significant introvert, which means i need alone time and and social boundaries. I think you're a very nice person and i appreciate all the efforts you've made trying to connect with me, but that actually makes things more difficult for me. It emotionally stresses me out, and that in turn also reduces my productivity at work. I think you're great, but it would be really helpful to me if there were no extra social interactions with me beyond what's needed for our work to get done smoothly. I know you have good intentions when asking about my personal life and striking up conversations, and i honestly appreciate that intent, but it would be great if I could have social interactions kept to the minimum. I really appreciate your consideration on this stuff, thanks."