How to Rise Above the Person Who Tries to Undermine You



Being undermined by a person you thought you could trust can devastate your sense of well-being and equanimity. Perhaps you confided in a friend that you’re struggling financially and hardly able to put food on the table. The other people in your social circle seem to be doing OK, so you would rather not have this become general knowledge.

However, while out at a group lunch, your friend offers to pay for your meal because “after all, you’re hardly able to afford this right now.” Shame and anger flood over you, and even several days later, you can’t shake off these feelings.

Good relationships are built on a foundation of trust, and when something like this happens, you don’t know how you’ll ever get over it. According to new research, though, there is a way.

Social Undermining and Its Effects on You

Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE)’s Sandra Costa and colleagues (2024) framed their study of social undermining as a form of workplace mistreatment, which they note is a common occurrence. Although bullying, insults, and aggression are more blatant sources of mistreatment, social undermining sits there under the radar with a persistent and enduring drumbeat. A coworker who threatens you physically is likely to get reprimanded, but one who engages in more subtle forms of mistreatment can easily get away with it.

Forms of social undermining, the ISCTE authors point out, include spreading rumors, withholding information, excluding or isolating a colleague, claiming credit for their work, or engaging in acts of sabotage. The negative outcomes on affected workers include “feelings of insecurity and workplace vulnerability” and can lead to “diminished productivity, increased turnover rates, and engagement in counterproductive workplace behaviors” (e.g. stealing office supplies, slow-walking completion of projects) (p. 2). Social undermining can also make people sick.

There are ways around this despicable treatment, though. A theory in organizational psychology known as the Job Demands-Resources model (JD-R) proposes that people have resources they can draw from to help buffer the negative effects of problems at work such as stress.

The authors propose that two resources that people can draw from when they are targets of undermining are forgiveness and revenge. Both of these strategies, the authors argue, “provide individuals with a sense of self-control over their work environment, making them better able to cope with job demands” (p. 3).

Revenge or Forgiveness? Which Works Best?

The overall model that the Portuguese research team investigated proposes that undermining can lead to feelings of negative affect which, in turn, can produce somatic (bodily) complaints. Revenge and forgiveness serve as the two coping mechanisms that could neutralize negative affect and therefore lower the odds of workers developing physical symptoms. Using undergraduate students in a Management class as recruiters for the study’s participants, the authors tested their model on a sample of 229 employees (average age 36 years) who completed surveys three times over a month-long period.

The measure of undermining included items such as “My coworkers gave me the silent treatment.” Forgiveness items included “I would let go of the negative feelings I had toward them,” and revenge items were framed in terms of thoughts or cognitions, such as “I wished something bad would happen to them.”

Negative affect items included ratings of emotions such as afraid, nervous, irritable, hostile, upset, and distressed. Finally, somatic complaints included problems sleeping, headaches, backaches, fatigue, and lack of energy. Because the study used a lagged design, undermining at time one could be used as a predictor of negative outcomes at time two, one month later.

With these scales now defined, you can think about how you feel when someone’s engaged in undermining directed toward you, such as that friend at lunch. More to the point regarding this study, though, try to conjure up a time when you were (or are?) the target of mistreatment at work and imagine your own reactions.

Forgiveness Essential Reads

Turning to the results, as the authors predicted, workers who reported higher levels of undermining did have higher levels of negative affect which ultimately translated into more somatic complaints. The only strategy that served to negate undermining’s effect was forgiveness.

Why was forgiveness so effective? Costa et al. suggest that this strategy works because it allows you to overcome “debilitating thoughts and emotions resulting from interpersonal injury” (p. 17). Revenge doesn’t neutralize those negative outcomes but only serves to magnify or escalate bad feelings. It’s also possible, the authors suggest, that forgiveness outweighs revenge when people want to maintain positive relationships with people they like.

Turning From Revenge to Forgiveness

Now, reflecting back on the time (or times) when you were mistreated, perhaps thoughts of revenge flood your mind. You wonder how it ever would be possible to forgive a person who has wronged you so mercilessly and publicly. Then ask yourself whether these fantasies actually make you feel any better.

Try instead to think back on a time when you did forgive someone, perhaps in a situation analogous to that unfortunate lunchtime encounter. Rather than having vitriol take over your mind, you found a way to feel what the authors call “a transformative process, one that can “enhance “constructive communication, reduce aggression, and foster feelings of closeness” (p. 12).

Forgiveness has an added benefit as an alternative to revenge. When you engage in revengeful thoughts, you remain stuck in a ruminative rut where you constantly replay harmful scenarios. It’s much harder to move on from there to any kind of reconciliation. Better, according to the ISCTE research, to find a way to repair the damage done by the mistreatment.

To sum up, it’s all too easy to imagine dire consequences for the underminer rather than follow the path toward forgiveness. However, as in so many situations in life, it’s forgiveness that will lead you to the path toward fulfillment.


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