In My Is this workplace bullying, or am I overreacting?
If you're asking this question at all, something has been happening for a while. People don't google "am I overreacting?" after one bad meeting — they get there after weeks of small things that are each explainable on their own and exhausting in total. So before anything else: the question is legitimate, and so is asking it.
Here's the honest answer up front: sometimes it is bullying, sometimes it's too early to tell, and sometimes it's ordinary friction — a stressed manager, a bad quarter, a personality clash. All three answers are useful, because each one has a different next step. What doesn't help is a stranger on the internet telling you it's definitely bullying to make you feel validated. You deserve clarity, not flattery.
Behaviours that have names
Self-doubt thrives on vagueness. Naming what's happening — precisely — is often the single most steadying thing you can do. See if any of these match:
- Gaslighting — being told things didn't happen, weren't said, or that your memory is faulty. Over time it erodes your trust in your own mind.
- Exclusion — meetings you should be in happening without you; information loops quietly closing; the "forgotten" invite that keeps being forgotten.
- Credit appropriation — your work presented as someone else's; praise redirected upward or sideways, mistakes redirected at you.
- Undermining — public correction of trivia, being contradicted by default, the eye-roll performed for an audience. The audience is the point.
- Setting up to fail — impossible deadlines, goalposts that move after you reach them, responsibility without authority, tasks assigned too late to do well.
- Micromanagement as control — scrutiny applied to you that colleagues doing the same work don't get.
- Triangulation — colleagues being told things about you; "others have complained too", never with specifics.
- Microaggressions — small, repeated digs that track your race, sex, age, accent, disability, or another part of who you are. Individually deniable; in aggregate, a message.
The five tests of a pattern
One bad day is not bullying, and honest guides say so. What separates a rough patch from a campaign:
- Repetition — the same behaviour recurring, not a single incident.
- Direction — aimed at you specifically. The comparator question is powerful: does he treat everyone this way, or you?
- Persistence — rough patches fade as pressure passes; campaigns continue and often escalate.
- Power — formal (your manager) or informal (social influence). Power asymmetry is what turns conflict into bullying.
- Impact — Sunday-night dread, broken sleep, shrinking confidence. Impact is data, not weakness.
And one question that changes the legal picture entirely: does the treatment track a protected characteristic — race, sex, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, pregnancy? In the UK (and most countries), bullying alone is not a standalone legal claim, but harassment linked to a protected characteristic is. If that rings true, your situation has legal routes that plain bullying doesn't.
What to do with each answer
If a pattern is forming: start a log today. Date, time, what was said or done (words verbatim where you can), who was present, how it affected you. Keep it on a personal device — never a work laptop. You are not "building a case against someone" by writing down what happens to you; you are keeping your own memory safe from the fog that stress creates. If it continues, that log becomes the foundation of everything else.
If it's too early to tell: log quietly for three or four weeks and let the evidence answer the question instead of 3am rumination. Either the log fills up — and you'll know — or it doesn't, and you'll get your peace back.
If it looks like friction: that's genuinely good news, and worth trusting. A direct, calm conversation ("when X happens, Y is the effect on me") resolves more friction than any formal process ever has. Keep the log habit anyway for a couple of weeks; if you're wrong, you'll know early.
You don't have to work this out alone. In My Corner is a team of five AI companions for exactly this — one who listens, one who decodes letters and knows your deadlines, one who keeps your evidence organised, one for fresh starts, one who teaches. Private by design: conversations are never stored on our servers.
Talk it through — In My Corner