Former Community – We Moved
🆕 Coached community here, for posts & feedback public community here.
Getting paid from Machievellian former boss
Thank you John for your kind message.
My personal elaboration of feelings and reduction of cognitive dissonance is still ongoing, but surprisingly, I feel I am slowly going more toward the side of "sue this person" now.
So maybe it is really becoming a possibility, and not simply something I wanted to say to him.
I don’t know how much he owes you.
I would rather lose 10k than go to court. This is an ordeal in itself.
I would use it as a threat but not go through with it.
That’s my opinion.
It's certainly a personal choice.
But I, after all, am a lawyer. I sue people on behalf of my clients, and defend my clients from others.
Here, the issue for me is not going to court in itself: it's doing it against him.
I think hopefully my internal processing will in time give me the answer on what to do. But, what I wanted to say is that I feel new choices are opening up more concretely in my mode of being.
Guys, roll of drums.
I received full payment!
Together with a very nasty email, as expected:
Him: Here attached the wire.
You were really offensive in your ways and a big delusion from the human point of view.
Time will in any case be a gentleman...
Do you think he is threatening me?
I think here FULL IGNORE his message is the best stance.
Thank you Lucio, your help was invaluable in reaching this outcome.
Congratulations on getting the full payment.
I see that this client was a bit of a headache from the posts here and I am glad this whole affair is resolved.
"You were really offensive in your ways and a big delusion from the human point of view.
Time will in any case be a gentleman..."
It's sad how some people want to take shots even after the issue is resolved. A lot of playing victim can be seen here.
Also I think this can extend to a power move I have recently observed people do where they essentially "call-out" your supposed passive-aggression to frame you as a bad guy.
BOOM! What a win!
Congratulations Bel, really happy to read.
Twice the win: financial and even emotional.
His last nasty-judge power move translates into:
You were really offensive in your ways and a big delusion from the human point of view.
=
You empowered yourself and escaped from my toxic embrace.
I am bitter that I couldn't control you and that I don't have you under my thumb anymore. And it drives me crazy mad that in our final showdown you checkmated me and won, and that I had to surrender and pay up
Thanks Lucio, your message is really helpful to me making sense of all this. Thank you for your kind words and your additional help here.
I want to reiterate my thanks also to Matthew, Lucas, John who contributed to this thread and result.
And Growfast, thank you for your support here above, your message was really kind.
And thank you Mats G for the thumbs up!
I am still processing what happened and this whole endeavor.
His email was even more nasty than I wrote above, I omitted a small part where he quoted someone unspecified (probably himself!) about "ungrateful people asking without timidity and forgetting what they received".
I am glad, but part of me is still sad that I was not able to end this in a better way.
I know rationally it was impossible with a person like this, I know he has basically been just playing with me the whole time until now, but... still.
I don't see the sadness/disappointment part at all, Bel.
It seems to be a total victory and the very best case scenario come true -it would at least be that way from an outside, neutral perspective-.
Just throwing random guesses here, you know better, but it's possible in these cases that one might have wanted a bigger revenge with the legal fight, and/or that this guy's judge power is having an effect.
I am satisfied with the legal/financial outcome: this was something I had earned, otherwise he would not have paid. And I also am glad it ended here, without needing to go forward.
But you are right, I feel somewhat “bad” after reading his message: like I would have preferred it were possible to be paid without having to reach this point. I know logically I did nothing wrong, but, you are absolutely right Lucio, his judge power move is having some effect on me.
I know he basically refused to pay before just to compel me to reach this point and to be able to say what he now said; I know he wrote it just to make me feel bad, and I also know he doesn’t even believe it (and your explanation was really helpful to reduce its effect) but, it still works somewhat on me. He also was able to trigger memories of when I was young and naive and believed in him.
The effect on me seems to be much less than with other previous persons who tried to do the same, however. So this means I must be more healed/detached than before, and probably walking in the right direction. And that’s thanks to you, PU and the community in no small part.
Is there something I can do to better be “internally immune” from judge power moves of this kind in the short term?
From my personal observation in applying what I learned in PU, I noticed that fighting judge power moves works in neutralizing the effect, but here I logically understand the best course of action is staying silent, unless I am missing something.
I can even see how in the future I could use his email to prove he has bad blood against me if need be. The lawyer I had contacted to assist me also agrees that his message is a “mistake” on his part from a possible future “legal point of view”.
Edit: his judge power move also has the effect of reducing in itself my wanting to get redress for what he did to me, so you are absolutely right also on this, the two things are linked.
Also, in the past I observed that effects of this kind tended to disappear after some days.
It’s funny, eh, you have a lawyer on this forum who probably has too many conscience scruples surrounded by a whole lot of other lawyers who had none and preyed on me like wolves :)
Here’s my personal reply (that I don’t think I will send) to counteract his judge power:
Hi …,
thank you for the payment which is long overdue.
As to the rest of your communication, what I find really offensive is writing to another person like you do, and even before that, waiting years before honoring your commitment toward a person who worked for you for months.
So it seems to me we have two very different categories of “offensive”; and as a consequence, we probably also have two very different categories of what’s the meaning of being a human person.
Kind regards.
I think if I really sent this, I would feel a lot better.
But it would also depotentiate my power a lot toward him.
