In this episode, we’ll think about how to look after yourself if you think you have a toxic relationship with your supervisor. We’ll consider what that means, what effect it could have on you, and most importantly, how to manage your thoughts so that you can make decisions about this difficult situation. I’ll talk about some of the most common thoughts that I see students having and help you find some other thoughts that might help you more. If you find yourself in this situation, please do reach out to the wellbeing services at your university and make sure that you are also getting the professional help that you need.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 19 of the PhD Life Coach. Now, last week I was thinking about how to have a great relationship with your supervisor, and I'd always intended that episode to be standalone. I had other topics planned for this week and I was going to crack on with different things. But as I was planning and recording that episode, I realized that so much of the advice I was giving was super useful if you had a largely positive relationship with your supervisor that perhaps had some challenges, some differences of opinions, some differences of approach. Perhaps some areas of conflict, but that was grounded mostly in respect and positive behaviour. And if that's your situation and you haven't listened to that episode, really go back and listen to the next last episode because I think you'll find it really, really useful.
However, I found myself adding all these caveats about how that's not true, if you are experiencing problematic behaviour from your supervisor. Because we don't want you to cognitively argue your way out of thinking that a behaviour is unacceptable. We don't want you to learn how to just accept. Problematic behaviour and cope with it. That's not what we're here to do. So a lot of those techniques that are useful in those situations where it's perhaps just differences of opinion aren't appropriate where you are experiencing inappropriate and problematic supervision.
So I decided to do an extra episode. This is your episode of what to do if you have a really problematic relationship with your supervisor. Now, what do I mean by problematic? Well, part of the problem is there isn't a specific definition of what's truly unacceptable.
I think there's a whole bunch of stuff that most people would agree, um, are unacceptable in an academic supervisory relationship, in fact, in most relationships. So these would be things like getting yelled at, physical violence, inappropriate comments, sexual harassment, racist, ableist, homophobic, any of those sorts of comments and microaggressions. Breaking confidences, stealing your work, belittling you in front of other people, excessive workloads. All of these things people would generally agree are unacceptable, and so if you are experiencing any of those, this is the episode for you. If you know anybody who's experiencing any of those, please do pass this episode onto them.
That is not an exhaustive list. You may well have things that would be unacceptable to you, and that's absolutely fine. We get to decide. We get to define, what is unacceptable behaviour in our supervisory relationship. So please don't treat that as a checklist, that if you don't have one of those, then yours is okay. You get to choose.
Now this is a complicated topic to give advice about because so much depends on the context that you are within. Do you have a problem just with your individual supervisor, but actually the rest of the research group, the rest of the department are supportive. Do you feel like the whole place has a toxic environment and isn't a good place for you?
So all of the advice that I'm going to give today is really focused on managing what you are thinking about the situation and choosing your response from there. So I'm not going to say you definitely should do this, you definitely should do that because you get to choose that. You get to decide what is appropriate for you.
But hopefully today I'll give you a framework that will help you to figure out what's right for you and what you want to experience, and what you don't want to experience, and what you want to do about it.
A lot of this work is based on my training from the Life Coach school, which developed the self coaching model, which I use in a lot of my work.
Those of you who have been coached from me either in my free monthly group coaching (if you haven't come to that, sign up for my newsletter and you'll get all the information). Or in my university membership programs, when you've been coached by me, you'll have experienced this. But essentially that model shows that we have our circumstances, the facts of what are happening to us, and then we have the thoughts that we have about those circumstances.
And these are the lines that run through our head and we get to choose those, and the thoughts generate our feelings, the emotions we experience. Our emotions influence our behaviours. And our behaviours are what dictate the results that we get. Some people who work with a self coaching model would argue that all circumstances are inherently neutral until we have thoughts about them, that it's only our thoughts that make them negative or positive.
I am not going to argue that in this podcast. I believe that certain circumstances are not inherently neutral. I believe that we live in a world with structural inequalities. I believe we live in a world where certain types of people get treated less well than other types of people. And that's not just in our heads.
That's the societal environment that we grew up in and live in. So what I'm not going to do is suggest that you cognitively reframe thoughts about experiencing your having to make them OK.
However, we do have thoughts sometimes that lead to emotions that don't help us manage these situations healthily. And so we are going to explore what some of those thoughts that you might be quite understandably having at the moment and the consequences of them. And I'm going to offer some alternatives for you that might help you manage the situation more effectively.
Before I do that though, I have a couple of caveats I want to put out there. As usual. It's complex. First one, I am a white, heterosexual, cisgender woman. I. kind of have ADHD although I'm not diagnosed and it's always manifested as overactivity in terms of my academia. And so hasn't really been a, um, a point of problem for me in my working environment, certainly not externally. I come from a background where my parents hadn't gone to higher education, but I was well resourced, well educated, well supported. So I come from and recognize the privilege that I bring to these situations. That's why I'm not going to talk a lot about my own experience in academia, because I haven't experienced a lot of these things because I come from quite a privileged demographic in that.
On that, I'm hoping in the future to bring guests onto the show who have specialisms in some of the areas that make all of this stuff hugely more complicated. So I hope in the future to have episodes where we look at racism in academia and how we manage that homophobia within academia and so on. So keep an eye out for those in the future.
The other caveat that I want to bring to this is please don't try and do any of this thought work when you're in the midst of crisis. So if you are experiencing anxiety and depression that are affecting how you function, both at work and outside, so perhaps you're experiencing physical symptoms, you're struggling to sleep, you're struggling to look after yourself, all of these things, please focus on looking after yourself first.
First step is you have to get out of the situation for a while and you have to look after yourself. You have to get support from people that are independent and are trained in your specific issues and bring some care and compassion to yourself. Please don't try to do reframing when you're in the midst of that sort of emotional crisis. All that will happen is you'll start to beat yourself up about the fact that you're finding it really difficult. You should find it difficult in that situation. Don't try to do it. Look after yourself first, and then as things start to settle a bit and things start to clear, then perhaps revisit some of this work. Your universities will have wellbeing teams and support services available to you to try and support you through that time.
If, however, you are at a position where you are feeling not in the midst of an emotional crisis, but that you are in a difficult situation, this is absolutely the episode for you.
I am going to go through eight thoughts that I suspect you might be having, and we're going to look at each one in turn and think about:
- is it true?
- what else is true
- and what if it is true?
Those are the questions we always ask ourselves about thoughts, and I haven't just invented these thoughts. These thoughts are things that have come through my own supervisory experiences, my work with PhD students who have other supervisors. My coaching, I've even been involved in investigating bullying allegations and things like that for other departments at my old university. So these thoughts are all things that I have seen students experience where they're having difficult supervisory experiences.
The first thought is “perhaps this is normal.”
There's a real tendency to start doubting ourselves, especially if your supervisor is telling you that they're not doing anything wrong, that this is just what you should expect, and this is academia, this is exactly how it's going to be. You start asking yourself, maybe this is normal, maybe getting yelled at, maybe being expected to work 18 hour days, maybe this is just normal.
Thoughts like that lead to confusion because that conflicts with the other thoughts in our head that are like, this can't be right. Surely we can't be expected to put up with this. And you start to get really confused. And the problem when you get confused is you can't really think things through clearly and it's really hard to decide what to do because you're really doubting yourself.
So we go back to that thought. Perhaps this is normal. Is it true? How can you figure out if this is normal or not. Are there people that you could talk to other colleagues, so people who are same sort of year as you, perhaps maybe people who are one or two years ahead of you, maybe people with this supervisor or a different supervisor, or is there a member of staff who's unconnected with your research group that you trust?
Is there someone you could talk to to figure out is this normal and to help you work through whether that's the case. Often it's not normal. Okay. Often it is not what you'd expect. Certainly looking across all of my experience in academia, across lots of different disciplines, working with a huge variety of people, you shouldn't expect to be treated in these ways.
But if you are trying to figure out your specific situation, try and open up those conversations to figure out is this normal or not.
Another thing I see, especially at the early stages of relationship breakdown is the thought, “if I can just X, then they will Y”. So if I can just work a bit harder, then they'll praise me. If I can just get this thing done, maybe they'll soften up on me. Maybe if I didn't do that, then they wouldn't yell at me.
Again, is it true? What else is true? And what I want you to start with with this is I want to start by reassuring you. You are not responsible for your supervisor's behaviour. You are not responsible for their feelings, and you are not responsible for their behaviour. They are grown adults who, whatever problems they have going on in their lives, are responsible for their thoughts, feelings, and actions.
What you do does not cause their results, the thoughts that they are having causes their behaviour, not the things that you are doing. And when you get into these sorts of toxic relationships and you just try and appease, you try and get this sort of hopeful but slightly desperate feeling, Ooh, maybe if I just do this, this and this, and I don't annoy them and I don't do this, then it'll be okay, then you are chasing a moving target because you’ve never been the one that's causing their behaviour. That's their thoughts.
It can become this desperate struggle where you just can't meet an expectation where you prevent their negative behaviour because it was never about you. Okay, so if you find yourself saying, if I can just do this, then they'll do that, really take a moment to pause and remind yourself you are not responsible for their behaviour.
I'd also be really cautious about trying to get approval from people that you don't like. I have seen this in both personal and professional relationships in the past. When you have somebody who perhaps praise doesn't come from very often, there can be a real tendency to really want it and to almost value it more because you don't get it very much.
This can be really toxic because again, you're trying to seek approval from somebody whose judgment you don't actually agree with, somebody who behaves in ways you don't like and you're trying to do things to get their approval. Instead, I'd really try and get you to focus on what do you approve of? What do you think is good behaviour?
Who do you want to be and focus on giving that approval for yourself, so that you can see your supervisor and their behaviour as something that's completely separate to whether you approve of you and whether you are acceptable to you.
Thought 3 that you might be having is maybe I'm just not good enough.
I see people turn this in on themselves so often that when you've got a hypercritical supervisor, you start to think, well, maybe, maybe I'm just not good enough. Maybe I'm not cut out to be here. And that thought can really lead to feelings of shame and the problem with shame as an emotion… Firstly, it doesn't feel good.
That doesn't mean we have to avoid it. Sometimes feeling it can be, you know, you, it's part of the human experience, but when we feel shame, we tend to isolate ourselves. We tend to avoid talking to other people. We just tend to hide and make ourselves smaller and smaller, which makes it really hard to reach out for help.
So when you read like blogs online about what to do if you think you're being bullied, it's always talk to somebody, do this, do that, and it's like, Yeah. But if if you are having these thoughts, maybe I'm not good enough, and you're feeling shame, it's really hard to reach out for support.
That's normal. That's human because you don't want to reach out to support and for that person to be like, well, yeah, of course you should be able to do that. Yeah, you're clearly up to it then if you can't. You are worried that that person's going to agree with your supervisor.
Again, I'd really encourage you to be really careful about what you make your supervisor's behaviour mean about you. If you got into your program, you are good enough to be there. Even if, so, one of the questions we ask ourselves is, what if this was true? Maybe you are not good enough to be there. Okay. I think it's unlikely, but maybe they made a huge error when they appointed you.
I don't believe that, but let's go there. Maybe you are not good enough to be there. You still deserve to be treated with respect. You still deserve to be supported to figure out what you are good at and what else you could do instead. Regardless of whether you are good enough, you don't deserve to be treated with disrespect.
What you can do here is you can really start to unpick, okay, what evidence is there that I am good enough to be here? I got in, I'm here. There's a big reason. But why else? What else are you good at? What else have you made progress on? Really try and get in the habit of building those thoughts for yourself as to what you are good at.
And then rather than having this generic, maybe I'm not good enough as a, like, as a whole, start to go, okay. If I'm worried I'm not good enough, specifically at what? Which bit of this am I not good enough at? Because we hide behind this generic, I'm just not capable. Okay. Tell me. Are you not good enough at writing? Are you not good enough analysis? Are you not good enough at project management? What is it?
Because if we can pin it down, then it's not about you. It's just about skills you haven't developed yet. And then we can start thinking, okay, well where can I develop those skills? So you see how once we take ourselves away from just this overarching, maybe I'm just not good enough, I shouldn't be here, thought we can start to really sort of pick it apart, reassure ourselves where that's appropriate and target where we can improve, where that's appropriate.
Thought four that you might be having. This isn't the right place for me.
Sometimes we take what's happening instead of making it mean something about us, we make it mean something about the whole place. Because I've had this negative experience with this supervisor, the whole place is toxic. The whole place is not the right place.
An extra element you might add onto this is, this is not the right place for someone like me. Now that might relate to some of your demographics, that might relate to your personality, your style, or your discipline, whatever it is.
And the problem with that thought is, again, we allow it to isolate ourselves. It's very hard to reach out for support if you believe this isn't the right place for you. Let's think about that. In what ways is that not true? In what ways could this be the perfect place for you? Are there other bits of the place you're at? So if you're in a department, are there other research groups that actually feel like less toxic environments? Are there other schools, other departments that feel like less toxic environments to you?
And if it does feel genuinely like this isn't the place for you, let's not make that mean anything about us. Let's look at that curiously and go, okay, maybe this isn't the right place for me. So what next? What steps do I need to take because I deserve to be somewhere where I'm treated well. I deserve to be somewhere where I feel like a part of the community. So how do we make that happen? What do I need to do to make that happen?
You see how that's a very different thing than maybe this just isn't the right place for me. Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe I'm awful, and all the thoughts that that leads to, and all the emotions that that leads to, which mostly lead to us procrastinating, hiding, isolating ourselves.
The fifth thought I'm going to tell you about can sort of sound resilient, but it worries me. So the thought is I'm just going to get my head down and get it done.
I've heard students say this before particularly where the problems haven't really come to a head until two, three years into their PhD, they're nearing the end. Certainly in the uk they would be and they think they've gone too far through to leave now, and it becomes this, I'm just going to get my head down and get it done. And that can lead to feelings of kind of resignation, I guess. It's just like, Ugh, I'm just going to have to do this.
Before you decide that that is the answer for you, I want you to ask yourself a few questions. I want you to ask yourself, what would be the toll on you doing this? So what will be the physical, emotional, professional consequences of you just getting your head done and doing the thing. How difficult is that going to be?
What toll is that going to take on your mental health? And try and be really honest about that. Try not to come to this conclusion from the point of view that you have no other choice. There is always another choice. No matter how far through you are, there is always different choices you can make. But if you are going to choose to stay and tough it out as it were, then what would the cost of that be?
Then you get to decide is it worth it? Is it worth that cost? And if it is, how can you look after yourself during that process? How can you ensure that if you are going to put yourself through what could be a very challenging period because you're determined to see it out, how are you going to make it as loving and caring and compassionate from the inside of you as it can be? How are you going to look after yourself?
And one big tip I would give you is don't keep your head down. Keep your head up. Often we isolate ourselves, as I said, if you are going to tough it out. If you're going to try and stay, you're going to try and finish anyway. Keep your head up, keep contacting other people, creating communities outside of your toxic relationship, finding support and finding the advice and care that you need from other people. Keep your head up as you are going through.
Thought six is one that often holds people back from talking to others about this, and this is that no one will believe me. Other people love them. They don't treat anybody else like this. It sounds so stupid. Nobody will believe that this is a problem. And that can lead to feelings like despair. And again, despair doesn't lead to positive action.
We just have to look after ourselves when we're in despair. It doesn't lead to us actually resolving situations either by staying or going. So the first thing to say when you're thinking “no one will believe me” is that might be true. Unfortunately, we see lots of situations where a student comes forward with a complaint about a supervisor, and for lots of reasons people don't believe them.
Maybe that supervisor is lovely to lots of people, but isn't being lovely to you. Maybe that supervisor used to be a kind and supportive supervisor, but they're not at the moment. Maybe that person is powerful and brings a ton of money into the department and nobody knows how to manage them. Maybe they've been like this for ages and people will believe you, but they won't believe that you can do anything about it, so they won't support you. Maybe they don't want to be the one that puts their head above the parapet and risks being targeted.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of reason to think that you might not be believed when you tell these situations. So I'm not going to falsely reassure you about that, but we come at it with compassion and curiosity. Maybe I'm not going to be believed. So with that in my mind, who am I best to speak to?
Who do I think has the best chance of listening to my story and believing me? How can I evidence what I'm saying? How can I keep copies of emails or ask other people who have witnessed the experiences to come with me?
What we do is we just start build up. There will be someone who believes some of this. Who might that be? And how am I going to have that conversation?
I also want you to be really careful what you make this mean about you. Sometimes when people don't believe your story, we start to doubt it. We start to think, oh my goodness, maybe I am imagining this. Perhaps this is normal. That first thought that we went through, maybe I'm just not good enough. This not being believed can really spiral you off into some of the other thoughts that we've talked about in this podcast, and I want you to be really, we aware that that might happen.
Somebody else not believing you does not mean you are wrong. It does not mean you're imagining this. It does not mean that you are interpreting things in an unnecessarily negative way. You know what you are experiencing. If that person doesn't believe you, think whether there's somebody else that will believe you. Think about how you can tell your story so that somebody else will believe you too.
The seventh thought is, slightly the opposite, I guess, which is “I need to make this right”.
And I often see this with students who are experiencing racism in the workplace or sexism in the workplace. Things that are based on your demographic rather than you as an individual.
Some students, and sometimes the staff indeed respond to this by coping with it themselves, but also saying, I want to improve this. I want to make it better for other people. No one else should have to go through what I go through. I'm going to campaign for better mental health support. I'm going to campaign for better diversity training. I'm going to campaign for more inclusive practices. Um, I'm going to get on this committee and that committee and a representative on this and run training on that, and I'm going to make this better for everybody else.
And there's a huge amount of merit in that. There are huge numbers of people who are already disadvantaged by virtue of the society that we live in, who then go above and beyond to try and improve the lot of people across their department. And so I would never say don't do these things.
What I would say is really carefully work out how much you have to give, how much you are willing to give, what toll the work might take on you, what toll the work might take on other aspects of your PhD and your research, and work out what you are willing to do.
This is not your responsibility to fix.
You may have huge sense of duty to improve things for those that come after you, and that is admirable and wonderful and totally understandable given the circumstances. But you should not have to do all the work. That is not part of your position in academia.
You are here as a PhD student, as a researcher, first and foremost, and you get to decide that you want to focus on that. Just because you are a black PhD student for example, does not mean you have to do DEI work. You are here to do your research. Anything you do above and beyond that, is at your discretion and you get to pick how much.
The final thought that I've seen so many times is everything will be over if I leave. So often people tell themselves that there is no alternative to staying because if you leave, you'll never get on another PhD. And if you never get on another PhD, you'll never have a research career and you will never get references and no one will ever take you seriously because this person might bad mouth you around the discipline. And that you'll be giving up everything that you've worked for.
I really want you to pick that thought apart because that thought leads to feelings of despair. It leads to feelings of being stuck, and none of those things help you to stay in this situation, and they certainly don't help you to leave.
So if you find yourself thinking those things, it's understandable. Be compassionate with yourself if you're thinking those things. You have worked incredibly hard to be where you are. This has been your dream for a really long time, and it's really sad and disappointing if that doesn't work out for you, if that isn't the way you wanted it to be.
So the first step is, you can experience those feelings. It is sad. It is disappointing, and that is totally, totally understandable. However, I really want you to pick apart the thought that there isn't anything else. Lots of people leave a PhD and go and start someone somewhere else. Lots of people change group, change discipline, change supervisor.
It can be done. It can be super positive. If your supervisor that's caused the problems won't give you references, there are always ways to get references from other people within the department.
I want you to see if you can believe that you could be successful somewhere else, that you could find a supervisor who will take on your work, that you could restart and thrive if you needed to. That it's better maybe to take a year back and be in a more positive environment than to push through in a challenging environment for the sake of your mental health.
What the right decision is for you is entirely up to you, but you can always make it work if you wanted to.
So I have a bunch of thoughts that I'd like to offer instead of some of these thoughts, and they might not feel true to you at first, but I had a coach once who used to say, borrow my belief for a while.
And so if these don't feel at all true to you, I really encourage you to borrow my belief for a while. I know these are true for you. I want you to practice the thought I deserve to be here. I can create my own future, step by step. I deserve to be treated well and I can look after myself through this process.
I believe that for all of you, no matter what situation you are in, and if you don't believe it, borrow my belief for a little while and practice. And as they start to feel more true and you start to be able to look after yourself through this process, and you start to find people who will support you with little bits of it, then you get to pick how you want to move this forward.
Whether you want to make complaints, whether you want to just leave, whether you want to get the support you need somewhere else, whether you want to add extra people to the supervisory team. There's so many different options that you can think through.
But my final thought is whatever you decide, decide in advance that it is the best decision you ever. If you decide you're going to stick it out, that you are going to try and bring in other people and get the support you need somewhere else, but stay working with your difficult supervisor, then really believe that this was the best decision for you, and that you are so proud of yourself that you did this, and you learnt how to look after yourself and get support from other places.
And if you decide to leave, decide now that that was the best decision you ever made, that you're so proud of yourself, that you looked after your mental health, and you removed yourself from a toxic situation and you found a better place.
Whatever you decide, make it the best decision you ever made, and thank yourself for making that choice for you and for your future.
Now you'll notice in this episode I haven't given you a ton of practical support about exactly what to do, about what processes there are available, what complaints, procedures there are, what options there are for mediation, and improving the communication with your supervisor, and, um, creating shared goals and all these different things that you can do when you're struggling and having a difficult relationship.
And that's on purpose for a bunch of reasons. Firstly, you have access to all that stuff. You know how Google works. You're going to have postgraduate, researcher handbooks and advice and all of these things at your university. Everybody does, but while you are still thinking these thoughts that this might be your fault or that you should be ashamed in some way, or that perhaps this is normal, you are not going to engage with all of that support anyway.
So I haven't gone through all of that because I want you to start by thinking about your own thoughts and your own feelings and to build from there. Once you've gone through the process that I've talked about today, and you're starting to see maybe this isn't my fault, maybe this isn't normal, and maybe I do deserve better, that's when you start searching.
That's when you start talking to your postgrad coordinator for advice, and they'll take you through all of the practicalities, all of the options that you have. So you do have that support. You don't need me for that. But hopefully this episode has helped get you and your mind and your emotions into a place where you can really use that cognitive ability that you all have and use those resources that you all have to work out the right next steps for you.
I really hope that's useful. My love and thoughts off with anybody who's experiencing difficult supervision. If there's any thoughts you are having that I haven't covered in this episode, please do let me know. As I said, this is really the start of a conversation about some of these challenging environments that there can be in academia. You can get in touch with me on Twitter @drvikkiburns. You can join my newsletter at the PhD life coach.com/work-with-me and you can come along to my monthly free coaching. All the information about that is in my newsletter. So if you are having any of these challenges, please do let me know and let me help you.
We will be continuing this conversation in future episodes, so let me know any of your thoughts and in the meantime, look after yourselves.
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