My boss is triggering, but in a different way. I believe she is un-DX BP1. We had a health consultant once that mentioned it to her, but she responded by telling us all what the woman said, and then essentially saying the woman had no idea what she was talking about, was obviously pushing a personal agenda, and what a huge failure that employee wellness effort was - despite the fact that the woman was using some pretty standardized, objective assessments.

Anyway, when my boss is up, the workload rises dramatically, and much of it is going to be pointless. She has a million ideas, and our staff just starts working on them until she figures out that they're not worthwhile any longer. She also gets extremely paranoid and sees the world solely as though it revolves around her personally. Every contact she has with people is rehashed in every meeting (I get to hear the same EXACT story, dramatized in the same EXACT way about 4-6 times). It always includes how they've figured out how important our agency is in the community and how they crossed her and are now falling over themselves trying to make it up to her; or they walked into a public meeting, saw her and panicked because they knew they couldn't get away with whatever they were obviously plotting before they saw she was there to prevent it. Sometimes, it's that she sat with someone, and somehow that means that this person and their agency will no longer support another 'rival' (in her mind) agency any longer (despite a 30+ year history of this not coming to fruition any time she foresees it). It's exhausting and very triggering for me. I can't stand to be around people who think they know everything that others are thinking/doing, especially those who can't think outside themselves for a second to consider whether a smile to her might just be a friendly acknowledgment or hello to her, rather than a sly, personal message that they're now in her pocket to destroy whatever enemy has crossed her now.

On the flip side, when she's down, she gets stuck in this victim mindset where she has done nothing but turn the other cheek for others, always taking the high road, and is taken advantage of and despised in the worst way by others. She has it in her mind that another person on our team (who, in reality, does most of my boss's workload and is critical to our organization's functioning) stabbed her in the back by making her handle an HR issue that was personal to her. She breaks down in professional meetings with people outside our agency (usually her, me and one or two other 'close' people we collaborate with), crying and rehashing how she now has to put on a brave face and work side by side with people on her team who BETRAYED her. It's disgusting and makes me furious that she would do that, whether its how she truly feels because she can't see outside of herself or if it's because she's deliberately and blindly manipulative to position people on her 'side'. Either way, it's completely bizarre, unprofessional, and untrue...and very uncomfortable for me to be present for.

UGH. Luckily, I work from home, so outside of scheduled phone meetings with her and the rest of our team or in-person meetings a couple times a year, I can avoid a lot of this. But I still get highly anxious every time we have a meeting and she starts talking.