New specialty bullying?

Hi! I’m wondering if anyone has changed specialties and encountered passive aggressiveness / bullying from other nurses? 

I’ve been a medsurg/Tele nurse for 3 years. I also have some experience in outpatient same day procedures. I recently made the change to the ED. I have been encountering problems passive aggressiveness from some of the ED nurses. It’s unprovoked. They’ll make comments to me as they walk by or just flat out tell me they don’t know how I can work the floor without having critical care in my background. They act like an inpatient nurse, I never worked my butt off. I ignore it but it’s starting to irritate me.

If you have experienced anything like this, how did you handle it? 

[Hoosier_RN, MSN]

You will find those types of people in every specialty, actually, every job category in the world has them. It's not limited to nursing

[JBMmom, MSN]

People are people, so for every type of person in the world, some of them are nurses. Some specialties, especially the ED and ICU, tend to attract stronger personalities. You're on the right track if you're ignoring them. Once you've been there a while and they see you can handle the workload, they'll back off. Or you can feel free to call them out on it. Sometimes that helps, sometimes it's not worth it. You have to decide what works for you. 

[DavidFR, BSN, MSN, RN]

Are there other colleagues who are more pleasant? Keep your social interaction to them and limit yourself to strictly professional communication with the others. Stay calm and polite and just ignore their comments.

Pride comes before a fall. One of these supernurses will stuff up one day and their critical care experience won't protect them because we're all human. They think they're so great anyway so they're probably being less vigilant than somebody like you.  

Do your job, form links with the nicer colleagues, go home, have a whiskey and forget it. You are better than them.

On 12/19/2020 at 1:02 PM, amandaxyo said:

Hi! I’m wondering if anyone has changed specialities and encountered passive aggressiveness / bullying from other nurses? 

I’ve been a medsurg/Tele nurse for 3 years. I also have some experience in outpatient same day procedures. I recently made the change to the ED. I have been encountering problems passive aggressiveness from some of the ED nurses. It’s unprovoked. They’ll make comments to me as they walk by or just flat out tell me they don’t know how I can work the floor without having critical care in my background. They act like as an inpatient nurse, I never worked my butt off. 
I just ignore it. But it’s starting to irritate me.
 

If you have experienced anything like this, how did you handle it? 

You will have to determine when to take crap or give two shakes of a rat's behind about pettiness. My advice is to ignore it unless it is something that is affecting your wellbeing considerably. If it ain't gonna be relevant a year from now, let it be and keep striving to be better. 

Following this thread

On 12/19/2020 at 2:02 PM, amandaxyo said:

They’ll make comments to me as they walk by or just flat out tell me they don’t know how I can work the floor without having critical care in my background.

😮

Terrible.

But what you need to understand is that this has nothing to do with you or your background. The only thing it has to do with is people who are exceedingly insecure in their own identity. All of their little comments are simply them shoring themselves up with out-loud self-talk in attempt to convince themselves that they are okay. They do this by telling themselves that, if nothing else, at least they are something more/bigger/better than someone else.

If they felt truly good about themselves they would have no need for this kind of appalling behavior. And I do think it is otherwise appalling that they would make random comments in this way. In the end, though, it points to just how poorly they feel about themselves. Their comments declare it to the world.

As sort of a coping mechanism, I would realize that this is pitiful, and they deserve pity. Wouldn't it be sad to feel so poorly about yourself that you needed to treat others this way in order to try to feel better? Think on that. Do not respond to these unprovoked attacks; they deserve no reply from you. When you are able, continue on with trying to develop positive rapports with people. But don't respond to this stuff; it would be a mistake and will only drag you down.

Good luck! 👍🏽

 

[FiestyNP]

Unfortunately bullying is very common in nursing. Sometimes standing up for yourself and confronting the bully in a calm but firm manner will make the bully stand down. I have had to do that a couple of times and once the bully knew I wasn't going to readily take the abuse they stopped it. 

[speedynurse, ADN, RN, EMT-P]

On 12/20/2020 at 10:45 AM, JBMmom said:

People are people, so for every type of person in the world, some of them are nurses. Some specialties, especially the ED and ICU, tend to attract stronger personalities. You're on the right track if you're ignoring them. Once you've been there a while and they see you can handle the workload, they'll back off. Or you can feel free to call them out on it. Sometimes that helps, sometimes it's not worth it. You have to decide what works for you. 

Yes to all of this. I have worked in 3 different departments as a nurse....well, 2 ER departments and one pre and post surgical recovery and honestly, all to some degree had strong personalities. The first one I think the strong personalities were easier to deal with because I had been with the team for awhile and we all let things slide, the second was a complete nightmare, and the third was a mix. I have learned to pick and choose my battles. I used to never speak up....then I spoke up too much....and now I have mellowed again  and do sometimes confront people....if the time and situation is right. None of us are perfect.....no speciality is perfect....