How can you identify or avoid adult bullies?

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well i mean you can stay in your house all day like i do!
or your gonna have to let it wash off your like a ducks feathers.
when i had jobs people constinelty bullied me at work, exept my last job because it was a special needs workplace, lol.

so be like the duck.

The most subtle kind of adult bullying is hard to identify, but basically if you have a "friend" with whom you can't ever quite get approval, or you leave feeling judged or bad about yourself after visiting with that person, they might be a bully. It could even be a close relative or a girlfriend/boyfriend. Sometimes even your life partner or spouse.

In certain cases, you can work through the bullying issue IF there is an underlying decent friendship with mutual respect. Way too involved to explain here, but a good therapist can help with that.

Charles

It is tough, I put up with one for 2 years grinding down my self esteem until I felt I deserved it.
I suppose I was unhappy and eventually realised everyone in the office felt the same when we talked when she was not there. Possibly look to others. I got support from an employment centre and it reached a point where they suggested I go off sick with stress as I was crying at my desk multiple times a week. Bear in mind that someone can act nice part of the time and still be a bully. I got on quite well with my boss socially (apart from when she was once racist ) Going into another job the difference is astonishing. Bullying can just be setting someone up to fail e.g. unrealistic targets or making a hostile environment, rather than directly being unpleasant.

Writing it down it was things like everyone had sleepless nights about approaching her if they wanted time off work or holidays, she made quips if we made more than one or two drinks a day, someone formally complained and she countered it with incompetence, there was lots of secrecy so we didn't know what was going on or what we were doing and had to rely on her, she wouldn't let us contact a colleague who was off sick, I went off sick- I was not allowed to return and wasn't allowed to collect my things, everything I did required permission, she wouldn't let me order staples I needed for 2 days. She was very confrontational and if someone criticised her or her team she'd throw it back and try and blame the other person at least partially.
All this sounds wacky but she had very convincing official reasons that you couldn't argue with e.g. to do with finances in the current climate. In a position of power I was worried about getting a reference or not doing well due to my patchy series of temp jobs and didn't want to give up a job in the middle of a recession when I struggle getting work.

I am over-paranoid with this sort of thing, so I take everything people say and do to heart. I am a sensitive person. It's the way I am, and I can't change that, even if I worked on it I won't be able to change myself fully. I like respect, I like friendliness, and I like peace. I don't like hostility and back-stabbing and snobbery and bitchy young women. It makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable. I know we can all be bitchy sometimes towards people, even I can, but I would never be like that towards a person who is a good worker and is a nice descent person. I just wish some girls of today would grow up.

I worry about getting a job because of bullies. I just know I will get bullied by other girls in the workplace. It panics me, because I can't be doing with all that. I just want a regular job what I can do and what pays my bills - I don't want to be tormented and teased and laughed at, just because I'm shy or quiet or not quite as social as they are. It will be just my luck to start somewhere and be bullied. And when there's a group of bitchy girls against me, it's way harder to deal with. I don't like people taking the mickey out of me. It hurts me deep inside.

When I see horrible bitchy youths bullying a descent person, I often hope to myself that they will have children one day who are born with a disability that affects their social behaviour, or just born shy and unconfident, and that they will be bullied - then these parents that were once bitchy horrible girls would feel upset and then realise how the innocent person they bullied was feeling. I don't like wishing bullying on anyone, but I would just love bullies to finally get how the victim was feeling.

And then Aspies are the ones who lack empathy!

You know the saying ''the lights are on but nobody's in''? Well, I'm the other way around - ''the lights are off but everybody's in''. It means I look like a naive, easily-led person from the outside, but on the inside, I've sussed the person out before they even noticed, but find it hard to put my thoughts into the corrent words and stand up for myself. So I let them bully me. So say for example if a group of girls were giggling at me in the canteen, I would look at them with an offended look on my face, but not saying anything because I'm either scared I'll make them worse, or the right words won't come out, even though I know straight away that they are being nasty to me. Then I will just go away feeling upset and hurt and self-conscious.
So, yes, I let the bullies win. But inside I know that they haven't won really. They don't even know that I've sussed them out already. But on the outside, they've won.