It’s been about 7 months since I was fired from a startup where the COO was bullying me into leaving. For instance:
I was ambushed into meeting rooms a few times where he’d point a finger and tell me whatever is going wrong with the company is my fault then step outside and claim that the company doesn’t have a finger pointing culture.
He'd leave smug snarky comments on my pull requests.
He made it really hard for me to get any code merged by re-reviewing the same PR over and over asking for nitty small changes, which naturally slowed down my work. This caused delays for the front-end team -- he used that to blame me for any work that didn't get delivered.
He even got HR into a meeting room one time and gave me a PIP to sign that contained stuff like “making too many git commits” (we squash when we merge anyway).
Looking back I cannot believe how I let this person bully me around like this and regret not just quitting but staying around to prove something to myself and worst of all believing what he was telling me and thinking I’m a really bad employee.
I was told that I need to forgive him and move on, but I can’t get myself to do that, this will sound really petty but I’m so upset that this person is still in a management position and completely got away with it. It’s making me paranoid whenever I get called into a meeting room or when a manager asks to speak with me.
If you have been in such a position before, how did you manage to move on?
My goal is to get to the point where I do not feel consumed thinking about my ex-boss.