When Someone Makes You Afraid to Learn: Dealing With Bullying in Nursing

Nursing is an amazing profession with so many amazing people, but nursing is not immune to bullying.

There is a phrase in nursing that has always bothered me.

“You just need to toughen up.”

Someone has had a difficult interaction with a senior nurse. They've been criticised in front of colleagues, made to feel stupid for asking a question, or walked away from a shift wondering whether they're actually good enough to be a nurse.

The response is often:

“That's just nursing.”

“They're like that with everyone.”

“Don't take it personally.”

“You'll get used to it.”

But perhaps we should stop asking nurses to become tougher and start asking a different question.

What happens when someone makes a nurse afraid to learn?

Because that is where this becomes much bigger.

The real damage isn't always obvious

Bullying doesn't always look like shouting or obvious abuse.

Sometimes it is much quieter.

It is the nurse who stops asking questions when a particular person is working.

The graduate who avoids certain clinical situations because they know they will be criticised.

The nurse who checks everything three times because they are terrified of making a mistake.

The person who stays silent during a discussion because they don't want to say the wrong thing.

The nurse who starts believing that needing help means they aren't competent.

And that is where bullying can become a patient-safety issue.

Because curiosity is essential to learning.

Questions are how we learn.

Feedback is how we improve.

Speaking up is how we keep patients safe.

If someone becomes afraid to do those things, we haven't made them a better nurse.

We've made them a quieter one.

Not every difficult interaction is bullying

This distinction matters.

Nursing involves difficult conversations.

You will make mistakes.

Your clinical judgement will sometimes be challenged.

Someone will tell you that you haven't done something correctly.

Sometimes they will be right.

That's part of becoming a competent nurse.

Good feedback isn't always comfortable.

But there is a difference between being corrected and being diminished.

Good feedback creates a teaching opportunity.

It might sound like:

“That wasn't the right approach. Let me show you what I'd do differently next time.”

The focus is the learning.

Compare that with:

“How do you not know this yet?”

The mistake might be identical.

The outcome isn't.

One builds competence.

The other builds fear.

The goal of feedback should be to improve practice, not to make someone afraid of making the next mistake.

And intent matters too.

The purpose of teaching should be to nurture improvement, not to scare someone into compliance.

“That's just their personality”

This is one of the easiest ways to explain away poor behaviour.

“They're just like that.”

“Don't worry about them.”

“They speak to everyone that way.”

But personality doesn't give anyone a free pass.

And sometimes the behaviour is difficult to identify because it is disguised as feedback.

A senior nurse repeatedly criticises one particular graduate.

The graduate is told they are too slow.

Then they are criticised for being too cautious.

They ask a question and are made to feel stupid.

They make a mistake and are treated very differently from another nurse who makes the same mistake.

None of those interactions necessarily proves bullying on its own.

But patterns matter.

Especially when the result is that someone becomes afraid to ask questions or participate.

So what can you actually do?

This is where I think the conversation often becomes unhelpful.

The immediate advice is:

“Report it to your manager.”

Sometimes that is absolutely necessary.

But there is a lot that happens before someone is ready to do that.

You might not even be sure that what you're experiencing is bullying, especially if you are early in your career.

You might be worried about making things worse.

You might be concerned about retaliation.

You might simply want to work out whether you're interpreting the situation correctly.

So let's talk about that space!

First: don't let their confidence become your evidence

One of the things I've noticed over many years in healthcare is that confidence and competence are not the same thing.

Some of the most outwardly confident people I've encountered have also been spectacularly wrong.

I've seen situations where someone was aggressively criticising another nurse because they believed that nurse didn't know what they were doing.

When the situation was properly examined, it turned out the person doing the criticising was actually the one working outside the relevant guidelines.

Their confidence had disguised a gap in their own knowledge.

So when someone repeatedly tells you that you're incompetent, don't automatically accept their assessment as fact.

Their confidence doesn't make their opinion accurate.

Stay curious

This is probably one of the most useful strategies I've found.

If you feel safe enough to do it, try bringing the conversation back to learning.

Someone says:

“You did that completely wrong.”

Instead of immediately defending yourself, try:

“Okay. Can you show me how you'd do it?”

Or:

“Can you show me where I can find the protocol so I can make sure I do it correctly next time?”

Or:

“What would you have done differently?”

These sound like simple questions.

But they can change the dynamic.

Because now the person criticising you has been given an opportunity to teach.

And teaching requires something different from criticism.

It requires knowledge.

It requires explanation.

It requires patience.

It requires being able to demonstrate what you are talking about.

Sometimes the person genuinely wants to help.

Great.

You've just created a learning opportunity.

Sometimes they don't.

That's useful information too.

The point isn't to trap them.

It's to bring the interaction back to the purpose it should have had in the first place: helping you become better at your job.

But there is an important caveat.

You don't have to do this if you don't feel safe.

Curiosity is a strategy, not an obligation.

You shouldn't have to confront someone who has significant power over you in order to prove that you can handle bullying.

Don't let the bully become your internal narrator

This is perhaps the most damaging part.

When someone repeatedly tells you that you're not good enough, eventually their voice can become your own.

You make a mistake:

“I'm useless.”

You ask a question:

“Everyone else probably knows this.”

You need help:

“They must think I'm incompetent.”

You avoid a situation:

“Maybe I'm not cut out for nursing.”

That's when the behaviour starts affecting your development.

So deliberately separate what happened from what you have decided it means about you.

You made a mistake.

That doesn't mean you're incompetent.

You didn't know something.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't be a nurse.

You needed help.

That's normal.

You're early in your career.

You're supposed to still be learning.

Document the pattern

If something keeps happening, write it down.

Not because you're building a case against someone.

Because memory becomes unreliable when you're stressed, and because patterns are often much clearer when you can see them written down.

Record what happened.

When it happened.

Who was present.

What was said or done.

How you responded.

What happened afterwards.

You might keep a private journal.

You might email your manager simply to record your concerns.

You don't necessarily have to ask them to confront the person immediately.

You might say:

“I'm not asking you to do anything at this stage. I just want to document what has been happening because I'm finding it difficult to know whether this is a pattern.”

That's a very different conversation from making a formal complaint.

And it gives you an opportunity to seek perspective.

Talk to someone you trust

You don't have to work this out alone.

Find someone whose judgement you trust.

A colleague.

A preceptor.

A clinical educator.

A senior nurse.

A mentor.

A manager.

You don't even have to start with:

“I'm being bullied.”

Try:

“Something has been happening and I'm not sure whether I'm interpreting it correctly. Can I talk it through with you?”

That can be incredibly useful.

Sometimes you'll discover that there is a legitimate clinical issue that you need to address in a safe environment.

Sometimes you'll discover that the behavior you've been experiencing is not normal feedback.

And sometimes you'll discover that you're not the only person who has experienced it.

If you're a bystander, you can change the interaction

This doesn't always require a confrontation.

Imagine a senior nurse says:

“You did that wrong. You should know how to do that by now.”

Another nurse could simply say:

“I actually found that difficult when I first started. Do you want to run through it with me?”

That's a small intervention.

But it does something important.

It supports the person being criticised.

It normalises learning.

And it demonstrates what helpful teaching actually looks like.

You don't necessarily have to challenge the person behaving badly.

Sometimes you can change the culture simply by modelling the behaviour you want to see.

And leaders need to be careful about the easy solution

When someone tells a manager they're having problems with another nurse, the easiest solution can be to separate them.

Change the roster.

Move the graduate.

Put them somewhere else.

Sometimes that's necessary.

But we need to ask who is paying the price for that solution.

If the person being bullied loses opportunities, changes shifts, loses access to learning or has their work environment disrupted while the other person's behaviour remains unchanged, we've potentially solved the organisational problem by disadvantaging the person who was already struggling.

That isn't necessarily psychological safety.

A good manager should listen.

Understand what the person is experiencing.

Work with them on strategies to protect them while maintaining their opportunities to learn.

And where patterns exist, the person displaying the behaviour needs to be part of the conversation too.

Not necessarily with a label.

But with an honest discussion about the impact of their behaviour.

Sometimes there is a genuine frustration underneath it.

Sometimes they don't realise how they are coming across.

Sometimes they genuinely believe they are teaching.

And sometimes they need to be challenged.

But we shouldn't automatically assume that the person experiencing the problem is the one who needs to be moved.

We need to stop confusing high standards with harshness

There is nothing psychologically unsafe about having high expectations.

In fact, good nurses should have high expectations of themselves and each other.

We should challenge poor practice.

We should question clinical decisions.

We should address mistakes.

We should hold each other accountable.

But we can do all of those things while maintaining an environment where people feel safe enough to say:

“I don't know.”

“Can you show me?”

“I'm not sure.”

“I think something is wrong.”

“I made a mistake.”

Those are not signs of weakness.

They are signs of a learning culture.

You don't have to become tougher

If you're early in your career and you're experiencing this, you don't necessarily need to become harder.

You need to protect your ability to keep learning.

Stay curious.

Ask questions.

Ask people to show you.

Find the guideline.

Document patterns.

Talk to someone you trust.

And remember:

Needing to learn does not mean you're incompetent.

You are supposed to have things you don't know.

You are supposed to ask questions.

You are supposed to need help.

You are supposed to make mistakes and learn from them.

That's how competence develops.

And if someone repeatedly makes you afraid to do those things, the problem isn't simply that you need to “toughen up.”

Because the strongest nurses aren't the ones who never ask for help.

They're the ones confident enough to say:

“I don't know. Can you help me?”

And perhaps that's the culture we should be building.

Not one where nurses are afraid to show what they don't know.

But one where curiosity is seen as competence, questions are seen as safety, and teaching is more important than making someone feel small.

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