Dismissive, Derisive and Belittling

Sarah

When Mike Rinder wants something, he’s as sweet as can be, smiling, sucking up and fluttering his eyelashes like a Southern belle. He did that to me once when I was driving somewhere and he wanted a lift.

But when he doesn’t want something from you, stay out of his way or he will push you down in every possible way. If you are excited about something, he’ll be dismissive, derisive and belittling. If you’re upset about something, he’ll be disdainful and contemptuous.

He was the head of the department I worked in, in the organization responsible for the external affairs of the Church. He went out of his way to make me look small in front of the rest of the staff. He wouldn’t talk to me except to tell me I was doing something wrong. Otherwise he would ignore me. Not because he was completely wrapped up in handling some important matter, but because he deliberately pretended that I was not even there when he passed me in the corridor.

As Scientologists, we tend to ask ourselves what we have done to upset someone if they treat you like that. I went round and round trying to figure it out. Finally I realized, after he’d left, it wasn’t me. The problem was Rinder.

It wasn’t, of course, that I was his only target. He did the same to plenty of other people in the office, especially women. Cutting remarks, to “point out” a deficiency in a staff member or something they were doing, were his specialty. They weren’t constructive remarks. It was cruelty for his own personal satisfaction.

One thing to know about Rinder is he is too arrogant to learn from his mistakes. A small but telling example is when he would use a word incorrectly, and was told so, he wouldn’t look it up and find out the correct definition. He’d just keep on using the word in the wrong way.

So, don’t look for him to change his ways. He is apparently incapable of doing so.