Tim Field Foundation

Working for a World Free of Bullying

Tim Field (b. Eastbourne UK, 24 April 1952, d. 15 January 2006) set up bullyonline.org to inform people about workplace bullying. In 2015 the Tim Field Foundation was established as a UK registered charity to maintain this website and further Tim Field’s cause against bullying.

timfieldfoundation.org and its companion site bullyonline.org both now forward to a small section of a blog that looks on cursory review like a one-sided repository of information on bullying in its various forms, couched in the context of a family counseling service. The original blog, maintained by Adrian Melia after Tim’s passing, served as a safe harbor information sharing space through which I came to know Adrian. I remember logging on to it after a space of several years in the wake of Adrian’s passing and found it in a late stage of infestation by a lurking contingent of the bullies themselves, with the moderators none the wiser, ignorantly playing both sides-ism on any clashes.

Back when the old site was moderated by Adrian Melia, we would collaboratively build a list of common characteristics of bullies. Adrian always insisted on using “bully” in place of “psychopath” to avoid the appearance of someone presuming to make diagnoses, just as Babiak & Hare (2006) used “fraudster” in place of “psychopath” in describing their informal study of the reactions of individual members of religious affinity groups to the antics of social predators in formulating their “one-thirds rule”. This study consistently and repeatably broke down the respondents into three groups of approximately equal size. I would later put names to these groups:

• Acolytes: born predisposed to align with, support, defend and enable psychopaths wherever they can find them;
• Skeptics: born predisposed to feel revulsion at psychopaths, and to resist them at every turn;
• Agnostics: born unable or unwilling to discriminate between a psychopath and any other person in similar attire.

It was through the writings of Adrian Melia that I was introduced to his anecdotal experience that institutional bullies never go more than two weeks after destroying one victim before choosing the next. I was able to confirm this two-week threshold in my own experiences, mostly in the computer industry, in the US spanning 35 years — interestingly, the same industry that had tormented Tim Field in the UK for almost 20 years. Interestingly, Donald J. Trump, the most successful narcopath in modern history by the measure of the constant worldwide attention he was able to attract over the course of ten years and counting as of 2026, had a macabre obsession with this two-week figure, usually as the amount of time it would take him to work out a plan that he had no intention of pursuing.

I suspect that most psychopathology professionals and academics are never exposed to the toxic environments of infested institutions and corporations for long enough to gather the quantity of experience needed with which to formulate this level of insight and appreciation. Who can blame them for wanting to wind down at the pub after a strenuous day of interviewing dangerous prisoners for their next scientific publication? They are outside observers. If they were once victims, as I would think many were, those parts of their lives would have been for the most part left behind them in the academic life of a psychopathology professional. The rest of us live in the bowels of the hellscape, created by a systemic ignorance and oblivion to such matters, that we call modern society.

For my own part, I had formative experience as the child of an aggressive, pathologically opportunistic and psychologically abusive psychopath with a captive victim, determined to sabotage my every aspiration by any means available. Needless to say, I never had to learn about these behaviors as an intellectual exercise. To me in adulthood, my childhood was a hellish normal from which I had once aspired to escape. My childhood ended prematurely when my parents split, after which there was no one to moderate or distract the remaining parent’s predatory instincts. I’ve been searching for ways to recapture that lost childhood ever since.

Fortunately during the early years, my close friend’s father just a few houses up the lane represented to me the old normal I might otherwise never have fully appreciated — a member of the Greatest Generation, the generation who lived through the Great Depression only to be sent overseas to fight the minions of foreign psychopaths in World War II. He was a living reminder that no, the normal I was living at home was far from it. As a veteran of the D-Day landings at Normandy against a world famous psychopathic Austrian, he was as worldly, grounded and exemplary a figure as the world is ever likely to produce. For me, it was a childhood of extreme psychological opposites.

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I’ve since settled on a short list of psychopathic behaviors and characteristics of concern to public safety:

• serial social predation;
• pathological opportunism;
• a fluid fictional narrative;
• a penchant for gaslighting.

In unstructured environments, in which the psychopath always rushes to a position of power, they invariably compile a list of friends and enemies. A friend is someone who consistently pays obeisance (an acolyte), while an enemy is someone who dares to disagree with them on any point, or to question their presumptive authority (a skeptic). All psychopaths build such lists, even if only in memory, but only in well-populated, unstructured environments over which they seek dominance does it become an essential tool.