Dealing with having been bullied

[Sunshine]

I am currently very confused and upset about something that happened to me quite a while ago, and I decided to take it here because I'm hoping someone could maybe give me a little push out of this little circle of thought-hell - or it might resolve itself while I'm writing it down.

So, here's the story. It comes in two parts:

Part 1: I was bullied in school.

I don't mean like once, or one year, or by one group of people. I mean consistently and permanently from about third grade right until the end of high school. I was ridiculed, insulted, humiliated, ostracized and intimidated on a daily basis. I don't know (or can't remember) how it started, but because I was with mostly the same kids from beginning to end, once the pattern was established, it became a habit, I guess. The few friends I had were in no position to support me much; they had problems of their own and I was mostly their support person.

My parents offered to send me elsewhere, but I refused, because I knew that I would have had trouble everywhere and at least at home, I knew the people I had to deal with and could pretty well estimate who would go how far. Besides, certain lines were never crossed - I was never sexually harassed or beaten (a few heavy objects and on one occasion a knife came dangerously close to making violent contact with my skull, but I ducked in time and I don't think the person who threw the stuff really planned to seriously injure me or considered the possible consequences of his actions) and my stuff was always either returned after a while or left somewhere where I could pick it out of the mud.

Because I wasn't physically harmed (much), I figured my best strategy would be to ignore the behavior completely. There was no way I was going to gain any control over other people, but I could control myself and my reactions, and so I played deaf and blind. I walked around with my nose in a book (preferably a big and heavy one that could be used as a shield in many senses of the word), used headphones whenever acceptable and daydreamed a lot. (During certain years of my adolescence, I think I spent more time inside my own imaginary wold than in the real one).

Neither teachers nor family members did anything about it, the former because they didn't know how (I guess), the latter because I asked them, begged them, in fact, not to get involved because I was convinced it would only make things worse.

By the time we graduated, I wasn't even that angry at the bullies any more. I was glad I wouldn't have to see them again, but I had spent more than half my life in their company and I made a point of giving each and everyone a hug and wishing them well, and it wasn't forced or an act. I attended a class reunion years later and was delighted to learn that one of the worst aggressors now works with disabled children. Nobody apologized or admitted that what they did back then was wrong, and I didn't bring the matter up. I had a coffee, they had their beers, and when I left, I thought, there, that's that chapter of my life brought to a close. I thought I had done pretty well and that in retrospect, my experiences weren't all bad because I grew stronger through dealing with them and I learned to get along on my own.

Part 2: I watched a movie the other night and read some stuff online

I came across this film by chance and I continued watching because I liked the acting. It featured a girl who became the victim of massive bullying and after it was over, I suddenly felt really upset and sent back in time, as if I had just come home from a really bad day in seventh grade and thrown myself on my bed crying with my parents standing around helpless and my snot ruining the plush of my stuffed animals. (I couldn't control my feelings, of course. I played it cool and tough as long as I was at school, and then at home I fell apart every other afternoon.)

Because I couldn't sleep and couldn't stop thinking about it, I googled around and visited a few websites that deal with bullying and how to detect and prevent it, how to help victims and perpetrators, and so on. I'm talking about good, reliable websites run by reputable organizations, and they all said that my old strategy, that I thought had worked so well and was so proud of, was all wrong. You're not supposed to ignore. You're supposed to ask for help. You're supposed to... just not do it my way. And that upset me even more. It was as if this major part of me being me was suddenly exposed as a huge mistake and my big achievement suddenly turned out to be a massive failure.

Now I feel like a massive failure. And I can't help thinking about all the ways in which I really am not okay: How I am afraid of people, all people I don't know well, especially men and boys and how I avoid groups and find excuses not to have to attend parties or other social events. How I can't say no and let myself be exploited all the goddamn time at work because people accept me there and I will apparently do anything at all to keep it that way and am terrified that if I stand up for myself, I will be cast out again. How for years I thought of myself as completely unlovable and dressed like a bag because I felt pathetic if I tried to dress up my ugly body, how when colleagues or even strangers on the street are sitting together and laughing I automatically assume they are making fun of me. How I have anxiety and eating disorders and panic attacks and cry way too easily and hyperventilate when I am upset and bite my own hands.

Are these long-term effects of the bullying and me not dealing with it properly? Or was I bullied because I was always neurotic and vulnerable? I don't expect anybody to answer that, of course. It's just that before this movie brought it all up again, I felt pretty good, pretty stable and strong and functional and now I'm shaken and confused and insecure. Even though I'm still the same person!


Wow, that turned into a long post. I'm going to tell myself not to be silly because of some articles on the internet now. If anyone has any insights (or just wants to talk about their own experiences with bullying or being an outsider), I'd be thankful for some outside perspective.

[Heather]

Sunshine: I am so sorry that you had to survive all of this, but I'm so glad that you did.

I want to sit and marinate with some of this before I say too much, but one thing I do want to say that I know to always be true is that when we're in anything where we have to struggle to survive, we do what we need to. And unless that involves doing anyone or ourselves real harm (and I don't think the impact of harassment to you was about you, but about what others were doing to you, as that'll always be the big source of impacts), there's really no right or wrong way. There's just whatever our way is to get through something and come out on the other side. I'd be pretty wary of anyone or anywhere who said there are right ways and wrong ways, and figure if they are saying that, they're clearly thinking awfully simplistically, and not from a particularly trauma-informed place.

One-size-fits all directives like that feel, to me, like say, a directive that everyone who is in the middle of someone trying to sexually assault them should yell and fight back with their body. That may be the right thing to do in the midst of one assault, while in another, a victim's instincts may be telling them -- rightly -- that with the person assaulting or trying to assault them, going along and cooperating is the way to go for them to survive. There just isn't a one-size-fits-all with any kind of violence.

I don't see any failure on your part here, because here you are, the lovely, kind and thoughtful person you clearly are. You won here, not lost.

Again, more from me later, when I figure out what I can say here that will be most likely to be of value for you, but I wanted to make sure you knew one of us saw this, and to say what I did.

[Sunshine]

Thank you so much, Heather, for replying - and so fast, too! When you probably have a lot of other things to attend to. Thanks so much!

You know, the kids I went to school with really weren't evil or anything. I always felt they were doing it to feel power, and if I didn't respond to them in any way, I would deny them that power and then maybe some day, they would stop.

I guess what I realized last night was that of course they had power over me, an awful lot of power, and I think I fooled myself a lot more than them when I pretended it wasn't so. And that just... that hurts. And it makes me feel helpless and scared.

[Redskies]

Sunshine, I'm so sorry you went through this. Those are horrible things those people did.

Even if - and in line with what Heather said above, that really is even if - some strategies other than the ones you used would ever have helped, you didn't make a mistake. None of us can use strategies that we don't know about or that no-one has guided us into using. It's my understanding that "don't do anything, it'll make it worse" is a very common reaction of any child or young person experiencing bullying or abuse, and it makes a lot of sense: a bullied or abused young person's literal experience is that they have less power in the situation, so that's the framework they continue to operate under. Their lived experience strongly suggests or demonstrates to them that they don't and won't have the power necessary to change the situation, so of course trying to change it seems to have only negative possible outcomes. It takes someone from outside the framework, someone who doesn't believe that the bully or abuser has all the power over them, to demonstrate the very non-universality of the bully's or abuser's power, and to enable the beginnings of change. Alternatively, a young person might see it happen with different people in a different situation and extrapolate to their own situation. But nearly always, what's necessary is some kind of demonstration from somewhere that a bully's or abuser's power is Not, after all, supreme.

It sounds like no-one was able, or knew how, to do that for you. It was their responsibility (that's not apportioning blame and not forgetting to be understanding or compassionate about any reasons behind their actions - it's possible to understand why someone didn't meet a responsibility and still know it was their responsibility) to be the spanner that jammed the hurtful machine, not yours. You didn't fail, and you didn't do the wrong things.

Coming to terms with our own past lack of power tends to be one of the tough places around bullying or abuse. Recognising that kind of vulnerability Is scary. If it helps any, I think that not acknowledging how powerless we felt at the time is often an important and very legitimate survival strategy; if it's hard enough to deal with much later, it would probably have been beyond us and much more emotionally damaging at the time.

"Ignore, pretend you don't notice and then pretend you don't care" was the main strategy given to me for most kinds of hurtful behaviour. I didn't experience the kind of bullying you did, but still, that strategy didn't help me either and made me feel crappy, and also contributed to some long-lasting challenging things in my own life and around relating to people.

[Sunshine]

Thank you for your reply! I really appreciate it. It's really helpful right now for me to hear (well, read) that maybe I just did the best I could under the circumstances.

Anyway, I'm here now. I'm not exactly okay and not exactly as strong as I would like to be, but I have come a long way. There was a time when I couldn't make a simple phone call, couldn't order my own food in a restaurant, couldn't tell a salesperson at a store what I wanted. There was a time where I threw up almost every day. I haven't had a real freak-out for nearly two months now, and they are becoming less frequent anyway. I have a job and I earn my own money and I can drive a car and nobody believes me any more when I say I'm shy because I've become so good at not behaving that way. I am in a good, stable relationship. I can have sex with the lights on. I don't know my current weight. I can have a bag of potato chips in my kitchen and only eat half of it and put the rest away for tomorrow. I know these are really very basic things, but for me personally, they are big achievements. My life has slowly but steadily become a lot better ever since I left school, so I must be doing something right.

So what's a proper alternative to "ignore, pretend you don't notice and then pretend you don't care?" It's a bit too late for me personally, but if someone I know or their loved ones are ever bullied, I'd like to be able to give some good advice instead of just passing on my own not-so-great experiences.

[Sam W]

Hi Sunshine,

Right on! Each one of those steps can be so, so hard to take, so jedi fist-bump for managing them all.

As for how to help others, that all depends on the context and your relationship to them and the bully. There is something to be said for going through the appropriate channels of reporting (like at a school, tell the principle or a teacher), and hopefully that works. If you meet administrative resistance, you could help by doing some legwork (if the person wants it) to figure out what resources they have to make it stop, and what steps they can take if those in power don't have their back. But sometimes, all you can do is act as support and validation for how much things suck, and say and do things that help to counteract the bullying messages. I agree that it's sucky to have to tell people to just ignore it and outlast, even though that's sometimes the only approach. Hopefully we're seeing a shift away from that in our culture.

[Sunshine]

Just dropping in to say thank all of you again for responding. I feel a lot better right now.

Sam, I love how you said that sometimes all you can do is validate someones feelings on how badly things suck. I think it's often underestimated how helpful that kind of support can be.

Again, a thousand thanks, I really appreciate everybody's kind words.