Bullies are everywhere.
They’re in the office, schools, online, and now they’re coming to a Playstation 2 near you.
I really hate bullies but have had trouble shaking them off in the past. I worked for one for 11 years. I was parented by one for 16 years. I was married to one for 10 years. There are still three people I don’t care to run into at a high school reunion because I haven’t quite gotten past the humiliation they dished out in middle school.
I may not have contemplated ‘going Columbine’ on them but even now just writing about them dredges up all of those old feelings of rejection and ridicule just like Jay describes in his incredibly powerful post.
I just wept. Wept, and seethed. I wanted the anger inside of me to dissipate. But it was too hungry. I spent hours feeding it, tossing any stick and scrap of kindling into it that I could find. I detested them – these shaven primates who marinated their minds in sports, and spent their spare hours torturing the odd men out. Yet at the same time, they seemed like the universe…a universe in which I had no place.
When I was writing the intro to this post, I initially wrote “I really dislike bullies.” instead of “I really hate bullies.” That’s because even thinking about them switched me emotionally to a kind of anger I try to stay far away from because it’s so visceral, and to distance myself I tried to lighten the words. Reading Jay’s description transported me right back to the days when I felt utterly powerless everywhere — at home, at work, at school — everywhere. It’s an ugly, primal place to be and I’m glad I don’t go there often.
Bullying can be subtle. It’s not always as blatant as “give me the lunch or I’ll beat you up.” Sometimes it’s the threat to withdraw attention, to minimize efforts, to devalue work.
One of the most memorable bullying occasions happened to me in middle school. For some inexplicable reason, the kids I usually hung out with started avoiding me. They would literally turn and walk the other way when I approached, putting their heads together and talking in exaggerated whispers while glancing back at me to see if I was watching, which I was.
Finally I confronted one of the ‘followers’, who offered this explanation: “We decided to hate you this week. We formed a club to hate you this week. There’s nothing you can do about it because there’s no reason for it. We just want to hate you.” Mean girls. Mean, mean girls.
What a rotten, miserable thing to say to someone else! And like Jay, these were the kids I’d grown up with. Our parents knew each other well. We had gone through elementary school together. We were in many of the same classes, played in the same band, went to Girl Scouts together. And for no apparent reason, they’d decided to hate me. Much later I had a conversation with the one I confronted. She couldn’t (or wouldn’t) remember it, but offered the half-baked explanation that at that time she threw her lot in with the ‘leader’ of that pack because they lived closer to each other than she and I did. What rot.
Bullying can be blatant. My father was a physical bully. If he was angry, whether or not it was our fault, he used force to get what he wanted. There was more than one night where one of the other of us would be torn from the bed at 2AM and soundly beaten because something that he THOUGHT I had done made him mad. He controlled everything, from the music that was played in our house to the way our rooms were arranged. No detail was too small, too imperfect to get his attention. My brother and I spent as much energy on finding ways to stay out of his way as we did on finding ways to please him.
For years I wondered if it was a nightmare or reality that I recalled when the image of him standing over my mother with a baseball bat popped into my mind. It wasn’t until I was older that I put together the two black eyes and discarded her lie that she’d tripped and fallen squarely on a sprinkler head with both eyes. And you know, it took me a lot longer to forgive her for protecting him all those years than it did to forgive him for doing it.
Bullying can be as simple as trying to alter another person’s reality. I worked for and was married to one of those — If I said the sky was blue, they’d contradict me and assure me that I was wrong, it was really green. When I disagreed, I’d be stonewalled, the other form of bullying founded on the premise that if something is repeated often enough it will become fact.
I couldn’t control who my father was or how he behaved. I couldn’t control what my so-called school friends decided to do. But I surely had control over who I married and who I worked for, yet I didn’t see their bully tactics until I was in too deep and had too much invested. It took a good therapist and a year’s worth of therapy to arrive at the understanding that I was still playing out scripts from the past, hoping for a better outcome.
The only time that I can recall standing up to a bully as a kid was when I was 14 and confronted on the way home by a man with a zit-scarred face, a long knife and a promise to “show me a good time” if I got in his car. I screamed as loudly as I could and scared him back far enough to run like hell home and hide in my room. I didn’t tell my mother or my father because I was sure I’d be yelled at for walking home by myself, something I’d started doing after the “friends” pulled their stunt. Escaping what could have been death for me was one of the most empowering moments of my life, even though it took me 20 years to figure that out.
Now that I have figured it out, I don’t allow myself to be bullied anymore. That’s why sometimes you’ll see me grab something like a bulldog and shake it till it dies by writing about it over and over. I’m not going to accept blanket indictments, name-calling, threats, or ridicule, all of which are forms of bullying. I am a nice person, but I’m not a bully-whipped cowering dog anymore and I have no intention of becoming one again.
My gut tells me when someone is trying to bully. I trust it, and I counter it. It’s the only way I know to keep the anger of the past at bay, forgiven but never, ever forgotten. I think it’s a healthy way to deal with it. Reliving the past is only productive if the outcome is changed.
The Playstation 2 version? That is not so healthy, I think. I’m afraid for kids who have that same outrage, the same burning anger. It’s not good to re-experience it. It’s not good to swap roles and become a bully. It’s not good to validate bullies either. I’m not usually a proponent of the “video games encourage acting-out in real life” philosophy, but if simple memories trigger anger, what good can come of playing it out in High Def over and over and over again?
Update: Sherry has a bully story, too, and is looking for suggestions on forming a plan to help her daughter when she goes to school.
Technorati Tags: Bully, Playstation 2, bullying, bullies, cyberbullying, anger, workplace bullies
