|
You know how jokes are often
funny because they are based in an ugly truth?
I had a new realization of that phenomena while
watching Bill Maher's new stand-up comedy special
"The Decider" on HBO the other night.
Bill was talking about various recent sexual
abuse scandals and was comparing the complaints
made against Michael Jackson to complaints made
against various Catholic priests with the aim
of suggesting that what Michael allegedly did
to his victims was gentle compared to the treatment
received by victims of the priests. Seemingly
out of nowhere, he started talking about a time
when he was a child and was rather viciously
beaten up during an incident of playground bullying.
As part of his punchline, he commented that
he would have gladly subjected himself to the
worst abuse Michael has been accused of perpetrating
rather than having to endure that single beating.
The comment resonated with
me, probably because like Bill, I too was bullied
as a kid, and also found the experience to be
pretty ugly. I don't think I'd ever choose to
subject myself to Michael's ministrations in
order to have escaped my own bullying experiences
(you gotta have standards in life), but I know
I would have given a lot to have been able to
stop them from happening.
The bullying I was subjected
to did not occur on the playground, but rather
on the school bus. I can vividly recall days
when I would have to launch myself out of the
school bus door and run as fast as I could up
the hill to the shelter of my house. A group
of older neighborhood boys would be after me
for reasons that were never entirely clear.
I was younger, more sensitive, certainly more
vulnerable and not talented at fist fighting.
Most days I'd make it home safely, but some
days I'd end up belly up on the grass trying
to fend off blows and kicks while a ring of
kids jeered and cheered that day's aggressor.
A blow to the head and you'd see stars like
in the cartoons.
I'm 40 years old now; it's
been something like 30 years since that sort
of thing last happened. Still, the experience
has not left me, it sucked so much. I don't
think about it much these days, but I know that
having lived through those experiences has shaped
me as an adult, and not for the better.
The experience of getting your
face smashed in by bullies (or taunted by them,
or pushed, or shoved, or excluded, etc. ) has
got to be an almost universal sort of thing;
something that many others who have endured
similar experiences can perhaps recognize and
respond to. In this spirit, I offer my self-disclosure
(and hijack Bill's) as seed for discussion.
There are lots of programs
designed to help schools and other institutions
prevent bullying. It's kind of a hot topic these
days in a small sort of way. Hopefully the things
that researchers have and will come up will
help limit the scope of the problem in the future.
However, I'm quite confident that it will never
go away entirely. It seems to me that bullying
is just one of those things that are just a
part of human nature. Something that can be
suppressed but not eliminated.
Where I want to go with this
essay is not to talk about how to make bullying
stop, but rather, to explore the sorts of damage
bullies do to their victims, and to discuss
a few paths through which some of that damage
can be, at least in part, undone.
Bullying is Abuse
Here's a few statements to get us started: 1)
Bullying is a form of abuse, and 2) Bullying
is a narcissistic sort of act. In making the
first statement here, I mean to say that both
bullying and traditional forms of abuse are
selfish and/or sadistic, destructive, and often
violent acts perpetrated upon victims who do
not in any way, shape or form deserve to be
treated in that manner. In making the second
statement I'm suggesting that ring-leader bullies
(those who organize bullying) are behaving as
though the emotional and physical health of
their victims is not important or is at least
less important than their own desire for the
thrill of aggression and dominance. Narcissists
treat other people as though they were objects
either to be used, or discarded, and the bully
both uses his victim (for purposes of self-gratification
and aggrandizement) and then discards him.
Now, children are fairly narcissistic
by their very nature. Children are not born
appreciating that other people are actually
just like they are with their own needs and
independent rights. A long period of development
must occur before children grasp that the other
people around them have needs and interests
just like they do and need to be accommodated
and accorded respect. The golden rule of treating
others as you would yourself like to be treated
makes no sense to a young child who has not
yet matured to the point where this basic appreciation
of the individuality of every person has been
grasped. Instead, children need to be held in
line with what amount to incentives (and sometimes
punishments) for acting as though other people
matter. So by saying that bullying is a narcissistic
action, I'm not at all saying that all bullies
are narcissists. Adult bullies who have not
outgrown their childhood narcissism probably
do qualify, but little kids are just going to
be that way. This is why I'm not terribly optimistic
that we can solve the problem of bullying in
our time.
Bullying Causes Long-Term
Emotional Damage
The experience of being bullied can end up causing
lasting damage to victims. This is both self-evident,
and also supported by an increasing body of
research. It is not necessary to be physically
harmed in order to suffer lasting harm. Words
and gestures are quite enough. In fact, the
old saying, "Sticks and stones may break
my bones but names will never harm me"
is more or less exactly backwards. For the most
part, physical damage sustained in a fist fight
heals readily, especially damage that is sustained
during the resilient childhood years. What is
far more difficult to mend is the primary wound
that bullying victims suffer which is damage
to their self-concepts; to their identities.
Bullying is an attempt to instill fear and self-loathing.
Being the repetitive target of bullying damages
your ability to view yourself as a desirable,
capable and effective individual.
There are two ugly outcomes
that stem from learning to view yourself as
a less than desirable, incapable individual.
The first ugly outcome is that it becomes more
likely that you will become increasingly susceptible
to becoming depressed and/or angry and/or bitter.
Being bullied teaches you that you are undesirable,
that you are not safe in the world, and (when
it is dished out by forces that are physically
superior to yourself) that you are relatively
powerless to defend yourself. When you are forced,
again and again, to contemplate your relative
lack of control over the bullying process, you
are being set up for Learned Helplessness (e.g.,
where you come to believe that you can't do
anything to change your ugly situation even
if that isn't true), which in turn sets you
up for hopelessness and depression.
At the same time, you may be
learning that you are helpless and hopeless,
you are also learning how you are seen by bullies,
which is to say, you are learning that you are
seen by others as weak, pathetic, and a loser.
And, by virtue of the way that identity tends
to work, you are being set up to believe that
these things the bullies are saying about you
are true.
It would be great if the average
person was possessed of unshakable self-confidence,
but this just isn't how identity works. Identity
is a social process. Other people contribute
to it. Particularly when people are young and
have not yet survived a few of life's trials,
it is difficult for people to know who they
are and what they are made of. Much of what
passes for identity in the young (and in the
older too) is actually a kind of other-confidence,
which is to say that many people's self-confidence
is continually shored up by those around them
telling them in both overt and subtle ways that
they are good, worthy people. This is one of
the reasons people like to belong to groups
– it helps them to feel good about themselves.
Bullying teaches people that they are explicitly
not part of groups; that they are outcasts and
outsiders. It is hard to doubt the reality of
being an outcast and an outsider when you have
been beaten or otherwise publicly humiliated.
It takes an exceptionally confident (or otherwise
well-supported) person to not internalize bullies'
negative messages and begin bullying yourself
by holding yourself to the same standards that
bullies are applying to you and finding yourself
a failure. In other words, it is rather easy
for bullying victims to note that they have
been beaten up and then to start thinking of
themselves as weak, no-good, worthless, pathetic,
and incompetent. These are the sorts of thoughts
that lead to depression, or, if they are combined
with revenge fantasies, to anger and rage feelings.
Where the first ugly outcome
of bullying unfolds rather immediately in the
form of a wounded self-concept, the second ugly
outcome unfolds more slowly over time. Having
a wounded self-concept makes it harder for you
to believe in yourself, and when you have difficulty
believing in yourself, you will tend to have
a harder time persevering through difficult
situations and challenging circumstances. Deficits
in academic performance can easily occur when
bullying victims succumb to depression or otherwise
become demoralized. They certainly also occur
when victims ditch school to avoid bullies.
The deficits themselves are not the real issue.
The real issue is that if deficits occur for
too long or become too pronounced, the affected
children can lose out on opportunities for advancement
and further study, and ultimately, employment.
I've read retrospective studies where people
report having left school early so as to avoid
continued bullying, and this of course will
have altered and limited the job prospects they
have available to them as adults. Leaving school
may be a dramatic (if occasionally realistic)
example of how early bullying can affect one's
life, but there are surely other ways that anger
or depression caused by bullying harms and developmentally
delays people's progress.
Inevitably, it is the sensitive
kids who get singled out for teasing; the kids
who cry easily; the easy targets. Targeted as
they are, many sensitive kids learn to think
of their sensitivity as a bad thing and to avoid
it, and/or channel it into revenge fantasy and
anger. This doesn't much work when you are a
kid (it is difficult to reinvent yourself without
actually moving to a new place), and it can
have negative consequences in adulthood when
the same children, now emotionally avoidant
or angry or cynical adults, find themselves
having difficulty entering into or maintaining
loving and warm intimate relationships.
A similar form of damage comes
when bullied kids internalize negative attitudes
concerning aspects of themselves that set them
apart from others, such as their sexual orientation,
minority group membership, or religious affiliation.
In such cases, bullying sets up a peer pressure
to reject aspects of one's self which are fundamentally
not rejectable, and thus a potentially lifelong
tension gets set up inside that person. If anyone
out there has a better idea for how someone
can end up become a homosexual-hating homosexual,
or a jew-hating jewish person or other seemingly
self-contradictory person I'd like to know about
it.
The following list, culled
from my reading on this subject, summarizes
some of the effects bullying victims may experience:
In the short term:
• Anger
• Depression
• Anxious avoidance of settings in which
bullying may occur.
• Greater incidence of illness
• Lower grades than non-bullied peers
• Suicidal thoughts and feelings (In one
British retrospective bullying experiences survey
I came across (of unknown scientific value),
20% of the sample attempted suicide secondary
to having been bullied, whereas only 3% of participants
who were not bullied attempted suicide).
In the long term:
• Reduced occupational
opportunities
• Lingering feelings of anger and bitterness,
desire for revenge.
• Difficulty trusting people
• Interpersonal difficulties, including
fear and avoidance of new social situations
• Increased tendency to be a loner
• Perception of self as easy to victimize,
overly sensitive, and thin-skinned
• Self-esteem problems (don't think well
of self)
• Increased incidence of continued bullying
and victimization
A few interesting observations
of factors that seem to lessen the negative
impact that bullying has on people have come
to my attention during the process of cataloging
the ways that bullying can mess you up. For
instance:
Perception of Control
A 2004 Spanish college student sample study
suggests that there is a direct relationship
between victim's perception of control over
their bullying experience and the extent of
long term difficulties they experience as a
result of bullying. This is to say, that bullied
students who believed they were able to influence
and/or escape their bullies reported fewer negative
long term effects from having been bullied than
did students who felt helpless to influence
their situation while it was happening. Perception
of control (and not reality of control) was
key in this study, as no relationship was found
between the various ways that students coped
with being bullied and how they turned out.
I can see the outline of a
mechanism working here (where students who believed
they still had control over their situations
avoided developing learned helplessness and
therefore had less of a chance of experiencing
depression). However the study doesn't really
help us to know what to recommend that people
do to lessen their chances of long term problems.
Remember, it didn't matter what the students
actually did; it only mattered what they believed.
If we go with the idea that
believing you have control over events is important
then the thing to do if you are being bullied
is to keep persevering in your efforts to stop
the bullying as though those efforts will result
in your being able to get the bullying to stop.
No single thing you do may actually stop the
bullying from happening, but the effect of continually
working under the assumption that you haven't
tried all options and may still get the bullying
to stop may do the trick. And, of course, you
might actually get the bullying to stop because
of something you do or don't do.
Rather than try to control
the past (which is impossible), it might make
more sense for hurting victims to get themselves
to focus on what they can control in the present,
for the benefit of their future happiness and
fulfillment. As the poet George Herbert's classic
phrase wisely advises us, "living well
is the best revenge".
Early Exposure
The age at which kids are first bullied seems
to be important according to some research.
Young children who are first bullied during
their pre-teen years appear to be less negatively
impacted in the long term than are children
who are first bullied as teens. People first
bullied as young children report experiencing
higher long-term stress levels than do people
who were never bullied. However, people who
were first bullied as teens report more long
term social withdrawal and more reactivity to
violence than other groups. There is a greater
tendency towards the use of self-destructive
coping mechanisms in the first-bullied-as-teens
group, and an interesting but hard to make sense
of sex difference, where women tend to become
more aggressive as a result of their bullying
experience, and men to demonstrate a greater
tendency to abuse substances. I can't help but
wonder if the increased independence and emancipation
that teens enjoy makes them more likely to experiment
with and then get locked into maladaptive coping
strategies like substance abuse than their younger
peers.
Social Support
Finally, multiple researchers point to the protective
effect that a good social support network has
with regard to bully victim's short and long
term outcomes. Having supportive family members
and peers around who can be confided in when
one has been bullied and who can offer support
and advice tends to lessen bullying's impact.
There are a number of reasons
why it makes sense that a supportive social
network should help, but one of them deserves
to be made explicit. Namely, that when a bullying
victim is surrounded by and bought into a supportive
social network, they are receiving many positive
messages about their worth from network members,
and there are thus fewer opportunities for bullies'
negative messages to find purchase and grow
to take over self-esteem. If bullies can only
succeed in harming people physically; if they
do not succeed in harming them emotionally or
harming their identities, then relatively little
lasting damage can be done.
Undoing the Damage
If the primary damage that bullying causes is
damage to identity and self-esteem, then taking
steps to repair identity and self-esteem are
in order for people looking to heal from past
bullying experiences. What needs to heal, in
most cases, is not the physical body, but rather,
identity and self-concept. Bullied people need
to learn how to feel safe again in the world
(or safe enough). They need to learn that they
are acceptable people who have something to
offer other people. They need to feel in more
control over their moods and urges. They need
to feel again that if they set their mind to
something that they can hope to accomplish it.
These are not modest goals, by any chance, but
they are the sorts of things that bullying victims
need to think about working on.
I'll refer people to our topic
centers on Depression and Anger Management for
ideas about how these problems can be treated.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is likely to be
of particular utility with regard to depression
and anger that is secondary to having been bullied
because mood problems that have originated in
this way are very likely to have come into being
as a result of victims having become convinced
that they are worthless and incompetent. In
the language of cognitive behavioral therapy,
these would be thought of as dysfunctional core
beliefs which could be addressed and repudiated
using cognitive restructuring techniques that
encourage people to closely examine such beliefs
and dispute them when they are found to contain
exaggerations and distortions (which these sorts
of beliefs surely will).
Social withdrawal problems
and social anxiety also can be very profitably
addressed within the context of cognitive therapy.
One of the really nice things about a therapy
setting is that role playing can take place
between therapist and patient so as to provide
anxious patients with opportunity to practice
and improve how they will interact in feared
but desired social situations. When basic social
fears and skill deficits have been addressed,
it should become easier for socially withdrawn
people to find the connections they need to
finally feel fundamentally accepted by others.
I typically hate the overused
word "empowered", but I'm going to
use it here, because it really fits here. People
who have been bullied have been fundamentally
dis-empowered. Their feelings of personal safety
have been violated and their belief in their
own competency and adequacy has been brought
into question. Such people may exist in a state
of perpetual avoidance and paralysis. In order
to feel good about themselves, they will need
to break through that paralysis and engage in
something that helps them feel like they are
gaining in power. Not power over others, but
power over themselves. No other people can do
this for them. Each paralyzed person has to
decide to empower themselves.
There are a million avenues
one can go in to fulfill an empowerment goal,
the one that is right for any given person being
a function of that person's talents and opportunities.
Anger can be productively funneled into a competitive
endeavor (such as education, business, sports,
gaming or some other means of becoming excellent)
or a creative expression. Fears can be faced
down and courage can be found. I, as author
of this essay, cannot offer specifics on how
this can be accomplished as the right path for
each person will be individual, but I can say
that it is more or less as simple as picking
out a goal you desire to accomplish (which will
assert yourself) and then deciding to make it
happen. As with any self-improvement goal, it
is good to start small, and to dissect larger
goals into their smallest possible elements,
so that each step you take on the way to a big
goal is manageable. You can read more about
this process in our Psychological Self-Tools
self-help book.
|
