Heh, decent timing. My last CBT session ended with me realising one of my issues may be a lasting effect of bullying.
Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol"
Boiled it down and down and down until we hit the core of the issue and realised I don't want to poke my head up and ship code/sites/ideas/etc because I believe I'll be bullied for it. In school doing anything that lifted you up (e.g. good grades) made you a target.
The realisation was that that will probably not to happen now. If I do something exceptional at 34 I probably wont be bullied by my peers (or heck, even if I actually was bullied for it.. who cares lol, my peers don't understand the market I work in)
I'd never reevaluated the internalised rule "If I excel, I will be bullied" until the other day.
--
On a slightly more positive spin the whole thing made me quite sensitive to deception. If someone is trying to deceive or manipulate me my subconscious might as well be flashing up a Metal Gear Solid exclaim noise for how obvious it seems.
Would rich kids be facing much more competition for elite spots from poor but smart kids if bullying wasn't part of the curriculum in the public schools? Given that only 10% of kids get to go to a school where dignity is assured, it could be that 90% of the smart kids are being kneecapped and don't reach their full potential. One more thing that makes a mockery of "meritocracy".
I was glad to see though that New Hampshire (where I grew up) finally passed a law making it possible to sue schools for bullying like the other 49 states.
I wonder also how many Enrons and Challenger Disasters we've had because many of what could have been our best people had it beat into them that self-assertion is not allowed for them.
I have a friend who was bullied so abusively and thoroughly at a private school that his family pulled him out and moved him into public school (which turned out to be a very good school system with very little bullying, fortunately for him).
Obviously that's just one data point, but I don't think the incentive structure at a private school is what you think it is. There's a lot of incentive to keep issues quiet, and a lot of pressure to fit a certain mold.
Private schools are an instance of opportunity hoarding, and "opportunity" should be understood in a number of ways. The opportunity to buy a certain level of freedom from bullying in favour of a "selective" crowd, for instance. Though I doubt there is less bullying in private schools, more that it manifests in different ways; if I had to hypothesize, I might suppose the bullying is of a different intensity though.
Does anyone have experience with going to a "school within a school" for "gifted and talented" kids? I was trying to figure out why I don't remember any bullying from my middle school or high school, when it dawned on me that I might have been insulated from it by taking classes exclusively with gifted and talented kids —i.e., kids from stable/whole/educated households. I went to a high school where kids came from a mix of blue collar and lower-earning white collar families; does bullying still happen at public high schools in wealthy areas?
There's a lot of discussion here about how private school kids are insulated from bullying. Does anyone have first-hand experience or hard evidence of this? Based on books and movies about boarding school, it's hard to believe this.
That's me. Grew up in a very middle to perhaps lower-middle-class area and went to more-or-less middling schools. It definitely wasn't 'the mean streets' or anything but very blue collar. I'm certain there were kids living through very real problems at home and in their personal lives all around me. But I was blissfully unaware and disconnected from all that as I was wrapped in the bubble of band and honors/gifted classes and the associated type of kid. A pretty good childhood overall. One time, one 5-minute instance, I was actively, actually bullied, in a very minor and entirely inconsequential way by the football captain jock kind of kid. Took me by surprise, but rattled my cage enough that I still remember it. He went on to play in the NFL, had a short and pretty much unremarkable career as an athlete best I can tell, and now is a construction worker nearby and I saw a headline once that he got arrested for a DUI. I now live in a much nicer neighborhood in a bigger house than he does, and based on the blurb about the DUI, I drive a better car than he does/did. Point is, I can't imagine what it's like to actually be bullied. One tiny thing happened to me in an entirely impersonal and inconsequential way and here I am decades later googling the guy and feeling smug that I came out on top. I would have been crushed by any amount of real bullying.
A lot of the biggest bullies at my schools growing up were the richest kids. They might bully about different things, but they were huge bullies.
It seems like a lot of the HN discussion is focused on kids being bullied for being smart, which makes sense given the audience on here. However, other kids get bullied for lots of different reasons.
Chiming in with my anecdote. Took all honors classes throughout high school, so I pretty much never mixed with kids outside of that bubble. Was one of the few Asians in my high school in the small midwestern town, so I'm sure there was potential for bullying. But I wasn't bullied, and I credit some of that to the tiered class system.
This is one reason I'm up in arms about public school districts near me shutting down their gifted programs because they made certain not academically-inclined demographics feel bad about not being represented. So now, kids in my demographic get to feel bad about being bullied.
This is essentially how "honors" classes worked at my large public high school. If I weren't in the Anime- sorry, I mean, Japanese Culture- Club, I would literally have only seen the same 50ish kids all day out of a class of ~1000.
In freshman and sophomore year I decided that English classes bored me to tears, so I took non-honors English both years. There was zero overlap between that class and the kids I saw the rest of my day in honors classes. Then in junior year when I decided to do IB and was forced to take IB/AP English, suddenly boom yep exact same set of kids.
I'll admit, I enjoyed the experience. Admittedly partly because even half-assed work got me easy A's and glowing appreciation from my teachers (for actually putting in some effort and not being disruptive etc), but also getting to meet lots of different people was fun.
Also good god did I hate English class. So many insufferable books of what I still consider to be terribly little literary merit. I wish we'd been allowed to just read classical literature all year. For one of the book slots we were allowed to choose our own book, and I chose Plato's Republic, which I enjoyed thoroughly. It was the only book from prior to the 20th century that I got to read for class that year as well. At least it got better in senior year when we got to do Shakespeare again.
First I went to an average middle school an I remember many delinquents, but they had something like their own hierarchy independent from grades, so I guess nerds were no threat to their hierarchy, so they didn't care about nerds. Rather nobody cared about nerds to such extent that I didn't even know some animosity to nerds even exists. Standard grades were undefinable either, because ironically delinquents were below any standard, as a consequence nonstandard grades were undefinable either, so I guess separation based on grades was impossible as marginals were too numerous and visible. Then I went to an elite school for gifted kids (elite in terms of academic performance), but I didn't see anyone stereotypically rich there, and I'm not sure that a school for gifted kids is the same as a school for rich kids, I think they have very different goals. There was some kind of internment school for orphans nearby or something like that, so we got some flak from them, funnily I was once stopped by a girl and she tried to seduce me - a tomboy - I blushed, lol.
yeah, when I was trying to figure out 'What is the moment before the split second "my fingers just opened a new tab" effect, I realized so much of adhd is really consciously or subconsciously:
emotional flinching
distraction is just running away from a feeling. I don't actually care about the content of the new tab, i'm not addicted to the internet, blah blah
----------
BTW, The old book Focusing by Eugene Gendlin really helped me here-- it's on libgen or you can youtube the authors name to see some of his one on one sessions he did with people before he died. (You can do it yourself without a person tho, it's just having a kind listener helps you stick with it)
it's NOT about adhd or focusing on stuff lol, it's the name for his diy technique of 'figuring out what the feeling is' and unlocks all other therapy stuff that you may do after
Thanks for sharing 'distraction is just running away from a feeling.' It puts my experience into words succinctly without giving a root cause to why I might feel that feeling.
Separately sometimes I can find a period of my life that seems to explain why I act the way I do but I'm also not confident in my memory to know if it was happening before hand or if I'm just associating two things that are only slightly related.
For example: I tend to be a very self deprecating individual because I like to laugh and hang out with people who say silly things but I also use it as a crutch to avoid accidentally offending people. I went to a very bad college and so was considered very good at academics while there and may have developed this then to fit in. I could also have developed it growing up because it was a way to laugh off mistakes. I could also just like the sense of humor. Heck even this statement I'm replying to that I like so much I'm certain I've heard it and resonated with it before but have just lost focus of it over time.
Anyway thanks again for sharing, it has helped refined my thinking.
Yeah the whole "ok but why do I respond like that?" is a massive focus now that I've realised there are all these internal rules I've been following since early teens and possibly even younger.
I'll absolutely give that a look into, thank you!
Also for nerds who have yet to consider it: CBT is like debugging code, except the code is your brain. I'd highly recommend looking into it where possible, especially if you are opposed or wary of the "and how does that make you feel?" style of therapy. Fascinating field, and quite helpful for me so far.
> Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol"
Along this vein, I think the internet (Reddit especially) has been spreading an idea that "ADHD explains everything" in recent years. Every year I feel like I see more and more people self-diagnose with ADHD and then stop looking further for any explanation for their psychological situation. In some cases, people seem to get worse after receiving the ADHD diagnosis and medication and then hyperfocusing on their distractions even harder. From my position I see a lot of people with anxiety issues, perfectionism problems, or even textbook depression becoming convinced that ADHD is the explanation for everything in their life. Not all ADHD patients, mind you, but largely the recent influx of people who start with self-diagnosis via internet memes and TikTok (mis)info about ADHD.
Yes, this is definitely a thing. I was one of those that self-diagnosed after seeing a long twitter thread about ADHD symptoms and every single tweet fitting to an absolute T.
It wasn't until I found a psychologist that had an opening 90 days(ish) later that I was able to get fully diagnosed that I was even mentally able to think about myself differently. That said, I had the resources to see a doctor, I'm in my 40s, so there was no family to tell me I was making things up, and the only pressure I felt was from myself to address the issue.
If I couldn't do that and was stuck in a world that acknowledged ADHD was a thing, felt I had it, and yet felt disempowered to do anything about it, I could see myself easily falling down the rabbit hole you describe.
Oh absolutely. I'm open to it being something else but as it currently stands two people trained in the field reckon it's ADHD so I'll go with it for now.
In any case being diagnosed with ADHD was just me finding a missing edge piece of my jigsaw, it helps to know what I'm working with but there's plenty still to do.
I actually started the CBT because of that, I realised ever since I got diagnosed I was leaning into ADHD as an excuse (welp that's just me, can't help it!) and doing less overall than when I didn't know, which I thought was lame. Like that's it, I get a diagnosis and then give up trying to live? Lol no.
Absolutely, and the problem is that amphetamines will make most people feel better regardless of their underlying issue, because that's what they do to the human brain. If you're depressed and you start taking Adderall you will feel happier and more energetic in a way that will convince you that you just had ADHD all along, when it's simply not true at all. You can insert so many other conditions in the place of "depression" in that sentence and it will be true. I know because I went through this whole cycle myself: adult ADHD diagnosis that seemingly explained so many things in my life -> prescription for low dose amphetamines that gave me that "wow is this how normal people feel" moment and validated that ADHD must have been my problem all along -> eventually hit a ceiling with medication effects and begin having terrible comedowns such that when I skipped them for a day I felt essentially lobotomized and incapable of getting out of bed.
Eventually I came to accept that my attention and motivation problems were a combination of screen/social media addiction, drinking too much, poor sleep caused by the two previous behaviors, poor diet, lack of exercise, and the stress of pandemic isolation and working from home. Addressing those issues was much more difficult than getting diagnosed with ADHD but in the long run it has completely changed my life for the better. I do think the ADHD thing was an important detour on my path to a healthier life, but I wonder how many people who are in the same boat will move beyond the "ADHD explains everything" stage and actually solve their real problems?
Another common thread among ADHD folk is perfectionism. I certainly suffer from it, and it’s extremely harmful to my career.
People end up confused why I’m not delivering when what I do deliver is excellent. They figure I don’t care or I’m checked out, something like that. I become less reliable because not delivering is imperfect, and I begin to give up not only on my objectives but myself as well.
I’ve had this lead to catastrophe twice, but I’m much better at identifying it and speaking about it now.
It’s debilitating at times. Knowing I can do better, but it’s not there yet. I could deliver something so much faster, but if it isn’t the best I can do, I’m ashamed of it. I feel like a complete hack.
Worse still is that when I nail it, do good work, get it out on time, etc… It’s still not good enough.
Fundamentally it’s because I’m not good enough. ADHD can lead to some extremely insidious and harmful self talk.
When it comes to worrying about being bullied, I have to ask: why do you think you’re able to be bullied? Are you worth making into a target? Why did you internalize that?
Personally I think being bullied is a significant part of why I feel I’m not good enough. That’s what I was told for years! Unfortunately, I was young and dumb, very impressionable, and it stuck. Oh well, keep at it and try to do better. You aren’t someone who deserves to be bullied and I’m just fine at what I do. We’ll get there eventually.
I strongly relate. I've noticed a lot of my bad habits or odd approaches to things are actually simple pain avoidance. Bad things happen to us and we unconsciously develop methods of avoiding or lessening those bad things. No different than a beaten dog flinching at a raised hand. For me, a lot of these behaviors have been easy to unlearn, but it took half a lifetime to notice them in the first place. And who knows what other subtle pain avoidance behaviors I engage in that I've yet to see or understand.
Hazarding a guess: A frequent theme in bullying (at least in my experience) is falsely building up an expectation of positive outcome, then pulling out the rug, while blaming the victim for having unrealistic expectations, usually with rhetoric that they are inherently unworthy of positive outcomes, so by deceiving themselves they have only revealed their compounded lack of worth.
Experience that enough and I would expect one could develop quite advanced heuristics to protect oneself from deception.
Same way an abused dog will flinch when you raise your hand. You recognise the signs of bad things to come. Most flinches are wrong, but if you're always quick on the defensive you don't get hurt as often.
Someone looks shifty, or pauses at just the right moment in their sentence. Or scratches their nose while trying to get you to do something, or can't keep eye contact when they usually would. If they excessively look away for a moment during a disagreement get yourself ready to block the sucker punch. Or they accuse you out of the blue of doing something that's a complete 180 of your character -- ask them straight back if they're doing it themselves.
I can't really explain it too well I realise, having edited this comment like 20 times, as I've only just started looking into it myself.
When I was coming up, especially in middle school, we were always told that you should just ignore bullies and they would go away. This, of course, never actually worked. And anyone who did fight back against their bullies were punished just as severely, if not moreso if they swung first, as the bully. This entire approach was complete BS and only served to enable bullies because they now know that their victims either won't fight back or, if they do, the victim will receive most of the consequence.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think its vitally important that all children learn some form of self-defense (boxing, karate, BJJ, it doesn't matter). I only realized this way later in life when I started training in Muay Thai and found I had way more confidence standing up to other men, both because I knew how to handle myself and because I wasn't as afraid of getting punched in the face. Bullies only go away if you make them go away. Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision (which is often the situation). You may be punished, but the sense of catharsis more than makes up for that.
> You may be punished, but the sense of catharsis more than makes up for that.
The kind of punishment doled out by law-abiding adults to children isn't even a blip on the radar vs. suffering a vicious bully. It isn't even worth mentioning, punishment for violence is a total farce until adulthood. That's basically the whole source of the problem; bullys have realized there are no consequences.
The best response to a bully is an immediate and vigorous aggression resembling that of a honey badger, full stop. I agree it's important to teach children self-defense and get them familiar enough with conflict to not piss themselves when faced with it. It's the children who can get away with fighting back without negative consequence, and substantial upside potential.
I'll tell you that 40 years later the people I have rage at are the principals who told me I had no recourse to stop the bullying than the bully himself. It's not just getting hit or the unkind words, it is that the entire community organizes to support the bully and his ability to operate. I'm not particularly mad at the actual bully, in fact in one case I made peace 20 years later with that individual and his family.
I was on both sides of bad behavior in school that involved insults, punching, etc. and this is not necessarily bullying. There was the time a friend and I did something cruel to an MR kid and his big brother (emphasis on "big") gave me the smackdown which I deserved. Not to condone my own behavior, but the fact that this kid got immediate protection from his big bro would have reduced the long term psychological effects of my transgression.
100%, the way to avoid being bullied is to not be an easy target.
I once had a kid bullying me in middle school. I spoke with my mother about it, who recommended I say something to the teachers, which I did.
When that didn't work I knocked the shit out of him the next time he tried to bully me, to the point that he was running around the edges of the classroom trying to get away from me while I chased him down to beat on him some more.
He stopped fucking with me after that.
To your point, we both got suspended, but my mother made it clear I wasn't being punished and made sure I had fun during that suspension.
It's a lifelong skill that will be used as an adult too.
100% agree, I was a skinny kid who taught himself to fight to ward off bullies.
I bought a punching bag and started training when I was 12 - in 6 months I got so strong that I was bare-hand punching into cement walls.
There was this bully who would constantly berate me - he probably had 4 inches over me and a good 15-20 pounds heavier.
This one time am walking down the street and he comes out of nowhere and throws a punch, luckily I saw it coming, ducked and it grazed my cheek.
I flew into a rage - all I remember is he was down on the ground in a couple mins and I had beaten his face to pulp - I stopped when a friend and bystanders pulled me off.
So yes, learning to fight is a life skill - because there are times when there are no adults around and it's you or the bully.
> the way to avoid being bullied is to not be an easy target.
That may work for the individual, but there's always going to be an easiest target. We have studies of bullying interventions, including teaching kids self respect by way of martial arts, and changing the victim doesn't work.
I suggest people should look into the actual science on this. A good start is "Bullying at school: what we know and what we can do" by Dan Olweus from 1991.
Dan Olweus, the father of studying bullying and anti-bullying interventions, also studied this. He found that fighting sports did not help bullying at all, and there was even evidence it made it worse.
It's not so surprising when you think about it. Bullying is about power, but it isn't being good in a fight itself that makes some kids have power over others. It's social, not physical. The victim had the ability to strike back physically all along, they don't need special training. In theory the victim could stab the bully in the back in plenty of ways - even literally. The reason they don't do that, and the reason the bullies don't fear it, is because all the ways the victim could strike back would be scorched earth. It makes no difference if it's with freshly learned BJJ or a weapon.
> Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision
Adult supervision is no guarantee either. Kids are way smarter than adults give them credit for. I remember bullying occurring in the presence of teachers who were completely unaware of the meaning of subtle language or other cues meant to be harmful (with the same meaning known to others of the in-group).
> When I was coming up, especially in middle school, we were always told that you should just ignore bullies and they would go away. This, of course, never actually worked.
I don't think ignoring works well, if we consider "ignoring someone" as an emotional attack. The bullies may feel more hurt/rejected/ignored and therefore bully more or in different ways. The ignoring/conflict avoidance can be quite similar to a silent treatment, which can escalate conflict.
> I only realized this way later in life when I started training in Muay Thai and found I had way more confidence standing up to other men, both because I knew how to handle myself and because I wasn't as afraid of getting punched in the face. Bullies only go away if you make them go away. Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision (which is often the situation).
I agree with you that I'd love if more people took self-defense (full disclosure, I train people in what I call Emotional Self-Defense), as when I took Krav Maga I felt more confident to stand up for myself in situations where I had previously thought I would be physically attacked. I disagree, however that "fighting back is the only real solution" because I think what I learned in Krav Maga was the confidence to stand up for myself without having to fight back. I learned that I could fight back if I needed to but that in most situations, just standing up for myself and not attacking back would bring quicker and longer lasting resolution.
Part of the reason I created Emotional Self-Defense is because I thought most self-defense/martial arts don't go far enough upstream to resolve the conflict when it's at an emotional stage and before it becomes physical violence.
Anecdote to go with everyone else's: punching a bully in the nose in the 9th grade wound up bringing about an immediate, universal and permanent end to anyone bullying me in school.
Love it. My best friend was bullied by the class jerk for being Indian. Unfortunately for the bully, my friend and I had been practicing martial arts together for years, and my friend knocked the guy out in the middle of class. The story spread like wildfire and no one bothered him ever again. It still gets brought up many years later at class reunions!
A couple of years later, some other kid tried his luck against me with the same result. It's the grapevine that really does it for you. "Some kid fell down trying to tackle me" turned into "I knocked out this hapless boy with Bruce Lee's one inch punch" over the course of a week of storytelling.
Ideally the equilibrium would be that enough people in the group can't be bullied that it extinguishes the bullying behavior, or bullies get ganged up on.
It's unfortunate, but to the person being bullied, their immediate concern is not the next weakest person. Their immediate concern is avoiding or fending off the bully.
For the people who think bullying isn't a problem:
Replace "bullying" with: Parental neglect/abuse, unfair rejection/blame, or being backstabbed in a situation that you can't really do anything about it/no one will believe you. It gets at what the end-feeling is like. Bullying in its raw form seems acutely more harmful than say, parental abuse, which only manifests as "bullying" years later, but it's the same overall kind of pain, and I am amazed at how many people from broken situations who should easily understand have taken a hard stance, and missed the point on bullying. It's not the same as "getting one's ass kicked", because there is no productive lesson to be learned, it's more of a feeling of obvious rejection or being singled out in some way that hijacks the human evaluation system in a highly damaging way, that can stay with you for years - unfairly.
Worth solving: Of course, but who knows how? Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish.
> Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish.
This is the part that few people seem to want to acknowledge: top-down "solutions" to problems like this end up being worse than the problem they purport to "solve".
I've been focusing on a very bottoms-up approach: how to respond to micro-attacks. So practicing responding to getting rejected, ignored, blamed, even idolized, and complimented—anything that makes me want to disconnect more and more from the person and from myself. I've found that in getting better at these very simple, micro-interactions, I start to get better at the bigger things.
One of the things I've noticed the most in classes is that being attacked is often a subjective experience from the receiver, often oblivious to the giver. I have people intentionally try to reject the other and it seems very uncomfortable to try to do it intentionally.
Anyways, I find it neither dystopian nor hellish. One person who took a class said, "Jim, your workshop it f*cked my feelings but they needed it, thank you."
I don't mean to advertise here, more just to say I believe there are ways to approach it that I feel excited about.
I sometimes feel like I'm in some alternate universe when I read stuff like this:
> These new findings indicate that interventions should also focus on supporting victims of bullying and helping them build resilience;
...
> These studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.
Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me. I'm mean, I'm all for teaching kids resilience and self-reliance, but at some point, we have to get to the root of the problem, which is the bullies and why they want to bully other kids and stop trying to just fix the kids who get bullied.
It's one thing to not be so sensitive when it comes to jokes or teasing, but this requires a maturity that a child does not yet have.
A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were (I know I'm treading very close to a No True Scotsman with that statement).
I was bullied when I was a child and it was BAD. I can't really express how EVIL the bullies were. Like something out of a horror film.
Edit: I'm a little confused by the replies - I re-read my comment to see if anything was ambiguous. I'm saying that bulling is way worse than people think. Maybe it was unclear that I am agreeing with the comment I was replying to, not opposing it?
> A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were
I say those things and my stepfather was abusive to the point of choking me unconcious and kicking me in the face with a steel-toed boot.
Please, do tell about how I know nothing about dealing with abuse at the hands of others.
> Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me.
At over 40 years of age I've had to deal with people attempting to bully me, most of them are completely shocked when they realize they can't.
My point here is that if you think bullying is something that stops at graduation then sure, that sounds like a reasonable position, but the premise itself is wrong.
One of my favorite lines:
> Bullies don't stop being bullies when they graduate, they just get lawyers.
Do you think that if bullies were stopped when young, they might be able to turn into adults that don't bully?
Regardless, as others have said here, I have way more avenues for dealing with bullies as an adult, including but not limited to getting my own lawyers.
This is a good point. Policing bullying in school (when young) may work if one can catch it in the act but this bully behavior never stops in adulthood, it starts taking different forms. Being aware of bullies and not being affected by their actions helps but they will only find a different target.
This presupposes that bullying is always explained by something environmental or that it's learned behavior. But what if bullying is just fun for some people? What if human beings have differing innate levels of aggression, empathy, and tolerance? What if some people see bullying and feel a little pit in their stomach -- fear, disgust, anger -- and what if others simply don't?
"The blank slate" conception of the world continues to mislead us about the domain of effective interventions.
I don't understand what point you are trying to make here. If some people find bullying fun, they should be taught why it isn't fun for others and dealt with if they continue. I mean I'm sure rapist think that their rape is fun or empowering or something, but that doesn't mean it should be allowed.
If you're going to make a claim like "'the blank slate' conception of the world continues to mislead us", it wouldn't hurt to have more than a series of what-ifs.
After watching how my kids schools deal with this, I think the a big part of the solution is not just thinking about bullies or the bullied, but the rest of the kids in the middle that aren't bullies or the bullied.
The schools programs really focused on the middle kids showing them how to spot bullying, not tolerate it, report it and to stick up for other kids, and bullying seemed to become publicly seen as weak and uncool.
One of my kids has/had some personal circumstances that they would've been flayed alive for at the schools I went to back in the day. I am so grateful for the change in culture, and how the other kids treat each other now compared to what I went through.
I would say in an ideal world yes, but the fact is that in the real world a lot of generalizable anti-bullying messaging/curriculum can start from a good place but can easily be mis-construed or willfully and purposefully construed or in fact morph into such things like critical race theory, etc.
Society will probably need a lot of time to collectively figure out where to draw the line between the spectrum ranging from "let's not bully a distinct subgroup of people" and "why are we unnecessarily over-empowering a distinct subgroup over all other groups".
In the meantime, those people in the subgroups need support.
> Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully?
Why not both?
This is a research paper, not a political document. Here, researchers focus on the psychology of the bullied, and make a suggestion that may improve his condition. There are, I guess, other research papers that focus on the bully, and others that focus on the environment, each with their own conclusions.
The job of policymakers is to take all the suggestions and build a policy based on what researchers consider effective, in addition to other considerations like ethics and cost. It is up to them do decide if it is more important to prevent bullies from bullying or if it is better to teach kids how not to be bullied.
Researchers are just there to give facts, backed by evidence.
I read somewhere that to be successful you need to focus on the environment people are in, as in instead of trying to figure out who the bullies are, you need to figure out why a certain environment leads to bullying behaviour.
I teach people how to protect themselves from emotional attacks. What I've seen is that most of us who attack others often believe we were attacked first.
So I don't know if "bullies" necessarily think they've been bullied per say, however I feel quite confident they believe they feel attacked in some way (rejected, guilt tripped, ignored, blamed, etc).
So with this in mind, I try to teach anyone to learn how to respond better to these attacks because I think we counterattack more than we may realize.
>Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me.
It is entirely possible that the want to bully can be reduced but cannot be prevented. Of course people should do what they can to prevent it on the bully side, but it is reasonable to also consider other factors.
Absolutely people try to make bullies not want to bully, from psychological counseling to suspending them from school. It sort of works, but any success is limited. Also bullies can attack outside the school premises.
This is why helping other kids withstand bullying, defuse situations, and generally not feel helpless is still important. By the same token, however much you may discourage people from stealing, you should still lock the door.
The scientific consensus is that more commonly aggressive disorders that involve violating others’ rights like BPD and ASPD are less treatable than anxiety and depression.
Stop trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics. You’re out of your wheelhouse.
Bullying is the social destruction of self not because it is the act of one "crazy" person but because bullies have the support of the entire community including teachers, other students, and school administration.
If it was just one violent person doing one thing it would be a minor act. It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you.
I recently wrote a letter to the alumni development office of the undergraduate school I went to about why I don't give money to them when I was re-traumatized by receiving the first alumni newsletter I had received in a long time.
We had a student who waged a war against gays but this was the 1980s and people like that were so afraid of AIDS that instead they'd bash straight people who showed the slightest amount of support for gays. I couldn't leave my room without the risk of being assaulted. It only ended when he hit a resident assistant in the face with a rock from a catapult at point blank range. A gay man and a lesbian woman committed suicide because of this nonsense.
This person had support from many groups of people at tech including religious people, drug users (this guy was the drug dealer who would take the biggest chances to get supply) and the school administration. What I found was so wounding was that I lost many of my friends over this.
The person I blame most of all was the very popular dean of students who told me repeatedly that his "hands were tied" but I am sure he would have found something he could have done if his daughter was the victim.
The ringleader of this group went to prison a few years later because he was caught on tape selling 3 kilos of cocaine to an undercover cop. If I heard he was still alive and had gone straight I would would forgive him and actually celebrate him because he has paid for his crimes and it is such a hard thing to go straight.
I would have a very hard time forgiving the dean of students because he has received so many accolades from people and is seen as a hero (for many good reasons), I grieve more for the people who were victims of suicide than I do for my own suffering which was minor in comparison. I wonder how many other victims there are from before and after I was there. It is all the more wounding for me because otherwise college would have been a respite and chance to heal from the abuse I received in the public schools.
I'm not sure how getting to the root of the problem instead of treating the symptoms is "trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics." If the topics are more complex, let's address those complexities. I feel like when they say, "We should teach kids how to survive bullying better," they're the ones trying to apply feels-right reasoning to a complex situation. That's a short-term solution. If the real, long-term solution is medical intervention of some sort, then do that! But don't let the bullying continue and put all of the work on the victim of the bullying. Sure, we can help them be more resilient, as I said above. But the actual problem needs to be addressed no matter how hard or complex it is.
Studies show that roughly 1% of the population is psychopaths, and these people are over-represented among CEOs of corporations. From that we can assume there are rewards for psychopathic behavior, and this includes bullying. Starting in school, the bullies are often rewarded by established authority figures. Some of this is generational perpetuation: a generation ago some bullies became leaders and now they want the new generation of bullies to also become leaders, as they associate their own behavior with ideal leadership. Therefore, to end bullying would require a full-going social, cultural, and economic revolution. The entire generation-to-generation cycle would have be broken.
I have ADHD and Aspergers. Which results in extremely high anxiety. I did not get along with other children or people. In fact; I found them completely boring and had no desire to interact with anyone. My instinct at school was just to avoid them all. Eat alone, hang out in the school library.
I have run into parents who homeschooled their children and let them follow their curiosity. Some of the results I saw them get were completely out of this world. The kids taught themselves multiple languages and instruments.
I’m going to be faced with a similar choice with my kids. I will likely put them through public elementary school. Junior high I feel is abusive to children.
They are going through very complex hormonal and emotional changes and on top of this you dunk them in a tank surrounded by parasites who are garaunteed to act like savages.
With mobile phones and cameras.
I think I could see a strong argument to skip junior high and high school altogether and explore home school.
If anything like what happened to me happens to them (and I honestly didn’t have it that bad), I will seriously consider pulling them out.
The damage that was done to me lasted 15 years. That is unacceptable.
I personally had severe acne. Putting me in junior high to get taunted - irreparable self esteem damage.
Parents need to understand.
Let’s be honest. The elephant in the room is human beings get ahead by bullying Eachother and forming mobs and cliques.
This behavior has shown up at every job I have ever had. The dumber the people are the more likely they will use this “strategy” to get ahead. It is the go to dumb person strategy.
You can only avoid it often by working at smaller companies or developing much better social skills.
One of the things that happens is similar to the group psychology of hazing.
A person perceives abuse as much worse than the person that deals it out. Hazing is the person being abused then delivering worse punishment than they received to the next round of people, again because their perception of the original hazing abuse was worse than what their abusers perceived.
School tolerance of abuse/bullying is essentially this hazing cycle occurring over generations, more slowly.
That's not the only fucked up human psychology loop in play. Denial, stockholm syndrome, and of course, laziness all come into play.
We're strongly considering homeschooling our kid. We have reservations (read are scared of how hard it sounds compared to sending them off to school) but hearing about experiences like this move us in that direction.
It sounds like a best of both worlds. Avoid bullies and other bs associated with institutional education and instead have a customized, curiosity driven education.
...and also to keep the kid in an associal bubble. Socialisation and experiencing/handling all kinds of people in life is the most important skill to be learned in school. I woulnt want to give this up for comfort.
I attended high school in a not-well-known country (Nigeria) and the amount of bullying I witnessed was unfathomable. I’m talking outright beatings from seniors, and it was legalized (reporting to the school authorities will get you more beatings).
I transferred from a chill private school to a public school because, well, my Dad wanted me to have some “experience”…needless to say, the experience I got was that even teens can be extremely cruel to each other…the funny part is that most people here see it as normal and laugh about it, like they don’t realize they’re living the equivalent of a wild animal farm…but for some reason, I got over the horrific bullying real quick…or maybe I’m scarred and don’t know it.
Haha, yes, unfortunately that’s how it is at virtually all government-run schools in my country…pure cruelty is the order of the day, and I’m not exaggerating.
This reminds me that I should write down the experiences I remember as a child, including being chased over three miles by half a dozen kids. I finally crossed into an older woman’s yard, she recognized what was happening and asked me inside. I’ll never forget the beautiful polar bear rug in her living room. She got her keys and drove me home.
Lucky for me I sprouted between elementary and junior high, I also got meaner, and the problems stopped.
I turned out okay but I’m sure it shaped me in various ways.
My parents basically said “If you keep getting bullied, assault the bully, try to draw blood, and we’ll take you out for ice cream if you get suspended.”
Highly recommended for any parents of boys out there - it is the best way to address this problem.
Yep. I got my ass kicked in the playground by a much larger kid. Completely unprovoked. I came home crying, my dad told me to return to the playground and hit him back. I insisted that I couldn't, he's much larger and stronger.
"Get a piece of wood then"
I did. As I approached the playground, I felt ridiculous. This wood still wouldn't do anything. To my surprise, the bully fled the scene, clearly afraid.
This incident has taught me a lot. It wasn't the wood that did it. It was the fact that I came back. He could now easily kick my ass again, wood or not. But I might come back yet again, and what (or who) will I bring next time?
From fearful to being feared. A pure mind play.
I do not believe in the perfect world-to-be where one day we've eradicated all bullies and other bad actors by educating them. Life will test you and learning to stand your ground and retaliate is a skill I wish we didn't need, but most definitely need. Address the problem from both angles at once.
I never really got physically bullied because this was just understood in our house, so I was confident enough with the option to throw down that it didn’t happen.
There was also the fact that my parents spent beyond their means for “good” schools - but I was a tiny kid and otherwise would have made an ideal target.
I think two scuffles overall, both were the first and last time, and one of the bullies became my friend afterwards. No blood was drawn at any point.
Having the confidence to start a fight with a bunch of classmates/teachers watching makes a big difference, they will usually break up the fight.
I mean - great advice if you’re as big as the bully. As a kid who was often smaller than kids 2-3 younger than him all the way to his senior year in high school… Can’t say that advice would go over well.
It can also backfire, depending on the kid's psyche. A troubled child could imaginably interpret that as carte blanche and overreact to a perceived threat or retaliate and get into serious trouble.
We lived in a normal city where this wasn’t much of a risk, not San Francisco.
Also, most bullies wouldn’t tell anyone, since they are usually bullying people in the first place because their parents abuse or ignore them. Needless to say, if you are a shitty parent, this is a very bad idea.
Readit News
Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol"
Boiled it down and down and down until we hit the core of the issue and realised I don't want to poke my head up and ship code/sites/ideas/etc because I believe I'll be bullied for it. In school doing anything that lifted you up (e.g. good grades) made you a target.
The realisation was that that will probably not to happen now. If I do something exceptional at 34 I probably wont be bullied by my peers (or heck, even if I actually was bullied for it.. who cares lol, my peers don't understand the market I work in)
I'd never reevaluated the internalised rule "If I excel, I will be bullied" until the other day.
--
On a slightly more positive spin the whole thing made me quite sensitive to deception. If someone is trying to deceive or manipulate me my subconscious might as well be flashing up a Metal Gear Solid exclaim noise for how obvious it seems.
MGS Exclaim for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbeEO58Hlfo
https://sfstandard.com/business/inside-ftx-founder-sam-bankm...
Would rich kids be facing much more competition for elite spots from poor but smart kids if bullying wasn't part of the curriculum in the public schools? Given that only 10% of kids get to go to a school where dignity is assured, it could be that 90% of the smart kids are being kneecapped and don't reach their full potential. One more thing that makes a mockery of "meritocracy".
I was glad to see though that New Hampshire (where I grew up) finally passed a law making it possible to sue schools for bullying like the other 49 states.
https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2021/05/26/families-deserve...
I wonder also how many Enrons and Challenger Disasters we've had because many of what could have been our best people had it beat into them that self-assertion is not allowed for them.
Obviously that's just one data point, but I don't think the incentive structure at a private school is what you think it is. There's a lot of incentive to keep issues quiet, and a lot of pressure to fit a certain mold.
There's a lot of discussion here about how private school kids are insulated from bullying. Does anyone have first-hand experience or hard evidence of this? Based on books and movies about boarding school, it's hard to believe this.
It seems like a lot of the HN discussion is focused on kids being bullied for being smart, which makes sense given the audience on here. However, other kids get bullied for lots of different reasons.
This is one reason I'm up in arms about public school districts near me shutting down their gifted programs because they made certain not academically-inclined demographics feel bad about not being represented. So now, kids in my demographic get to feel bad about being bullied.
In freshman and sophomore year I decided that English classes bored me to tears, so I took non-honors English both years. There was zero overlap between that class and the kids I saw the rest of my day in honors classes. Then in junior year when I decided to do IB and was forced to take IB/AP English, suddenly boom yep exact same set of kids.
I'll admit, I enjoyed the experience. Admittedly partly because even half-assed work got me easy A's and glowing appreciation from my teachers (for actually putting in some effort and not being disruptive etc), but also getting to meet lots of different people was fun.
Also good god did I hate English class. So many insufferable books of what I still consider to be terribly little literary merit. I wish we'd been allowed to just read classical literature all year. For one of the book slots we were allowed to choose our own book, and I chose Plato's Republic, which I enjoyed thoroughly. It was the only book from prior to the 20th century that I got to read for class that year as well. At least it got better in senior year when we got to do Shakespeare again.
Deleted Comment
emotional flinching
distraction is just running away from a feeling. I don't actually care about the content of the new tab, i'm not addicted to the internet, blah blah
----------
BTW, The old book Focusing by Eugene Gendlin really helped me here-- it's on libgen or you can youtube the authors name to see some of his one on one sessions he did with people before he died. (You can do it yourself without a person tho, it's just having a kind listener helps you stick with it)
it's NOT about adhd or focusing on stuff lol, it's the name for his diy technique of 'figuring out what the feeling is' and unlocks all other therapy stuff that you may do after
For example: I tend to be a very self deprecating individual because I like to laugh and hang out with people who say silly things but I also use it as a crutch to avoid accidentally offending people. I went to a very bad college and so was considered very good at academics while there and may have developed this then to fit in. I could also have developed it growing up because it was a way to laugh off mistakes. I could also just like the sense of humor. Heck even this statement I'm replying to that I like so much I'm certain I've heard it and resonated with it before but have just lost focus of it over time.
Anyway thanks again for sharing, it has helped refined my thinking.
I'll absolutely give that a look into, thank you!
Also for nerds who have yet to consider it: CBT is like debugging code, except the code is your brain. I'd highly recommend looking into it where possible, especially if you are opposed or wary of the "and how does that make you feel?" style of therapy. Fascinating field, and quite helpful for me so far.
Along this vein, I think the internet (Reddit especially) has been spreading an idea that "ADHD explains everything" in recent years. Every year I feel like I see more and more people self-diagnose with ADHD and then stop looking further for any explanation for their psychological situation. In some cases, people seem to get worse after receiving the ADHD diagnosis and medication and then hyperfocusing on their distractions even harder. From my position I see a lot of people with anxiety issues, perfectionism problems, or even textbook depression becoming convinced that ADHD is the explanation for everything in their life. Not all ADHD patients, mind you, but largely the recent influx of people who start with self-diagnosis via internet memes and TikTok (mis)info about ADHD.
It wasn't until I found a psychologist that had an opening 90 days(ish) later that I was able to get fully diagnosed that I was even mentally able to think about myself differently. That said, I had the resources to see a doctor, I'm in my 40s, so there was no family to tell me I was making things up, and the only pressure I felt was from myself to address the issue.
If I couldn't do that and was stuck in a world that acknowledged ADHD was a thing, felt I had it, and yet felt disempowered to do anything about it, I could see myself easily falling down the rabbit hole you describe.
In any case being diagnosed with ADHD was just me finding a missing edge piece of my jigsaw, it helps to know what I'm working with but there's plenty still to do.
I actually started the CBT because of that, I realised ever since I got diagnosed I was leaning into ADHD as an excuse (welp that's just me, can't help it!) and doing less overall than when I didn't know, which I thought was lame. Like that's it, I get a diagnosis and then give up trying to live? Lol no.
Eventually I came to accept that my attention and motivation problems were a combination of screen/social media addiction, drinking too much, poor sleep caused by the two previous behaviors, poor diet, lack of exercise, and the stress of pandemic isolation and working from home. Addressing those issues was much more difficult than getting diagnosed with ADHD but in the long run it has completely changed my life for the better. I do think the ADHD thing was an important detour on my path to a healthier life, but I wonder how many people who are in the same boat will move beyond the "ADHD explains everything" stage and actually solve their real problems?
People end up confused why I’m not delivering when what I do deliver is excellent. They figure I don’t care or I’m checked out, something like that. I become less reliable because not delivering is imperfect, and I begin to give up not only on my objectives but myself as well.
I’ve had this lead to catastrophe twice, but I’m much better at identifying it and speaking about it now.
It’s debilitating at times. Knowing I can do better, but it’s not there yet. I could deliver something so much faster, but if it isn’t the best I can do, I’m ashamed of it. I feel like a complete hack.
Worse still is that when I nail it, do good work, get it out on time, etc… It’s still not good enough.
Fundamentally it’s because I’m not good enough. ADHD can lead to some extremely insidious and harmful self talk.
When it comes to worrying about being bullied, I have to ask: why do you think you’re able to be bullied? Are you worth making into a target? Why did you internalize that?
Personally I think being bullied is a significant part of why I feel I’m not good enough. That’s what I was told for years! Unfortunately, I was young and dumb, very impressionable, and it stuck. Oh well, keep at it and try to do better. You aren’t someone who deserves to be bullied and I’m just fine at what I do. We’ll get there eventually.
Like if you're hosting a party, it's easy to obsess about there being enough entertainment, food, booze, etc, far beyond what's actually needed.
The main thing from my perspective is that I care if I don't do it, to the point of depression - hence the therapy :)
Experience that enough and I would expect one could develop quite advanced heuristics to protect oneself from deception.
Someone looks shifty, or pauses at just the right moment in their sentence. Or scratches their nose while trying to get you to do something, or can't keep eye contact when they usually would. If they excessively look away for a moment during a disagreement get yourself ready to block the sucker punch. Or they accuse you out of the blue of doing something that's a complete 180 of your character -- ask them straight back if they're doing it themselves.
I can't really explain it too well I realise, having edited this comment like 20 times, as I've only just started looking into it myself.
Deleted Comment
With the benefit of hindsight, I think its vitally important that all children learn some form of self-defense (boxing, karate, BJJ, it doesn't matter). I only realized this way later in life when I started training in Muay Thai and found I had way more confidence standing up to other men, both because I knew how to handle myself and because I wasn't as afraid of getting punched in the face. Bullies only go away if you make them go away. Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision (which is often the situation). You may be punished, but the sense of catharsis more than makes up for that.
The kind of punishment doled out by law-abiding adults to children isn't even a blip on the radar vs. suffering a vicious bully. It isn't even worth mentioning, punishment for violence is a total farce until adulthood. That's basically the whole source of the problem; bullys have realized there are no consequences.
The best response to a bully is an immediate and vigorous aggression resembling that of a honey badger, full stop. I agree it's important to teach children self-defense and get them familiar enough with conflict to not piss themselves when faced with it. It's the children who can get away with fighting back without negative consequence, and substantial upside potential.
Get angry, and hurt them.
I was on both sides of bad behavior in school that involved insults, punching, etc. and this is not necessarily bullying. There was the time a friend and I did something cruel to an MR kid and his big brother (emphasis on "big") gave me the smackdown which I deserved. Not to condone my own behavior, but the fact that this kid got immediate protection from his big bro would have reduced the long term psychological effects of my transgression.
I once had a kid bullying me in middle school. I spoke with my mother about it, who recommended I say something to the teachers, which I did.
When that didn't work I knocked the shit out of him the next time he tried to bully me, to the point that he was running around the edges of the classroom trying to get away from me while I chased him down to beat on him some more.
He stopped fucking with me after that.
To your point, we both got suspended, but my mother made it clear I wasn't being punished and made sure I had fun during that suspension.
It's a lifelong skill that will be used as an adult too.
I bought a punching bag and started training when I was 12 - in 6 months I got so strong that I was bare-hand punching into cement walls.
There was this bully who would constantly berate me - he probably had 4 inches over me and a good 15-20 pounds heavier.
This one time am walking down the street and he comes out of nowhere and throws a punch, luckily I saw it coming, ducked and it grazed my cheek.
I flew into a rage - all I remember is he was down on the ground in a couple mins and I had beaten his face to pulp - I stopped when a friend and bystanders pulled me off. So yes, learning to fight is a life skill - because there are times when there are no adults around and it's you or the bully.
That may work for the individual, but there's always going to be an easiest target. We have studies of bullying interventions, including teaching kids self respect by way of martial arts, and changing the victim doesn't work.
I suggest people should look into the actual science on this. A good start is "Bullying at school: what we know and what we can do" by Dan Olweus from 1991.
It's not so surprising when you think about it. Bullying is about power, but it isn't being good in a fight itself that makes some kids have power over others. It's social, not physical. The victim had the ability to strike back physically all along, they don't need special training. In theory the victim could stab the bully in the back in plenty of ways - even literally. The reason they don't do that, and the reason the bullies don't fear it, is because all the ways the victim could strike back would be scorched earth. It makes no difference if it's with freshly learned BJJ or a weapon.
Adult supervision is no guarantee either. Kids are way smarter than adults give them credit for. I remember bullying occurring in the presence of teachers who were completely unaware of the meaning of subtle language or other cues meant to be harmful (with the same meaning known to others of the in-group).
I don't think ignoring works well, if we consider "ignoring someone" as an emotional attack. The bullies may feel more hurt/rejected/ignored and therefore bully more or in different ways. The ignoring/conflict avoidance can be quite similar to a silent treatment, which can escalate conflict.
> I only realized this way later in life when I started training in Muay Thai and found I had way more confidence standing up to other men, both because I knew how to handle myself and because I wasn't as afraid of getting punched in the face. Bullies only go away if you make them go away. Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision (which is often the situation).
I agree with you that I'd love if more people took self-defense (full disclosure, I train people in what I call Emotional Self-Defense), as when I took Krav Maga I felt more confident to stand up for myself in situations where I had previously thought I would be physically attacked. I disagree, however that "fighting back is the only real solution" because I think what I learned in Krav Maga was the confidence to stand up for myself without having to fight back. I learned that I could fight back if I needed to but that in most situations, just standing up for myself and not attacking back would bring quicker and longer lasting resolution.
Part of the reason I created Emotional Self-Defense is because I thought most self-defense/martial arts don't go far enough upstream to resolve the conflict when it's at an emotional stage and before it becomes physical violence.
A couple of years later, some other kid tried his luck against me with the same result. It's the grapevine that really does it for you. "Some kid fell down trying to tackle me" turned into "I knocked out this hapless boy with Bruce Lee's one inch punch" over the course of a week of storytelling.
Replace "bullying" with: Parental neglect/abuse, unfair rejection/blame, or being backstabbed in a situation that you can't really do anything about it/no one will believe you. It gets at what the end-feeling is like. Bullying in its raw form seems acutely more harmful than say, parental abuse, which only manifests as "bullying" years later, but it's the same overall kind of pain, and I am amazed at how many people from broken situations who should easily understand have taken a hard stance, and missed the point on bullying. It's not the same as "getting one's ass kicked", because there is no productive lesson to be learned, it's more of a feeling of obvious rejection or being singled out in some way that hijacks the human evaluation system in a highly damaging way, that can stay with you for years - unfairly.
Worth solving: Of course, but who knows how? Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish.
This is the part that few people seem to want to acknowledge: top-down "solutions" to problems like this end up being worse than the problem they purport to "solve".
One of the things I've noticed the most in classes is that being attacked is often a subjective experience from the receiver, often oblivious to the giver. I have people intentionally try to reject the other and it seems very uncomfortable to try to do it intentionally.
Anyways, I find it neither dystopian nor hellish. One person who took a class said, "Jim, your workshop it f*cked my feelings but they needed it, thank you."
I don't mean to advertise here, more just to say I believe there are ways to approach it that I feel excited about.
> These new findings indicate that interventions should also focus on supporting victims of bullying and helping them build resilience;
...
> These studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.
Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me. I'm mean, I'm all for teaching kids resilience and self-reliance, but at some point, we have to get to the root of the problem, which is the bullies and why they want to bully other kids and stop trying to just fix the kids who get bullied.
It's one thing to not be so sensitive when it comes to jokes or teasing, but this requires a maturity that a child does not yet have.
A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were (I know I'm treading very close to a No True Scotsman with that statement).
I was bullied when I was a child and it was BAD. I can't really express how EVIL the bullies were. Like something out of a horror film.
Edit: I'm a little confused by the replies - I re-read my comment to see if anything was ambiguous. I'm saying that bulling is way worse than people think. Maybe it was unclear that I am agreeing with the comment I was replying to, not opposing it?
If there are skills that could be taught to children to prevent their own bullying, would you deny them?
I say those things and my stepfather was abusive to the point of choking me unconcious and kicking me in the face with a steel-toed boot.
Please, do tell about how I know nothing about dealing with abuse at the hands of others.
What a ridiculous take. Helping people build the skills needed to defend from being bullied is nothing like victim blaming, at all.
At over 40 years of age I've had to deal with people attempting to bully me, most of them are completely shocked when they realize they can't.
My point here is that if you think bullying is something that stops at graduation then sure, that sounds like a reasonable position, but the premise itself is wrong.
One of my favorite lines:
> Bullies don't stop being bullies when they graduate, they just get lawyers.
Regardless, as others have said here, I have way more avenues for dealing with bullies as an adult, including but not limited to getting my own lawyers.
Deleted Comment
"The blank slate" conception of the world continues to mislead us about the domain of effective interventions.
We have a word for those people: "sociopath"
The schools programs really focused on the middle kids showing them how to spot bullying, not tolerate it, report it and to stick up for other kids, and bullying seemed to become publicly seen as weak and uncool.
One of my kids has/had some personal circumstances that they would've been flayed alive for at the schools I went to back in the day. I am so grateful for the change in culture, and how the other kids treat each other now compared to what I went through.
Society will probably need a lot of time to collectively figure out where to draw the line between the spectrum ranging from "let's not bully a distinct subgroup of people" and "why are we unnecessarily over-empowering a distinct subgroup over all other groups".
In the meantime, those people in the subgroups need support.
Why not both?
This is a research paper, not a political document. Here, researchers focus on the psychology of the bullied, and make a suggestion that may improve his condition. There are, I guess, other research papers that focus on the bully, and others that focus on the environment, each with their own conclusions.
The job of policymakers is to take all the suggestions and build a policy based on what researchers consider effective, in addition to other considerations like ethics and cost. It is up to them do decide if it is more important to prevent bullies from bullying or if it is better to teach kids how not to be bullied.
Researchers are just there to give facts, backed by evidence.
So I don't know if "bullies" necessarily think they've been bullied per say, however I feel quite confident they believe they feel attacked in some way (rejected, guilt tripped, ignored, blamed, etc).
So with this in mind, I try to teach anyone to learn how to respond better to these attacks because I think we counterattack more than we may realize.
It is entirely possible that the want to bully can be reduced but cannot be prevented. Of course people should do what they can to prevent it on the bully side, but it is reasonable to also consider other factors.
This is why helping other kids withstand bullying, defuse situations, and generally not feel helpless is still important. By the same token, however much you may discourage people from stealing, you should still lock the door.
Stop trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics. You’re out of your wheelhouse.
If it was just one violent person doing one thing it would be a minor act. It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you.
I recently wrote a letter to the alumni development office of the undergraduate school I went to about why I don't give money to them when I was re-traumatized by receiving the first alumni newsletter I had received in a long time.
We had a student who waged a war against gays but this was the 1980s and people like that were so afraid of AIDS that instead they'd bash straight people who showed the slightest amount of support for gays. I couldn't leave my room without the risk of being assaulted. It only ended when he hit a resident assistant in the face with a rock from a catapult at point blank range. A gay man and a lesbian woman committed suicide because of this nonsense.
This person had support from many groups of people at tech including religious people, drug users (this guy was the drug dealer who would take the biggest chances to get supply) and the school administration. What I found was so wounding was that I lost many of my friends over this.
The person I blame most of all was the very popular dean of students who told me repeatedly that his "hands were tied" but I am sure he would have found something he could have done if his daughter was the victim.
The ringleader of this group went to prison a few years later because he was caught on tape selling 3 kilos of cocaine to an undercover cop. If I heard he was still alive and had gone straight I would would forgive him and actually celebrate him because he has paid for his crimes and it is such a hard thing to go straight.
I would have a very hard time forgiving the dean of students because he has received so many accolades from people and is seen as a hero (for many good reasons), I grieve more for the people who were victims of suicide than I do for my own suffering which was minor in comparison. I wonder how many other victims there are from before and after I was there. It is all the more wounding for me because otherwise college would have been a respite and chance to heal from the abuse I received in the public schools.
The reason people bully is the same reason people kill is the same reason people commit genocide.
If you’ve got a solution for that, I’d love to hear it. Seems to me that teaching resilience is a much more productive approach.
I have run into parents who homeschooled their children and let them follow their curiosity. Some of the results I saw them get were completely out of this world. The kids taught themselves multiple languages and instruments.
I’m going to be faced with a similar choice with my kids. I will likely put them through public elementary school. Junior high I feel is abusive to children.
They are going through very complex hormonal and emotional changes and on top of this you dunk them in a tank surrounded by parasites who are garaunteed to act like savages.
With mobile phones and cameras.
I think I could see a strong argument to skip junior high and high school altogether and explore home school.
If anything like what happened to me happens to them (and I honestly didn’t have it that bad), I will seriously consider pulling them out.
The damage that was done to me lasted 15 years. That is unacceptable.
I personally had severe acne. Putting me in junior high to get taunted - irreparable self esteem damage.
Parents need to understand.
Let’s be honest. The elephant in the room is human beings get ahead by bullying Eachother and forming mobs and cliques.
This behavior has shown up at every job I have ever had. The dumber the people are the more likely they will use this “strategy” to get ahead. It is the go to dumb person strategy.
You can only avoid it often by working at smaller companies or developing much better social skills.
A person perceives abuse as much worse than the person that deals it out. Hazing is the person being abused then delivering worse punishment than they received to the next round of people, again because their perception of the original hazing abuse was worse than what their abusers perceived.
School tolerance of abuse/bullying is essentially this hazing cycle occurring over generations, more slowly.
That's not the only fucked up human psychology loop in play. Denial, stockholm syndrome, and of course, laziness all come into play.
It sounds like a best of both worlds. Avoid bullies and other bs associated with institutional education and instead have a customized, curiosity driven education.
While assigning them to read and discuss Lord of the Flies...
I transferred from a chill private school to a public school because, well, my Dad wanted me to have some “experience”…needless to say, the experience I got was that even teens can be extremely cruel to each other…the funny part is that most people here see it as normal and laugh about it, like they don’t realize they’re living the equivalent of a wild animal farm…but for some reason, I got over the horrific bullying real quick…or maybe I’m scarred and don’t know it.
Lucky for me I sprouted between elementary and junior high, I also got meaner, and the problems stopped.
I turned out okay but I’m sure it shaped me in various ways.
They’re helping the abuse by lying to those children in their role as a trusted adult.
Highly recommended for any parents of boys out there - it is the best way to address this problem.
"Get a piece of wood then"
I did. As I approached the playground, I felt ridiculous. This wood still wouldn't do anything. To my surprise, the bully fled the scene, clearly afraid.
This incident has taught me a lot. It wasn't the wood that did it. It was the fact that I came back. He could now easily kick my ass again, wood or not. But I might come back yet again, and what (or who) will I bring next time?
From fearful to being feared. A pure mind play.
I do not believe in the perfect world-to-be where one day we've eradicated all bullies and other bad actors by educating them. Life will test you and learning to stand your ground and retaliate is a skill I wish we didn't need, but most definitely need. Address the problem from both angles at once.
There was also the fact that my parents spent beyond their means for “good” schools - but I was a tiny kid and otherwise would have made an ideal target.
I think two scuffles overall, both were the first and last time, and one of the bullies became my friend afterwards. No blood was drawn at any point.
Having the confidence to start a fight with a bunch of classmates/teachers watching makes a big difference, they will usually break up the fight.
Even if you do catch the bully in a 1 v 1 fight, will the next fight be 1 v 1?
I was also a tiny kid and it worked for me…
Dead Comment
My decision to cross the street could result in me getting hit by a car, I'm still going to do so. Life is risk, these types of comments are useless.
Violence committed for the welfare of man is a virtue.
“We don’t hit girls” was an unqualified demand, though.
Is that before or after their arrest, incarceration and juvenile court hearing?
Also, most bullies wouldn’t tell anyone, since they are usually bullying people in the first place because their parents abuse or ignore them. Needless to say, if you are a shitty parent, this is a very bad idea.