Bullied But Not Beaten

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.

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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.

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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.

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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:. 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. A 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.

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". 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.

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.

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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.

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. I'll end here with an appeal for comments and contributions. Have I missed anything important with regard to being bullied, in your opinion and experience? What are your own experiences with having been bullied? The Other Side of Suicide. How to Talk with Your Kids about Sex.

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Or, get it for Kobo Super Points! In the course of an ordeal that was to last from junior high to her senior year in high school, she became the victim of brutal verbal abuse, theft and even a threat to her life. Coaches and school administrators displayed a shocking indifference and outright hostility when Celeste and her mother turned to them for help, so mother and daughter had to fight the battle against bullying aloneand they won. This is their inspiring story, written to give hope and lessons-learned to other parents and children in this all-too-common situation.