[The following article was written by me and is re-published from http://bullseye-bullying.blogspot.com]
Growing up, I was a tender, sensitive
child. Like many sensitive children, I was a target for bullies from
an early age. It began when I joined a local soccer team and quickly
found out that I wasn't very good at sports. The entire team used to
gang up on me, including the middle-aged coach, who led the charge by
responding to my inadequacy not with advice or encouragement, but
with ridicule.
Pushed by my parents (who had only the
best of intentions) to continue playing sports, I had similar
experiences in tee-ball and basketball. By the time all the school
children in my town were starting to get to know one another, I had a
reputation.
Middle school was the worst. I had a
handful of friends, and we were all outcasts, bullied to some extent
by overlapping groups. There was one person in particular, who shall
of course remain nameless, who singled me out from the very moment
our eyes first met. We had apparently attended the same kindergarten
glass, though I didn't recall that at the time, and he had remembered
me all through grade school, even though we went to different
schools. I recall the event as clearly as if it was yesterday, which
begs the question if it really happened this way, or if this is a
dramatized/traumatized memory:
I walked into 6th grade
English class, and this person was already sitting at a table. As I
looked around for a seat, he said to me, in the most threatening tone
he could manage, “Hey Pete. You don't remember me, but I remember
you.” I made a face at him, and he immediately mocked me to his
gaggle of goons.
From there until 8th grade
he made my life a living hell; trotting out many of the classic
bullying moves in the process: kicking me into my locker, upsetting
my lunch tray, mocking me in front of the whole school, etc.
When I went to high school I was still
reeling from these experiences, and I was elated when I found out
that the person in question had opted to attend a private high
school, and I would never see him again. But high school held it's
own challenges, less physical and immediate, perhaps, but no less
condemning.
My response was to draw further inward.
I got interested in Punk Rock and Heavy Metal, and through music
found an identity that gave me enough confidence to get by until
graduation. I learned to own my outsider status, to act as if it was
my decision, not theirs. In
the end, I became enough of a curiosity that by the time senior year
came, I was friendly and conversational with everyone in my
graduating class.
And when I went to
college and I had the same experience so many of us have. All that
class-warfare, the freaks and geeks vs. jocks and cheerleaders, that
all melted away and suddenly we were just people. I never heard from
most of my fellow graduates again, but the ones I have, even those
that were bullies to me at one time or another, have met me as
equals.
But sadly, my
experiences left a lasting mark on me. By becoming so wrapped up in
my outsider status, I found it difficult to become fully engaged with
people who didn't share it. I may have owned it this time, but the
feeling of standing outside looking in persisted. Years of being
told I was insufficient had caused me to lack confidence at a deep
level, and this showed up in the way I failed to apply myself to
constructive activities, and I spent most of college in a
marijuana-induced sleepwalk, wearing a girl-proof shell of fat and
poor hygiene. I squeaked out of college in just under seven years
with a degree in Philosophy, boasting a 2.1 GPA.
I moved into adult
life, and immediately drowned in a sea of mediocrity. I was Salieri,
constantly taunted by the ease with which Mozart outdid my most
solemn efforts.
It
wasn't until I met my now-wife that things really started to change
for me. We met on E-Harmony; the perfect meat-market for those
lacking confidence. Not that I am embarrassed about the way we met
(quite the opposite), we were both at a point where we were looking
for something serious, and we didn't want to waste precious years
messing around with anything less. Through the process of our
courtship, I taught myself the most important lesson I’ve ever
learned: Fake It 'Til You
Make It.
Confidence is a behavior pattern, a habit like any other. It can be
adopted artificially, but quickly becomes natural with practice. And
this is what all those bullies knew that I didn't.
The
common wisdom is that bullies act the way they do because they are
protecting themselves from their own lack of confidence by projecting
their weakness onto others. I generally agree with this, and I think
most sane, reasonable adults more or less agree as well. Bullies
are, in a childish way, faking
confidence,
and eventually it becomes natural. By then, though, the habit has
become hard to break; they know no other way of demonstrating
confidence, so they keep on putting others down, sometimes well into
adulthood. But I’d be willing to bet that nine out of ten bullies
started out as a child that was hurting in some way.
All this brings me to several conclusions:
We,
as adults, should not
punish
bullies for their activities in any extreme way. Who are we to
punish a child for mistakenly acting out on their inner pain? Not
only that, but punishment of the top-down sort has never been shown
to be an effective means of modifying behavior. It may force
compliance in the short term, but it breeds discontent with authority
in the long term. I learned, as many victims do, that “telling”
only makes the bullying worse. I’ve had bullies be forced to say
they were sorry to me before. Their false apologies hurt more than
their sincere blows. And no matter how hard parents and teachers
work to make it safe for victims to come forward, the act of
“telling” will always be bad, even in the absence of retribution.
Running for help is a habit, and its one we'd do well to discourage
in our children.
All
adults know there is no shame I asking for help when we really need
it, but in the adult world that help is most often in a collaborative
setting. It's right
for me to ask for help if I have a difficult and important work
project that I won't be able to finish on my own. But asking to be
rescued is
something different entirely. Encouraging children to do that is the
same as saying “If you fall off the horse, don't get back on, just
wait for mommy to come and pick you up.” Encouraging kids to beg
for rescue will breed weakness in adults, and like it or not, there
are always, always
bullies in life, even when we're grown up. They may not be trying to
hurt our feelings, they may not have even been bullies as children,
but there are always those who seek to take what we have, or to take
credit for our good deeds, or who believe they are in some way better
than us and deserve more. Nations bully each other. And running to
the UN doesn't seem to prevent much conflict, does it?
As
an adult there is often no one to run to, so to teach that habit –
even if it's effective at the child level – is to do a disservice
to future generations. The appropriate way to meet strength is with
strength,
and not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up. If we want to put
an end to bullying, we have to educate victims on the nature of
confidence at an early age. We should be teaching them to find their
power any way they can; be it the intellectual route of nerds who
eventually employ their bullies, the independence of freaks who go on
to live fascinating lives, or sheer power in numbers. Kids could
support each other by forming an anti-bully club, so if a bully
wanted to take on one of them, he'd have to take on all of them. The
only way to stop a bully is to tell them you won't stand for it.
There's no reward for the bully if you refuse to take their taunts
lying down. If you take a few knocks in the process, I think it's
worth it. Taking punches builds character. Chances are a childhood
bully won't murder you. I know there are some who encourage victims
to kill themselves, but if the victims learn early to stand up to
this kind of treatment, to find their strength and fight for their
right to be who they are, to say to that bullies face, “Screw you,
I have a right to be whoever I want, and I’m not going to let you
take your self-hatred out on me!” I think we could actually see
change.
I don't have any children, so perhaps I am speaking in ignorance.
Maybe I will one day be so consumed by protective instincts that I
will change my mind. But the sad truth is that in a world where
people and nations compete for limited resources, strength is the
only survival strategy. Birds don't learn to fly by being coddled in
the nest, they learn to fly by being rudely shoved out, sometimes
hitting the ground. Fish don't learn to swim by holding close to
their mother, they learn by being abandoned and hatching to find a
hungry eel waiting for them. And humans don't learn to stand up for
themselves by asking their parents and teachers to do it for them. I
dearly hope that when my child comes to me saying they've been shoved
around by some bully, I still have the wisdom to tell them, “Next
time, you shove back.”
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