I was a fat kid at school and nobody thinks much about bullying fat kids. If there is a benefit to being bullied it is that early on we learn a lot about real friendship, and that people who appear to be your friends may not be there anymore when there is nothing tangible left that they want.
My dad was an accountant and one of the companies he worked for was R.Whites, makers of lemonade and numerous other soft drinks. He would frequently bring home crates of “pop” (not helpful when I was already packing well above my weight) and piles of stickers with the slogan “I’m A Secret Lemonade Drinker” blazoned across them. The TV advert which coined this phrase achieved something approaching cult status in the 1970’s and, quite suddenly, I found myself popular with kids who never gave me a second glance. They would gather round me imploring me for a sticker or two and, for a while, my stock felt as if it were rising, I seemed to have power and influence. When the stickers ran out so did the power and influence.
Years later I came to realise that my dads work, which always seemed to me interminably dull, actually kept me safe on occasion. If there had been an endless supply of stickers I may have enjoyed a smoother passage through my early years at secondary school.
If there is something as common in my work as clients telling me they had an idyllic upbringing, only to reveal later that it was far from such, it is clients casually tossing into a conversation that they were bullied at school, as if it were just a fact of life, a rite of passage which every child passes through. It isn’t and neither can it be brushed off as having little or no significance.
We still have a habit of minimising bullying despite all the protestations to the contrary, the zero tolerance policies in our schools and the obvious consequences in later life to those that have been targeted. Perhaps we misunderstand what bullying actually is and the shame that tends to follow in its wake.
Firstly, its easy to think of bullying as physical but it is emotional and psychological bullying which often seeps deepest and most destructively into our unconscious. “I wasn’t really bullied” a client will tell me before going on to describe long periods of ostracisation, deeply painful episodes of ridicule and rejection, and long term chronic psychological “beastings”. We don’t have to be punched repeatedly in the face to feel as if we have been punched repeatedly in the face.
The impact bullying has on our self esteem is frequently disastrous. Rejected by our peers we think little of the possibility that it is their own inadequacy and vulnerability which they are trying to compensate for and, instead, assume that we must be sidelined for some good reason we cannot see even though everyone else seems able to.
We grow to see ourselves as outsiders and learn to discount the unquestionable upside of the uniqueness we all, ironically, share. To be familiar with individuality, to be happy ploughing our own furrow is the very aspect of ourselves which makes it possible for us to connect positively with others. Being comfortable in being separate shows immense strength, but when it has been exploited in a negative and destructive way it becomes a burden.
I have lost count of the times I have been working with someone struggling to accept themselves only to have them reveal experience of bullying earlier in life. Bullying is like a blindfold which prevents us from seeing all that is good about us but allows sufficient light in to make out what we perceive as the dark spectre of our own inadequacy.
It doesn’t surprise me that we are so coy about being bullied. In fact, the admission itself is sometimes enough to trigger the same feelings of shame and vulnerability which we almost certainly felt in the midst of it all. “Why didn’t I do something?”, “Why did I let it happen?”, “Why didn’t anyone rescue me?”. It’s easy to answer each of these and many other similar questions with the simple explanation that you were weak, not good enough and, thus, probably, to some degree, deserved it.
Just this week a client told me of how he’d stood up to a bully at work after we’d spent a long time talking about it in a previous session. He was pleased with the results and said that it had really changed the dynamic of the relationship. In the next breath he pondered on a number of other explanations for his colleagues changed behaviour discounting the impact of his own increased strength and assertive action. This is normal for people who have been trained to think of themselves as in some way short of “enough”, but it’s still real progress.
The picture we have of ourself is one which was painted years ago and which has been added to every day since. We can’t just throw the painting away and start again, but what we most certainly can do is start to question whether the likeness is really as close as we once believed and, when we see that it is not, we can make new brushstrokes and, before too long, the picture is quite different.
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