Bullied (25 page)

Rick took one sip of his beer, put the glass down and excused himself. I thought he was just going outside to get something out of his car but he never came back in the bar to finish his beer or pick up his change. My sister, when hearing this story, said, “Why didn’t you go after him?” Besides not knowing that he would not come back into the bar, this would have been the first fight I ever started in my life. The only question in my mind was how far I would knock him off his bar stool. The anger from many years of bullying never goes away and learning how to defend myself is something I have never regretted.

As a bullied child, I had a choice between four courses of action. The first was to put up with this abuse and torture without fighting back. The second was to end my miserable young life with suicide. The third choice was to take the lives of my bullies with a school shooting but that, obviously, would also cost me my life as well. The choice that looked the hardest was the one that I chose, to get proficient at fighting back, so the bullies would leave me alone.

Had the fourth choice not looked like it was working as it did, I might have resorted to the third choice, to be a school shooter and kill my bullies if I could get them in a group. The only place to kill them all at the same time would have been at school. The main feelings driving this illogical reasoning process were anger, fear, depression and my certain knowledge, based on years of bullying, that my life was not worth living.

I read a few books about bullying written by various psychologists and they have no factual personal experience, other than interviews with the bullies and their victims. The books appear to be just a way to increase their professional income and cash flow.

When I was a child, there were no "martial arts” schools. Today, my first choice to help bullied children would be to enroll them in these courses and help them learn self-defense. Learning to defend oneself against insecure Bullies is a lifetime requirement.

Have the child ask himself, “Do I have to fight?” He should only fight when it is a certainty that there will be violence inflicted on him or her. If the child is prepared to fight back, this may dissuade the bully from this intimidation in the future. It works.

As with all interactions with humans, all bullying encounters generally start with words. Bullying with words is a normal human strategy that one runs into throughout life especially in the workplace. Learning to have a polite one on one conversation with the bully during childhood is a skill the child will need and use the rest of his life.

It was very apparent that many bullies I encountered were the victims of bullying in their families by older siblings, parents and relatives. In my own experience with family, I regarded at least four individuals in my family as bullies and after a number of years felt no differently about them than I did the bully on the street or playground. I would feel the same way about them if I met them today.

This was, most likely, the main reason that throughout my grammar school years and two years into high school, I was always the shortest person and most bullied in my class.

I also had ADDHD, which went undiagnosed until fifty years later. Looking back, I can see it was a very costly handicap and did make me appear “different” and therefore a likely victim of bullying.

After I intentionally gained weight as a child, I found this was also another focus by many to regard me as their inferior.

Current culture enables young children to set themselves apart from other children by wearing expensive clothing, running shoes, jackets, etc. Children from middle class families may not dress as well as their elite appearing peers and this could make them targets for online, verbal or physical bullying.

My mother did not have any idea of what was happening in my life as to the bullying, intimidation and violence until, at the age of fifteen, she witnessed me almost strangling a big kid to his death in my front yard. She led a very challenging life as a single mother working full time at a low paying job. If she had asked me questions about my life on a regular basis, at least weekly, she would have learned about this activity years earlier.

The new feelings from puberty are very confusing to a young child, especially when combined with the other feelings of terror and depression from daily violence inflicted. Enabling the child to understand that the powerful feelings of puberty are for a different purpose will clarify the issue for the bully and the victim.

Helping the child understand the purpose for these powerful feelings is critical. They must understand that these emotions are part of the plan to promote the union between a male and a female to procreate the human race. The main challenge to the author as a child was to make sense of why all of this was happening in my body. After I learned, why it was happening and what sex and making love were, life began to make sense and the bullying became a separate issue.

One of the best positive issues in my story was that, no matter what my anger or rage was against the bullies or disgust with life, I knew it was wrong to kill them or myself. This guidance alone probably saved my life and the life of others.

Being under duress as a child, pushed my mind into many possibilities about how I would lead my life as a child, teenager and adult. The preaching from the Sisters about ethics was a very necessary part of my education. One particular statement that stuck with me for life was an often-repeated statement by various Sisters, “When you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, are you going to tell yourself, I am going to be the best liar or thief I can be today?”

Attending school, facing bullying by other students and family led me to believe that there might not be any point to continuing to live through this torture. When I surprisingly found out that public speaking was a talent, it made me more confident and curious as to what other skills I might have that could make living my life more interesting and controllable.

The difference between my experiences at school in New York State was extremely different from my experiences in Massachusetts and Arizona. After leaving my hometown, I had no known social ranking in my new community and people began to know me as the person I was. I never had a fight while finishing high school after leaving my hometown.

The pack animal culture of grammar school was very concerned with status and ranking. Even when new children came to the school it was easy for them to understand where the local bullied children were in the ranks. My experience was that my severe bullying lasted from fifth grade (age 5) to the sophomore year in high school (age 15). The customs of the school culture continued, even though I was in more control after I learned to fight back effectively, until I fortunately moved away to a different state and a new high school. This was the best thing that ever happened in my young life.

This is not just “kids being kids”. As portrayed in this book in the detailed thoughts of the victim, it is a destructive process with lifelong negative consequences to your offspring.

Bullies, in my opinion, are trying desperately to compensate for their low opinion of themselves as well as to achieve a higher image in the eyes of the bystanders. They are trying to compensate for the fear they have in their own life it by inflicting violence on others. After I discovered this when I was approximately twelve, I created a strategy to take advantage of this fear by turning my fear into anger and fighting back regardless of the pain inflicted upon me. I found that if I caused the Bully to feel any level of pain they would possibly cease bullying me. At the least, the incidences of bullying decreased rapidly after I learned to use aggressive defense tactics.

The popular kids in grammar school and high school who everyone else wanted to be may not do well in their lives or careers unless they go on to college or get advanced degrees. Education appears to be the greatest differentiator in status and independence later in life. The quest for status through high school is meaningless afterward.

As a child, I knew that violence inflicted on adults by other adults was against the law and could not understand why I had to deal with violence every day, usually in plain sight, when these same Adults had laws protecting them. Today, law enforcement seems more aware of the fact that bullying breaks the same laws and these laws also apply to children. Kids being kids is no longer an excuse for Adults failing to intercede. This applies to parents and all bystanders.

If you go back to your reunions for the classes where you were the victim of bullying, what you will find is that the bullies, for the most part, have not done well. Most likely, the same qualities that made them the insecure, demonic, threatening, intimidating persons they were in elementary and high school did not prepare them very well for life and they did not pursue a college degree.

However, just putting in the time and getting the degree is not the most important benefit received. Just the exposure to the vast array of information that is available at a University is enough to bestow humility on those new to higher education.

As the years in school move on, the conversations about obtaining this knowledge is enough to restructure how to gauge the relative importance of fellow human beings. As you will discover, the most important qualities of your importance as a human being are not the same ones as they were in grammar and high school. The adults that do not go on to higher education may still think these same qualities are important but that is why they will, most likely, not do very well in life.

To be certain, there is still bullying that goes on in adulthood and in the workplace but for the same reasons on the part of the Bullies. It is still the same quest to overcome their fear of non-importance. However, education, knowledge, research and hard work can generally overcome these bullies because they may not make this effort.

My experience with family is that it has its own “pack mentality” with everyone struggling for their rank and importance. My view of it as a child was that, “The louder you are the more important you are”. Family encounters may end up being negative discussions about other family members. Somehow, this makes the family rank seekers feel more important. This naturally translates into brutal disciplinary action toward the children that, somehow is entertaining for certain family bullies.

If issues do arise, the parent should weigh the seriousness of the infractions and personally discipline their child appropriately. Do not let family bullies discipline your children, or they may walk away from family forever, as I did.

After several years of experiencing bullying at school, it was easy for the author as a child to see that bullying was ego oriented. When the pecking order participants in his family seemed to be personally rewarded from their behavior, it seemed that all bullies were the same, family or not. In the author’s family, in his teens, he identified four family members that he considered bullies, like all the rest of them. The most obvious strategy for dealing with bullies is to avoid their presence. In applying this technique to family, in order to avoid one bully, the victim must avoid the whole family. After identifying them as bullies, that opinion was to last the rest of his life.