Long Term Effects of Being Bullied (by a Survivor)

I feel it's time I had my say about the issue of bullying. I'd never planned to write this post about a long season of my life I preferred to forget. But since my husband became a relief teacher, the worst parts of the school lifestyle have been popping into my head. 

Since bullying is still an ongoing scourge on society, I thought I'd share some hard-won insights from years of being on the receiving end. (That's me in the photo above, during a time when all this was ongoing. There wasn't ever a time when it wasn't.)

Throughout the Primary and High School years, you name it, I experienced it. Pinches, punches, shoves, kicks, and name-calling along the lines of ugly freak and pathetic loser. Also loads of sexual harassment which I thought I simply had no recourse but to put up with. The term was virtually unknown in the 1970s and 80s. 

Once a kid who was rebuked for bullying me replied to the teacher, 'It's not fair to single me out, because everyone picks on Paula.'

Here are some points that may sadly resonate with you too. It's decades ago for me now, but these things still rear their ugly heads. 

I suppose I should add a disclaimer stating that I'm not a professional counselor. Just an empathetic soul who has seen it all. Now for the list.

We deal with serious PTSD

 Just because chronic stress is invisible doesn't mean it's innocuous. The Bullied Brain by Jennifer Fraser, reveals that sending me back to school every day would've caused severe cortisol overload. That's the stress hormone. It was an eye-opener when I read that neurological brain scans of kids who have been persistently bullied by their peers resemble the brains of combat soldiers. So the burden of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder dogged my footsteps long after I thought I'd moved on. The horror of those school years helped mold and shape my anxious personality, just as wind and waves form the topography of the cliffs in any given region. 

In her book, The Cure Jo Marchant provides evidence that long-term psychological responses to ongoing stress can certainly harm us, and the emotion of fear takes a severe toll on people. Other authors, such as Joe Dispenza and Henry Wright, confirm how repeated treatment of us gets absorbed into our brain chemistries and outworked in our personalities. It reminds me of the way in which blue dye steadily becomes evident in hydrangea petals.  

We are ever on high alert.

We remain on the lookout for further attacks, hypervigilant and edgy. I liken myself to a crab scuttling for cover when a sheltering rock is lifted. I've never shed the habit of peeping out at my periphery, finding it difficult to relax, especially in social situations. If we were shy people to start with (which I was), the character trait blows out even more.  

Marchant quotes evidence that people with stressful childhood histories continue to react far quicker to stress stimuli than others, and small hassles escalate more rapidly to full-blown anxiety. This brain activity is measurable, which helps explain why the effects of early adversity may persist long after others think we should have gotten over it. 

This also explains why we feel a certain paranoia at times, and find ourselves second guessing deeper meanings behind personal remarks directed at us by others.

I haven't been to a chiropractor for years, but they always used to tell me my shoulders were wired extremely tight and tense. Probably no wonder.

We approach everyone with the sense that we must earn decent treatment. 

All the pep talks we may have endured during our childhoods have a way of eroding our confidence. Our well-intentioned relatives and friends may have urged us to be braver, behave with nonchalance, just ignore the bullies (yeah, right, as if they don't follow us), or try smiling and giving compliments. Or we might be counselled to 'learn to take a joke!' (Sure, having your fingers stomped on, your belongings stolen, the back of your head repeatedly slapped, or being called a repulsive misfit is really funny.)  

And our families never hear the note of delight in a bully's voice when they come up with a particularly venomous insult.

I used to try taking advice on board. It's easy for harassed kids to respond by becoming people pleasers or try-hards, hoping to create patches of relief for ourselves. Performative behavior goes against the grain though, and then we feel there's yet another character defect to beat ourselves up over. I kept waiting for the day when my antagonists might perceive some admirable quality in me and stop their behaviour. That day never came. 

In all honesty, I felt that I tried everything. I had nothing left in my arsenel. No idea what to do. And I internalized the responsibility, because I believed the fallacy that stopping bullies required deterrent action from me.

 We can't dodge the insidious message that there is always something we need to do differently just to be left alone. So you see why this isn't a blog post about how to get bullies to change their minds. I had no secret weapon, like Rudolph's glowing red nose, to turn the tide of unpopularity. Our culture promotes fictional stories about how characters transform themselves from sorry nerds to something impressive, but I never figured it out. Cinderella had to become a fairy tale princess to get her spiteful step sisters off her back.

We live with the default assumption that others won't like us.

When we've been treated harshly for being ourselves from our very earliest memories, our automatic recourse is to figure out what sort of mask we should wear. And of course pat advice such as, 'Just be yourself,' rolls off us like water off a duck's back. I can't count the number of times when my classmates suddenly burst into peals of laughter just because I said something unintentionally hilarious, pronounced something oddly, or showed my feelings too plainly. This is coupled with a sad sense of futility. We stop hoping that people will like us on face value because we know they'll soon discover the fashionable attitude towards us. 

Carrying this hangover into our lives beyond the school years can be extremely challenging. In my adult years I've written fiction, and trying to market my own books has sometimes felt like being handicapped with sandbags around my ankles.

We learn to instinctively mistrust signs of friendliness from others. 

This wariness is understandable, taking into account all that we've dealt with, including fake syrupy sweetness from people who eventually tell us that they hate us intensely. Second guessing others as well as ourselves becomes instinctual. 

It is hard to shrug off our mantle of shame.

We start out with the assumption that we must be flawed.

Our brains at the age of 5 or 6 are extremely plastic and malleable. When we're continually told that we're ugly and pathetic, we stand defenceless. At that age, we don't have the emotional kit-bag of coping hacks to help us deal with bullies. 

Years later, we still freeze when put on the spot. We face normal social situations as if we're about to sit an exam. We are accustomed to walking hunched with shame from a very early age. As small children, it seems perfectly logical that if we're being pushed around and called names, then there is evidently something fundamentally wrong with us. 

Once during my early years of university, I crossed paths with a former High School bully at a Christian youth camp, and my knee-jerk reaction was to pull back with shame, hoping she wouldn't see me. And I was about 19 or 20 years old at the time. 

So where do we go from here?

I believe the key is to accept that we've been broken. We resemble rag dolls who show up in our new, recycled lives having been knocked around, had our stuffing pummeled out of us, our clothes torn, and permanent marker scribbled over our faces. There might still be traces of shoe prints on our stomachs or ripped woolen hair hanging from our heads. I'm not advocating self-pity, but this perspective helps me forgive myself for being awkward at parties, shy during occasions when we've all been urged to step up, and tongue-tied when others in groups are freely sharing. 

It is counterproductive to be rough on ourselves if we come from a background of being broken. I sometimes find it easy to fall back into my old mental habit of kicking myself, and assuming my anxious, edgy behavior is the reason I was targeted in the first place. But no, that's circular reasoning. I've found it's more helpful to treat myself with a gentler approach.

Whenever I come across advice to send my former, confused self a hug back through time, I find myself growing emotional, and sometimes even a bit teary. 

That brings me to something I can't stress too highly. We never, ever deserved the way we were treated!!! It doesn't matter if our clothes were unstylish, or if we needed speech therapy, or liked goofy music, or couldn't hit cricket balls, or wanted to keep our heads tucked behind books in libraries. (All that applied to me. Your characteristics might be different.) Nor does it matter what we looked like. I was picked on mercilessly for physical attributes I certainly couldn't have changed. It is never okay to be harassed, assaulted and sneered at day after day.  

Hear me, we did nothing wrong! 

Forgiveness for our own sakes  is a powerful concept and not merely a platitude. Making the choice to forgive our bullies removes emotional toxins from our systems, even if we have to do it many times over. I've found it's not realistic to consider forgiveness a one-time action. Those acidic memories may return, and we have to do it over again. But each time becomes easier. 

Finally, we need to think of ourselves as survivors. We wear our wounds internally and unobtrusively, but the courage we've mustered is real. The fact that we've come out the other side with the ability to still be loving, trustful, moved by beauty and amused by humor makes us overcomers. 

If that describes you, you're a champion, as am I. Although we don't receive medals, we sure deserve them.

This was one of the hardest blog posts I've written, but I wanted to help bust the myth that being bullied is something we may go through for a period of time and then simply get over. I do hope it may help others realize they are not alone. Please feel free share it with any suffering souls you may happen to know, however long ago their trauma may have been. 

And next week I'll return to my usual blog content.