On bullying and psychology
Sep. 4th, 2006 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bktheirregularI was small when I was growing up.
OK, that didn't make much sense. I was smaller than my peers when I was growing up, and I was almost always a target for bullying - the psychological kind, that is. I didn't know how to conform, I didn't have the store of knowledge that most kids somehow had growing up - my authority figures were an absent-minded professor and a stranger in a strange land. Later, I would describe the sensation as akin to missing an essential course in school, or perhaps playing a game in which everyone but me knew the rules.
The bully tactics, though, cut deep. Psychological jabs and prods, daily, weekly.
And the advice I got constantly was to not react, to not let them know they'd had an effect. I couldn't react physically, anyway. One time I got pushed so far that I threw one punch, and got pummeled for my trouble. But even letting out my emotions was denied me.
No wonder I ended up so screwed up as a young adult.
But one other thing that happened: from those days forward, when I have seen people engage in pranks that are roughly equivalent to beating up weak kids on the playground, or psychological torture ... I take it personally. Schoolyard bully is an epithet in my lexicon, one roughly on par with rapist.
People who have preyed on the weak, and drawn pleasure from it ... from the dregs to the heights, to the halls of power that were once the province of men such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison ... those people, to me, are a cancer. Not knowing better isn't an excuse. Only in fun isn't an excuse.
If, today, I were to meet the people who'd tormented me as a child, I wouldn't forgive. Even if they'd fallen on their knees and begged forgiveness from whatever deity they hold sacred, that wouldn't be enough.
Maybe, if they were to go on their knees before the people - the human beings - that they had wronged, and beg forgiveness from them, and run the chance that forgiveness would be denied them - for in my case, I know it would never come - then, maybe, they might enter another category.
The one I term human beings.
Schoolyard bullies don't qualify.
OK, that didn't make much sense. I was smaller than my peers when I was growing up, and I was almost always a target for bullying - the psychological kind, that is. I didn't know how to conform, I didn't have the store of knowledge that most kids somehow had growing up - my authority figures were an absent-minded professor and a stranger in a strange land. Later, I would describe the sensation as akin to missing an essential course in school, or perhaps playing a game in which everyone but me knew the rules.
The bully tactics, though, cut deep. Psychological jabs and prods, daily, weekly.
And the advice I got constantly was to not react, to not let them know they'd had an effect. I couldn't react physically, anyway. One time I got pushed so far that I threw one punch, and got pummeled for my trouble. But even letting out my emotions was denied me.
No wonder I ended up so screwed up as a young adult.
But one other thing that happened: from those days forward, when I have seen people engage in pranks that are roughly equivalent to beating up weak kids on the playground, or psychological torture ... I take it personally. Schoolyard bully is an epithet in my lexicon, one roughly on par with rapist.
People who have preyed on the weak, and drawn pleasure from it ... from the dregs to the heights, to the halls of power that were once the province of men such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison ... those people, to me, are a cancer. Not knowing better isn't an excuse. Only in fun isn't an excuse.
If, today, I were to meet the people who'd tormented me as a child, I wouldn't forgive. Even if they'd fallen on their knees and begged forgiveness from whatever deity they hold sacred, that wouldn't be enough.
Maybe, if they were to go on their knees before the people - the human beings - that they had wronged, and beg forgiveness from them, and run the chance that forgiveness would be denied them - for in my case, I know it would never come - then, maybe, they might enter another category.
The one I term human beings.
Schoolyard bullies don't qualify.
