Never say anything that couldn’t stand as the last thing you say to someone. You’re words matter more than you realize.
Being beat to that extent can cause both physical and emotional pain for life.
Both forms of abuse hurt. When the abuse goes on for a long time it feels like it takes 10x as long to heal.
It sucks to be in a relationship with someone who can’t forgive or forget. Mean vindictive people who will twist words and who are suppose to love you unconditionally.
Oof that hit home.
I could not disagree more. Words are meaningless. They are sounds. They only matter if you choose to give them meaning.
The proof is incredibly simple. I speak multiple languages, one of them is Spanish. However, it is South American Spanish and not any of the dialects spoken in Spain. A common insult in Spain is "gilipollas". It means absolutely nothing to me, even though I know what it means ant that is an insult. Someone could call me gilipollas all day and I would probably die laughing; frankly, it really sounds funny to me.
What if you are insulted in a language you don't understand? Same thing. Meaningless. At that point it really becomes just sounds. And that's the point. The only process that gives words meaning and can attach them to negative emotions is in your brain.
Put a different way: Nobody can force you to interpret words as an insult or something to get emotional about except for yourself.
I got my kids used to not caring about insults by actually insulting them. Things like "You are a moron!" quickly became the subject of jokes at our home, with them being free to call me anything they want in response. At first I had to do this because one of my kids ran into verbal bullies at school. It is amazing to see just how much power one gains by removing meaning from words used to deliver insults. At the limit they become nothing less than a joke.
Verbal insults, at the end of the day, are signs of weakness. The person who has to resort to diminishing someone else verbally in person or --as is often seen-- online, has to resort to such nonsense because, well, to be kind, they have nothing else to offer. Why give someone like that the power to interpret those words as they wish you would interpret them? The best approach is to turn those words into irrelevant noise. To go from that, to have words affect you for life? No, that's a big mistake.
> I got my kids used to not caring about insults by actually insulting them. Things like "You are a moron!"
I do that too, although just because its fun rather than for any other reason. But your kids know that is friendly banter with you. It's quite different to your boss calling you a moron and insulting you all day.
So you might say, well if my boss did that then I'd leave, fuck them. And I'd be the same. However, not everyone is in a position to be able to just get out and quit.
And that doesn't even address the far more insidious ways people use words to hurt you. Telling other people you're a moron, building up an undeserved contempt. This is what bullies do and it's not so easy to shrug it off. When they get a significant number of people in on it then you can't escape it and feel like a fool. This is the source of my shyness and anxiety about talking to people. Even though I try to push down those feelings I still feel awkward and on guard because for a few of my school years ANYTHING I said unguarded would be pounced on and I'd be laughed at.
Then there's gaslighting and other verbal lead ons where you're sweet talked into believing you're a moron. I don't have any experience with this.
> The best approach is to turn those words into irrelevant noise. To go from that, to have words affect you for life? No, that's a big mistake.
I wish this were the case. Toot toot for you if it is, but for many it's not possible, I think perhaps you could take a more sympathetic view - what has worked for you does not work for everyone and perhaps others had a difficult time when they were more vulnerable to it and that left an unshakable impression on them.
I can definitely understand that. At the same time, I know, without a doubt, that this approach has worked for at least one of my kids. He told me this much a few times after being bullied and pretty much viewing it as a laughable event rather than taking it seriously. And, in fact, the bullying stopped very quickly because he did not engage at all.
> I think perhaps you could take a more sympathetic view - what has worked for you does not work for everyone and perhaps others had a difficult time when they were more vulnerable to it and that left an unshakable impression on them.
Yes, of course, I understand everyone has different life experiences.
I am simply sharing my, our, experience. The perspective might be useful to some or not one person. At the very least someone might have seen what I had to share and, perhaps, understood they might have the power to change the way they interpret what they are experiencing.
It's like being afraid of heights. All else being equal (circumstances, balance, physical condition, health, age, etc.) the only difference between a person who is afraid and one who is not, is in the way the brain interprets reality. That's it. Nothing else. Train the brain to modify that interpretation and going up a tall skinny ladder goes from a horrific paralyzing event to no problem at all.
Bottom line: I really think we need to understand that these things are only real if we make them real. Easier said than done, of course. I don't see that as a reason not to try to, carefully, slowly, go up that ladder and see things differently.
Perhaps instead of suing the entire school district, GP should rather sue the parents of the offending child? /s
To remove the tongue from the cheek, though, and provide some anecdata in the same breath, let me say that I have a number of close friends who are teachers; their constant complaint is that the children reach school already too spoiled (in the rude and egocentric sense). Which apparently gets worse every year.
It's easier to make a case for a society-wide pandemic of negligent upbringing by parents who - goes without saying - are under-educated in child rearing, lack the traditional support networks ("it takes a village to raise a child") and generally overburdened by life's other demands. The children then get passed over to underpaid and overworked teachers (and overflowing classrooms), where the egos of the little cute monsters clash, occasionally loudly and physically, more frequently in passive-aggressive, bullyish manners.
But yeah, "back in mah day..."
If you are forcing a person to interact daily with bad people the least you should do is ensure that those bad people won't hurt this person.
Definitely not something that twenty minutes a day is enough for. And perhaps such a lack not only allows for bad patterns to emerge and fester, but also traumatizes the child. Modern city life, and its discontents, I guess.
I got bullied by a teacher, probably more, starting in fourth grade. I've written about it on this website. It can develop authority issues, trust issues, or both. It's a lifetime of work to undo those things.
Similar to people posting their stories with names with the hope for justice in some form or fashion, suing someone puts the details out for bare. He would likely never get the state government to actually repeal pensions, but he would get to tell his story in a media that people would definitely be paying attention to.
There's a valid question of whether any of the approaches above are healthy for a society. I'd venture to say no, but that is the way our society is.
It's frustrating that people downvoted your comment. It's a failure, from a lack of empathy, to understand that the reason you want to make an example of the school district is because you were one of the victims of bullying.
Words are not the cause of these events. They might, in several ways, trigger them, of course. After all, a declaration of war is nothing but words and so is a legal divorce filing.
However, for these and other conflicts, if we dug down to root causes, we always find a lot more than just spoken or written words. Two that come to mind would be, in the case of war, strategic/national interests and, for divorce, infidelity or serious lack of agreement on matters the couple deem to be important.
Another example is American parents. Since you can’t spank your kids you have to resort to hurting their feelings with words to discipline them. No wonder teens in this country hate their parents.
My mom enforced clear consequences based on what I valued and she valued. Break rules, I lose computer time. Trespass on someone’s property, I write an apology letter and deliver it to them. Etc