The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

emotional flinching

distraction is just running away from a feeling. I don't actually care about the content of the new tab, i'm not addicted to the internet, blah blah

----------

BTW, The old book Focusing by Eugene Gendlin really helped me here-- it's on libgen or you can youtube the authors name to see some of his one on one sessions he did with people before he died. (You can do it yourself without a person tho, it's just having a kind listener helps you stick with it)

it's NOT about adhd or focusing on stuff lol, it's the name for his diy technique of 'figuring out what the feeling is' and unlocks all other therapy stuff that you may do after

https://sfstandard.com/business/inside-ftx-founder-sam-bankm...

Would rich kids be facing much more competition for elite spots from poor but smart kids if bullying wasn't part of the curriculum in the public schools? Given that only 10% of kids get to go to a school where dignity is assured, it could be that 90% of the smart kids are being kneecapped and don't reach their full potential. One more thing that makes a mockery of "meritocracy".

I was glad to see though that New Hampshire (where I grew up) finally passed a law making it possible to sue schools for bullying like the other 49 states.

https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2021/05/26/families-deserve...

I wonder also how many Enrons and Challenger Disasters we've had because many of what could have been our best people had it beat into them that self-assertion is not allowed for them.

There's a lot of discussion here about how private school kids are insulated from bullying. Does anyone have first-hand experience or hard evidence of this? Based on books and movies about boarding school, it's hard to believe this.

Along this vein, I think the internet (Reddit especially) has been spreading an idea that "ADHD explains everything" in recent years. Every year I feel like I see more and more people self-diagnose with ADHD and then stop looking further for any explanation for their psychological situation. In some cases, people seem to get worse after receiving the ADHD diagnosis and medication and then hyperfocusing on their distractions even harder. From my position I see a lot of people with anxiety issues, perfectionism problems, or even textbook depression becoming convinced that ADHD is the explanation for everything in their life. Not all ADHD patients, mind you, but largely the recent influx of people who start with self-diagnosis via internet memes and TikTok (mis)info about ADHD.

People end up confused why I’m not delivering when what I do deliver is excellent. They figure I don’t care or I’m checked out, something like that. I become less reliable because not delivering is imperfect, and I begin to give up not only on my objectives but myself as well.

I’ve had this lead to catastrophe twice, but I’m much better at identifying it and speaking about it now.

It’s debilitating at times. Knowing I can do better, but it’s not there yet. I could deliver something so much faster, but if it isn’t the best I can do, I’m ashamed of it. I feel like a complete hack.

Worse still is that when I nail it, do good work, get it out on time, etc… It’s still not good enough.

Fundamentally it’s because I’m not good enough. ADHD can lead to some extremely insidious and harmful self talk.

When it comes to worrying about being bullied, I have to ask: why do you think you’re able to be bullied? Are you worth making into a target? Why did you internalize that?

Personally I think being bullied is a significant part of why I feel I’m not good enough. That’s what I was told for years! Unfortunately, I was young and dumb, very impressionable, and it stuck. Oh well, keep at it and try to do better. You aren’t someone who deserves to be bullied and I’m just fine at what I do. We’ll get there eventually.

The kind of punishment doled out by law-abiding adults to children isn't even a blip on the radar vs. suffering a vicious bully. It isn't even worth mentioning, punishment for violence is a total farce until adulthood. That's basically the whole source of the problem; bullys have realized there are no consequences.

The best response to a bully is an immediate and vigorous aggression resembling that of a honey badger, full stop. I agree it's important to teach children self-defense and get them familiar enough with conflict to not piss themselves when faced with it. It's the children who can get away with fighting back without negative consequence, and substantial upside potential.

I once had a kid bullying me in middle school. I spoke with my mother about it, who recommended I say something to the teachers, which I did.

When that didn't work I knocked the shit out of him the next time he tried to bully me, to the point that he was running around the edges of the classroom trying to get away from me while I chased him down to beat on him some more.

He stopped fucking with me after that.

To your point, we both got suspended, but my mother made it clear I wasn't being punished and made sure I had fun during that suspension.

It's a lifelong skill that will be used as an adult too.

Adult supervision is no guarantee either. Kids are way smarter than adults give them credit for. I remember bullying occurring in the presence of teachers who were completely unaware of the meaning of subtle language or other cues meant to be harmful (with the same meaning known to others of the in-group).

I don't think ignoring works well, if we consider "ignoring someone" as an emotional attack. The bullies may feel more hurt/rejected/ignored and therefore bully more or in different ways. The ignoring/conflict avoidance can be quite similar to a silent treatment, which can escalate conflict.

> I only realized this way later in life when I started training in Muay Thai and found I had way more confidence standing up to other men, both because I knew how to handle myself and because I wasn't as afraid of getting punched in the face. Bullies only go away if you make them go away. Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision (which is often the situation).

I agree with you that I'd love if more people took self-defense (full disclosure, I train people in what I call Emotional Self-Defense), as when I took Krav Maga I felt more confident to stand up for myself in situations where I had previously thought I would be physically attacked. I disagree, however that "fighting back is the only real solution" because I think what I learned in Krav Maga was the confidence to stand up for myself without having to fight back. I learned that I could fight back if I needed to but that in most situations, just standing up for myself and not attacking back would bring quicker and longer lasting resolution.

Part of the reason I created Emotional Self-Defense is because I thought most self-defense/martial arts don't go far enough upstream to resolve the conflict when it's at an emotional stage and before it becomes physical violence.

It's not so surprising when you think about it. Bullying is about power, but it isn't being good in a fight itself that makes some kids have power over others. It's social, not physical. The victim had the ability to strike back physically all along, they don't need special training. In theory the victim could stab the bully in the back in plenty of ways - even literally. The reason they don't do that, and the reason the bullies don't fear it, is because all the ways the victim could strike back would be scorched earth. It makes no difference if it's with freshly learned BJJ or a weapon.

This is the part that few people seem to want to acknowledge: top-down "solutions" to problems like this end up being worse than the problem they purport to "solve".

One of the things I've noticed the most in classes is that being attacked is often a subjective experience from the receiver, often oblivious to the giver. I have people intentionally try to reject the other and it seems very uncomfortable to try to do it intentionally.

Anyways, I find it neither dystopian nor hellish. One person who took a class said, "Jim, your workshop it f*cked my feelings but they needed it, thank you."

I don't mean to advertise here, more just to say I believe there are ways to approach it that I feel excited about.

Stop trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics. You’re out of your wheelhouse.

It is entirely possible that the want to bully can be reduced but cannot be prevented. Of course people should do what they can to prevent it on the bully side, but it is reasonable to also consider other factors.

It's one thing to not be so sensitive when it comes to jokes or teasing, but this requires a maturity that a child does not yet have.

A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were (I know I'm treading very close to a No True Scotsman with that statement).

I was bullied when I was a child and it was BAD. I can't really express how EVIL the bullies were. Like something out of a horror film.

Edit: I'm a little confused by the replies - I re-read my comment to see if anything was ambiguous. I'm saying that bulling is way worse than people think. Maybe it was unclear that I am agreeing with the comment I was replying to, not opposing it?

At over 40 years of age I've had to deal with people attempting to bully me, most of them are completely shocked when they realize they can't.

My point here is that if you think bullying is something that stops at graduation then sure, that sounds like a reasonable position, but the premise itself is wrong.

One of my favorite lines:

> Bullies don't stop being bullies when they graduate, they just get lawyers.

"The blank slate" conception of the world continues to mislead us about the domain of effective interventions.

Society will probably need a lot of time to collectively figure out where to draw the line between the spectrum ranging from "let's not bully a distinct subgroup of people" and "why are we unnecessarily over-empowering a distinct subgroup over all other groups".

In the meantime, those people in the subgroups need support.

Why not both?

This is a research paper, not a political document. Here, researchers focus on the psychology of the bullied, and make a suggestion that may improve his condition. There are, I guess, other research papers that focus on the bully, and others that focus on the environment, each with their own conclusions.

The job of policymakers is to take all the suggestions and build a policy based on what researchers consider effective, in addition to other considerations like ethics and cost. It is up to them do decide if it is more important to prevent bullies from bullying or if it is better to teach kids how not to be bullied.

Researchers are just there to give facts, backed by evidence.

This is why helping other kids withstand bullying, defuse situations, and generally not feel helpless is still important. By the same token, however much you may discourage people from stealing, you should still lock the door.

So I don't know if "bullies" necessarily think they've been bullied per say, however I feel quite confident they believe they feel attacked in some way (rejected, guilt tripped, ignored, blamed, etc).

So with this in mind, I try to teach anyone to learn how to respond better to these attacks because I think we counterattack more than we may realize.

The reason people bully is the same reason people kill is the same reason people commit genocide.

If you’ve got a solution for that, I’d love to hear it. Seems to me that teaching resilience is a much more productive approach.

The schools programs really focused on the middle kids showing them how to spot bullying, not tolerate it, report it and to stick up for other kids, and bullying seemed to become publicly seen as weak and uncool.

One of my kids has/had some personal circumstances that they would've been flayed alive for at the schools I went to back in the day. I am so grateful for the change in culture, and how the other kids treat each other now compared to what I went through.

While assigning them to read and discuss Lord of the Flies...

A person perceives abuse as much worse than the person that deals it out. Hazing is the person being abused then delivering worse punishment than they received to the next round of people, again because their perception of the original hazing abuse was worse than what their abusers perceived.

School tolerance of abuse/bullying is essentially this hazing cycle occurring over generations, more slowly.

That's not the only fucked up human psychology loop in play. Denial, stockholm syndrome, and of course, laziness all come into play.

It sounds like a best of both worlds. Avoid bullies and other bs associated with institutional education and instead have a customized, curiosity driven education.

Is that before or after their arrest, incarceration and juvenile court hearing?

"Get a piece of wood then"

I did. As I approached the playground, I felt ridiculous. This wood still wouldn't do anything. To my surprise, the bully fled the scene, clearly afraid.

This incident has taught me a lot. It wasn't the wood that did it. It was the fact that I came back. He could now easily kick my ass again, wood or not. But I might come back yet again, and what (or who) will I bring next time?

From fearful to being feared. A pure mind play.

I do not believe in the perfect world-to-be where one day we've eradicated all bullies and other bad actors by educating them. Life will test you and learning to stand your ground and retaliate is a skill I wish we didn't need, but most definitely need. Address the problem from both angles at once.

Violence committed for the welfare of man is a virtue.

The trouble is that he, for some reason, sees elevating himself and pushing others down as an appropriate thing to do at times. He is fairly insecure and reflexively does this. His mom is quite similar, and like him, also unaware of how it affects people.

When either of them do this, they are entirely oblivious to how uncomfortable or upset they’ve made someone feel. His mom is much better at apologizing even if incredulously, but he still lacks the social tact to recognize the importance of acknowledging and apologizing if it was insensitive. If anything, over time he may actually be less receptive to the idea that he’s doing anything at all.

I have no doubt that many kids will think he was a bit of a jock and a bully later in life. He will remember school as a somewhat lonely and confusing point in time.

Even discussing this with him openly has yielded no results. It makes no sense to him. Likewise, his mom is also still positive that anyone she offends simply misunderstood her, or that people are too sensitive or lack a sense of humour.

I wish I understood it better. At any rate, I’m fairly certain that a lot of bullies are very misunderstood and often potentially quite miserable and lonely. The more they push people away, the fewer opportunities they get to grow and improve themselves with deeper relationships. It’s not a good situation for anyone.

Couple that with GROUPS of bullies, what do you advocate?

Well, the modern solution to war is more firepower, and that is the firearm. So essentially, the end state of advocating violence is school shootings.

Maybe things are different now, with kids spending too much time indoors playing video games instead of running around in the woods. But I think violence is generally an outcome from boys being together and relatively unsupervised. The insidious part about violence in schools is the double-jeopardy you face from administration; first you get your ass kicked by the bully, then you get your ass kicked again by the bureaucracy putting you through the wringer.

in my home growing up we were bullies. I unfortunately carried this into school and didn't learn manners until later

Educational policy informed by this research usually looks not to intervene in physical conflict between equally matched (by size/age) peers. It also looks at conflict management and resolution as a primary responsibility of the peer group, rather than the adults/teachers, with the escalation path being to older peers before adults.

It's this kind of logic that creates it actually. Trying to create Uber safe environments for hypothetical outcomes results in those behaviors being suppressed and mutated later. Children are designed to bully, the same as every other mammal species plays when young. If they were not, you wouldn't find it in every place where children are throughout the planet.

We can only mitigate severe effects. Smaller schools is the most significant step, but it will never happen.

In society there's often a reflex to blame girls from trying to hitch hike, like stepping in risky activities.. but for bullying it seems completely passive and unwarranted.

The issue is, what are you going to do about it? Teachers can't be fully responsible for fixing them, and clearly the parents (often) won't. You can't really go "draconian" mode on the bullies either, they're still kids. And even if you would, they'd get even worse.

I’ll speak up. Context:

Australian, male, went to shitty public school in an old and wealthy suburb that had a dozen private schools and 1 public school. I was from a dysfunctional family with a lot at home issues. I wasn’t smart or hard working and because of my metabolism and genetics, I was obese until about 18 when my body started to mature (later compared to my peers).

I got bullied. Hard. By my peers at school. By kids at my games of basketball on the weekend. By my friends. By my brothers and by my father. I’m talking about every day comments about my weight. My smell. My family. My unattractive body. My fat dumb face etc. (Verbal, never got into a violet situation).

What ended up happening is that I began to bully back. I would say nasty things back to people. I would pick things up from South Park. I would knock kids books off the table. Draw on lockers with (poorly) drawn male genitalia.

Ultimately, it felt like the normal thing to do. Just be a total fucking prick to everyone.

I’ve changed a lot since then. I personally can’t stand being around verbal conflict or even consume media that makes fun of people.

I find a lot of modern ‘comedy’ to be a form a Bullying to someone somewhere.

I’m personally very sorry to my family and friends I still have for my actions that time. And I’m personally very sensitive to witnessing these behaviours.

In my life I try my best to be kind and considerate. I try not to judge people and keep my negative thoughts to my self.

I never wanted to be a bully. Looking back I feel as though I was just fitting in.

I've seen some of this in our local schools: meetings held with the head teacher to "hear both sides" when one side is a bully asserting their right to bully the other side.

> kids in an actual martial art

I had this idea, based on my experience as a kid, but never actually got around to enrolling them. They're in college now and so I guess it wasn't necessary.

I was picked on a fair bit in school. The nature of "zero-tolerance" meant that fights were quick. I recall one day just being shoved into a a door threshold unexpectedly. I had had it at that point from this person, so I took my heaviest book out of my bag and slammed him in the head with it as he was already walking away triumphantly. Looking back, he could have been seriously injured. Many people witnesses and laughed at him.

He never bothered me again.

But how can you know someone will leave you alone or just escalate things?

Exactly my experience as well. Fighting back is the only thing that ever made the bullying stop. I fought back once in the locker room against a boy two years and two feet older and taller than me, basically lost the fight immediately, but because I fought and wouldn't submit, everybody else stopped the fight and after that day I was never bullied in school again.

The reason I never fought back sooner is because I was scared of the rules even more than the bullies. The "Zero tolerance" rules made clear that if I fought back I would be just as bad as the bullies, and in just as much trouble (except I'd actually be in more trouble, because my parents would be livid at me for getting suspended while the bullies' parents wouldn't give a shit.) "Zero tolerance" means zero due process. It's the school administrators essentially siding with bullies by default because it makes the paperwork easier. Absolutely immoral. It should be their responsibility to figure out who actually started the fight and punish the perpetrator but not the victim.

In the end I didn't get in trouble after all, because locker room fights were beyond the eyes of adults and nobody ratted anybody out. I resent the teachers and the administration the most, for making me afraid to stick up for myself. The kids who bullied me were psychos or broken people, and I find it easy to forgive them. But the administration did harm to me by being lazy bureaucrats.

This I have to disagree with. Some of them I believe have a terrible home life and are handing down the abuse to whomever is a weak target.

You may be right in other cases though, and that had never occurred to me. Lack of respect and self control may stem from neglect or lack of parenting rather than abuse.

The kids couldn’t actually physically damage me since I was so much bigger. They did cause a lot of psychological harm. I had a very negative predisposition towards anyone that I met. I just assumed everyone would be hostile towards me and would want to make fun of me. I still struggle with this mindset and I am in my thirties. I will usually be very shut off from people I do not know.

There were a couple of times that I did stand up for myself. Each time the bullying completely stopped.

I thought I was being the better person by not fighting back but that was not true. I was being harmless. That harmlessness invited more violence.

Most US public schools and low-rate private schools are like this. If your children are in an ultra-competitive public or private school however, the bullies are tossed out, the schools confident in the 100% ironclad certainty there is another family literally grateful for the opportunity to place their child in the new opening within 24 hours. The student body goes through cycles of forgetting this until a new bully is expelled, then the bullying simmers down to much more subtle forms.

In the ultra-competitive private boarding schools, the kind of over the top physical bullying you hear about in public schools is nearly non-existent because they will expel on far lower thresholds for bullying.

But yes, if your children are in US public school or you are a child in a US public school, generally speaking fighting back regardless of the zero tolerance consequences tends to stop the bullying better than going through toothless school policies. Bullies tend to prefer soft targets over porcupines. If you are being bullied and choose to fight back though, then go in at a location with adults to intervene quickly nearby expecting to get hurt and lose (in the sense the bully has the physical upper hand), but never defeated (in the sense you and the bully have to be separated before you stop). If it is a group doing the bullying, go for the leader.

The US public school systems' bullying problem won't stop until the bullies' parents know that they have a no-recourse, no-litigation-overturning consequence to bullying that sees their precious no-fault snowflake expelled to "lower class" schooling if they run out their options.

We both were arrested and charged, and I was told to my face by a judge that “there is no such thing as self-defense in schools.” Which is not only a bald-faced lie, it’s unconstitutional. You have a right to be secure in your person, and a right to self-defense, well established by the Supreme Court in case law and described in the Declaration of Independence.

I also didn’t get bullied again at that school after that incident. Self-defense is not just a right, it’s an imperative.

As an adult however I realize that my bullies were actually abused children who had a rough time at home and took it out on me at school.

> When they break a bullies nose/arm/etc and get suspended you should not only encourage them to continue you should celebrate the victory.

Sorry, but this is completely sociopathic insanity. Celebrating one child maiming another? What is this, the hunger games?

> Bullies aren't beat enough at home, so it's your job to bring the beatings to them.

Do you think it's ever ok for an adult to beat a child? You have it all wrong, it's the kids who are beat who become bullies.

> If you are not capable of violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless.

Capable of violence is one thing, systemically encouraging it as part of normal upbringing is however strictly antisocial.

So what's the ceiling on that? What if they escalate back? What if I can't win physically?

Is head-injury risking brain damage to my opponent going too far? Do I bring weapons? Bats? Knives? This sounds like a losing escalation path really, guns are pretty readily available and a half-dozen rounds to the chest sounds like it would be a nice permanent solution to most bullying problems.

Is that going too far?

The number of people in this entire comment section who don't see "escalate the violence" as having some very obvious negative outcomes is incredible. It's all "boys will be boys" style rhetorical crap, where they pretend that there's a magic set of limiting rules and that somehow teenagers throwing punches isn't in fact gambling on serious injury and death.

Oh and the best part: the victim doesn't want to be there. The victim wants the problem to stop. The victim, is the one who in violent escalation gets held to account for going "too far" in response.

The "real world" doesn't work this way, it's not even remotely similar. In the real world in most US states if someone assaults you in public you actually can legally draw a weapon and kill them in response, but at the very least the authorities will descend and the assaulter's life as though know it - if caught - is quite thoroughly over. School's are the only place where everyone knows the identity of the perpetrators and theirs witnesses galore and the authority says "nah, the victim should handle it - but you know, not too much".

Please replace the word bullying in your question with the word rape or mutilation or imprisonment or starvation and see how horrible that line of thinking is.

My experience was not as bad as some others on this list. I believe that is because girls are psychological bullies, and boys are physical bullies. My husband was chased and beaten up until he the beat up the lead bully.

I met my lead bully as an adult. I was surprised to find out that she did not realize she was a bully. She acted as if we were childhood friends. One of her friends apologized to me, so others certainly realized.

Her life did not go as well as my life. I suspect it was because the traits that made her a bully as a child did not work for her as an adult.

Whether you learn something from it or not, the purpose of school is to learn. If you went into work every day and had someone beating you up every day, would you be productive? Probably not (and btw, the only reason we have systems where this happens at all is because of what adults want, not what kids want).

This is absolutely true in my experience. It's the same way that many criminals prey on the smaller/older/weaker in society. Why pick a target that has a good chance of winning in a fight? I'm sure plenty of others have anecdotes, but I fought a bully, won, and they were always friendly after that.

Dang, I was going to post this suggestion as a joke (because “proof that weak people deserve it”—get it?).

>Establishing temporal priority – what come first, bullying victimisation or poor mental health – is an essential first step. Indeed, one important alternative hypothesis that must be ruled out is that early mental health symptoms account for both an increased risk for being targeted by bullying behaviours and also for later psychopathology. Findings so far have shown that over and above early signs of poor mental health prior to bullying victimisation, being bullied in childhood or in adolescence is associated with new symptoms/diagnoses of mental health problems, and especially with later symptoms of anxiety and depression (Arseneault et al., 2006; Bowes, Joinson, Wolke, & Lewis, 2015; Kim, Leventhal, Koh, Hubbard, & Boyce, 2006; Stapinski et al., 2014; Zwierzynska, Wolke, & Leraya, 2013). These studies are robust not only because they controlled for symptoms prior to being bullied but they also controlled for a range of other potential confounders, including gender, parental socioeconomic status and low IQ.

Welcome to the school system.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...

I used to feel that way, but found I was continually having those experiences because of the people I was with, and the expectations I had.

It's possible to have a life surrounded by supportive, loyal, strong and gentle people who treat you with respect.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhosLaughingNow

> Sounds almost like victim blaming.

The public health measures could be directed at the bullies, no?

I think when the article says "that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying" they refer to more health based intervention. Such as helping kids to be healthy and not malnourished, or overweight from eating bad food.

I disagree. They are not suggesting that the interventions specifically target the victims.

This is only true if bullying actually corrects something which is a big logical leap to just leave to an appeal to nature.

> Sounds almost like victim blaming. If true, if there’s something about the bullied that causes them to be bullied, perhaps bullying is actually a form of social correction. Not that nature should be our guide, but often harsh social behavior is functional from an evolutionary standpoint. That said,

A distinction needs to be made between post-facto "victim blaming" and prevention that involves potential victims. Conflating the two leads one to oppose good measures out of an allegiance to an unrealistically perfect, ideologically-motivated fantasy (that social problems can and should be solved only by authorities applying pressure to the "guilty" people").

This isn't really as ambiguous as you present it to be, the obvious answer is "when you do it to them unprovoked, that's what distinguishes bullying from self-defense".

There are scores of comments here describing a strategy that worked for them, it's evidently effective. Have you ever tried what you're preaching with real childhood bullies? I'm naturally skeptical that it's effective to ask an immature victim to play therapist with an immature bully, but I might find it more believable if you mentioned literally any reasoning or evidence at all suggesting it could work.