Bullies have been on my mind lately, and it has nothing to do with the flap over the rating of the movie “Bully,” which opens Friday.
Let me backtrack.
I lost my voice last week, right before I was to give a talk before the Women’s Power Strategy Conference in San Rafael, organized by the amazing Patricia V. Davis, and I had to cancel my talk. That was distressing to me (and probably more so to Patricia), but as so often happens there was a silver lining to my cloud. I called my friend and former co-worker Jennifer Gennari, who has a middle-school-age book coming out this spring, My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer, to fill in for me. Boy did she! 
While I knew her book involved a girl who has two mothers, I didn’t know it was also about bullying and that it was based on a real-life experience Jennifer had in her own community. Needless to say, her talk was lively and timely, and I so appreciated the honesty of the teens who attended her talk when they were asked about their experiences about being bullied.
Then, I was reading the IJ and came upon a story that distressed me. A boy I had known since he and my son were in kindergarten together was arrested for robbery and drug possession. There was nothing bad about this boy, but he was big — much bigger than his classmates — throughout his life, and that made him a target of taunts and teasing.
In other words, bullying.
I can’t definitively connect the dots, but I can’t help but think that years of being ostracized and picked on led to some serious self-esteem issues he carried with him into young adulthood. How could they not? Indeed, Patricia McDougall’s article “What Happens Over Time to Those Who Bully and Those Who Are Victimized?” indicates that while many bullying victims said that their unhappiness and shame decreased over time, others who remembered bullying as intensely painful continued to show low self-esteem, depression, pathological perfection and greater neuroticism as adults — the kind of feelings that could lead one to get mixed up in a robbery and drug possession arrest.
There have been other kids my boys and I knew who were picked on for being different; two ended up killing themselves.
And I question why the parents of the bullies, why we as a school community and, most important, why I, didn’t do more to stop the bullying — just as the incident that Jennifer experienced made her wish she had done more. I am frustrated and angry at myself, but now it is too late.
That’s why I loved yesterday’s story about a teenager who wrote about being bullied on Reddit, leading to the bully’s arrest. As much as I have a love/hate with social media, in this instance it worked. Still, no one should even have to get to that point.
More needs to be done to stop bullying. As Jennifer said in her talk, it has to come from us — every one of us.
Of course, when we think about bullies we think about kids — they do most of the bullying, right? Not really. Adults bully, too. More than a third of adults have been bullied in their workplace, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute (and I never even knew that group existed).
But it happens outside the workplace, too, as I know all too well; for the past two-plus years, I have been bullied by my sibling, which I alluded to in my Mommy Tracked columns “It’s Not Fair!” and “Mom Loves You Best.” While a parent may come to the rescue of a bullied child, there is no one who can come to the rescue of a bullied adult — except the bullied adult herself. And that is what I have been trying to do.
It’s been exhausting and stressful nonetheless. There isn’t much that you can do to keep emotional bullying away except remove yourself from that person’s presence and perhaps block emails and phone calls and, if you can, get restraining orders but those are hard to get between siblings, especially for just emotional abuse. But if you have an aging parent in a nursing home — as I do — there are complications if you cut off all communication with family, too. All the nurses and doctors just want the family members to get along so you don’t complicate their lives. I get it.
But I also get how hard it is to try to get out of a bullying situation. And remain in it.
- What’s your story about bullies?
- What can we do better to stop bullying?
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Twitter: jengenn
says:
Thanks, Vicki, for your thoughtful response. It is terrible to see–and it always makes me wish we could give everyone a healthy dose of confidence and compassion so we learn to stand up for ourselves and stop being mean!
One minor point–MY MIXED-UP BERRY BLUE SUMMER, which will be available May 8, is for middle grade readers. There’s so little fiction for this age group (9 to 12) I’m proud to be providing a story for young people who might be having a tough time in middle school.
Twitter: OMGchronicles
says:
Jen, I was going to email you about this but you were right on top of it! I’ve made the change about the age the book is for (sorry), and, yes — middle-schoolers will greatly appreciate the topic.
Twitter: lynnhenriksen.com
says:
Yes, and sometimes mothers are bullies of the worst kind. I have a good example of a “momma bully” in a collection of stories I’ve gathered over the years, written by a woman who really had no way to stop her mother’s bullying until she was old enough to move away from home. But the pain stayed with her for years, even after earning a degree in psychology and undergoing therapy where she tried to forgive and made excuses for her mother’s behavior. This is what she had to say to me after writing her mother memoir, “Telling this story was a good experience for me, and I’ve since done much soul searching and writing, exploring the negative experiences in the relationship between my mother and myself. I now realize that the pain around my relationship with her is gone. What I’m left with today is called health!”
Vicki, I hope this woman’s experience will encourage your readers in the “write” direction. Thanks for the thoughtful post.
Twitter: lynnhenriksen.com
says:
P.S. I’m sending warm thoughts in your direction for what you’re personally dealing with right now!
Twitter: OMGchronicles
says:
Thanks for writing, Lynn, and for your warm wishes.
How horrible to grow up with a bullying parent; I think that would set the stage for a child to be unable to trust any adult figure. Telling our story is extremely cathartic, as I know you know. Good luck with your memoir series.