BULLYING
by Dr. Daniel A. Bochner
Bullying is awful. Just hearing the word twists our stomachs, doesn’t
it? Certainly there have been significant efforts to put a stop to bullying.
Yet it seems to be a stubborn problem stemming from developmental
processes in children as well as the nature of society. Bullying is sometimes
significantly reduced by school and community administrators who
successfully create a culture among our kids that views intimidation as
“uncool,” but such an accomplishment is relatively rare and requires
significant parental involvement. Successfully preventing the desire to bully
within the bully himself, presents a more complex issue due to difficulty in
truly understanding the bully. The most frustrating part of the puzzle by far,
however, is that the suggestions for the victims of bullying are quite often
almost useless. So lets look at each of these areas one by one to see if it’s
possible to get a better handle on the problem (for the remainder of this
article, bullies, victims, and administrators will be referred to in the male
form for the purpose of clarity).
The first thing to understand about bullying is that it stems from a
natural human desire for dominance. Dominance is built into us as animals,
as is the need to work with one another because communal efforts lead to
cultural development and all sorts of progress. We need leaders and we
need workers, and that’s just the way it is. In many ways we do our best to
level these traits in our children when they’re very young. On the one hand,
we want our children to get along with other kids and, for example, be good
sharers. On the other hand, however, we teach our children to compete and
we want them to have a desire to win. Is there really any parent who
wouldn’t want their child to be a “leader” among his friends? We do know,
however, that there are many ways to be a leader, and many of them are not
very good. We want our children to lead from the front with good judgment
and good influence on their peers, but certainly there are many children who
are leading from the rear, trying to get other kids to do things that are unsafe
or bad for them. Many bullies intimidate and demean others for the express
purpose of leading, and entertaining other kids, in a negative direction. But
the desire to bully always comes back to the common and natural human
desire to dominate.
The need to dominate in a bullying fashion, that is the need to
intimidate others, essentially comes from poorly balanced character or lack
of integrity within one’s personality (please see article, The Power and
Control Addiction). This absence of balance and integrity can come from a
variety of factors, including inborn intensity combined with relatively minor
difficulties at home, or very bad problems at home which manifest in poor
balance of character regardless of the genetic level of intensity. Sometimes
there exists within an individual a significant inborn intensity combined with
very bad problems at home. Such a combination leads to the most vicious
kind of bullies. The problem is even worse when a child is born with
significantly good social ability. We have all known children who seem to
understand social situations better than we do and who swim through every
social challenge. When these especially socially skilled children are
especially intense and/or have certain kinds of problems at home, there can
be especially cruel, and sometimes very complex forms of bullying.
From a developmental perspective, it is easy to observe certain stages
where bullying is more or less serious. Clearly bullying occurs before fifth
grade and even in a very immature fashion within the pre-school years, but
the bullying seen in the middle school years is typically the very worst. Of
course, the high school years can also be quite rough. There are very good
developmental reasons for why these years are so bad. At the very same
time that children are gaining a better understanding of the world around
them, they are simultaneously feeling more vulnerable than they have ever
felt before. At this age responsibilities grow and puberty makes sexual
attraction a focal point. Between the ages of 11 and 14 the ability to think
more abstractly develops extremely quickly right along side the sexual
awakening.
This development of the mind is great in that kids can learn to look for
symbolism in literature and can start to figure out algebra, but what is not so
great is that they are developing the thinking power of little adults, even
though they still feel very much like little children. It is obviously quite
common to have young teens acting as though they think they’re smarter
than their parents. In a way, that makes sense since they roughly double
their thinking capacity within one to two years. With their sudden increase
in intelligence kids do not think, “wow, I must have been really stupid
before.” Instead, they think, “Wow, I’m so smart now I really must be
smarter than everyone - certainly I must be smarter than my stupid
parents.”
This increased intellectual capacity makes kids think they should be
able to handle much more than they have ever before. In fact, parents and
teachers start heaping on the responsibilities, and increase expectations at the
same time. In addition, the sexual awakening of this age makes early teens
want to be more like adults as well. Since all of this happens simultaneously,
it's actually very scary for kids who don’t really feel that much more capable
in the maturity arena than they had been just a few years prior.
Unfortunately, they aren’t able to admit to this feeling of vulnerability, which
they would view as making them more childlike at a time when they so
desperately want to feel like adults. Thus, they resort to behavior that
makes them feel the opposite of vulnerable.
Bullying becomes an alternative to feeling vulnerable and weak in the
face of seemingly insurmountable new challenges that are supposed to be
“no big deal.” In the kids who are already prone to bullying, as outlined
above, the need to be dominant becomes overwhelming. These kids need to
bully in order to feel any sense of adequacy at all. In the case of those with
natural social ability, it simply becomes such an easy way to fend off the
vulnerability of the early teen years that bullying is used with immediacy and
very little thought to successfully establish dominance as an alternative to
being as childish as one really feels.
With individual personality integration and childhood development as
they are, it is amazing how successful some schools have been in creating a
culture where bullying is simply not “cool.” Although the transformation in
teens is not complete anywhere, when school administrators truly focus on
developing a caring atmosphere within our schools, and when they put
serious consequences in place against bullying, most kids tend to fall into
line. So far, this has been possible really only in places where there is a
homogeneously high level of parental involvement. Only with parental
involvement will kids have to care about their parents’ opinions enough to
care about the opinions of teachers or the consequences their teachers give.
When the culture of the school has not, or is not enough to, overcome
bullying, the question remains what to do about the bully and his victim.
Starting with the bully, it is important to understand that his efforts to fend
off vulnerability or fear are completely unconscious. That is, the bully thinks
of himself as dominant and strong – in fact, that is the whole purpose of his
behavior. The bully does not know that he feels weak and vulnerable. This
is true even in cases where the child is abused by a dominating parent. In
those cases the bully simply sees himself as doing what his parent does. He
doesn’t understand what the behavior accomplishes for him (or for his
parent either).
The trick to helping the bully overcome his behavior is very
complicated. It requires that he see and feel the pain of his victims so that
he can feel some shame and take some responsibility. Shame, believe it or
not, is the simple antidote to bullying. It connects the bully to his own
feelings of vulnerability and weakness. And thus, it connects him to the
feelings engendered by his bullying. In fact, the administrator or teacher
dealing with a bully will typically find that the bully seems almost incapable
of taking any responsibility or feeling any shame for what he has done.
When the bully does say the right thing, it is rarely if ever heartfelt. It is
evidence of just how much the bully needs to feel dominant that he seems so
incapable of being sorry for what he does.
Further complicating the issue, the victims typically cannot be expected
to make the vulnerable statements that are necessary to get through to the
bully, get him to see how his behavior has hurt someone, and to help him
understand why he should be ashamed. Instead, administrators must do
their best to get the bully to put himself in the shoes of the victim. For those
bullies that face such treatment at home, this can be an especially painful,
but necessary, process, as the bully breaks down into his shame while he
comes to terms with exactly how pathetic and weak he really feels.
One final way to get bullies to feel proper shame is for adults to notice
when the bully’s behavior makes the adult himself, feel vulnerable. At that
point, if that adult is capable of staying in their role of authority as parent or
administrator, while simultaneously remaining vulnerable and true to their
own experience, the authority must communicate to the bully how the bully’
s behavior has been hurtful to the authority. Once the bully is able to
communicate an understanding of how their behavior effected the adult
personally, the adult must follow through with appropriate consequences
even within the context of being hurt (please see article “Communication
From the Heart”). It is absolutely essential that a consequence be given so
that the incident will be taken seriously. Merely thinking that the bully seems
to truly understand is not the only consideration. When people are truly
sorry and ashamed, they actually benefit from the feeling of compensating
for their behavior. Thus, if the consequence involves some form of
reparation, it is especially useful.
Finally, and most perplexing, figuring out how to help the victim is
extremely complex. We have all known the kind of kid who almost seems to
be a magnet for bullies (those who seem sullen or different or who get hurt
very easily). However, there are also many kids who are bullied just
because it is so obvious that they deeply care what other kids think. Some
kids are simply shy or sweet and find it almost impossible to be mean, which
leaves them totally defenseless when more dominant and spontaneously
mean kids challenge them with cruelty. So how do we talk to these kids
about getting out of the victim situation?
In an abstract sense, it is easy to see that self-esteem is the culprit. If a
kid who has been bullied starts to feel really good about himself, either due
to therapy or a change in his life, the bullying invariably vanishes. When a
kid feels good about himself, it simply doesn't make sense to him that other
kids are treating him like he’s something he’s not, such as pathetic, useless,
or idiotic. Thus, he won’t react to bullying in the way the bully wants and
needs. That is, the bully expects his victim to act afraid or pathetic, but if
the victim is neither afraid nor pathetic and, in contrast, feels confident, his
reaction to the bully will not be satisfying to the bully. The bully will then
lose interest and choose another victim.
The problem in this easy truth, however, is that we cannot typically get
the victim to develop a sudden burst of confidence. We typically deal with
our own frustration about the victim's difficulties by suggesting that the
victim defend himself with nastiness equal to that of they bully, which the
victim is incapable of enacting because he is generally too nice. The worst
thing we suggest, or that victims sometimes try to do, is come up with
“comebacks” to ugly bully comments. From a child who is not feeling
confident, “comebacks” will always fall flat, and will ultimately play into the
hands of the bully who invents his next line with the alacrity and enthusiasm
of a grand master chess player eyeing checkmate, and with the iniquity of
the most venomous snake. Victims are not pathetic, but their ability to be
mean, even with the best pre-fabricated lines, is typically non-existent. Most
victims are automatically nice and only think of the mean things they could
have said after the incident is over. Simply put, they don’t want to hurt
anyone. In contrast, the bully takes pride in being viperous and has become
very skilled at it. The victim is simply not going to win by engaging the bully
on the bully’s terms. The bully will always be better at verbal jousting than
your typical victim.
There are, however, some simple tactics the victim can use. Although
victims are quite awkward in inventing derisive or contemptuous slams,
slights or even snubs, they certainly can act more confident. He can learn to
act like he doesn’t care and like the bully doesn’t matter. He can act, and
hopefully become, indifferent. Of course, we all know even that is difficult,
but it is far easier than “comebacks.” If you watch the kids who are not
bullied, but who themselves don’t bully, it can be observed that they are
simply able to look a bully in the eye, seemingly without fear, and walk
away. Sometimes they are particularly effective with a disappointed shake
of the head or a one word expression of distaste (yichhkkkkkk! Or
Wowww!?!) and then a turn away. No one ever, however, really achieves
success in dealing with a bully when they decide to engage in mutual insults,
unless they themselves enjoy bullying.
The bully only bullies if he is capable of making his victim feel the
feelings he doesn’t want to feel. He wants to be dominant which requires
that someone must be weak and/or submissive so he won't feel that way.
All the potential victim must do to frustrate bullying is to behave like he is
not weak or feeble no matter what the bully does, and the bully will move on
to someone else. Behaviors that communicate indifferent strength are the
key and include: 1. looking the bully in the eye without fear; 2. thinking to
ones self, but in a way that can be read in ones behavior, that the bully is
behaving foolishly; and 3. successfully acting like the bully is foolish, but
without calling the bully foolish. These behaviors can easily be practiced at
home. Because they involve only facial expressions and body language, they
do not require a quick wit, a better “comeback,” or even real confidence.
When they are successful, however, behaviors that show indifference toward
bullying will, indeed, help the victim build very real confidence and self-
esteem.
While bullying is a complex social phenomenon, it can be understood
more fully. Great strides have been made in developing more supportive
cultures in middle schools and high schools. There is a lot of room,
however, to handle bullies and their victims in more helpful ways. The key
to helping bullies is in getting them to feel shame and take responsibility,
which puts them in touch with their own vulnerability. The key to helping
victims is to keep our advice very simple - the victim must be able to
confidently behave as though the bully’s behavior is not having the bully's
desired effect. To make this problem really disappear we all have to look it
in the eye and accept our own vulnerability. Only by seeing and accepting
our own vulnerability can we hope to get the bully to see his vulnerability.
Only by accepting our own vulnerability, instead of trying to get the victim to
act strong like we might think we are, can we get the victim to see that he
can look the bully in the eye himself because, truly, all there really is to fear
in dealing with the bully is fear itself.