Why Me?

2nd June 2003

As a victim of bullying your mind is often full of questions: what is bullying? Why is it happening to me? What Have I Ever Done To You? To answer them you have to cut right through to what the bully really wants. All of us regardless of whether we have experienced bullying or not, carry the image in our heads of the bigger bully hitting the small victim. All of us at some point will have felt putdown by someone or perhaps been excluded and felt left out. We know that physical, mental and relational are the three forms bullying can take. But what bullying is about to me is even simpler, to me it can be broken down into one word 'Intention'.

Bullying is about intention:

There is a difference with regards the comments people make between what is bullying and what is not. Our friends and family members will probably all at one point joked with us, taken the mickey, said things just to wind us up. I know mine have! Habitual bullies however don’t do it to make you smile; it’s just the opposite. Their comments and actions have a different intention…they intend to hurt you, they want to cause you pain, they want to see you look unhappy, they enjoy seeing fear. Their intention is bad, the comments of friends however are said without malice, their intention is good, and they just want to joke with you. To a habituated victim however these lines will become blurred and a distinction becomes very hard to draw. The distinction often becomes irrelevant anyway as everything said and done can feel like bullying. When a number of people are doing it at school you get very sensitive to everything said to you and the last thing you’re in the mood for when you get home is for friends and family members trying to wind you up.

Pretty soon you become paranoid and see the situation as yourself, alone against the whole world. It doesn’t take long; the situation develops to the point that you withdraw as much as possible from people so they cannot hurt you. This becomes your solution, your method of survival. Hindsight taught me that this ‘solution’ only hurt me more as I missed out on so much growing up. Continual bullying will effect your entire life, leave it unchallenged and pretty soon there will be very few hiding places.

How does bullying do this?

Every day that goes by with no effort by the victim to help themselves and stop the bully’s negative impact drags them further into the game. The longer you stay playing it the harder it is to leave. If your dealing with a bully and you can see through them, you can see their intention is bad then you need to do something positive about it. In my own experience if you leave the bullying unchallenged things could get very unhappy for you very quickly until life is the very last place you want to live.

I think boxing is a good analogy for this. If you imagine two boxers in the ring and one of them comes out aggressively and throws punch after punch, the opponent bobs and weaves and tries to evade each punch but does not throw any back. Sooner rather than later he is going to have to fight back or he will get worn down and lose. I think the same applies to a bully when they insult you, threaten you, put you down. Everytime you let it go and do nothing about the problem it increases. No matter how confident you are when it starts or how easily you think you can laugh it off. Sooner or later if you do nothing the comments will start getting through and will start to drag you down. You could wait and hope that the bully will get bored and stop, maybe they will but that wouldn’t leave you in control. If they are left to stop of their own accord they can just as easily start again whenever they like and you still won’t be in control.

What I’m saying is that you must not leave this problem alone and hope it goes away. Once you’ve seen clearly the bully’s intention and recognised that someone is bullying you then take action straight away to stop it. Bullying can and does destroy people’s confidence, people’s happiness, people’s entire lives. Please don’t allow anyone do this to you. There is help and good advice all around if you resolve not to accept the bullying and seek it out.

The bully’s intention is to hurt you, we’ll take that as a given. More importantly, what is yours? What’s your intention? Do you intend to let the bully pick away at you whenever they like, causing you untold happiness and misery? Or are you going to stand up and declare a stronger intention? An intention to confront the problem, to not accept the negative feelings the bully is trying to transfer onto you. An intention that will help you stop the bullying before any damage to you is done.

- Bullying is all about intention.
- The bully intends to cause you pain.
- Whether or not they achieve this is all down to YOUR intention. The choice is yours?

For more information on the psychological effects of bullying and workable solutions to the problem please refer to Rob’s book What Have I Ever Done To You?