People normalizing bullying you got as a child

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I was a very small kid till I grew about 6 inches when I was 15. Before that, my experience is much the same. Despite my small size, I started going rabid chihuahua on my persecutors. Once my reputation changed from "weak, weird little kid" to "psycho little kid," I mostly got left alone.

This guy knows what the f**k he's talking about.

check your pms boi

I would get in trouble for standing up for myself and I was getting into fights and my school wanted me in a behavior program so my parents had to get a lawyer. They thought I had to toughen up. No one at school wanted to help me and they didn't take it seriously. The staff probably thought I was dealing with normal kid teasing and stuff than me being targeted and harassed and taken advantage of and I didn't always know kids were being mean to me. It left me to a point where I had a hard time trusting anyone and I would be jaded to take things from other kids when they would give me a piece of candy or something because I didn't know they had done something to it and were waiting for me to put it in my mouth to laugh and tell me they had farted on it or say on it or something and then go telling other kids so they could think I was stupid because I fell for it. Also I have anxiety so that affects how you process and handle things. I guess me getting into trouble by adults who were supposed to help me made me more of a target because they now saw they can get me into trouble. Good everything worked out for you and you standing up for yourself got everyone to leave you alone and you had adults on your side than them telling you to toughen up and be no help. It took for the AS diagnoses and my parents threatening to sue because they had a lawsuit and my therapist coming to my school to finally end the bullying. Then kids finally left me alone in 6th grade and then we moved. Then I would misinterpret other kids intentions as them picking on me so I stood up for myself to make them afraid of me but that didn't work. My mom sees me as the bully even though I thought I was being harassed. But that is how aspie kids can come off as bullies because they misread intentions. Then that makes them a target for being singled out because kids then think they're mean or kids start to bully them because they see they can get them upset easily and start to actually target them just t get them upset and then the adults are no help because they don't understand the child. Instead they get mad at the child for reacting to the playful teasing and for getting upset. But that comes off to the aspie as the adults sticking up for the bullies and siding with them and that can lead to them having trust issues.

I say the only time a bully has actually left me alone was when I told one of them to look stupid up in the dictionary because it had a picture of him and any name he called me I told him to look it up because it had a picture of him and this was all scripted my mother taught me. He went running home crying to his mother and he never bothered me again. But that won't work on everyone because when I tried the same thing with a bully online I did to my old best friend, it didn't work while it worked with my old friend and that was me telling her how happy I am that she doesn't like me because that means she won't talk to me or look at me or call me on the phone or come to my house and her only response was "you're stupid" and for some reason that remark didn't bother me. That was also scripted too by my mother because she taught me to say it.

well, maybe it's normal for children to be mean to easy target children, maybe this is in humans nature to be mean when you can, and there is a lot of examples .. like in wars for example they can do the worst things to other weak people.
so maybe it's normal, but it isn't okay at all, and it needs to stop, there is no reason for this to continue.
and it can't be the fault of the target, that is nonsense.
it can actually stop if the parent's teach their children who to behave, in my class there was no bullying, the worst thing that could happen is for a girl not to find close friends because she is annoying or her School Performance is very poor.. ect, but they won't be really mean to her or ignore her compeletly if she wanted to talk to them, one time a girl hid something that belonged to her friend in another unpopular girl's bag, and her friend was really angry with her when they found out what happened, and as we grow older it became better not worse like i hear about what happens usually in high school.

if there was bullying in my class i am sure i could have been a target, because in my first two years i was one of those girls who had no friends, but i had the chance to learn how to have a friend, and even without talking with the rest of the class i was able to gain some self esteem from my drawing because my classmates liked my drawing, i think i wouldn't be the same person if my classmates worked on destroying my self esteem when i was younger, fragile and weak, especially because i had no social skills, was lost and didn't know who to fit in, and i could see who all the girls inreacted so easily with each other, and felt like they were just somewhat better than me and that i was a coward.

it must have been hard on you, when what you really needed was help and encouragement not teasing.
maybe it's not that hard for an NT kid, maybe he can deal whith "some" teasing when he already have friends and normal self esteem.

it's just wierd to think of high school students bullying, because they are older they should be wise, but the reailty is that they do, becasue they can, and nobody stops them, just some stupid humans.


anyway, an important thing is to not get too deep in the victim mood, it will just make it seem worse.

Last edited by Scheimaa on 23 Apr 2017, 10:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.

some bullies won't learn in this lifetime. a lucky [or unlucky] few, such as Danion Brinkley, are shown by the supreme disciplinarian-in-chief, the error of their ways in a manner they can not ignore.

I'm familiar with this. For me, the normalizing of bullying when I was a kid came from my own parents. I had a relative who was about twice my age ( 5 vs. 10 years old) who smothered me on the living room floor one day with a pillow. When I fled to the hall, crying, my mom simply got angry, and I was told that I should be tougher basically. They were in the room when it happened, and didn't offer any help or sympathy.

Because I naively trusted another boy on the school bus, and gave up one of my possessions as a result of his machinations, my mom also got angry again, and she belted me. She didn't really ask questions as to why I did it or anything. It was a pretty instant reaction.

It's one thing when peers do it, and quite another when parents decide to normalize bullying. It's interesting how it was always something wrong with me or my fault. I'm not sure what effect this has had on me. I still remember both incidents quite vividly, though.

have you forgiven your mother for all that lack of support? I would not have.

my mother does it and she keeps all time telling about those people I want to forget and she doesn't understand why I want to avoid them, she keep telling me how everyone makes fun of everyone but they did grew out of this and are friends... but she never thinks that I went thru a much more systematic """fun""" and people actually never offered any interest in becoming friend with me after all.

it makes me real sad because all this people are nice and successful now and I feel they are a bit guilty about how I'm now

I know that nobody who mistreated me has any misgivings or sorrow whatsoever.

She actually died a few years later. So she's been gone around twenty years now. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure what I would do if she were around. I feel like I've moved past that point in my life. It's not something I could go back to even if I wanted.

Life is what it is. I had some good times with her. Do I forgive her? I dunno if I even knew her well enough at that age to be able to know what I would be forgiving.

I would really like to believe that. In my (and I am sure many WP members) case, it wasn't a case of harmless fun gone too far. The bullies knew exactly what they were doing, they knew the pain it was causing and they just didn't care. The followers were worse: they committed what I now know are crimes against me just to protect themselves against being targeted and the teachers deliberately turned a blind eye to protect their jobs (one of the bullies had powerful parents).

It does drive me crazy when I was told that it was my fault for not standing up to them. The one time I did, *I* was the one who got into trouble and the bullies pulled the best acting performance I have ever seen (didn't help the two worst bullies at the time were the two shortest boys and I was the tallest). My the time I realized I had to stand up legal consequences be damned I was usually attacked by 6-8 kids at a time. How are you supposed to defend yourself then?

I honestly think if you were to sit my bullies down they would probably say I deserved it and they have exactly zero remorse.

I honestly believe we live in a sociopathic culture and that sociopaths are vastly undercounted here.

I hate it when people do that. I remember when me and my dad were having an argument about me not talking to people enough, I told them that it was hard for me to do it because of my anxiety and low self esteem. He asked me why I had low self esteem and I told them that I was bullied in elementary school and that kids would always call me ret*d and say that they didn't like me. When I told him, he told me to get over and stop being so sensitive. He also said that because this happened long ago, that this shouldn't still be affecting me. I was angry because I felt that he was being dismissive of my feelings and that he thought that my problems meant nothing. Bullying shouldn't be treated as something that's normal and that you grow out of with age. People should just listen to you and not be so judgmental. The effects of my childhood bullying today resulted in generalized anxiety, social anxiety, low self esteem, negative thoughts and an inferiority complex.

Me too.

I was one of a group of bullies, as well as a victim or "survivor" of bullying from aged about 7 to 12 and I've wondered if I should make contact over Facebook and apologise. What makes it even worse is we were all boys bullying a girl. One who in retrospect might have been being neglected at home judging by her smell and appearance... and knowing what I know now, was probably on the Autistic spectrum. I wasn't suspected of having Asperger's at that stage, to my knowledge. Just "behavioural issues"...
I've never really spoken of this but feel very guilty for my part in how this girl was treated and how I allowed classmates to torment her.