Were you Bullied? Tell stories

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I hate the schools attitude of "boys will be boys" while they watch and do nothing

I was bullied in my childhood: Teenagers grabbed by my hair and some knock down and kicked me. A classmate bit me and another beat my s**t out (Don't know why).
There is far less physical abuse at high school, because my physical appearance looks intimidating. I remember a girl hit me "kindly" in first year, and my classmates tried to put a bag on my head (It was like a game) two years ago. But there was a lot of verbal abuse too, specially 'cause there's a degrading song with my name.

I was bullied throughout school - property destruction, name calling, jokes, rumors, etc. For some reason, it was a popular hobby for some of the bullies to steal my stuff and destroy it (or hide it, which was less bad). One of the events that stands out the most occurred in junior high. I received several keychains with beanie baby animals on them for Christmas. I love stuffed animals (not so much beanie babies), but my parents thought I would like to have them to put on my school backpack/house key because it helped me to have something soft when I was struggling during the day. (I had a teddy bear purse - yes, apparently I was too old by this point - but it was constantly getting stolen and hidden to the point that the teachers gave me unlimited-time hall passes on a daily basis because it was such a common occurrence and many of them felt bad for me.) Anyway, the first or second day back at school all of my keychains disappeared. I asked around about them, but no one would tell me anything. Finally, on my birthday (Jan one of the boys in my class who'd known me since preschool finally felt bad enough (I think) that he came to me and told me that some of the boys had left the keychains in an abandoned locker. I was so excited that I was going to get them back on my birthday (though I was worried that he'd lied). When I got to the locker and opened it, I found all of the animals had been "murdered" as I termed it and were hanging grotesquely in the locker. It was really horrible what they did to them, and I was so upset by it that I couldn't even get them down. I don't really know what made "completely normal" people come up with some of the things that they did. It was pretty bad. Anyway, I was constantly hurt during this time as well (I'm supremely clumsy), so I got to hobble off all depressed on my birthday.

I didn't get much physical bullying, though I did have my injured ankle kicked occasionally. I was on crutches at least three times during 7th and 8th grade and a couple of times in high school. I almost had to have surgery to repair my right ankle because I kept hurting myself so much.

I don't really know what initially made me such a target. I may be a know-it-all if you get me comfortable around you, but at school I was super quiet. I generally stay out of people's way, though I did seek out social relationships for awhile. One of my best friendships was during junior high, actually. I met another Aspie (though neither of us were diagnosed at the time). She didn't approach people at all and had given up on ever having friends, but I just said okay and we became friends anyway. I didn't understand why it was so easy for us to talk to each other and be around each other until later when I found out that I have Aspergers. She used to draw me as animals, which kind of made the bullying easier to deal with. Also, my school would let kids with injuries leave class early so that they wouldn't have to be jostled about in the hallways by the other kids, and one student from class got to leave early with the injured person to carry his/her stuff. Some of the mean kids would ask the teacher before class if they could be my book person because they wanted to leave class early (especially the class just before lunch), and the teachers often didn't ask me. Then the kids would be really mean to me in the hallways or run off with my stuff. After I became friends with the other Aspie, the teachers started assuming that she would carry my stuff, which she did. It was so much better.

I was mostly homeschooled, but I did stay through a whole year of kindergarden where I had a bully. I don't remember why, nor am I sure if I ever learned why. I just remember one particular instance of her punching me. (I don't think she hit very hard, but I still didn't exactly like being hit either way.)

If you attempted suicide because of bullying, then you weren't dealing with it very well. Your problem is you were letting it effect you, and you shouldn't do that. First off bullies are just negative people. Whether or not they are bulling you or not, you should ignore negative people like that. Focus your attention on people who are positive and will have a positive influence on your life. If you can't find anybody like that, then just take care of yourself.

Max000 wrote:
If you attempted suicide because of bullying, then you weren't dealing with it very well. Your problem is you were letting it effect you, and you shouldn't do that. First off bullies are just negative people. Whether or not they are bulling you or not, you should ignore negative people like that. Focus your attention on people who are positive and will have a positive influence on your life. If you can't find anybody like that, then just take care of yourself.


Max, I can see the logic in your point, however when your life is composed of being bullied and you have no way of meeting / connecting with "positive" people, how are you supposed to "deal with" that? This simplistic advice assumes too black and white an outlook and seems to be frankly, victim-blaming.

Are you seriously saying that nothing's ever upset you, that you've been able to "deal" with everything that's come your way? I see that you'e 52. Do you think the generational difference might be contributing to the harshness of your viewpoint?

Sorry, don't mean to come across aggressive or snarky, genuine question lol

I experienced fairly severe verbal and not as severe physical bullying on a daily basis during preschool and my first 7 years at school, I used to come home crying every day and I would repress the memories of what happened so the next day when my mother mentioned something I had told her the day before I would deny that it had happened because I wouldn't remember. I was bullied and rejected on and off during my high school years, and the bullying finally stopped for good by the end of my first year of college, when I was 20 years old (I think because I had developed my social skills enough).

I don't remember a lot of the verbal bullying due to memory suppression and also because it's more difficult to remember that kind of stuff. Some of my memories:

- Having groups of kids pull my pony tail hard and painfully on a regular basis and then duck out of sight laughing when I turned around.

- Having tanbark thrown at me, stuffed down my neck, and in my hair.

- Being pushed against the fence and forced to recite swear words (because they knew how upsetting I found it).

- Having rubbers, pencils, etc thrown at me in class.

- Kids telling the most popular boy in class (and one of the only people who had ever been kind to me) that I had a crush on him (in grade 6 when boys and girls traditionally kept to themselves and being labeled as having a crush on somebody was social suicide and offensive to the other person).

- Being slapped across the face on several occasions

- Having kids wave their hands in front of my face, saying that I was a hollow shell and there was nobody home, and laughing at me.

- Kids constantly whispering about me and laughing at me in groups nearby wherever I was walking or playing (by myself of course).

- Kids refusing to sit next to me on the bus or hold my hand when we were supposed to walk in pairs to class.

- An older group of kids once surrounded me in the playground convinced me they were interested in hearing me play recorder for them and then when I did laughed at me and mocked me for it.

- Kids making up nasty raps about me and chanting them whenever I was around

- Kids calling me by my last name when everybody else was called by their first name.

- When I was occasionally given money by my parents at lunch to buy hot chips as a special treat the other kids would surround me and eat them all.

- being sprayed with water from the drinking fountains, being shot with water guns and hit with water balloons.

- I really wanted to be accepted by other kids so I said I'd do dares in exchange for kids buying me a 30 cent icypole (per dare) but kids would dare me to do things then laugh at me and not buy me the icypole. I was told to stick my arm into the toilet bowl, run across a busy street, climb a tall fence into a construction site, and tell the same boy mentioned above that I was in love with him in front of him and all his friends, among other things. I did all these things.

Last edited by sunshower on 14 Jun 2013, 3:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

^ this.

I'm fairly sure most kids know the "sticks and stones" drill. Doesn't mean it works.
I knew that I shouldn't let any of it affect me, but fact is, it DID. It hurt being openly disliked by everyone for no apparent reason. It hurt being shunned, teased, and pushed about, feeling that I could do nothing right -- that whatever I did well, no-one would remember or acknowledge, and whatever I did wrong, no-one would let me forget. I knew that no-one was on my side, and that that wasn't getting better.
People often ask me why I never transferred to another school. It's fairly simple -- for one, I felt that if I did, everyone who wanted me gone at my old school (which was fairly good academically) would've "won" (and yes, I'm aware of how ridiculous that sounds). For another, I had absolutely no reason to believe that things would be better at another school ... and at the one I was at, after a while, I at least knew what I could reasonably expect to be done/not done to me.

[ Edited to fix formatting error, sorry about that!]

Last edited by alwaystomorrow on 14 Jun 2013, 4:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

Ignoring bullies doesn't work. The only thing that does work is developing your social skills and making friends so you become less of a target (bullies deliberately target people they sense are vulnerable). Of course this is easier said than done, as I mentioned above it took me 20 years to do this.

The whole "not letting it affect you" thing is also bad advice. It's the same as that god awful saying "sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me". Absolute BS. When thinking back about my experiences with bullying most of the incidents I can remember are the physical ones because they are easier to remember, but in terms of pain/trauma there's no question in my mind that the verbal and emotional bullying was far worse.

Bullying does and will affect you and damage you, and the best thing to do is not to blame yourself as the bullies are the ones at fault. Attempting suicide doesn't mean YOU screwed up, or YOU were weak or let it affect you, it means that your situation was particularly bad and you coped with it in the only way that you knew how at the time. The bullies are the ones at fault.

The advice about surrounding oneself with positive people is good advice. The best thing you can do for yourself is to try and make true friends, try and be around people who are kind to you and help boost your self esteem. If you don't have any friends, the best thing you can do is try and educate yourself and learn social skills - read books about social skills, read books on body language, ask advice from your parents. Try and be as nice as you can to the other kids at school, even the ones who bully you, and eventually some may start being nice back.

^ this.

I'm fairly sure most kids know the "sticks and stones" drill. Doesn't mean it works.
I knew that I shouldn't let any of it affect me, but fact is, it DID. It hurt being openly disliked by everyone for no apparent reason. It hurt being shunned, teased, and pushed about, feeling that I could do nothing right -- that whatever I did well, no-one would remember or acknowledge, and whatever I did wrong, no-one would let me forget. I knew that no-one was on my side, and that that wasn't getting better.
People often ask me why I never transferred to another school. It's fairly simple -- for one, I felt that if I did, everyone who wanted me gone at my old school (which was fairly good academically) would've "won" (and yes, I'm aware of how ridiculous that sounds). For another, I had absolutely no reason to believe that things would be better at another school ... and at the one I was at, after a while, I at least knew what I could reasonably expect to be done/not done to me.[/quote]

It is as you say; the bullying for me got so bad that at the end of grade 4 I transferred to another school, but I was bullied at the new school just the same.

The best way to heal is to accept your past experiences and not suppress your pain and hurt, express and release it as best you can in art or writing, and try to be the better person in spite of it - let you define you and not the bullies. Building up your self esteem does wonders, but to do that you need friends, and to get friends you need social skills. So best plan of action is social skills -> friends -> increased self-esteem -> building a new sense of self for the future.

If you're really struggling with social skills then the most basic thing you can do is just to try and be as nice as possible to everyone, and it will hurt when you get rejected in response, but eventually you may get through to someone.

I fail to see where I'm victim-blaming. The blame is clearly on the bullies, but how does that help the victims? I guess it comes down to you have two choices. Do you want to deal with it, or do you want the bullying to destroy your life. Personally I choose not to let it destroy my life.

I will admit though, that I really can't understand people who let this stuff get to them. It's baffling to me.



I assume you mean nothing a bully did has ever upset me? Nothing that I can think of since about the first grade. What people say about me positive or negative is of no concern to me. I could care less what people think or say about me. If somebody wants to talk s**t about me, I will probably just laugh at them. And I don't need friends so I don't even care if people like me or not.

This may be due to the fact that people don't "let this stuff get to them." Most people don't get a choice, and the skills necessary to mindfully manage one's state of mind while in a constant psychological state of emergency (read: experiencing trauma) is something that is often not learned until adulthood, if it is learned at all.

You're under the mistaken impression that people choose their emotional responses and are able to control them - but that is simply not true.

You're victim blaming by telling Sweetleaf this:



Please tell me how you're not telling Sweetleaf that it is her fault for being suicidal after dealing with bullying? I am curious how "You were letting it affect you, and you shouldn't do that" is not in any way telling Sweetleaf that she is responsible for experiencing the trauma that was inflicted on her?



This right here tells me that you probably haven't been severely bullied, because it's not simply "talking s**t" about you. If you see bullying as "people saying negative things about me" then you've got it confused with gossip. Now, the two can and do happen in tandem, but bullying is more severe mistreatment than having people talk s**t about you.

I wonder if you've ever actually been bullied, as opposed to just having people not like you. I don't really care if people don't like me. It bothers me when people lie about me, especially since I have had multiple experiences in my life where such lies were believed. However, when I've been bullied, it's psychological abuse, physical abuse, harassment, assault, battery, attempts at social manipulation, finding ways to get me into trouble while they get away with it, doing whatever they can to strip away whatever sense of safety or security I had. That's bullying, not "talking s**t."

And I simply didn't have the tools to understand why I was being so violently rejected all throughout school, from kindergarten to my final year in high school. Why friends would turn on me, or why people I didn't know or care about would threaten me or attack me or whatever. No one bothered to explain what was going on, so it was random, and being random made it worse because I never knew when something would happen or if things would be calm.

Ignoring them didn't make it stop - they didn't go away. They escalated. Plus, it was hard to just "ignore" having things stolen, being cornered and verbally or physically attacked, having teachers get in on the verbal bullying in classes where I was supposed to be learning the subject (and failing to do so). I am not an emotional person. I do not display emotion as a general rule, and when I was bullied, I didn't react, but that didn't make a difference, because they would keep at it.
So, anyway, just to clarify:

If people just talked s**t about you and didn't like you, that was not bullying. Trying to compare those experiences to actual severe bullying as if they're equal will result in nonsensical results, such as your statements above.

Last edited by Verdandi on 14 Jun 2013, 5:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

I disagree about social skills and having friends being a deterrent to bullying. I've seen many people who have excellent social skills still get bullied. Friends are of limited help to prevent getting bullied. Often one group of friends will bully another group of friends.

I actually think that my being introvert and autistic helped me get through bulling in school. Since I really didn't need any friends in school, being excluded from any social groups really didn't bother me. If other kids wanted to be my friend wanted to be my friend, that was fine. If they didn't thats was fine too.

I said "seems to be victim blaming" because that's how your initial statement came across as it appeared devoid of sympathy or compassion. If that's just how you are, I apologise for misunderstanding. (Edit: Misunderstanding driven by my own terms of reference, I suspect)

I can't get my head around how nothing can have bothered you since the 1st grade though How would you have dealt with living in constant fear and terror at home, so there is no refuge in any aspect of your life, then things like, I dunno, the usual getting the s**t beat out of you by a bunch of people and then being the one punished because they all tell the teacher you started it, or being chased around a playground by a group of around a dozen with a baseball bat, having your face stamped on, being deliberately set up for humiliations by that nastiest of creatures, the teenage girl, being bullied by a pupil who blatantly gets away with it because he represents the school at sports ( I dealt with HIM, eventually, much to the delight and acclamation of other victims), having people come to your neighbourhood specifically to terrorise you, before you consider all the nasty little, and not-so little, mind games and verbal stuff. I'm going to stop that right there, because despite being mentally calm, my body's upset and shaking now

What, were you 5'8" by the first grade and hospitalised the first bully that had a go at you? What? I've got a 9 year old son with AS/ASD and he's moving school this summer when his mother moves to another county. His school life has paralleled mine so far, and I'm struggling with his pain, because I don't have answers for him! "Sticks & Stones..." won't cut it, I'm afraid, not for him at least. I've not long sat him down and started to discuss some of the reasons why he is treated the way he is, but this is new, big scary territory for both of us!

I mean no disrespect, if you felt that you had an untroubled school life, which the way you come across seems to say, frankly I envy you! I've had 40 odd years for my skin to thicken, but still now all it will do is hold in a barb till I can get home and pull it out to bleed! I go between 'puppy dog-style "don't hurt me" to murderous rage / scariness ( actually, simply losing it - I can't "plan" aggression) as my main defence/survival mechanisms, and there's little I've ever been able to do about it!

If there's a secret, please, fess up! I'm sure I'm not the only one here who would love to know of an easy way. Exactly HOW did you manage not to be bothered?

That old saying "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me" sounds nice but for a sensitive little kid that doesn't know how to be any tougher words can hurt a lot, plus bullying isn't always just a bit of name calling.

To go with that saying I actually had boys throwing rocks at me once when I was walking home from school.

Saying that a reaction is wrong and that you just need to get over it does seem like victim blaming. The victims of bullies don't choose to be miserable and traumatized. They can't help it. I had a school counselor in sixth grade say that the other kids didn't like me and treated me the way I did because of the way I acted. I didn't know how to act any other way and she never even gave me any advice on how to attempt to change things.

I've had people on this forum tell me that they somehow control their emotions and choose which ones to have. I can't do that. I may be able to hide an emotion by having a flat affect or don't always have the emotions people would expect but that doesn't mean I can control them.

My bullying wasn't as severe as others here (I've read some stories here that were so bad that the bullies should have been arrested even though they were minors) but I had a lot of verbal abuse and shunning from nearly all of the kids in school (throughout school I only had 1 friend who ditched me in sixth grade) but there was some physical bullying too. I was that kid in the school that everyone bullied and hated. I had to skip school to get away from it and that caused me more problems.

I dono, I guess I grew up hearing Sticks & Stones, and I believed it. So verbal bullying had no effect on me. That plus as I said, I have never cared what others think or say about me. They might be able to piss me off, but they can't hurt my feelings.

Bullying is unfortunately a part of human nature. It's been going on a long time. I think people just have to learn to cope with it.