Fascinating article about bullying

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Hi guys,

I found this article about bullying on Psychology Today's website. It has some information on both the sources of and solutions to bullying that might be helpful to anyone who is suffering from bullying. Feel free to take a look: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles ... -bad-bully

Psychology Today also has some articles on social life that I found helpful. You can check them out here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/social-life

thank you Cookiemobsta, for that enlightening article

WOW!

I can use that for my own website(s) on mobbing and bullying in the workplace.

Ever since I found myself in the right place at WrongPlanet, things have definitely taken a turn for the better in other areas of my life!

I was a very easy target in grade school, due to my sweet, laid back nature.

My solution to bullying was to give them fair warning and then beat the tar out of them after they bothered me one too many times. I was always extremely small (I weighed 88 pounds my freshman year of high school, for example), so I was always a target. Oddly enough, that also worked in my favor since none of them ever expected me to fight back, much less fight hard.

The same thing would happen before wrestling matches; I wore glasses but obviously couldn't wrestle with them, so I would come out on the mat squinting really hard. Also, I was always wringing my hands (my dad called it my "dinosaur arms"), so that added to the awkward look. My dad would always point out when some little redneck kid was laughing at the wimp he was about to wrestle. They would get so frustrated when I did to them what they thought they would do to me.

I did all i could to ignore them or not acknowledge their existence. I think they just gave up over time because they got no enjoyment out of tormenting me (and quite a few people liked me because i didnt make an ass of myself). Granted, the bullying in my school ages wasnt as bad as it could be (never had the beatings, was in 1 fight when i was 6-10 years old. I got a bloody nose (which was a common occurrence due to growing), but i made the other kid double over in pain from a gut shot). I was always more interested in school work and had my own sense of fun that a few others caught on to. But if they want to get to the root of bullying, get the bully's parents (kids are a reflection of their parents after all).

Yeah...there is this kid at school who seems to think its fun to call me names so i guess next time he does i will walk up to him and ask why he keeps calling me these things then if he says somthing like "because your a prick" then well i guess i will have to reshape his face. Seriously if i ever get into a situation where i feel that i am winning a fight and he is bleeding out i will totally beat him till he cant move, maybe break his arm or shatter his ribcage then boot his face to a bloody pulp. he also seems to take joy in spitting at me so... after i have beaten him to near death i will phlegm on him till my throat is dry.

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I had some bullying in school...I found that fighting back did not help too much. I did find that telling them I am a witch and I will cast a spell on them seemed to work well. Other than that I learned to ignore them because they want to get a reaction...and any reaction will do. I just was non-reactionary, non emotive...pretended they did not exist. At 1st it pisses them off, but then they get bored and mess with someone else.

I fought the bullies back but I was labled as the bully and labled as dangerous. My worst bullies were teachers.

"[Targets of bullying] were thoroughly socially incompetent..."

Yeah, i think that would explain a lot. =\

I found it interesting, in the article, where it talks about the traits of bullies, including the deficits in reading and understanding others. There seems to be some overlap with autistic spectrum traits, and yet, the whole of the pattern is quite different, from what I can see.

Despite having suffered a lot in school, I actually found a lot of the article difficult to relate to. At times it's almost as if they're only talking about the bully caricatures you see in TV shows, the big dumb meatheads who punch someone and then snatch their lunch money - which isn't at all like the popular, intelligent, successful students who caused me the most pain in school. It also seemed focused on one-on-one bullying, which I can't remember ever witnessing back then. There were always others ready to join in for the entertainment value, or just watch and smirk.

Maybe my definition of bullying is just more broad than theirs, though. The idea of labeling and isolating the behaviour as a phenomenon has never really sat well with me, when my experience has been that bullying is just the extreme end of a mean streak that runs through almost all kids to some degree (like the ones who watched and smirked), and plenty of adults too. By their definition, the people who made my life miserable at school don't quite qualify as bullies, so they kind of get a free pass.