Do you ever get bullied, without even knowing it.

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Looking back at certain instances, I seem to notice only afterwards that someone was bullying me (not like the "I am going to kick your ass" bullying, but more subtle ways). Do you ever notice this? It slightly peeves me off.

this was, and is, my entire school life. it's so much worse realizing later. i get caught up wishing i knew enough to react appropriately.

If someone says something mean, I automatically assume they are being sarcastic...It is only later that I realize they weren't joking. It makes me feel foolish because I didn't realize that they meant it.

I don't think this is exclusive to any person. All people are bullied in one way or another. If you are familiar with the expression: "Whomever controls your emotions controlls you", this is how people manipulate us, whether it is advertising or a significant other.

My family gets upset when I mute the TV during commercials. I tell them it is just people trying to make you think you need something. To me, that is bulling too.

Very much. I thought everybody being mean to me was just normal.
Also, I had learned that bullying requires a certain level of organization. Meanwhile, I think there was, but I didn't recognize it at that time.

This is something I've had difficulty with all my life, telling the difference between friendly ribbing and actual bullying.

I have been bullied before without noticing it.

I have had it where one will appear to be your friend to your face and even say it but would often leave me out or talk about me.

I also had it when people invited me over and ignored me before.

In fact, I did not start getting the picture until I hit 30.

Probably.

However, I think that applies to most people. Even neurotypicals

I don't know the specifics of what people did to you.

But I feel compelled to share I slightly different viewpoint of 'making fun of' that I have come to develop over the years.

I think people making fun of other people is actually really beneficial and is a natural dynamic of human social interaction.

People will nitpick at each other in attempts to homogenize and refine each other, this is really the purpose of making fun.

When your younger in grade school, or even high school, this instinct manifests it as being very mean, especially to us. Because we typically get made fun of for things we will never be able to change, and the people making fun of don't realize we can't change that. I was poked fun at alot in my early years, and I thought this was very horrible. But I came to realize these people aren't inherently mean, they are expressing a innate tribal instinct in humans, that humans placed in proximity of each other will nitpick, they poke fun, it is a tribal dynamic, to get everyone on the same wavelength. People will naturally try to 'make fun of' or 'nitpick' things out of you that don't fit into the tribal dynamic of the group.

Typically more serious poking fun of is done by groups of people to individuals. Because the group is literally trying to erode incompatible properties out of the individual so they can join the group. So if you understand poking fun of in this manner, to me I stopped seeing it as so terrible. You have to understand that even people who highly respect each, even people in tight knit groups, still heavily poke fun at each other, for this reason, of trying to homogenize themselves to form a stronger bond. The act of poking fun is not inherently mean, it is inherently for strengthening social bonds.

However, the thing that is terrible about this for us is that, many of the qualities people try to erode out of us, cannot be eroded out of us by nitpicking, and we ourselves don't even realize that. And us being 'weird' we have many qualities people think they need to erode out of us.

However there is a solution. Eventually people stopped poking fun at me about my oddities when I started to unapologetically express my oddities. When I started to very sternly declare, I am weird, this is how I am, this is what I am going to do. If someone poked fun at me, I expressed my weirdness more intensely. Until I stood my ground in my identity and my weirdness, then people would realize, its not a quality they can erode out of me, and they would respect it, even find amusement in it.

If someone says something purposely on the meaner side to me, I return it to them. Really you must learn to be quick in your thoughts and how you respond to people. It is more a social test than anything. I have actually gotten really good at this and have became friends with people who, 10 years ago, I never would of imagined myself becoming friends with. The truth is, everyone wants to be friends with everyone, some people just have stricter and more mean fronts to get through. You might find being outright bullyish back to people of those types is actually what they want, its how they play, its how they flirt with others. In fact I would go so far as to say, you should be slightly cold to everyone you first meet, make them earn your respect.

I wouldn't know.

Yes, I hav been bullied countless times. Sometimes its obvious and other times I don't realize what was actually going on until much later. I hav trouble deciphering whether or not someone is joking or being mean. I also fall for fake-niceness and repeatedly get bullied from those kinds of jerks.

This has happened so many times. It's awful. Once it took me months to realize it. I wasted so many months with this "fake friend'

I can speak from being bullied both physically and verbally both in school and out of school. People shove you around like trash and say their sorry just to excuse their poor behaviour.

They verbally abuse you by lying to you about facts and playing on your emotions cause your not as socially aware as them

its sad

I mentioned before in Junior High having a sociopath make 'friends' with me in order to humiliate me so I won't repeat that but it also happened at work. Since I was well liked and wasn't being assaulted I had no idea supervisors and managers were bullying me because it was like going from Alcatraz to a small Jail: felt like Heaven in comparison to school.

Couldn't have said it better than this! Back in my retail days. the managers LOVED to lie to me about facts (like how much they were paid, how much I cost to employ, how much profit the store makes and how much things like ladders, forklifts, roof repairs, etc actually cost). I even felt VERY guilty about making a whopping $9 an hour after 6 years of service when in reality I was doing $12-15 an hour worth of work for years! Co-workers tried to warn me but I simply couldn't see it since none of them ever struck me or ganged up on me to my face.

They also knew that firing me would backfire since I was so popular and well known so they helped me fall on my own sword so to speak and manipulated me into thinking I was a horrible worker all of a sudden. Given my experiences in school you would think I would have clued in but since my co-workers were and still are generally 'on my side' I didn't see it coming. Since I was never physically assaulted (although a supervisor did back me into a corner and threaten to right in the middle of the store) I didn't even realize this behavior was bullying until many years later.

Yeah. Much of my childhood was spent being bullied/emotionally abused both directly and indirectly and I didn't really even realize it until I was around 10 or 11 years old. I mean I could sometimes tell when someone was being explicitly mean ("go away, we don't like you", "you're ugly", etc.) but more subtle things like people trying to avoid me or telling me false things or excluding me from stuff wasn't really picked up on until I had some massive epiphany of "Wow people are really mean" when I was (like I said earlier) about 10 or 11. People stopped bullying me regularly once I hit 7th grade because I figured out how I could reciprocate the meanness. Now that I look back on my earlier years I realize that I did feel somewhat rejected and disliked but I could never figure out why. Those feelings just got bigger and kind of carried over as years went on and now I'm paying for it lol.

Me too. Also relevant, I find that people often treat me like I'm overreacting if they are "teasing" me or something. I think that's bullying; saying something to get a reaction out of someone then being like "Oh, no, no, I was just kidding, why are you getting so angry"