Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Dan Bochner. I'm a psychologist and author of two books, the latest of which is printed in its entirety on my website,
http://www.DrBochner.com. Of course bullying sucks, but it's amazaing how poorly understood it is. In this article I hope to provide clarity, as well as direction for real solutions. I hope you like it.
Bullying
by Dr. Dan Bochner
“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”
—Honore de Balzac
Bullying is awful. Just hearing the word twists our stomachs, doesn’t it? Certainly there have been significant efforts to put a stop to bullying. Yet it seems to be a stubborn problem stemming from developmental processes in children as well as the nature of society. Bullying is sometimes significantly reduced by school and community administrators who successfully create a culture among our kids that views intimidation as “uncool,” but such an accomplishment is relatively rare and requires significant parental involvement. Successfully preventing the desire to bully within the bully himself, presents a more complex issue due to difficulty in truly understanding the bully. The most frustrating part of the puzzle by far, however, is that the suggestions for the victims of bullying are quite often almost useless. So let’s look at each of these areas one by one to see if it’s possible to get a better handle on the problem (for the remainder of this article, bullies, victims, and administrators will be referred to in the male form for the purpose of clarity).
The first thing to understand about bullying is that it stems from a natural human desire for dominance. Dominance is built into us as animals, as is the need to work with one another because communal efforts lead to cultural development and all sorts of progress. We need leaders and we need workers, and that’s just the way it is. In many ways we do our best to level these traits in our children when they’re very young. On the one hand, we want our children to get along with other kids and, for example, be good sharers. On the other hand, however, we teach our children to compete and we want them to have a desire to win. Is there really any parent who wouldn’t want their child to be a “leader” among his friends? We do know, however, that there are many ways to be a leader, and many of them are not very good. We want our children to lead from the front with good judgment and good influence on their peers, but certainly there are many children who are leading from the rear, trying to get other kids to do things that are unsafe or bad for them. Many bullies intimidate and demean others for the express purpose of leading, and entertaining other kids, in a negative direction. But the desire to bully always comes back to the common and natural human desire to dominate.
The need to dominate in a bullying fashion, that is the need to intimidate others, essentially comes from poorly balanced character or lack of integrity within one’s personality (please see article “The Power and Control Addiction”). This absence of balance and integrity can come from a variety of factors, including inborn intensity combined with relatively minor difficulties at home, or very bad problems at home which manifest in poor balance of character regardless of the genetic level of intensity. Sometimes there exists within an individual a significant inborn intensity combined with very bad problems at home. Such a combination leads to the most vicious kind of bullies. The problem is even worse when a child is born with significantly good social ability. We have all known children who seem to understand social situations better than we do and who swim through every social challenge. When these especially socially skilled children are especially intense and/or have certain kinds of problems at home, there can be especially cruel, and sometimes very complex forms of bullying.
From a developmental perspective, it is easy to observe certain stages where bullying is more or less serious. Clearly bullying occurs before fifth grade and even in a very immature fashion within the preschool years, but the bullying seen in the middle school years is typically the very worst. Of course, the high school years can also be quite rough. There are very good developmental reasons for why these years are so bad. At the very same time that children are gaining a better understanding of the world around them, they are simultaneously feeling more vulnerable than they have ever felt before. At this age responsibilities grow and puberty makes sexual attraction a focal point. Between the ages of 11 and 14 the ability to think more abstractly develops extremely quickly right alongside the sexual awakening.
This development of the mind is great in that kids can learn to look for symbolism in literature and can start to figure out algebra, but what is not so great is that they are developing the thinking power of little adults, even though they still feel very much like little children. It is obviously quite common to have young teens acting as though they think they’re smarter than their parents. In a way, that makes sense since they roughly double their thinking capacity within one to two years. With their sudden increase in intelligence kids do not think, “Wow, I must have been really stupid before.” Instead, they think, “Wow, I’m so smart now I really must be smarter than everyone—certainly I must be smarter than my stupid parents.”
This increased intellectual capacity makes kids think they should be able to handle much more than they have ever before. In fact, parents and teachers start heaping on the responsibilities, and increase expectations at the same time. In addition, the sexual awakening of this age makes early teens want to be more like adults as well. Since all of this happens simultaneously, it’s actually very scary for kids who don’t really feel that much more capable in the maturity arena than they had been just a few years prior. Unfortunately, they aren’t able to admit to this feeling of vulnerability, which they would view as making them more childlike at a time when they so desperately want to feel like adults. Thus, they resort to behavior that makes them feel the opposite of vulnerable.
Bullying becomes an alternative to feeling vulnerable and weak in the face of seemingly insurmountable new challenges that are supposed to be “no big deal.” In the kids who are already prone to bullying, as outlined above, the need to be dominant becomes overwhelming. These kids need to bully in order to feel any sense of adequacy at all. In the case of those with natural social ability, it simply becomes such an easy way to fend off the vulnerability of the early teen years that bullying is used with immediacy and very little thought to successfully establish dominance as an alternative to being as childish as one really feels.
With individual personality integration and childhood development as they are, it is amazing how successful some schools have been in creating a culture where bullying is simply not “cool.” Although the transformation in teens is not complete anywhere, when school administrators truly focus on developing a caring atmosphere within our schools, and when they put serious consequences in place against bullying, most kids tend to fall into line. So far, this has been possible really only in places where there is a homogeneously high level of parental involvement. Only with parental involvement will kids have to care about their parents’ opinions enough to care about the opinions of teachers or the consequences their teachers give.
When the culture of the school has not, or is not enough to, overcome bullying, the question remains what to do about the bully and his victim. Starting with the bully, it is important to understand that his efforts to fend off vulnerability or fear are completely unconscious. That is, the bully thinks of himself as dominant and strong—in fact, that is the whole purpose of his behavior. The bully does not know that he feels weak and vulnerable. This is true even in cases where the child is abused by a dominating parent. In those cases the bully simply sees himself as doing what his parent does. He doesn’t understand what the behavior accomplishes for him (or for his parent either).
The trick to helping the bully overcome his behavior is very complicated. It requires that he see and feel the pain of his victims so that he can feel some shame and take some responsibility. Shame, believe it or not, is the simple antidote to bullying. It connects the bully to his own feelings of vulnerability and weakness. And thus, it connects him to the feelings engendered by his bullying. In fact, the administrator or teacher dealing with a bully will typically find that the bully seems almost incapable of taking any responsibility or feeling any shame for what he has done. When the bully does say the right thing, it is rarely if ever heartfelt. It is evidence of just how much the bully needs to feel dominant that he seems so incapable of being sorry for what he does.
Further complicating the issue, the victims typically cannot be expected to make the vulnerable statements that are necessary to get through to the bully, get him to see how his behavior has hurt someone, and to help him understand why he should be ashamed. Instead, administrators must do their best to get the bully to put himself in the shoes of the victim. For those bullies that face such treatment at home, this can be an especially painful, but necessary, process, as the bully breaks down into his shame while he comes to terms with exactly how pathetic and weak he really feels.
One final way to get bullies to feel proper shame is for adults to notice when the bully’s behavior makes the adult himself, feel vulnerable. At that point, if that adult is capable of staying in their role of authority as parent or administrator, while simultaneously remaining vulnerable and true to their own experience, the authority must communicate to the bully how the bully’s behavior has been hurtful to the authority. Once the bully is able to communicate an understanding of how their behavior affected the adult personally, the adult must follow through with appropriate consequences even within the context of being hurt (please see article “Communication from the Heart”). It is absolutely essential that a consequence be given so that the incident will be taken seriously. Merely thinking that the bully seems to truly understand is not the only consideration. When people are truly sorry and ashamed, they actually benefit from the feeling of compensating for their behavior. Thus, if the consequence involves some form of reparation, it is especially useful.
Finally, and most perplexing, figuring out how to help the victim is extremely complex. We have all known the kind of kid who almost seems to be a magnet for bullies (those who seem sullen or different or who get hurt very easily). However, there are also many kids who are bullied just because it is so obvious that they deeply care what other kids think. Some kids are simply shy or sweet and find it almost impossible to be mean, which leaves them totally defenseless when more dominant and spontaneously mean kids challenge them with cruelty. So how do we talk to these kids about getting out of the victim situation?
In an abstract sense, it is easy to see that self-esteem is the culprit. If a kid who has been bullied starts to feel really good about himself, either due to therapy or a change in his life, the bullying invariably vanishes. When a kid feels good about himself, it simply doesn’t make sense to him that other kids are treating him like he’s something he’s not, such as pathetic, useless, or idiotic. Thus, he won’t react to bullying in the way the bully wants and needs. That is, the bully expects his victim to act afraid or pathetic, but if the victim is neither afraid nor pathetic and, in contrast, feels confident, his reaction to the bully will not be satisfying to the bully. The bully will then lose interest and choose another victim.
The problem in this easy truth, however, is that we cannot typically get the victim to develop a sudden burst of confidence. We typically deal with our own frustration about the victim’s difficulties by suggesting that the victim defend himself with nastiness equal to that of the bully, which the victim is incapable of enacting because he is generally too nice. The worst thing we suggest, or that victims sometimes try to do, is come up with “comebacks” to ugly bully comments. From a child who is not feeling confident, “comebacks” will always fall flat, and will ultimately play into the hands of the bully who invents his next line with the alacrity and enthusiasm of a grand master chess player eyeing checkmate, and with the iniquity of the most venomous snake. Victims are not pathetic, but their ability to be mean, even with the best prefabricated lines, is typically nonexistent. Most victims are automatically nice and only think of the mean things they could have said after the incident is over. Simply put, they don’t want to hurt anyone. In contrast, the bully takes pride in being viperous and has become very skilled at it. The victim is simply not going to win by engaging the bully on the bully’s terms. The bully will always be better at verbal jousting than your typical victim.
There are, however, some simple tactics the victim can use. Although victims are quite awkward in inventing derisive or contemptuous slams, slights or even snubs, they certainly can act more confident. He can learn to act like he doesn’t care and like the bully doesn’t matter. He can act, and hopefully become, indifferent. Of course, we all know even that is difficult, but it is far easier than “comebacks.” If you watch the kids who are not bullied, but who themselves don’t bully, it can be observed that they are simply able to look a bully in the eye, seemingly without fear, and walk away. Sometimes they are particularly effective with a disappointed shake of the head or a one word expression of distaste (Yichhkkkkkk! or Wowww!) and then a turn away. No one ever, however, really achieves success in dealing with a bully when they decide to engage in mutual insults, unless they themselves enjoy bullying.
The bully only bullies if he is capable of making his victim feel the feelings he doesn’t want to feel. He wants to be dominant which requires that someone must be weak and/or submissive so he won’t feel that way. All the potential victim must do to frustrate bullying is to behave like he is not weak or feeble no matter what the bully does, and the bully will move on to someone else. Behaviors that communicate indifferent strength are the key and include: 1. looking the bully in the eye without fear; 2. thinking to oneself, but in a way that can be read in one’s behavior, that the bully is behaving foolishly; and 3. successfully acting like the bully is foolish, but without calling the bully foolish. These behaviors can easily be practiced at home. Because they involve only facial expressions and body language, they do not require a quick wit, a better “comeback,” or even real confidence. When they are successful, however, behaviors that show indifference toward bullying will, indeed, help the victim build very real confidence and self-esteem.
While bullying is a complex social phenomenon, it can be understood more fully. Great strides have been made in developing more supportive cultures in middle schools and high schools. There is a lot of room, however, to handle bullies and their victims in more helpful ways. The key to helping bullies is in getting them to feel shame and take responsibility, which puts them in touch with their own vulnerability. The key to helping victims is to keep our advice very simple—the victim must be able to confidently behave as though the bully’s behavior is not having the bully’s desired effect. To make this problem really disappear we all have to look it in the eye and accept our own vulnerability. Only by seeing and accepting our own vulnerability can we hope to get the bully to see his vulnerability. Only by accepting our own vulnerability, instead of trying to get the victim to act strong like we might think we are, can we get the victim to see that he can look the bully in the eye himself because, truly, all there really is to fear in dealing with the bully is fear itself.
