Taming the Bully

Have you ever had a bully that picked on you in school or in the workplace? I had a few notable ones that I'll be telling you about in this episode 

Bullies can make our lives very uncomfortable can't they? Pushing us around and putting us down with negative messages. Society has a long way to go to be sure, but it does seem to be improving in education and resources regarding bullying generally.

But what do you do when the biggest bully in your life...is yourself? Tune in and I'll share a few things that have worked for me. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Did you ever have a bully that picked on you as a child? Maybe teased you on the playground or pushed you around? Or perhaps even as an adult, a coworker that gossiped behind your back and made you miserable there? If so, you probably sought out advice on how to deal with the situation and tried different things with varying levels of success. But what about when the biggest bully you're dealing with in your life is yourself? What do you do then? Welcome to the Joy Felicity Podcast. I'm your host, Laura Wakefield. So I don't know if any of you had bullies that bothered you when you were growing up. I had a couple of fairly notable ones for about six months. I guess I was probably in about second grade, maybe third grade. This little boy would hide in the bushes and jump out at me when I was walking to school. We walked fairly far distances from a young age back then to school, and he would chase me the rest of the way and kind of cage me in the monkey bars and tease me. And it didn't feel like playing to me. And I would cry a lot and was really rather terrified of this little boy for a long time. Would go to my mom and talk to her about it. And back in those days when somebody was bullying you as a child, you know, us Gen Xers grew up with advice like just ignore it, don't cry, big kids don't cry. He'll get over it. Or he probably just has a crush on you, which is really an unhealthy message to be sending people, actually, that if somebody's being really mean to you, that's a sign of devotion. But actually in this case, he did at one point in time later on admit that he did have a crush on me. But this is exactly what he said. He said, I need to tell you something. I love you, but if you tell anyone, I'm gonna break your face. So I'm not sure that was exactly the undying devotion that I was looking for. But anyway, I'm sure he grew up into be a fairly nice boy, but he terrorized me for a few several months when I was about nine or 10. And then in high school, starting from maybe about seventh grade through sophomore year of high school, there was this group of girls, and they were sort of bullies generally. It wasn't just me that they picked on. There was quite a few kids that were traumatized by these girls. They did a lot of teasing, a lot of name calling, a lot of mocking. And at that age, you're very, very insecure. So that kind of thing can have a pretty deep psychological impact. They were very pretty girls, fairly popular girls, and they were mean girls. They were kind of the original mean girls, like from the movie. And they for some reason had it out for me among other people. I never really thought, again, at that time in life, to really tell very many people about it. Bullying was something that we were taught to just kind of suck it up and not to do much about it. Either suck it up and don't respond and ignore it, get over it. Or the other piece of advice we got, which seems so contrary to the way that we teach kids now, but was to fight them, to actually stand up to them. And if they were picking on you to pick on them right back, the general way of thinking back then was that if you stood up to them, that they would back off eventually when they saw that you were strong. The old ways of thinking regarding bullying, you know, I can't disagree that there is some level of logic to it, that some of those techniques with some kinds of bullies really did work. However, it left the bullying victims feeling rather unsupported. And it created this idea inside of you that somehow something you were doing was why you were being picked on. And that's not a good psychological message to be sending to kids that somehow they're responsible for this bad behavior from other people. But this girl eventually it accelerated to the point where she was doing things like trying to trip me downstairs where I could get literally very physically hurt. And I finally did speak up and talk to another friend of mine who knew her. She was a year ahead of me in school, and so was he. And he and I were quite good friends, and I told him what had been going on, and and he stood up to her on my behalf and basically told her that if she didn't leave me alone, she was gonna have trouble from him. And he was a pretty imposing force and was a bit my hero in that particular regard because she never picked on me again. That girl was ultimately eventually expelled from school because she was being so difficult and causing so many problems for some of my fellow students, in addition to myself. But I've always wondered what happened to her. What was going on in her life as I've gotten older looking back and realizing that she also was just a kid at the time and probably had some things going on in her life that were causing her to act out that way and these desperate cries for attention from her. But she did make several of us quite miserable for a little while in there. And I look back on that and some of the mindsets that developed inside of me because of these bullies. My most notable bully, and I haven't talked a lot about this on this podcast, I plan to quite soon, actually. I had a stepfather, not my current stepfather. He's in a wonderful, amazing man that I love and adore. But before him, I had a stepfather for several years of my childhood, about 10 years, that was very abusive to me in a variety of ways. That again, I will talk about more fully on a future podcast. From the time I was about six until I was about 16, there was a fair amount of both physical, sexual, and psychological abuse going on in my world. And that's the ultimate bully of a child, is somebody that's in authority that they're supposed to be able to trust. And this puts wounds and scars on your mind and on your heart and on your feelings about yourself and what you should do in your life, what you're capable of, who you are. It really does carry with you for a long time the effects of abuse and bullying. So it's serious business. And I feel like in today's society, we're understanding that a lot better and we're doing a lot more preventative education to try to teach kids the kind of stuff that went on in my high school and in my elementary school, the things that kids said to each other, the ways they treated each other, those things would not be tolerated in today's classroom if they were known about. There definitely is still some of that happening online and behind the scenes. And sometimes victims of bullying are afraid to step forward and say anything because, you know, either they've been so beaten down by it or they just they don't know if anyone will believe them, or they just are scared to make the bully even madder. And so sometimes these things carry on, but I do think that we're evolving and we're progressing a bit in our society in the way that we address this issue, especially for children. And in the workplace as well. Even as adults, you know, we can have people that are quite hard on us and then can make our lives rather miserable. And these days, the advice is a little different. Whereas before we were told big kids don't cry, don't say anything. We're taught more now to seek out help, to go to HR, to go to your parents, to go to your teachers and tell them what's happening so that they can intervene on your behalf and perhaps stop the situation or find out what's going on with the person that's being accused as well, and see if they can find solutions that are healthy. And I think that it's much more of an empowering environment now for people who are suffering those kinds of things. All of that being said, there's one bully that's done probably more damage than all of the others combined. Now, this bully was influenced by those earlier bullies in my life for certain. But this bully has continued forward in my life through today. This bully talks to me every week, sometimes every day, is very, very close to me, very intimately in the know of all of my fears, all of my weaknesses, all of my mistakes, all those things that I keep hidden from other people this bully knows about and uses them against me at every chance she gets. She looks like me, she talks like me, but she is mean to me. Some people call this kind of a bully, your inner critic, and we all have one. And because it's our own voice that we're hearing inside of our head, we tend to give it a little bit more credence than we do an outside force. Now, this inner critic really is a part of me, but yet feels very separate from me because that bullying mindset that goes on inside my head is very, very internal and very different than the way that I behave or respond or talk in any other setting. The things that I will say to myself in that inner critic voice, I would never say to another human being. I would never sit and berate and put down and belittle another person the way that I allow that voice sometimes to rant at me. Nor would I let anybody speak to another person in my presence that way without trying to step in and intervene. If my daughter was standing there and somebody was saying the kinds of things that my inner critic says to me, but directing them at her, every ounce of mama bear would come out of me in her defense. I would not let someone, even if it was a stranger, be berated like that without trying to step forward and say, hey, don't talk to them like that. Hey, knock it off, and trying to wrap my arms around the victim and try to protect them. If someone came to me and said that somebody was bullying them in that regard, what would my advice be to them? I would try to counsel them to seek solutions, to seek help, to end the behavior, to get themselves out of that negative situation. I would also try to support them in understanding that just because somebody said those things about them, that doesn't automatically make them true. And they don't need to internalize those things. And even if the things that the bully was saying were true, because bullies oftentimes do use our weaknesses that are real against us. So sometimes the things they're saying are factually true, and maybe even are things that we already know we need to work on. And those kinds of things can hurt especially deep. But I would work with them to try to find ways to positively work on those things and not internalize all of the mean, nasty negativity that was surrounding it, because that's just simply counterproductive. That's not going to help you make positive change through negative messaging. And I would try to help them to see that. Furthermore, I would just simply try to comfort them. Because when people are mean to us, even when we know it's not true, or even when we have heard all of the right messages and we know it's just a bully, the trolls online, we know that it's all them, it's nothing we did, and all of that. It it doesn't matter if we know that stuff. When people are mean to us, it still hurts. So I would try to lift them up and restore their confidence. Make them feel supported and loved and valuable. Try to send the opposite of the hateful message and instill some loving messages instead in their place. So the primary place that that mean, nasty bully voice comes out in my life is toward myself. Silent to others around me, but screaming loudly within my own mind. Horrible messages. You're not enough. You're ugly. People don't like you. People won't want you. You are worthless. You're not good enough for that. You'll never be successful at that. You should just quit now. You're so unorganized. I could go on. Because this bully knows us so well. This bully knows exactly how to hurt us, exactly how to discourage us, and exactly what to say to bring us down. Now I don't claim to know exactly why we all seem to have this inner critic living inside of us. There's a lot of reasons, and that would take a whole other podcast to try to unpack that question. But I think it's pretty universally known that most all of us, if not every single one of us, has this negative voice that speaks inside our minds often, not just sometimes, but quite often, and discourages us. And it tends to come out more as we're wanting to try new things, as we're about to step out of a comfort zone. And it tends to want to chase us back on in there. And in some ways, perhaps psychologically, this is an effort to try to protect us from our weaknesses and the things that we might fail at and to keep us safe in a little cocoon somewhere where we're not stepping out of line and can't get hurt, right? So there's some strange psychological questions surrounding this voice. But what I do know is that this voice tends to keep us small, tends to keep us from moving forward in our life, tends to keep us surrounding ourselves with others, maybe who have negative messages to send to us. This voice keeps us down. This voice keeps us from trying, from striving, from stepping out, trying new things. It also can bring us back down, even if we've overcome it and begun to see signs of success. It starts screaming louder sometimes then to try to bring us back down to baseline, back down to comfort zone, back down to normalcy in air quotes. I'll say, because what is that anyway? It tends to want to keep us where we already thought we belonged. And this is what I meant earlier when I said that it was influenced by previous bullies, previous messages that created these imprints on our ways of thinking about ourselves, can come out later in this inner critic telling us this is who you are, as evidenced by these awful things that happened to you before. And then it all has this air of truth about it that we have a tendency to believe, even though, as I said, we would never say that to somebody else or allow someone else to say it to someone that we love, we will listen to this voice when it's being mean and destructive to ourselves. So why does this matter and what can we do about it? I think the primary reason that all of this matters is that each one of us came into this world with our own unique set of talents, with our own missions, our own things that we were meant to do, meant to achieve, meant to share with the world. And when this voice is ringing too loudly in our ears, so often those talents and missions and achievements never come to be. They never happen because we're too afraid to allow them space to breathe and to exist. And so we just stay in our comfort zones and those things die inside of us sometimes. I think we've all felt that. That sounds so dramatic when I say it, but I believe it. I know that it's true. How many of us have had music or writing or whatever talent that we have that literally goes unexpressed for the majority, or if not all, of our lives? That's tragic, in my opinion. And how many of us are living a life that isn't fueling our passions, that isn't making us happy, that feels dull, that feels unexceptional in ways that matter to us. I'm not talking about competing with anybody else. I'm talking about allowing our own true nature's room to dance. And that inner critic is usually what's standing between us and fulfillment of those dreams and passions and desires and talents. That inner critic is what's standing between us sharing those things with the world and possibly helping so many other people to do the same. I know I run into this in my life. I paused my podcast for several months, and there were some concrete reasons for that initially. I was having some surgery, and I didn't really have a great place to do the podcast in my new house, and blah, blah, blah. You know, there were several reasons why it did actually genuinely make sense to pause my podcast for a month, which was initially what I intended. But it's now been, I think, five months. It's been a lot longer than the time that was necessary. And the reason for that is I lost my stride. I'm just being open and honest with you. Taking that break got me out of the habit and out of this stride of doing it and allowed that inner critic a chance to kind of play around inside of my head. What are you doing this for? It costs a lot of money every month. You'll never go anywhere with this. Nobody even cares. Well, that was never the point. The point of this podcast for me was never about any of that. It was because I genuinely felt compelled to do it. Every time I went to record a new episode, the voice in my head got stronger and stronger, worrying about finances and is this the best use of your time and all of the questions. And eventually I got to where it was so uncomfortable listening to it that I kind of put it all aside for a while just to make the voice be quiet. I know that there are some of you out there that have faced this same thing. There's something that you want to do for a career, for a hobby, for your life. And you don't really know why. You just know that you feel like you're meant to do it. But those crazy voices start going in your head and can really, really hold you up. So what what do we do about it? Because those kinds of voices are kind of like those bullies. They can scare us, they can really beat us down, they can genuinely hurt our confidence, even our bodies as the stress starts to mount, can be affected. Just like with an in-person bully. That bully inside of your head can do genuine damage. So, what do we do about it? The old school ways of fighting bullies, fight back, ignore it. There's some merit to that, to try to just learn to ignore the voice, but we all know if we've really heard this voice before, that it's tough to ignore. It'll keep at you until you pay attention to it. And fighting back is kind of tough when that voice is actually inside of you. The answer for me when I start getting into one of these patterns, and I've been in this pattern about many, many things in my life in the past. I'm using the podcast as an example because I'm recording the podcast now. So obviously, I've overcome this to some extent. I'm sure I'll fight it again. But to be recording today, I've overcome this particular negative voice. But how? I think first of all, beginning to understand that the voice, although as I said earlier, it looks like you, it sounds like you, it's not you. That crazy mind loop that goes on inside of your head, dragging you down, is not you. And understanding that is very, very important. Sometimes it helps to maybe name it. You know, I've been saying inner critic, but maybe give it a name, an actual name. Maybe think of a previous bully in your life. And I'm just coming up with a name out of my mind. But let's just say the bully's name was Lisa. That's not an actual bully that I've had in my life. But let's just say that that that was. We could call that inner bully Lisa, and that gives it something concrete to associate it with. Kind of personifies it importantly as something separate from you. So give it a name, whatever that name might be. So that when you hear that talking, you can just say, That's just Lisa. I don't have to listen to her. That can help more than you might think. Just simply to recognize that that name is not you. Associating that name with somebody mean can help us not to listen because we recognize that that's not a kind, loving person speaking to us. That's somebody really mean. So we can dismiss the things that they're saying the same way we would a bully. Also offering ourselves the kinds of positive messaging and encouragement and comfort that we would offer to somebody else. If Lisa was going after our kid, what would we say to our child? And spending some time meditating, actually comforting ourselves, healing those wounds, sending counter messages. If Lisa's telling us you're no good, tell yourself you are. You don't have to listen to that, you don't have to internalize that. Actually speak to yourself because that other voice is speaking. Create a new voice speaking counterpositive messages. Allowing that voice to exist without fighting it has also helped me quite a bit. When I fight it, it feels like I almost give it extra fuel because it starts fighting back harder, and then I'm fighting back, and then it's fighting back. And the next thing you know, the fight has turned into an explosion inside of my mind. But when I learn to hear it and just let it roll on by and not think about it too much, just release it, just let it go, just accept it. Yep, there's that voice again. There's that Lisa, and I apologize to anyone listening, named Lisa, not trying to pick on you, I just thought of a random name. But that acceptance actually takes the power out of it. That's been my experience. Because remember, this voice inside your head is imaginary. Its effects are real, but in truth, it's just imaginary. And the more that you respond to it as if it's imaginary, the less power it will have over your life. The more you fight it and respond to it as if it's true, and something that you have to put down, the more real it becomes. But when you just accept it that those voices are going to come sometimes and acknowledge them as if they are exactly what they are, imaginary, and just release them and move past them, there's a great deal of power in that. Releasing the anger and replacing it with love. Love for yourself, knowing that you deserve better than the treatment of that bully. Knowing that the thoughts and feelings and ambitions and dreams residing inside of you deserve to come out in the sunlight. Knowing that your uniqueness is your gift and that it's up to you to nurture it and to share it with others. Love is almost always, if not always, the answer to almost any question that arises. And that's true here too. Love for yourself, love for others, allowing them the space also to exist without being bullied by harsh thoughts and words from you. Loving yourself enough to continue moving forward, even if you're not quite ready to quiet those voices, just keep walking anyway. The voices can rage around inside as much as they want, but keep moving forward. Record that podcast anyway. Sing that song anyway. Follow that dream anyway. The more you do that, the more you're sending a message to that voice that you just simply aren't going to listen, and it will begin to kind of burn out when it knows that it's having no effect. Some people use the term fake it until you feel it, and and I know what they mean by that. But I'd rather say, love yourself anyway. Follow your dreams anyway. And just see what happens. I'd like to just remind everyone today to just be nice to others. Let's not be bullies to other people, but let's not be bullies to ourselves either. Let's take all those principles of kindness and love and encouragement that we apply to others out there in this world and apply them to ourselves as well. The world will become a much more beautiful place for us when we learn how to do that. Thank you for joining me today on the Joy Felicity Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and share, and come follow me on all major social. Media sites at JoyFelicity or on my website, joyfelicity.com. You can follow the link in the description for this episode to all of the places that we can connect. Have a great day, everybody, and remember dare to dream, plan to play, live to learn.