How does bullying start?
This video starts with a simple story that shows how something so simple can lead to bullying and a life of pain. The video continues to go through several scenarios that help people understand the lifelong impact that bullying has on someone’s life.
“You sound like a girl!” – The insult stung like a swift slap to the face. It came from one of the cool boys. The most athletic, the one with the parents that had a lot of money, the one who had never known want or pain or imperfection. Counselors will tell you that bullies will bully because of their own hurt inside and they want to feel better about themselves, but sometimes, people are just cruel because they are born that way.
Being called “Prince and Michael Jackson” became pretty standard for me. I cried easily and that made me easy prey. Recess, bathroom breaks and then later in life the locker room were all places of torment. It didn’t happen every day, but it happened enough that I hated going to school. I was called a girl, gay and fat and a few other insults. I was punched in the eye and pushed around a few times. Looking back they were all pretty minor incidents, but they happened often and enough times over the years that they left a lasting and damaging impression on me. A few years back I finally went to counseling to deal with a lot of the emotional baggage, but the residue of that pain will be with me for the rest of my life. I don’t even think that is necessarily a bad thing, it is knowledge and with knowledge there is power. Those of us that bounce back despite all odds are over comers. We press on despite the hurt and shame and do our best to prove the haters wrong – but that doesn’t happen for many of us.
What I’ve learned over the years is that words hurt and they shape us. Words are like little chisels fashioning the way we see ourselves. The words become our truth and distort our vision to the point that we are no longer able to see clearly who we really are, but instead only see the distorted picture that cruel individuals have painted for us. Being told you are ugly, fat, stupid, gay, worthless… when you hear them enough you start to believe them.
So why isn’t the awareness of the problem helping?
How many people need to die before something changes? It seems that the issue needs to be worked at the heart of the problem, but where is that? Will better parenting help the bullied children or do parents need to better educate their children who are doing the bullying? I don’t have all the answers, but I know that a zero tolerance policy would have been nice when I was in school. It seemed that the teachers did their best to help with the bullying, but they can only stop what they see or hear and they can’t be with a student all of the time. Bullying can get so bad at times that you become an emotional wreck. Extreme measures seem to be the only option and those measures normally end up being acts of violence upon the perpetrators or themselves. The only real way to solve problems is to come back to the only truth that we have and that is the Bible. We have to “love thy neighbor as thyself” – until we get that right we will continue to careen out of control on a path that leads to destruction.
Recent News of Suicide Related to Bullying
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