While We're on the Subject of Bullying

I have been seeing a lot of stuff on the subject of bullying in current media these days. It's a trend that I am watching and as a result of repeated exposure to the ideas around it, I had sort of an 'aha' moment a little while ago.

is bullying natural?

This isn't going to turn into a 'poor me' story, and I don't want to share this for sympathy, but I feel that if we don't give bullying a 'voice', then bullying will proliferate in the substratas of our culture. If we don't give bullies a tolerance level and a model for change, we are all 'spitting into the wind' on the whole issue.

Ms Spider's shadow self

I haven't told many people this story. It's not something that I think about a lot any more. Until now. Watching Ellen the other day, I saw a clip where she drew attention to gay bashing as well, which is a form of bullying, in my opinion. After percolating that in my noggin for a while, I remembered suddenly about my own experiences in life that pitted me against others, leaving me in an unfair situation when I first arrived on Canadian soil from Germany when I was a small girl of 5. The first year back with my mother, I found myself in an authoritarian home with a mother who was obviously out of whack, emotionally. Her 'asthma' medicine was a bit of a help moodwise, but she was happiest when she was making things and at her worst when subjected to the stresses of motherhood and life in the '60's. She was a bully. Never asking, always told, always assuming her world was more important than mine, she muscled and strong armed me through the next 8 years of my life.

Photo has nothing to do with the story, its just pretty

Then fast forward to my school. I was a big girl for my age. Somehow, this or some other thing, perhaps my accent with my newfound English, were responsible for attracting negative attention to myself. I could have been precocious, or obnoxious for that matter, but what the result of all that was, was that I was the victim of bullying from my first years at school and four years after. There became a phenomenon at school that children would run up to me, touch me and run and touch their friends, yelling 'Christina's germs, no returns, I'm vaccinated!' and then they would laugh maniacally. This didn't happen just once a day, this happened hourly by a good portion of the student population who thought it was funny to belittle someone. I took to staying in the classrooms and helping teachers so that I could stay out of harm's way.



the hardworking wood spider



I would walk the eighteen blocks home from school and be greeted by my tyrannical mother. Yay, more bullying. I had power issues with my self esteem as a result of living those years under the belittling and demotivating personalities that seemed determined to 'keep me down'. Being isolated and then harassed is some of the meanest situations to be in.

At 13, I packed a schoolbag with precious things, hit the bank for my $13 and then took a bus to the far reaches of Vancouver, to where I could hitch-hike. I was off to seek my fortune. I had tried a dozen times previous and was always returned to the care of my mother, who would corporally punish me and then emotionally and verbally belittle me, usually in terms of worthlessness until my next determined escape attempt.

Bullying causes the recipients to lose a sense of balance in their world. It's hard to make clear decisions when the rug can get pulled out from under one at any moment. It also creates survivors.

chaos creates its own form and symettry

I'm not advocating bullying by any means, but I have to say that there are two kinds of people that come out of the mix, like Anthony Robbins says ' those who face their emotional winters skiing or freezing to death'. I learned as a young girl growing into a woman that I was never a 'victim' but rather, a 'survivor'.  Somewhere in that constant onslaught of poor treatment and distorted guidance that caused my core beliefs to be established by what turns out to be a 'hall of mirrors', I became a 'glass half full' kind of positive person. On the other hand, my little sister, eight years my junior, after years of exposure to my twisted mother's psyche, has grown up a 'freezer to deather'. She's turned out as distorted and crazy as her mother. In my whacky world, I seem to be the only sane one in the family.

Bullying didn't stop there as at 23 I was thrust into a situation where I was held up at gunpoint at a place of business by a little elderly man in a three piece pin striped suit, who shot me where I sat, nearly ending my young life.

working together

Years later, destiny, fate, what have you, called me to live on a sweet little gulf island known as Saltspring in the waters off of Vancouver in Canada's southwest. There I recieved several counselling sessions that gave me a chance to work through issues of my mother, the bullying, and my getting back to normal after taking two bullets to the head. I made peace with my mother, realizing that she bullied because of her own powerlessness in her development, she was passing on that cycle of authoritarian corporal parenting because that was all she knew. I made peace with the creature who shot me as well, learning to honour the teachers that catch us unawares, who temper us, as if we were steel that needed the repeated heating and cooling in order to mature into proper adults, instead of feeling fear or resenting a man who could have been so haunted that he saw holding young women at gunpoint as the best he could do to evolve from his lot in life.

I made peace with the evil children who used to touch me and run, too. Knowing that their lives were filled with unfairnesses and distortions of parenting that led them to believing it was right to pass that meanness forward onto others. They weren't evil, they were 'freezers to deathers' reacting the only way they knew how, that imposing their will and agenda upon others who they deemed 'beneath them'.

diverse people learning to work and live together, celebrating differences instead of demonizing what we don't understand...

Bullying is a latent part of our culture and seems to be a solution for those who were maltreated themselves. As I said in the start of this treatise, there has to be a discourse where bullying intersects our media constantly, to 'keep it in the news' so that there is open discussion about it, and so that it is seen as an issue that 'isn't going away by itself'. Hence my suggestion of creating models for change so that people who are using bullying behaviour have some recourse to changing their habits and perspective in life, so that they cease needing to feel like they are 'in charge' and 'in control'. Bullying stems from fear and then that perpetuates the negativity. Changing that loop is not easy but with healthy conditioning showing the bully that there are other ways of looking at the world that don't include violence, rage, anger, fear may not work all the time, but its definitely worth a try.

There are four ways of being in the world. Mad, sad, glad or scared. Freezer to deathers need to be shown ways to be 'skiiers' so that they don't have to constantly be on the defence, and so that their chance to be 'glad' starts happening more often, slowly moving them into lives where there is less unfairness and less need to impose their intentions, will, agenda.

a leaf is a good metaphor for a survivor, all year's process of change and refinement ultimately ending in compost!

I'd forgotten all about my years being on the butt end of 'Christina's germs'. I can't say I'm glad for the unfairness in my life, but I live a life of no regrets, and its all what's taken me to get where I am today, with the critically thinking and kind mind, and a stable life with loving, healthy people all around me... maybe not totally refined, but definitely way better off than those dark days of 18 block walks in the rain with the water running off my slicker and down the back of my gumboots, as I moved from one hell on earth to the other.

Bullying sucks. Talk about it.