When Your Self-Esteem is Attacked

While we all know that we shouldn’t pay attention to the things bullies say, protecting our self-esteem isn’t that easy when faced with someone who is dehumanizing and denigrating you.

Bullies put people down. It’s what they do.  Their reasons for doing this vary, but it basically has to do with power. They may be trying to hide their own insecurities by pointing out the flaws of others. Or they may simply be grooming someone for social exclusion.

When you are targeted by a bully it is hard not to take it personally. After all, you are being ostracized by a group when this happens and we feel ostracism as physical pain.

Plus, we all have our flaws and most of us are insecure about our flaws so when someone points it out we are only too willing to agree with them.  

Finally, if there weren’t something wrong with you, you wouldn’t be targeted, right?  Wrong. Even if there is nothing wrong with you, you might still get targeted. Often bullies just chose people out of convenience, not because of any dislike of the individual. Their methods of attack have to do with the most convenient ways to socially ostracize a person. It is rarely personal.

If you are being bullied, what are some of the ways to raise your self-esteem?  The first thing you should do is to learn how to get bullies to leave you alone. (See The Bully Vaccine book for information on how to do this).  If you can stop a bully from bullying you, you will feel empowered and will know that the bully is the person with the problem not you. It really does amazing things for your self-esteem.

Beyond that Psychology Central has several suggestions on what you can do. (see: http://psychcentral.com/lib/how-to-raise-your-self-esteem/)

One way is to slow down on personalizing what is happening. This is why you keep being told, this isn’t about you – it’s about the bully and their problems. The more you can feel sorry for the bully being so damaged they behave poorly, the less you will take their behavior, which is targeting you, personally.

Another way to help your self-esteem is to acknowledge your emotional reaction but choose your response. Yes, being told you are a horrible person hurts. But that doesn’t mean you have to retaliate or show that you are hurt. Choosing your response helps you to be strategic in your response (which is important when you are trying to get the behavior to stop).  It will also help you to appear more professional in the workplace. While the other person is acting like a school yard bully, you are a professional adult – that’s something you can and should feel proud of.

For more information on how to protect yourself and your children from bullies check out the Bully Vaccine Project website.

Bullying and Personal Ethics

How do you want
to be treated?

This post is in response to the video of a group of middle school students bullying and taunting a school bus monitor in Greece NY.  It’s a very difficult video to watch. This post isn’t about what can be done to stop such things from happening. (That post is here). This post is about what this incident tells us about personal ethics.

To be ethical, you must first recognize that the people you interact with are real people. The reason why the rest of us got so upset is because she’s a grandma and a widow and her son killed himself and the kids taunting her didn’t take any of that into account. She didn’t deserve to be treated that way. No one does.

It is clear from the video and from conversations with one of the dads, the kids, who are 13 – 15, weren’t thinking about what they were doing. They were just one upping each other and it was a game to them. Of course they weren’t thinking about the impact they were having on Ms. Klein (the bus monitor). They were thinking about themselves and how to fit in with their peers. To them, Ms. Klein wasn’t really human. As a result, they never considered the impact they were having on their target.

All too often we go through life ignoring the reality of the people around us. We get so wrapped up in our own problems that we don’t consider that other people might have problems of their own. And that is why we all got so upset at the behavior of those kids on that bus. They didn’t take into account the reality of Ms. Klein’s life.

The secret to ethics isn’t about following a set of rules. It goes much deeper than that. It is about truly understanding the golden rule. When you take the time to think about how you want to be treated by others, as a real human being worthy of respect and dignity, you realize that you need to treat others with respect as well. Everyone is struggling with something. When you realize that, the thought of tormenting another person becomes unthinkably cruel.

Image: "School Bus" by Arvind Balaraman FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Letting Go of the Hurt

Image: photostock /
 FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There are a lot of people in the world who have been hurt by bullying, physically and emotionally. As I say in my book, The Bully Vaccine, I seem to have escaped that. Sure, people were mean to me, but I never took it personally because I had been taught by my mom that when people behave badly towards you it is because they are dealing with issues and fears that usually have nothing to do with you.

And, in my experience, my mom was right. I don’t really remember being bullied as a child, though I know there were people who were mean that I didn’t like being around, but I never took it personally and so was never emotionally troubled by what they were doing. I mostly just thought such individuals were pathetic and felt sorry for them.

I bring this up because it is clear that a lot of people are harboring hurt about what happened to them into adulthood and I genuinely want to help them release that pain.  So here goes.

In order to let go of this pain you have been holding on to you have to choose to let go of it. The reason you are finding it so hard to let go of it is because to do so requires you to accept that what happened to you wasn’t really about you. And that’s really hard to do. Most people would rather cling to their pain than let it go because at least, it’s their pain and it’s about them.  

To let go of your pain and no longer require closure or an explanation or an apology from the person who caused you that pain, requires you to accept that what happened, despite how horrid it was for you, wasn’t actually about you.  It was about the other person and the fact that their obnoxious hurtful behavior was all about them trying to take their pain and put it onto someone else. In essence, you bully was desperately trying to offload their pain onto someone else and just got in the way.

The question you need to ask yourself is this. Would you rather feel hurt or would you rather feel compassion for someone else? Because for all these years, you took the hurt someone else placed on you and owned it and made it all about you. Because the idea that you might not have mattered was too scary to even contemplate you held onto that pain longer than you should have.

This really is a rational choice you can make. But to do so, you need to let go of your hurt and that requires you to let go of your ego and realize, what happened to you wasn’t about you. Yes, it impacted you and you were hurt by it. But as soon as you get your ego out of the way and allow yourself to really understand that the person who hurt you must have been in tremendous pain to do what they did, you will find you can let go of the hurt you have been carrying around and you will be much much happier. 

Standing Tall

I just published a book on bullying called, The BullyVaccine.  I was talking to my son about bullying the other day since I’ve taught him the skills I teach in the book and he said, it’s important to stand strong and have courage.

I agree. The problem is, how does one do that?  It isn’t’ easy.  As I was pondering this concept of standing tall, I realized something important. Standing up for yourself doesn’t mean you get violent or demean the person you are standing up to.

Yes, you are defying them, but the best way to stand tall is to stand up, look your oppressor right in the eye and basically say – you don’t scare me and no, I’m not going to stoop to your level. It’s an act of compassionate non-compliance.

It isn’t about fighting back. It’s about declaring that you aren’t going to play the game a bully is playing anymore. And that’s why standing up is such an act of courage.

I don’t think it’s just kids that need to learn this lesson. It’s the adults as well.

Here is a video of my son talking about bullying.