I encountered a fella at the bar I used to work in, he had gone to the same school as me but I didn’t recognise him as he was a few years above but as I served him he eagerly explained that everyone calls him Earl now although that wasn’t his name. He told me that he had been a horrible person his whole life and had recently turned it all around and was on a mission to right his list of wrongs because he was inspired by this new show called “My Name Is Earl”. I hadn’t heard of it at the time but it pleased me that a grade-A arse-hat had found a reason and motivation to no longer be a be such a garment and instead be an enthusiastic force of good. I don’t know if he was “Cable Guy” friendly but at least he was trying.
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Or, the other option now that they do not interact with you at all in your life is to leave them in the past where they belong, and do not think of them at all.
Ah, I should have thought of that. I’ll get to it, just as soon as I stop thinking about this damn white bear.
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If they performed competently, merely not thinking of them will be a great deal easier said than done. Unpleasant memories of sufficient affective salience are like scar tissue: too closely integrated with the tissue around them to be neatly resected; but sufficiently galling to make themselves felt during the normal use of the affected system.
We all forget in the end, of course, no brain lasts forever; but on more useful timeframes there can be difficulties.
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I ran into one of my bullies years after school, as he was being evicted from an apartment building (don’t know why). I was with a heavyset female friend and as we walked away I could hear them making jokes about her weight. Clearly things hadn’t changed for my bully. In general, asshole kids grow up to be asshole adults.
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Growing up, I had a few people who caused me stress, but I never felt all-out bulled by them, they were always just mild annoyances I had to deal with once in a while. And I’m not bothered by those annoyances, today, I can barely remember them… what bothers me is that… I can hardly identify anybody ELSE who was bullied, either. There are a few… people who were overweight, or new immigrants are perennial targets… but even there, it never SEEMED to me to be as bad as I saw all the time on TV shows, mostly exclusion and a few remarks now and then, which, in retrospect, I’m sure felt horrible to the people involved (and of course. I only ever saw a small slice of their lives), but at the time I never considered it that bad, and there didn’t seem to be any organized campaign to harass anybody, nobody I can remember getting beaten up by the same person all the time. Sometimes I wonder if I happened to live in a remarkably nice area (it was Canada!), or if I was just mind-bogglingly oblivious.
And even those examples I was aware of kind of stick with me, I have many regrets in my life but among the biggest was I kind of wish I had the awareness and guts to have gone out of my way and tried to befriend them. (Of course, most of my other regrets and present problems also involve a lack of guts, so…)
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It’s not easy, but it’s a heck of a lot healthier than allowing the actions of a disturbed child in the past continue to affect your adult life. If it requires therapy, then so be it. If it requires meditation and self realization, then so be it. By carrying the bully into the present, these people only continue to inflict harm on themselves (all without any current interaction with said bully). They’ve in essence become their own bully.
And to be a bit of a bully, and torture everyone here:
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Mindfulness and cultivating non-attachment really do help here. (I say this as someone who was bullied terribly, still suffers over it, and who considers a lot of “change your thoughts, change your life!” stuff to be total bullshit.) Reading Pema Chodron’s “Comfortable with Uncertainty” and learning some of the mindfulness techniques involved in Dialectical Behavior Therapy have really improved my ability to cope with painful memories - they still come up, but I can get less involved with ruminating on them or feeling like I have to do something about them.
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I’ve never been able to coax a definition of ‘mindfulness’ out of anyone(and ‘anyone’ includes 5 or 6 allegedly theraputic professionals, not just random people or self-help schlock) that managed more than “I recognize your statement’s adherence to grammatical conventions; but it is without discernible meaning.”, so that one still has me puzzled; but sheer forgetfulness helps attenuate the issue over time.
It’s probably not healthy (and I deliberately chose a distasteful and abnormal side effect of wound mal-healing as a metaphor, this fact is not lost on me) that I still avoid the grounds of my old elementary school, and locations where children of the age were I had the most serious trouble congregate; but time slowly dulls all memories. I will never forgive, or even understand what that would mean; but I’ll forget sooner or later.
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It looks to me like a “debugger process attached to the mind to monitor the activity of other processes running”.
I did what I could (though some misanthropy still lingers). On the other hand, finding out on a class reunion that the worst offenders’ lifes quite suck now (not all that bad but not happy either) was not an entirely unpleasant thing.
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I don’t think anyone’s suggesting somehow transcending human nature and that getting a bit of a vengeful giggle out of the knowledge that your bully suffers a bit is an absolutely horrible thing (though wouldn’t it be nice to get to the point where you felt pity and compassion for the poor SOB’s suffering rather than glee).
I’m suspicious that a lot of bullies, regardless of material privilege, had home life issues or mental issues that caused them to act out in the first place. Mine certainly did. Of the two worst offenders, one came from a broken home where his older brother committed suicide. Bit of an obvious case there. The other was (and is) super privileged. Dad owns a large (and well known) producer of sports equipment, and laid heavy pressure on Bully Jr. to “be a man”, play football, etc… He’s honestly very well off today, but still a total tool. I don’t feel bad because the bully succeeded (thanks to the power of Dad), I feel bad because he’s never had to confront his issues, and I’m sure his family, employees, and others in his life still have to deal with his a-hole tendencies. When your ex-bully is a big successful man-child who, I’m sure makes the others around him suffer, you feel worse that he never evolved than you do that he’s materially successful.
And to be honest, I’m immature enough to giggle a bit when say someone stealing from a business misjudges a glass door and KO’s themselves trying to escape (HA ha! Concussion and possible permanent neuro damage eh?), but it seems a bit weird for me to want someone who I personally know already was suffering a bit (thus the need to bully to feel good about oneself) to suffer more. Just IMHO.
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Kids don’t have the scale of understanding to know what a “living hell” is. Getting an atomic wedgie is emotionally the same as getting sent to Auschwitz, as far as they’re concerned.
So yes, it is a little weird for a grown and presumably mature man to obsess over someone who squirted him with a fountain pen in middle school. Essential parts of the maturation process are learning perspective and how to let go. Or at least working up the gumption to fight back, which I reckon this book is the author’s passive-aggressive way of finally doing.
You get “in general” from a single anecdote?
Being forced to ride the bus and go to school with a kid and his sidekicks who will, inevitably, cause you intense pain, destroy your schoolwork, and/or steal your lunch –– every day for about three years –– is about as close to “a living hell” as I can imagine a kid going through in school.
Being bullied scarred my entire life. It transformed who I was as a kid and as an adult. It’s not something to simply “leave behind”, sadly.
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Nope, 44 years of experience.
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