The Extended Damages of Bullying

Society used to confine its descriptions of bullies to the misguided tough kids in school who would harass or beat up smaller kids - popping their books, stealing their lunch money, or giving them wedgies.  They still exist of course, but we have expanded the definition to include all kinds of controlling or belittling behavior which terrorizes its targets into shells of themselves.  

Many kids who are not physically attacked are nonetheless “ganged up on” verbally in attempts to keep them “in their place”.  The repercussions of this often last well beyond their school years.

Most of us continue to psychologically mature long after school ends, but those formative years still impact what type of person we will become.  Bullies who get away with their actions often become hardball-playing adults who think nothing of steamrolling others to get what they want.  

Some, who learn where the lines are drawn, use that trait to their advantage in business.  Others wind up in the system when they cross society’s thresholds of tolerance.

I’m sure some bullies are simply mean-spirited, but many act out to cover or compensate for their own lack of self-esteem.  It seems that inattentive parenting is the most noticeable culprit when people make kids but fail to parent them.  

Children have not yet developed the capacity to process the things that are missing from their lives, though they are more than capable of recognizing the void that remains.  They will often lash out, inflicting physical or psychological harm on others to balance their own pain, while hiding behind an outwardly tough exterior hoping to fill that void.  They crave any attention, even negative, to replace that which is missing from their childhoods.

Of even greater concern is their victims.  Many kids who can’t escape the cycle of bullying in adolescence carry damaged self-esteem into adulthood.  This manifests in a variety of ways, seldom good.  

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Some crawl deeper into their shells and become disturbingly introverted, eschewing life’s joys for fear of a lack of acceptance.  We see this often with individuals who become addicted to gaming and computer programming, pursuits that are usually done alone.  What human contact they do experience is often virtual, a world where they can pretend to be someone they’re not.

Some allow the frustrations to build up to the point that they explode.  We see this in many of our school shootings, which often trace back to bullied youths.  They conclude that everybody is culpable, so they all need to be taught a lesson so extreme as to be felt by everyone everywhere.

Some respond more subtly, though the damage is still there if you read between the lines.  They will search for acceptance by associating with the “wrong crowd” in an attempt to feel validated, often to self-destructive ends.  

Most of us have experienced this first-hand, either ourselves or through someone we care about.  Most dramatically for me was through my sister-in-law, my wife’s younger sister.

When I met her she was 18 years old and had recently given birth to her son.  She was a beautiful, smart, and funny girl who maintained excellent grades in school, but who was relentlessly bullied by groups of her peers.  For all of her positives, she held onto feelings of inadequacy even after school ended, obsessing about not being pretty enough, or thin enough, or having enough money or enviable things.

She was raised in a tight middle-class family but began to push them away in her search for peer acceptance from the other side of the tracks.  She acted like things were cool when she knew well that they weren’t, which certainly contributed to her becoming pregnant by a criminal at 17.  She taught herself to tolerate terrible treatment by others because they claimed to love her, and she craved that negative attention.

When her baby’s father went to jail, she continued to seek damaged people to replace him in order to feel worthy.  That led to her acceptance of being a mother of three living in poverty, lest she feel inadequate in a community that values supporting itself.  She would rather be part of a camaraderie of self-described victims of society than of those by whom they felt judged.

Throughout this time, her true self would shine through during moments of security, such as holidays with family.  She could let her hair down and shed the facade, and the warm, smart, and funny young woman would reappear.  But then she’d return to the life she and her insecurities had chosen, and hide behind the veil of a street kid once more.

Eventually, it all caught up with her.  A man she was seeing was involved with drugs and had a disagreement with a fellow dealer.  That dealer came to their home and murdered them both, while my niece and nephews were still in the house (they were, thankfully, not physically harmed; the emotional damage is another story).  My sister-in-law was 26 when she was killed.

Even eight years after she graduated high school, she never stopped being a victim of the bullies of her youth.  Her two sisters, who were raised in the same house by the same parents, did not follow the same path.  Her views about herself were forged by her environment-not by her family.

Her story’s end might be extreme, but the dynamics that led to that end are not so much.  Countless people have had their self-esteem bludgeoned repeatedly throughout their lives, which has led to damaged psyches, lack of confidence, and poor personal choices that are rarely outgrown.  Even for survivors, their lives become a shadow of what they could have been.

Stories about the far-reaching effects of bullying should be heard by all young adults before they make choices that spiral out of their control.  People who choose to become disinterested parents need to know the extended damage such choices create, well beyond the lives of their own kids.  Nothing exists in a vacuum.

Zephareth Ledbetter is the author of “A White Man’s Perspectives on Race and Racism”, available as an ebook at smashwords.com/books/view/1184004, and can be reached on Facebook and Twitter