Bullying hurts. It’s not the physical beatings in the locker room. It isn’t the trippings in the hallways nor having your books knocked out of your arms. Neither is it the name-calling nor the threats. It’s not the rumors, the lies, and smear campaigns, nor is it the setups to get you into trouble, the jokes or pranks.
It’s the cumulative sum of all factors:
It leaves the target feeling that he’s lost all control over his life and that he no longer has a say in what happens to him- it’s the feeling of having power over nothing!
Is it any wonder that in an attempt to snatch back control over something, anything, many targets soon begin to bully those who are even more vulnerable than them?
Through their own victimization, targets learn that to keep from feeling so powerless, they must bully too. In bullying them, bullies unwittingly teach their targets how to bully.
We call these people bully-victims– people who are both bullies and are targets of other bullies. They bully to feel better about themselves and to ascend a few rungs up the social ladder.
Nobody wants to be on the bottom. Everybody wants to be better than somebody. It’s a sad part of human nature.
Just as people are fighting like crazy to stay on top, others struggle to keep off the bottom. As it is quoted, “Sh¬** rolls downhill and lands at the bottom.”
Person A at the top bullies Person B, who is second from the top.
Person B then bullies Person C, and so on.
And down the pecking order, the nastiness rolls until it lands on Person Z at the bottom. Then, everyone bullies Person Z because Person Z is defenseless! There’s no one for Person Z to bully because he’s the one with the least power of all the others.
Anyone on the bottom is going to catch hell because they’re powerless. And that person will likely be kept on the bottom because no one wants that position. Therefore, everyone keeps Z down to ensure that none of them ever take Z’s place.
That’s how it works, folks!
As long as someone else is on the bottom, it keeps you and everyone else safe from being there. It’s why bully-victims get bullied by pure bullies, then go on to select their own victims to degrade and humiliate.
However, must of the time, this doesn’t turn out good. Because sometimes, bully-victims become worse off then pure bullies or pure victims.
Pure bullies are people who don’t get bullied by other people.
Bully-victims are both bullies and victims of bullying by other bullies. And they bully far more than the pure bullies do because they have more to prove.
Bully victims are far more hated and ostracized than pure bullies or pure victims. They’re lonelier and have few friends or none at all.
Bully-victims often resort to trickery and deceit. Many are pathological liars, cheats, fakes, and sneaks. They believe that humans are the lowest forms of life on earth. Bully-victims tend to be Machs.
Understand that bully-victims need help. They need someone to get it through their heads that just because people are bullying them doesn’t make it okay to turn around and bully someone else.
But tell them lovingly and with patience because they’re badly hurting inside themselves and need someone to listen to them and gently guide them in the right direction.