Your experiences with bullying?
 

Share your experiences with bullying here. Have you ever been bullied. Or seen someone go through it?

Do you think it stays with you for life or can you 'get over it'?

My experiences with it haven't been pleasant. Was bullied relentlessly at school because I was the tallest girl in the class. Even taller than a lot of the boys. I was 5ft 8 from the age of 12. Looking back there was probably some jealousy involved but because I'm a sensitive soul and reacted badly it just got worse. I hated secondary school. I've also experienced harassment in the workplace and bullying from an ex boyfriend. I don't believe it ever completely leaves you but it can shape you into a better person which I hope I am today. Xx

no, people knew i would go further than they would..

I had no problem with it myself.
However, I helped a couple of lads I was at school with against them.

One of them have more or less erased as much as they can of the bullying.
The other still has confidence issues.

I detest bullies, anyone who thinks they're clever trying to make others lives hell, no matter what form they apply it in.

Odious creeps the lot of them.

I know it's even worse now as social media has increased.

What annoyed me too, was the people who should have dealt with it.
Took no notice of the lads bullied until I and another exposed the creeps.

I was at school, not physically but I didn't exactly fit in , had one best friend so we kind of stuck with each other.
I was a bit of a yes person until my late 20s and an abusive relationship, drank a lot for confidence and courage, but that wasn't sustainable so had to kind of grow a pair... Read a lot about toxic relationships and how to recognise manipulation and deal with it. Admitting to myself that I was becoming what I hated most and that I was at times guilty of narcissistic emotional bullying the kids. That was really hard and since I stopped drinking 99% of that has stopped ( ok 95%) At work I've come up against a few characters that have been a challenge, but recognising the patterns of toxic behaviour is helpful in dealing with them effectively.

heavily bullied in my early high school years, mostly for my weight as I was chubby. I reacted very badly and tried to stand up for myself and once got hit by a boy a year above me, on the way home from school he slapped me in the back of the head and pushed me over a wall and kicked me while I was on the floor.

My mum got me into weight loss and around year 9 I started to lose weight and the bullying subsided. In year 11 I had lost a lot of weight and began struggling with it and became ill and when I was off school for a while due to that I then went back and got bullied for that too, the worst being someone writing anorexic and slag on our tutor display under a picture of me in the entrance hall. It took my mum ringing the school to get it removed too as my head of year ignored me for 3 days begging to have it removed.

I gained confidence hugely in college though thank god

Really, thank you Kate, Kizzy and Amy Jade.
Powerful accounts of your nightmare experiences.

It's sad you have been through those awful things and times.

I've never been bullied, nor especially popular in school. Like I had friends and stuff, but I was always a bit "weird" lol and not overly fitting in. But I've never looked like an "easy victim" or anything like that.

Wow Amy I'm so sorry to hear that... I really can't imagine that lasting the afternoon now! I'm so pleased that bullying is bring addressed much better in schools over the last couple of years.

I kept quiet about it for years, I felt like I deserved it because I was fat and ashamed. I should have spoken up so much sooner but I think at that age you think you can just deal with it

Yep. All the chavvy lads in my year and other years used to bully me as I was into performing arts and they would slap me, bully me in PE, pinch my bum in the dinner queue and always call me gay, ironic really

But I dated 3 of the hottest girls in my year so I think a lot of it was jealousy. But the confidence between what I had in primary compared to how low it was in secondry was sad. I still get panicky when Im on the bus and a load of school kids get on

I've never been bullied but I saw plenty of it, somehow in my first couple of years of high school they managed to put about 4 or 5 of the roughest, worst, most aggressive and cruel kids in the year group into one class group (mine) so inevitably, there were another couple of kids in that class who got it quite badly. Not a huge amount of physical bullying but pretty relentless targeting "for humour". Occasionally groups of the rest of us would step in because the bullies would actually back down pretty quickly if challenged, but :shrug: we were kids like 12/13/14 so to be honest for the most part we really did nothing about it, which is a regret in hindsight.

I know at least two from that class ended up with serious long term mental health problems, obviously no way to know if it's related but they were a mess by the end of school.

That said, one of the girls who was bullying ended up pregnant at 13 and left school, two of the guys ended up junkies, and another (....lol...) I have heard is doing several decades in prison for smuggling guns through Glasgow for Irish Nationalists. So I don't think they had the best of lives either :umm2:.

It wasn't even a bad school!! Like I said they just somehow managed to place all of the absolute worst kids in one class for the first 2 years of high school.

One of them threw one of the others out of a window when the English teacher left the class :omgno:. It was ground floor but still.

God I'm having flashbacks, I'd forgotten a lot of this stuff.

Nope.
I had a wicked mother that made sure I always fought back.

I was teased a little in school for being gay and camp but nothing on the verge of bullying really, some things out of line and nasty but nothing I’d really call ‘bullying’.

I always gave as good as I got in most instances too, wish I still had the balls I had when I was younger :joker:

I am very fortunate to have never been bullied throughout my life. I guess growing up and being at school, I could fit in with pretty much every social group in a way. I was never the most 'popular' but was always included.

On the other hand, I can't say I've seen anyone been on the receiving end either. There's been occasions where people have been really nasty to a person and I've tried to step in (not all the time regrettably) but it's never been out and out bullying.

...it’s really sad to see so many experiences of bullying...:hug:...Amy especially, you were let down so much by the school who didn’t have that abuse removed immediately, just staggering that it took your mom to take action and contact them directly...the school should have been the ones contacting her to explain what had happened and that it would be dealt with severely, reassuring you and her of the action they would be taking for such abuse against you...I’m so, so sorry that a system let you down after all of those years of bullying behaviour toward you as well...:hug:...



...I have a very low tolerance for bullying behaviour../...I’ve experienced so much of it with others because of my job and I know the damage it can do which is so far reaching...and can manifest in so many different ways into adulthood...and it’s no consolation or understanding at all to know that the person bullying is often extremely unhappy also and that there is a ‘need to take some kind of control over someone or something’....anyways, you’re all amazing people and I’m sad that you went through those times but you still all shine, despite those horrid experiences...:hug:...



...I agree with Joey as well, that sadly... because of social media and the vein that ‘online’ can often take...bullying has expanded and stretched so much and from childhood into adulthood...and all too often...(...one time would be too often..)...it can lead to someone taking their own life...)...because there is no escape from, with ‘online’...and especially atm when online is how we’re all living our lives more, there is little choice in that...and obviously all of the ‘under stress’ ingredients are there as well to enable a specific behaviour to be quite prominent...

No never been bullied really, the closest I got was a woman I worked with as a teenager, she would try to bully most of us that she worked with though, she tried with me a couple of times but it didn't work out too well for her

I've never been bullied. If you think this begins to happen, there are definitely ways of stopping it 99% of the time

If you think that it's very obvious you've never been bullied

I was bullied a fair bit in my early teens, just cause I was shy, introverted and 'different' from other people, and I had very low self-esteem. Going through a ton of personal stuff while being continuously teased by others for the way I came across certainly wasn't pleasant in my early teens, but I think it was definitely beneficial, since it was an experience to learn and grow from.

I was picked on a lot in primary most weeks, being shy really didn't help. In high school I wasn't much apart from the odd thing here and there but most people had that.

i've been bullied quite a few times at school, by usually same 3 guys (who called me names like einstein bc i am 100 times smarter than them)

but whenever one guy was around his girlfriend (whom liked me) he didn't do anything to me :laugh2:

became more awful when that guy became the gym teacher's assistant when me and my classmates had gym also :skull:

Thankfully never. I was pretty gobby though so tended to get left alone. Bullies are cowards at the end of the day and rarely want to take on someone who will fight back

I was always in the popular groups so no

I think there are ways of stopping it effectively, sadly not everyone has access to those means though. To stop it without outside intervention you need to have a vicious streak of your own, which not everyone has. To stop it with intervention you need adults (teachers or parents) who will take it very seriously and attack the source head-on and persistently which, sadly, simply doesn't always happen. I think a sad reality is that in the first case - bullies pick their targets selectively and it's not the kids who can fight back either physically or nastily... and in the second, the places where bullying is at it's worst are in environments with disintersted asults who aren't paying attention in the first place, so are likely to find it "a hassle" when it's reported and half-arse the response or try to sweep it under the carpet.