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#peer abuse
intersexfairy · 2 years
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hey uh. don't listen to the people who say the bullying won't matter once you get out of school. because shit. it will.
bullying is peer abuse. it's traumatizing. and while getting out of the environment helps, the hurt doesn't go away. all the things ingrained in you don't go away. just because your bullies might not be in your life doesn't mean the awful things they did to you don't matter. they are still very significant people in your life.
please don't brush it off. please treat yourself with kindness and fight for the support and safety you deserve. you are not the person your bullies thought you were. you never were. you deserve to be happy and confident, and minimizing what happened won't lead to that.
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defectivegembrain · 9 days
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Thing is it's like. I grew up on the same street as a bunch of other girls around the same age, so we formed a friend group. And I think they were genuinely nice to me for the most part, but I was always the weirdo. My autism diagnosis literally mentions frequent misunderstandings between us. I remember often having a totally different game in mind than them, and not realising they couldn't just know how I thought it should go. I remember the closest friend to me at one point saying in an exasperated tone "why do you never understand?!"
Some things were worse. When they found out about my weird Willy Wonka phobia they started singing the song of the guys I won't name because uhh still a problem for me at nearly 30 years old. And me being me, I froze up and just sat there being scared. When I heard them making the typical jokes about emos I knew I had to keep hiding my scars from them. I was always out of place, is the point.
Then there was a sleepover for my birthday. We had fun and I was happy for a little while, which was rare and precious at the time. We decorated t-shirts with all our names. They all wore theirs for bedtime. I didn't, as it was something too new and it hadn't even occurred to me that we might do that.
Then you know, general chat. Some stuff about school. And one of my friends, who I had always thought was kind, was talking about this guy in her class and she said "everyone makes fun of him, even me". And I said nothing, but I was freaking out inside. She was a bully, that was bullying. And in my own class I was that kid that everyone made fun of. If she'd met me in a school setting would she treat me like that too? And I just. It confuses me to this day. She knew how much I had been bullied. I wish I'd asked her how that was any different.
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avpdrecovery · 6 months
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“The rejecting responses of our parents to our emotional expression alienate us from our feelings. Emotional abuse/neglect scares us out of our own emotions while simultaneously making us terrified of other people's feelings.“
— Pete Walker, Complex PTSD From Surviving to Thriving
(Note: Remove "parents" and replace it with "peers" and this would still make sense imo. One thing I noticed is that a lot of psychology books focus on the relationship between child and parents, but rarely ever branch out to consider what being abused by peers can do to a developing child.)
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neuroticboyfriend · 29 days
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bullying is abuse.
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bitter-and-angry · 1 year
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It isn’t safe here! Please let me leave!!!
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cryptidanathema · 4 months
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People used to bully me by telling me I ruin everything I touch, make it stupid and dirty just by association. So like you're telling me if I like the same thing you do or whatever that I don't have to share it? It's all mine now? I have marked it my territory? Sucks to suck bitch I win
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forget-the-feeling · 8 months
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“LITTLE GIRLS ARE NOT STAND-IN MOTHERS FOR THEIR MALE PEERS!”
I was always expected to “set an example” for boys my age. I wasn’t allowed to fight back and I wasn’t even allowed to cry when they hit me over and over again. I wasn’t there to babysit them, I was a kid too. It’s no wonder there are so many man-children and heterofatalist women
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traumatizedjaguar · 1 year
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furiousgoldfish · 1 year
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Happy birthday!! Hope it's okay!
I've read your article about how school bullying follows up child abuse and how child abuse creates the risk of abuse in the future, and I wanted to ask something. Idk how and why but child abuse and school bullying were two different, separate things for me 🤨 like I felt that my first experience of being bullied was in high school. It wan't the same and 'nothing uncommon'. I felt devastated like it was the first time ever I was treated like that. Maybe child abuse just has made me sensitive to others' judgement and to how people percieve me? Like the only truth about who I actually am, is in how others see me. What do you think?
Yeah, it can definitely make you more sensitive to judgment!
I don't know if I can explain this well, but this is something that can happen when you're abused at home, but usually feel safe in public areas: you develop 2 types of behaviour, almost like two personalities, one for home, and another one for public. It also changes how you feel about yourself at home, and how you feel about yourself in public, surrounded by other people. At home you're constantly aware that you're not valuable, that you're despised, that you can be hurt at any moment, and that you're disposable. But with friends and in public social setting, you can feel welcome, valuable, like you fit in.
Then, you have to base your self worth choosing from these two settings; if you're well received in public and amongst your peers, you can decide that well, parents must have been wrong about you, because all of these other people like you just fine and want your around, so your parents obviously don't know shit about you and can go to hell with their dumb opinions. You embrace your image of yourself of a person beloved by your friends and you hold onto that in order to survive the hateful ordeal you have to endure at home, knowing it is undeserved and that you're not all that awful things your parents say you are.
But, deep inside you're still scared that your parents might be right. Because they knew you first, and they knew you the longest, and they watched you grow, and their words are etched into your brain. So you're always careful and looking for warning signs that other people might develop these negative opinions of you as well, it's never a truly 'safe' situation, as long as there are people like your parents claiming confidently that you're nothing but a burden or a waste of space.
So then, when you're clinging to this hope that people in your peer setting will view you in a more favorable way, and then you end up abused in that setting too - that's when your entire view of yourself can crash. Because you just received a confirmation that even people who are not your parents, see you as nothing but a target, someone who is acceptable to hurt and harass and nobody will find you worth protecting and saving. It's absolutely devastating, and it can make you question yourself very deeply on how are you perceived and what is your true identity, if everyone around you is okay with you being abused? It's extremely painful, and very cruel for an abused kid to be given a little hope of normalcy, and then to have it yanked away like that, by some kids who don't even know what they're doing or who they're hurting, they're just in for lashing out at someone vulnerable and unprotected.
I only realized way later that bullying had this same negative impact on my self-worth, even if I didn't know it at the time, because bullies just weren't as violent as my parents, so I didn't need to take them as seriously. But they did mean that I was seen as nothing but a target both at home and social setting, and it did manage to isolate me even more, and make me even more certain that I am not a part of society, and will only be hurt and rejected if I ever try to belong anywhere. It is a very painful thing to be put thru.
So in conclusion, yes, abuse makes you extremely sensitive to how you're perceived in public, because your self-perception has already been challenged and weakened by the trolls that live in your home so having the outside world affirming their stance is devastating.
In the contrast to this, not being abused at home can make your self-perception positive enough, that when you're bullied at school, you're aware that these bullies are the only source in your life who find you an acceptable target and that you will be seen differently, and accepted in all other areas of your life. It's still a crisis in not managing to belong with your peers and being seen as an acceptable target in a social setting, and sometimes pride or shame can stop a person from even confiding in their parents about it, but it shouldn't completely crash their self-perception, like it would happen for an abused kid. (I am speaking here just hypothetically, I might be wrong about this, I don't actually know for sure how non-abused children deal with bullying other than what I've seen in tv shows)
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The trust issues you develop when specifically interacting with people your age and younger after surviving childhood bullying is wild.
The way you assume that every person who comes up to you has bad intentions. The amount of anxiety you feel having to talk to anyone who looks young. Immediately assuming every negative comment a person makes is about you, even when they're not talking to you and you're never mentioned. Every laugh is laughing at you. Every person whose nice to you is just waiting for the punch line where you become the butt of some elaborate joke. Even positive comments you take as backhanded. Nice people are always secretly condescending.
If you're still in education, even after you leave the school it happened in, entering another academic institution brings those feelings straight to the front of your mind.
This sort of thing doesn't just go away when you leave the place it happened. It stays with you for a very long time, sometimes your entire life. Random tones, words and settings will trigger feelings of fear, alienation, dread and anger without you even knowing why.
And this is just the social, emotional and verbal bullying. Physical and sexual bullying are a whole other nasty beast. How do you even begin to unpack this?
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gncrevan · 2 years
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tw: peer abuse, childhood trauma
i honestly am convinced that "x group should be bullied" jokes set us back enormously on an ethical level.
i think this stems in part from the misconception many people have that bullying looks like it does on TV. that there's one person or a small isolated group of bullies who call you names and shove you in a locker. but this is simply not the case. bullying is perpetrated by a comparably large group and permitted and perpetuated by the majority and the authority within a given setting.
bullying looks like getting beaten up by all the boys in third grade at once, getting pushed every single day in first grade, never feeling safe to talk in class, not being allowed to laugh in public, nobody talking to you unless it's to be condescending and insulting, hiding in the toilet stalls to cry. bullying looks like your teachers blaming you, friends abandoning you because they can't stand the fallout (if you even had any in the first place), not feeling able to tell your parents about it, getting abused and exploited by the people you try to go to for help. bullying looks like random explosions of rage, aggression, self-harm, suicidality.
bullying happens in schools, hobby groups, activist groups, organizations and workplaces. it is a form of peer abuse that utilizes group dynamics to create outcasts and then systematically punish them for not fitting in. it can only happen because the majority and the authority (teacher, boss, HR etc.) allow it or even stoke it on, partake in it or start it in the first place.
bullying is traumatic, especially for children. it does not build character or serve to make someone less "weird" or teach them a lesson. it's not funny to say that someone deserves bullying, that's the logic of abusers. victims of bullying are often disabled, queer or racialized. the target is "weirdness" and an inability to fit in. that's also how enablers justify not interfering; they say we just need to be taught a lesson, so we'll learn to hide and contort ourselves and become small.
bullying causes trauma. bullying is abuse.
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intersexfairy · 1 year
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hey I just wanted to say something? It's kind of an old post but j just found it and I needed to reach out. It's about the post on bullying.
I'm literally bawling my eyes out. In the five years since I finally got out of the place were I went through six year of bullying, I have never, once in my life found anyone say that. I've been looking for any kind of proof that I wasn't alone, that i wasn't going insane or exaggerating and just. Thank you so much. I can't stress it enough. Thank you so much for that. It means the world to me.
Oh my gosh, you are beyond welcome. I was bullied for a long time, too. I prefer to call it peer abuse because it makes it more undeniabl;. "Bullying" is normalized in such a way that survivors of it are constantly brushed off. Im so happy my post meant so much to you. It's exactly why I posted it.
Also, dw about it being an old post. I have a lot of posts circulating so Im used to it. And since most of my positive/serious posts are messages to myself as much as they are others, it helps me to be reminded of them. It happened the other day with a post I very much needed to hear again.
Oh and remember to hydrate friend. Crying dehydrates you and I dont want you to get a headache.
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defectivegembrain · 9 months
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Jokes about shoving people into lockers are not funny jokes about people "needing" to be bullied are not funny "jokes" that sound exactly like the actual excuses and justifications adults use to shut bullying victims up are not fucking funny
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Tw sibling abuse
I am an (assistant) teacher at a preschool and there is a little girl, whos always had awful anxiety and selective mutism. Last year i worked in her classroom and she really seemed to like and trust me, and I was 100% ready to drop anything to make sure shes comfortable and feeling safe
My coworker just learned that the girl has a really shitty older brother who does stereotypical shitty abusive older brother things, and the parents "care", but not enough to give him consequences or stop the behavior or tell her anything other than to ignore it
It makes so much sense now why she is as amxious as she is, and also makes sense why I felt so inclined to protect her and was so worried someone was hurting her
My older sibling was abusive too, to an extent that still affects me a lot as an adult. Its killing me to know that such an innocent and vulnerable kid is going through the same thing. Of course, there is absolutely nothing I can do about any of this
Im just angry and sad and worried. My brain keeps wondering how bad it actually is- what happens behind closed doors? I guess i tend to project my trauma but im just so scared theres more physicsl violence than we think, or even SA, like my sibling did.
Any advice on how to cope? I don't work with her anymore so this isnt even my business but its stuck in my mind and i cant stop worrying about if shes going to be safe as she grows up. I know realistically, the answer is no. The world isnt safe for kids, and shes already much much more vulnerable than other kids her age. Its awful and I just want her to be okay. I also just want to stop thinking about this
i feel like a bad person for being so invested in a family that doesnt even know my name but i need her to be okay
hi there anon,
It sounds like you're getting triggered by this little girl's situation. That makes sense, taking into account your own experiences. Being around kids as a childhood abuse survivor can be so difficult and emotionally taxing.
You're definitely not a bad person for being invested in this. It makes so much sense, and you are not wrong for how you feel or what you think. Give yourself some compassion and kindness right now.
Remind yourself that there is nothing you can do in this situation. You are not a bad person for not being able to know everything about her situation and helping her. Your presence in her life when you did work with her was probably positively impactful on her.
Some coping skills:
Journaling: It can help to vent and just let everything out, unfiltered.
Meditation & Grounding: Here and here are some grounding exercises. Here, here, and here are some guided meditation exercises as well.
Breathing exercises
Affirmative self-talk. Be kind to yourself. Remind yourself that you are safe. Let yourself grieve your own childhood.
Mod Misa
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bitter-and-angry · 1 year
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Why are you so strict? I’m just a kid!!!
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sleepymenheragirl · 8 months
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I'm fucking 25 years old. I should be over all the bullying I went through by now, right? That's what everyone says, right?
So why aren't I? Why am I still afraid of people being mean to me again?
Is it because the alter who holds the memories and pain from back then still hasn't healed fully? Because the adults around me back then dismissed me every time and I never got to properly address things in therapy?
I can hardly remember it anyway, I only have a vague idea of what happened. I feel so stupid for still being afraid of verbal abuse at my grown age.
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