I’ve been targeted by bullies more than I care to admit.  Even my parents kind of bullied me. 

Is there something wrong with me?

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The very word, bullying, implies a power differential.  Bullying is associated with meanness and cruelty, but to some it is also associated with strength.  Which means that the bully’s target, by contrast, might be associated with weakness.

But being the target of bullying behavior doesn’t make you weak.  Being the target of anything is not what defines you, rather what defines you is how you respond. 

Bullies come in many shapes and sizes

When I say the word bully, it might conjure up images of boys hiding behind bushes, looking to beat up the nerdy kid from school.  And while that certainly counts, there are many less obvious types of bullying.  Let’s start by looking at how we are defining bullying first.

• Bullying is generally defined as seeking to harm, intimidate, or coerce someone perceived as vulnerable.
• Bullies seek control and power.
• Bullies seem to have little or no compassion for those around them. 
• Bullies disregard how their actions might impact others. 
• Bullies are willing to do anything to control relationships and situations.  
• Bullies are willing to humiliate and shame others to get what they want. 
• Bullies are often willing to lie to get what they want and think they deserve.
• Bullies defiantly and persistently cross people’s boundaries with seemingly no regard for the fact that their overtures are unwelcome. 
• Some bullies are willing to physically hurt others to get what they want.
• Bullies refuse to have real conversations with people, choosing instead to overpower and steamroll, using any means necessary to do so.  This might be in the form of silence, yelling, or even physical violence.

Not that it matters, but why do people start bullying?

Some people bully just for fun or entertainment value. 

Others end up bullying as a form of misdirected retaliation for the bullying that they themselves have experienced.  Some people who find themselves the target of bullying choose retaliation, often against somebody other than the person who bullied them.  In other words, they pass it on. A kid being shamed, humiliated or physically abused by his parents chooses to treat his younger siblings or the younger or weaker kids at his school in similar ways.  A parent being bullied by her boss at work comes home and treats her kids in the same abusive way her boss treats her all day. 

Bullies generally want to feel better about themselves.  They are trying to prove to themselves (and others) that they are indeed powerful and strong.  One way to look bigger is to actually become a bigger person, but an easy shortcut might be to knock those around you down.  Once they are smaller, you will feel far bigger without having to change anything about yourself at all. 

Everybody wants to feel good about themselves, but some will do it by bettering themselves and some will do it by attempting to worsen those around them.  Bullies are so fixated on feeling strong and powerful that they don’t care how they end up feeling that way.  In fact, they will go to any length to achieve that goal. 

What do you do when your parents are the ones bullying you?

Because bullying is more about human nature than it is about positions or roles, you can and will find bullies anywhere.  Being a bully is absolutely not restricted to the boys at school hiding behind the bushes.  In fact it is true that although sometimes bullies are children, sometimes bullies have children.

Think about how easy it is to become a parent.  It requires no licensure to have a child.  It requires no certification or degree program.  Anybody can have a child, and suddenly have full, carte blanche power over another living person. 

Parents are the people to whom children not only look, but are told they must look.

Parents are given explicit and often unfettered access to treat their children however they see fit.

Being a parent lands you in a unique position of uncontested power. And this power is defended everywhere you look.  Kids are often taught to obey their parents without question. 

And for many parents, this works well.  But what happens when that parent is a bully?

Remember that a prime characteristic of a bully is that they are insecure and trying to prove their strength and prowess by making those around them seem smaller, more insignificant.

Raising kids can trigger a whole lot of insecurity, even for the best of parents with the easiest of kids.  Kids are independent, autonomous beings who have minds of their own, which means kids will not always do exactly what you want them to do exactly when you want them to do it.

This independence, or defiance as it can be perceived by some parents, triggers a bully parent’s innate insecurity, which can lead to them asserting their dominance and power often in unhealthy ways. 

Some parents become bullies because their parents bullied them.  Maybe they know no other way.  Lacking imagination (and often compassion), they will simply treat others the way they themselves were treated.  Or now that they have kids of their own they might relish the idea of being able to treat somebody else the way they were treated.  Maybe they adopt the motto – Turn about is fair play. 

Some parents become bullies because they believe that they will be judged by others based on their ability to enforce blind obedience from their children.  They might believe that having “perfect” children will reflect well on them, and so they will go to any length to achieve what they define as perfection.  Unfortunately this almost never includes letting the child express his true interests, needs and desires.  Maybe this parent defines a perfect child as one that never talks back, doesn’t voice his own opinions, or is endlessly compliant and obedient.  Regardless, control becomes the goal.

Some parents never wanted to be parents at all, but they were overtly or covertly discouraged from acknowledging this.  Usually due to a combination of societal pressures, religious pressures or just life circumstances they now find themselves a parent to one or more children.  This discrepancy between the life they really wanted (however subconsciously) and the life they are actually living might cause them to bully their children as a way of expressing what they feel deep down inside themselves.  In other words, they treat their children the same way they treat themselves – with disdain and suppression.  After all, they didn’t get what they wanted, so why should their children?

Becoming a parent does not magically transform you into someone who is all-loving, self-sacrificial, nurturing or protective.  Rather, becoming a parent often gives you convenient access to semi-permanent targets. 

So, what do you do if you are the one targeted?

Anybody could be unlucky enough to find themselves the target of bullying.  In fact, if one or more of your parent figures are bullies, you will likely be one of their natural, built-in targets, through no fault of your own.

And when your earliest bullies are your parents, life can be very confusing.

If you are raised in an environment where your needs are consistently belittled and ignored, your boundaries are flagrantly disrespected, and humiliation or aggression (be it passive aggression or aggressive aggression) is often used to get you to comply with both reasonable and unreasonable rules, then you might begin to believe that this is just the way the world works.  In fact, you will begin to treat yourself in the same way you have been treated.  You will begin to suppress your own needs, you will begin to belittle yourself, feel toxic shame or even sometimes become aggressive against yourself.

When you are bullied by your primary caregivers, from a very young age, you will be unlikely to recognize it as bullying.  Instead, you’ll be more likely to either develop a hatred for your parents or a hatred for yourself, or sometimes both. 

Because being treated badly will be as familiar to you as the air you breathe, you might struggle to make sense of your place on the planet.  Maybe you’ll start to feel like you deserve this bad treatment, even going so far as to believe that if you were only a better person, then your bully parent(s) would be nice to you. 

And your confusion will intensify if you witness your bully parent(s) treating others (maybe siblings or other relatives, friends or even strangers) far nicer than they treat you.  Not only will this cement in your certainty that you are the problem, but it will also create confusion in the minds of these other people.  They will believe that you are making up your stories, because they are treated so much differently by that person than you are.  Therefore, they conclude that you must be making it up.  (For more on this phenomenon, see Jay Reid’s Substack column on being the scapegoat.)

But remember one thing: being bullied by your parent(s), whether you alone are their target or they have multiple targets, doesn’t actually mean anything bad about you.  Is it possible that you remind them of somebody, maybe their mother or father, maybe their partner, or maybe a shadowy part of themselves?  Yes, and this means nothing about you.  Is it possible that they simply resent you because they weren’t ready to have children yet or ever?  Yes, and this means nothing about you.   Is it possible that they had envisioned their perfect family, with a boy first and girl second, and you were the “wrong” gender?  Yes, and this means nothing about you.  Is it possible that they are jealous of you for one reason or another?  Yes, and this means nothing about you.  None of these things is your problem, even if they sound like they should be.  They aren’t.

Society’s insistence that a parent’s love (especially a mother’s love) is complete, transcendent and magical, unconditional and all-encompassing, creates dissonance in the mind of a person who didn’t have this experience or was bullied by his parent(s).  This persistent and inaccurate belief by society that parents always love their children can lead people whose parents don’t act in a loving way to erroneously believe that this means they are defective.

To complicate matters, having been treated unkindly will no doubt have affected how these kids show up in the world, often causing them to act out in a variety of ways.  Because of this acting out, they now label themselves as difficult, outside observers label them as difficult and the parents receive validation for how they are treating the child.  The loop completes itself.  Now the parent seems to have objective proof that the kid is bad and deserves to be treated poorly, which causes the kid to act out more.  The endless cycle continues.

I’d also like to acknowledge that parents who let another person (even the other parent) bully a child is complicit in the bullying behavior.  Much like a person who drives the getaway car for a burglar turned murderer can be found guilty of that murder, a person who enables a bully can also be considered guilty of bullying.

If you were the target of bullying, it means nothing about you.  But what you choose to do next, once you are capable of recognizing it, that is when your character starts to become defined. 

The first step is figuring it out

Because we are biologically predisposed to see our parents in a positive light, perhaps to preserve our very lives, recognizing this treatment for what it is takes some time.  It is true that we need to maintain connections when we’re young, and recognizing that our parents are bullies would put us in the position of threatening those essential connections. 

Unfortunately, because being treated this way has likely been normalized over your lifetime, it can be very challenging to recognize it.  In fact, it will be the normal by which you judge all other behavior.  This can be very confusing, especially because something deep down inside of you will probably know that the way you are being treated is not right.  Society’s persistent insistence that a parent’s behavior is always loving will cause you to define whatever it is you experienced as love.

Actually recognizing this behavior will require getting outside the family system and looking back at it in a more objective way. 

An important word of caution – make sure to try and distinguish between true bullying behavior by your parents and behavior that can mimic bullying but isn’t really bullying.  You want to make sure that you resist the urge to twist your family’s normal imperfections into stories of bullying.  You cannot expect perfection from your parents or anybody, but persistent bullying behavior is identifiable. How? Usually by seeking to have a conversation about your concerns, staying as open-minded as possible.

• Bullies will not admit their mistakes.
• Bullies will not apologize.
• Bullies will be unwilling to have honest conversations with you.
• Bullies will always turn the narrative back into you being the true problem.

So, before you go labeling anything, it is your responsibility to try and have these conversations.  If the bullying behavior continues, and there is no attempt to atone for normal mistakes and imperfections, you might just have a bully on your hands.  And you cannot talk a bully out of bullying. 

How not to become a bully yourself

Once you recognize that you’ve been raised by a bully, the first thing to do is to make sure that you aren’t passing it down.  After all, it is easy enough to internalize this way of acting and then you will often inadvertently start treating other people in this same way.  (Intergenerational trauma, anyone?)

You will likely be justifiably angry now that you’re able to see more clearly that how you were treated and continue to be treated isn’t right.  But first and foremost, resist the urge to become a bully yourself.  Interrupt the cycle.  Immediately.  You might not be able to change who your parents (or other bullies) are, but you do have the power to be the person you want to be.  You can make that choice without the help of anybody else.

For starters, let’s take a look at the same list from above, but this time through the lens of what a non-bully’s characteristics are.

• Non-bullies don’t seek control and power, but rather seek teamwork and mutual understanding.
• Non-bullies have compassion for those around them. 
• Non-bullies are concerned for how their actions might impact others. 
• Non-bullies recognize when they are attempting to control relationships and situations and they change their course.
• Non-bullies are unwilling to humiliate and shame others to get what they want. 
• Non-bullies do not try to manipulate relationships and situations using any means at all.
• Non-bullies are unwilling to physically or emotionally hurt others to get what they want.
• Non-bullies do their best to respect people’s boundaries especially when they sense they might be causing pain.
• Non-bullies have real conversations with people, admitting mistakes when necessary and seeking mutual understanding. 

Seek to hold yourself to the standard of not being a bully, even when addressing those that have bullied you.  This is incredibly important and is often the hardest part – bullying a bully is still bullying.  Don’t do it.  Once you have established that somebody, even your parent, is a bully, it is never acceptable to bully them back.  You will not be able to talk them out of their behavior, but neither should you retaliate or reciprocate it.  Just create some distance from that person, and continue to act with integrity, despite their actions towards you.

Another important response after recognizing that you were targeted by a bully, especially a parent, is to resist the urge to internalize their behavior towards you.  Recognize that you were targeted because of something inside of them, and this means absolutely nothing about you.  It does not mean that you are flawed or weak.  As much as it feels like it does mean something you, it does not.  So just as bullying a bully is still bullying, bullying yourself is also bullying.  So don’t do it.

The biggest indicator or your strength and your goodness is how you now choose to respond moving forward.

Respond with holding your head high.  And respond with breaking the cycle. 

If you choose to become a parent yourself, educate yourself on healthy parenting techniques.  Remember that bully parents write parenting books too, so use your best judgment when seeking advice.  Who you ask matters, and if it sounds like bully parenting, steer clear of it.

Become willing to question, challenge, and/or unlearn the rules you learned growing up.

Make the decision to not enable other bully parents.  Whether you see the behavior in your own parents, your siblings, your spouse or partner, or anyone else, you can choose to speak up wherever and whenever you witness this behavior.  Because you are breaking the cycle, you will do this with kindness, but you will do so.

Choose to communicate respectfully.  There is a middle ground between yelling and stonewalling that is called healthy communication.  Make the choice to find that middle ground.

Choose to act with integrity even when those around you haven’t, recognizing that acting with integrity sometimes means creating distance once you have tried seeking clarity.

Claim your power

Being the target of any number of bullies does not say anything about your character.  Rather, your character will be defined by how you choose to act toward others moving forward.

It really doesn’t matter if the bully was your parent or your sibling or your partner or your friend or even strangers.  Learn to recognize it, distance yourself from it, and break the cycle. 

In the moment, it might feel like the path of least resistance is to endure it, ignore it or even retaliate.  But we aren’t looking for the path of least resistance – we are looking for the right path. 

Make the choice to stand up for what is right, whether you are protecting yourself or others or both.

Yes, this takes bravery, which is all about doing the hard thing even though it’s hard.  By definition, this choice will likely be difficult, but now the power is yours.  You get to choose what comes next. 

What will your next action be?