@Vgal #216877
Ah, that wasn’t quite what I meant when I said the above. It wasn’t about you / the teacher making yourself vulnerable, but rather about acting respectfully and perhaps not being firm when required due to that. Basically, being nice to them, and having that niceness be interpreted by them as permissiveness and a sign that they can push you or others around.
Ah, I understand now. Yeah, I've written a whole thing below that bears on that concept of permissiveness. I wrote that before I scrolled back to the first of your replies so I'll leave this here.
Onto response 2:
While everyone is a flawed human being, there are also situations — many of them! — where there really is a victim and a perpetrator, and where the violence flows very much one-sidedly. A bully, and a bullied.
I'm not saying "everyone's just as bad as each other" in this situation. Yes, there absolutely can be victims and perpetrators and for that to be very consistent, with no exchange of roles.
I have met these people. And sorry if this is harsh to say, but I don’t appreciate you trivializing things into “everyone involved is simply a flawed human being who is probably doing their best or just trying to get through life”. No. Some among us are vile little fuckers who truly, honestly want others to suffer, and enjoy inflicting that suffering.
I'm sorry that I phrased that in a way that made it sound like I was trivialising it. I know how awful one person can treat another, I've been on the receiving end. It's no joke, and it's fucking horrible. What I'm saying is that the people doing these things are doing the only thing they know how to do, to get by. Ask any bully; they don't believe they're the villain of the situation.
I’m sorry, but I have to emphasize this point very firmly, because I see you nearing the sort of equivocations that can lead to teachers going soft on bullying and letting it go on rather than stopping the abuse. And that is something that I will push back on, especially as you are a therapist who might conceivably end up having to deal with such a situation and having to help people caught in it.
Go right ahead. This is helpful to know.
If you’re going to tell an abused child that their bully is actually really a good person deep down who’s trying, and that both kids aren’t perfect… then you’re damn right that the kid who’s being bullied isn’t ready! Nor should they be ready for something like that!
No, that's not what I was saying. The whole "people are good" thing seems to be the problematic part here, so let me explain something here.
There's an old piece of theory called... well, a few things. The OK Corral, the correlogram, I'm-OK, You're-OK, or the Grid for What's Happening. http://ernstokcorral.com/Publications/OK%20CORRAL%20monograph.pdf
"OK"ness means that the person has a right to exist, and has reasons for doing what they do. That doesn't mean those reasons are acceptable; Please be clear about that. I don't think bullying is acceptable. The OKness I was talking about just means that the things bullies do are a logical progression of the life they've led so far.
Let me work through a different example: let's say I was raised in a household where being aware of what's going on is hard to bear (violence, abuse, extreme poverty, take your pick). Given the awful circumstances, it makes sense I'll find ways to phase out of the situation so I can just not be aware of what's going on, since there's nothing I can do to directly change it. If I can 'not be there' in some way, then I'll do it. One day, probably as a teenager, I discover alcohol. Boom - I now have a way to black out and not be aware of the unbearable situation at home. So every time there's an incident, I drink, and numb it all out.
Except, in order to get that alcohol I may have to steal it. A number of people are going to be annoyed about that, justifiably so. I'll probably be a pain to deal with: loud, expecting others to get me home or else they're "not real friends", just obnoxious in general. People are going to not like me very much for that. I may even do harm to them myself, if I have a violent side. People look disapprovingly at me.
Time goes on. I increasingly find that life's easier if I'm drunk all the time, not just after an incident. All the angry, judgy people seem less important when I'm drunk.
Those people don't know why I started drinking, and they sure as hell don't see the 'coping incontinence' of me drinking for more of the time than I used to. Am I in a position to tell them that their disapproval isn't all that bad and I *could* deal with it without drinking, but I just don't want to, because a way of feeling no pain at all is right there? Nope, I'm drunk as a skunk, so I probably can't explain much very well. Plus, I was a teenager when I started tuning out this hard. I'm starting to get developmentally behind my peers.
How do you help someone like that? Tracking all the way back to the original reason - the adverse stuff going on at home - is probably a good place to start. You don't have to accept my lairy behaviour while drinking, but it helps to see through my behaviour to figure out what problem the drinking is supposed to be solving.
My argument is it's worth figuring out what that root problem is, because me drinking isn't helping me in the way some other behaviour would, and it's certainly not helping you, since you have a drunk in your life. The ideal outcome of all this is that I find a better way to cope with my horrible home life than drinking... but I may need help to spot what I've been doing. Just the jolt that you aren't interested in the surface level drunkard stuff that seems to be annoying everyone else may be enough to get me started on a road to recovery.
Going back to me and my drinking: my behaviour may be too obnoxious for you to get that far. I may not be ready to give up the bottle, because going sober is too scary even to think about. Both of these reasons will stop any sort of helpful intervention happening.
Thinking on from that, my emphasis as a therapist vis-à-vis bullying is to help adults who have a history of childhood bullying to rebuild the parts of their lives that were damaged by the bullying. We've been talking about helping children. The situation's different because an adult is out of that situation while the child is still in it. You can't provide medical aid to someone who's still in a burning building. They have to get - or be dragged - out of the building first. Same with therapy. You can't heal when you're still in the toxic situation.
Also, I'm not good with kids, but I'm much better with adults.
So... I'm going to apologise here for phrasing all of this so badly. I hope I've illustrated what I was thinking about all this, better. There is more I could say about how victims feel more incentivised to change a dynamic than perpetrators, which would bolster your point. Why stop bullying when you're the bully? That's another reason why I'm keen to look at the humanity of the bully. Is there a point where they were/are the victim of something? If that's something that can be worked on, they may no longer feel a need to carry on abusing other kids.
But again, they've got to be ready, and if they're not, you can't make them be ready.
I’ll finish up by saying that this is turning out to be fruitful talk for me. You might be finding it upsetting, and if you do, please know that I’m not intending to do that, and do what’s best for you. I’m striving to learn as much as I can from all this, so you and I never have to go through this particular painful conversation again. But I am listening, intently. Please let me know if you don’t feel listened to.