DON'T LET YOURSELF BE BULLIED
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 45.
Hello, friends. I'm a bit fired up today, and I'm excited to talk to you about bullies. It's a subject that comes up a lot with my clients, both in the context of their kids, as well as their own relationships.
But before I get started, I wanted to make sure you knew about a new coaching opportunity I'm offering, and it's entirely free. Twice a month, I'll be hosting group coaching calls on a Zoom webinar, where I'll invite people up to get coached, either through the chat or live on video. If you've never experienced live coaching before, this is a great way to see what it's all about.
There's something powerful about hearing and watching other people get coached and work through their own issues. Sometimes the coaching will be about a topic that resonates with you, but even when the coaching is focused on something totally different from your experience, I've always come away with insights that I can apply to my own life. So join me for the next call, which will be Saturday, April 22nd at 9 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
And if you're listening to this episode after April 22nd, you can find out about the upcoming calls by subscribing to the Small Jar community. You can do that by DMing Small Jar Coach or subscribing through either Facebook or Instagram. Okay, so let's dig into today's topic.
Bullies. Do you ever find yourself minding your own business, maybe just driving down the road, and you see someone riding your tail? I'm by no means a timid driver, but even in my most aggressive driving mode, I typically stay braking distance away from the car in front of me. I'm fascinated that some people seem to love driving two feet behind.
Seriously, like right behind. Are they in that much of a rush? Or maybe they have no sense of personal space. Or the answer we typically come to, that they're just jerks.
There was one time I was driving with my son. It was an early weekend morning. I think I was driving him to track practice.
And all of a sudden, this truck pulled up alongside of me, then screeched ahead of me and proceeded to stop short entirely. I was totally caught off guard. And of course, my adrenaline started racing.
I tried to turn to move around the guy, and he just got in my way again. I should have just stopped and waited for him to leave me alone. I honestly still have no idea what I did to provoke the guy.
Maybe I somehow pulled out in front of him without looking. But as I said, it was an early morning, and I didn't notice any cars on the road. So this guy persisted for about a half a mile.
He was driving less than 10 miles per hour and was constantly weaving across the two lane road so I couldn't get around. Eventually, I took the bait and tried to get around him and just ended up making myself look like a total hothead in front of my son, who at this point was not yet a driver. So not the best look in terms of setting an example.
Not to mention the fact that I was probably putting us in danger by provoking this guy who was obviously mad. So on the road, there are bullies. On social media, there's bullies.
People seem to feel free to express themselves in ways that are pretty aggressive when they're hiding behind the security of a username or their computer monitor. They call names. They criticize everything about you from the quality of your posts and incorrectness of your views to deeply personal cuts about your looks or family life.
These anonymous bullies can make us mad in the moment for sure. These barbs almost always come out of nowhere, so there's a bit of a shock factor, particularly if the person is really aggressive or hurtful for no reason. So we can feel this physical reaction like a fight-or-flight response where bodies take over, cortisol increases, and we're physically ready to fight, or we just want to get anywhere but near the bully.
So we're taken off guard, and we feel this adrenaline rush, and we might feel compelled to retaliate or yell back. But for the most part, within a few minutes, maybe within an hour, our heart rate starts to decrease, and we start to let go of the anger, and we just think, what was that about? We kind of recognize in those moments, once we've recovered from the shock of the aggression, that whatever that person was projecting onto us was entirely about them, because they don't even know us. Maybe we did something that pissed them off.
For example, maybe I cut that guy off in the truck, and he decided I shouldn't have done it, and he was angry about it. But at the end of the day, he doesn't know me, so his apparent anger about my carelessness didn't have anything to do with me as a person. I didn't take it personally.
So consider that we give ourselves that grace when we're dealing with anonymous bullies, that we don't make it about us. Think about the last time you encountered an angry person who threw obscenities at you for no reason or was just rude to you in a store. I want to invite you to just think about how quickly you recovered from it.
Sometimes we're able to completely let someone else's anger wash over us. There have even been times for me when people are honking at me in traffic, or someone could even stick up their middle finger. Look, I think I've told you I live in New Jersey.
So people I've never seen before in my life flare up with this ridiculous, unexpected anger, and I literally look at them and think, wow, they must be having a really hard day. There's so much power in just giving their anger back to them, because it's not for me. It has nothing to do with me.
Even if I cut them off, even if I did something that triggered their anger, I still don't have to make it about me as a person, or even that I did anything wrong. And look, if I messed up, I'm 100% on board with taking responsibility. But is the anger and rage necessary? I say all of this completely acknowledging that there have been times when I have been out of my mind with anger about something.
But in those moments, it also wasn't about the other person either. So sometimes we're able to access that ability to stay completely unruffled in the face of someone else's angry or even mean actions, and sometimes we're not. And even the best of us can find ourselves in an irate mood over the smallest inconveniences because of where we are in our emotional space at that moment.
So all of us are running around in the world dealing with our own demons, dealing with our own struggles. And so any one of us can actually succumb to being a bully if we're in the wrong mental state, one where we're just quick to perceive every unmet expectation as a major inconvenience and a source of anger. That acting out is about us.
Think about what would compel someone on social media to criticize or demean a complete stranger. Are they bored so they're seeking entertainment? That's about them. Are they actually insecure and looking for a way to feel powerful? That's about them.
Have they been so hurt in their own life that they want to share their pain with others? That's about them. It's so easy to see when the bully is anonymous because they don't even know us. So how could their mean words have anything to do with me? I want to invite you to consider that this is always true, whether you know the bully or not.
And look, the reality of life is that bullies are everywhere. They just are. Not only do all of us have the ability to be bullies in individual moments when we find ourselves taken over by anger, but there are just people in the world who are not nice, people who are purposefully mean.
And look, as a life coach, I will almost always encourage myself and my clients to see that we always have the ability to change our perspective about something or someone if we want to. For example, someone could do or say things, and we don't have to make it mean they're a mean person or that they're a bully. We could theoretically choose to forgive this person because they've been hurt in their life, that they're acting out because of their past, or that this is what their parents modeled, and so this is how they learned to survive.
So I do think there's a value and understanding when we label someone a bully or a mean person that this is a choice we're making, a label we're putting on them because of their behavior. And that label is not the truth. It's a perception.
But I also want to offer that we get to believe whatever we want to believe about someone who's mean to us or cruel to someone we love. We don't have to turn the other cheek and say it's okay. You don't have to like it.
You don't have to grin and bear it. You also don't have to excuse it or forgive it. I'm a huge believer in the concept that you don't have to do anything.
There are no shoulds or have tos in the way we do anything in our life, including how we interact with other people. I've coached clients who are very deep in their faith and want to see the best in everyone and want to forgive everyone and show up as their most compassionate selves. And all of that is wonderful, but that's also a choice.
We choose to live with a set of values that governs our behavior, but when it comes to someone else doing things or saying things that go against our values and particularly our boundaries of what's acceptable, you don't have to force yourself to believe it's okay. You can feel love or compassion for the human without condoning their actions. This is a lesson I honestly wish I had known earlier.
Empathy is such a powerful, beautiful thing, but when a bully takes advantage of it, when a narcissist makes an empath believe that they're less than and not good enough through their repeated abuse, that empathy becomes a vulnerability. We're never going to change the other person, ever. We don't have control over how other people think, how they feel, how they behave.
No matter how well we comply, we're not going to change another person. We're not going to convince them to be someone different than they are. So why would we put ourselves in that position? Why are we hoping that people like that will accept us or that there's something that we can do to make things better? I've been intentionally vague here because there's so many applications of this in all of the relationships of our lives.
So I imagine as you're listening, you're visualizing your own bully or narcissist or a bully who's impacted one of your kids. I honestly wish that we taught a sense of empowerment with bullies more actively in school. We try to teach our kids not to be bullies and we try to teach our kids not to fight back with bullies, but we also want our kids to stand up for themselves.
It's kind of a confusing message when you think about it. And look, it can be hard for us adults too. There's such a fine line there.
What does standing up for yourself look like if you're not fighting back? And I don't know that we give kids the tools to understand the difference. There are movements in schools to stop bullying and I do think that schools can continue to share messages with kids about appropriate behavior and with parents about how to cope if their child is feeling bullied or if they observe that their own child is showing signs that they may be bullying other people. I think that type of education is valuable, but I also think if we're to accept the reality, which is we're never going to stop all the bullies, no matter how much education or lessons in bullying we give, no matter the repercussions we enact, all of the talking in the world is not going to stop the world from having bullies.
So rather than waiting for the world to change, which we have absolutely no power to do, we have the opportunity to embrace for ourselves and for our kids the power to not be bullied. Now this is a superpower, my friends, and you already have it. Think about the anonymous bully.
Nine times out of ten, you don't let that person bully you, even if you have a reaction in the moment because you're taken off guard. It's like the jump scare in the movie you weren't expecting, but you didn't carry that experience with you. You didn't make any of it mean anything about you.
There are people in our lives, whether that be our partner, a friend, a family member, a boss, or a colleague, our kids, there are people in our lives who may just be bullies. And depending on our relationship with them, and depending on how much control we perceive they have over us, or our perceptions about the intricacies of our relationship, sometimes this makes it very difficult for us to set boundaries with those people, to not make their hurtful words or actions mean something about us. And boundaries are a tricky thing in relationships with people in our life.
We can have the belief that it's important for us to support and love our family and friends, or to be the better person and rise above whatever's happening. We can offer forgiveness again and again, no matter how many times they cross the line, because we love them. And maybe we excuse their behavior because we think we know where it's coming from.
We can sacrifice our boundaries and our sense of self in the hope that somehow, by us being better, we can heal the other person. It just never works. When you break it down, we don't want to cut off or lose the people we love.
Sometimes in relationship, we have this vision of what the relationship used to be, or could still be, if we could just repair everything. Setting boundaries, communicating boundaries, and being willing to enforce consequences, particularly if those consequences are that you'll walk away from the relationship, these feel hard to set and enforce. If this conversation resonates with you at all, I want you to know how deeply I understand how hard it is to walk away and to set a boundary with someone who you love deeply, or who you had a deep, caring relationship with in the past.
But the reality is that even people we love, even people who say they love us, can be bullies, the most damaging kind of bullies, because there's a part of us that believes they're right when they tell us what's wrong with us, why we're not good enough. When we know, and even worse, when we love our bully, we make their words and actions mean there's something wrong with us. So we've talked about anonymous bullies, we've talked about bullies in our life, and now I want to talk about the bullies we are to ourselves.
And let's face it, we are all bullies to ourselves. Everything from the disparaging thoughts we have about ourselves when we look in the mirror, to the thoughts we think about what we're capable of, telling ourselves we're not the kind of person who can be motivated, or that we don't have any professional skills because we've just been a mom. There's so many words and phrases we use to diminish ourselves on a regular basis.
It's so fascinating as a coach to talk to people and listen to the way they talk about themselves as if it's all true. I don't think I had any concept of this before I became a coach and started analyzing my own self-view, and then seeing that reflected in other people. Look, we all have different types of views about ourselves, but the readiness with which we express the absolute truth of our negative feelings about ourselves is astounding to me.
And look, no matter how good I get at self-coaching, my mind continues to offer me all sorts of crap about why I'm not good enough or doing it wrong. And I want to offer that's actually okay. Our brains do this because there's a certain instinctual level to us wanting to be accepted.
Think about our evolution. When we were cave people, if you were cast out of the tribe, that pretty much meant you were going to die. So being accepted can feel a bit like a life or death situation to our nervous system.
So let's just give ourselves a little bit of compassion to acknowledge that when our minds offer us this diatribe of negativity about us, nothing has gone wrong. It's just our brain wanting desperately to fit in. But the problem is that we believe everything our brain offers to us.
So when all of this comes to our kids, it's even more scary because all of the things I've talked about, the anonymous bullies, the bullies we know and love, the bullies we are to ourselves, all of us experience this, all of us, including our children. Our kids will absolutely encounter an anonymous bully like trolls in their social media or kids they don't even know in the mall who make a snide comment about something they're wearing. Our teens are very likely to experience bullies in their school or even among their friend group.
It's also very likely our kids are being highly critical of themselves, perhaps even bullying themselves on a regular basis. So if all of this is kind of a default way of the world, how are we to support and protect our kids from bullies? If we can't even protect ourselves from these bullies? Well, let's take it one by one. As I talked about from the start, it's actually fairly easy for us to brush off the anonymous bully.
For the most part, we know that whatever they're saying or doing is more about them than us. So I want to invite you to consider it's possible to have this mindset with every single bully in your life. That friend who talks behind your back or doesn't invite you to certain events, you can let that be about her and not about you.
I'm not saying that you have to embrace her behavior and maybe you decide you don't want to be her friend, but her actions don't have to mean anything about you. That boss who berates you, consider how that has nothing to do with you. Your spouse is cheating.
That doesn't have to be about you. You get to believe whatever you want to believe about yourself. This lesson is so incredibly valuable, but in the context of bullies, let me tell you, this is pure gold.
You get to believe whatever you want to believe about yourself. So why would you ever choose to believe something bad about yourself just because of words that came out of some other person's mouth or actions that some other person took? Why did they get to decide who you are? Why would you choose to make them right, to give them the power to decide what you're made of? This is a powerful lesson for us as adults, but think about how powerful it can be for our kids. And I get how scary it can be.
We see stories in the news about suicides from bullying and it's literally our worst nightmare, but we can't change or stop the bullies. So our work for ourselves and our kids is to model that when people say hurtful things or take hurtful actions, those words and actions have absolutely no power to change your worth. You were born worthy.
You were born good enough. That has literally never changed throughout the course of your life. You know this because I'm willing to bet that this is the way you feel about your children.
There is nothing that they could do or say that would take away their value as human beings, their worth, their worthiness. You don't need anyone's permission to believe you are enough, that you're worthy. And if you can feel empowered to know that someone else doesn't get to decide your worth, you also get to decide that you will not undermine your own worthiness, that you get to decide that no matter what, you are beautiful, lovable, enough.
Refuse to be a bully to yourself. It's just a no for me. We all have doubt.
Our brains will offer us all of these worthless thoughts that we're not good enough, that we're not capable, that we're doing it wrong, that we'll never do it better. Think about the words you say to yourself when no one's listening, those terrible words you say when you're alone. Would you ever in a million years say those terrible words to your child? Just imagine their face, their eyes looking at you and you saying to them, you're not good enough.
You look terrible. You'll never accomplish that. You would never, ever say that to them.
So why do you say these things? Whatever your version of self-bullying looks like, why would you say these things to yourself? We're always building up our kids and encouraging them. Can you imagine the power of doing that for yourself? I'm capable of doing anything I put my mind to. I'm capable of trying my best and trying again when I fail.
I'm capable of keeping going. Anonymous bullies say words. They mean nothing.
Bullies we know and sometimes love say words and we don't have to make them mean anything. Our own minds, insecure, wanting to fit in and be accepted, they offer us words and we don't have to make them mean they're true. We can never stop all of the bullies in the world but you have the power to never let another bully's words or actions mean anything.
You have the power to never again let yourself be bullied and start with the bully you are to yourself.
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program MOM 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
