Sans Fig Leaf

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"Escaping the bully"

15 February, 2001

I've known a few true bullies in my life. Unfortunately, at one time, I was one of them.

I had gotten into an argument with one of my friends, and I tongue-lashed him into submission in front of others. When it was pointed out to me that I was sometimes (often) a verbal bully, it came as quite a shock. I had always pictured myself as the victim of bullies. As long as I could remember, throughout elementary school, junior high, and even high school, I had been the target of various physical, verbal, and emotional assaults.

Yes, I had stood up for myself, but until I was about 14 or 15 years old, standing up to the bullies had just prolonged the beating.

Finding myself in the same category as my former tormentors wasn't pleasant. I did a lot of soul-searching. I knew that part of the problem was my role models growing up--because the first bully I ever met was my own father.

But I couldn't just excuse it away. I have little patience for people who blame everything on their dysfunctional family or alcoholic parents or what have you, and take no responsibility for their own actions. So I set out to stop being a bully. It wasn't easy. It didn't happen right away. I had a lot of lessons to learn.

One of those lessons was that anger is a symptom of pain. We lash out at people when when feel hurt or threatened.

When someone lashes out at us, we feel hurt or threatened. But they may be lashing out at us because we made them feel hurt or threatened. It can become a vicious circle. So I started making conscious efforts to break the circle when I could. If someone got angry at me, I tried not to strike back, but to take a deep breath and ask myself what had I done to provoke it? I would try to apologize for whatever it was, and attempt to steer the conversation into a more productive direction.

It didn't always work, and as often at not it didn't work because I couldn't completely contain my own anger. But I made progress.

Another important lesson I learned was that I was defining my success by the tally of my wins over my losses. I looked at too many things as competitions. I had to start thinking of disagreements as simply differences of opinion or perspective. If no one's life or well-being depended upon it, than it probably wasn't worthing battling over. It wasn't easy to let go of the battle banner, but I made progress.

The most important lesson I learned was that, deep down under the layers of pride, creativity, humor, and intellectualism, there huddled in the depths of my psyche a kicked puppy. Hoping, somehow, to win favor from the rest of the pack, but deathly afraid of rejection. That puppy had been raised by a very agressive, clever, and ruthless alpha dog. It knew how to show its teeth. It knew how to test an opponent and find the weak spots where a bite would do maximum damage.

And that was the heart of the problem. The only way that part of myself knew how to protect itself was to attack. My attempts at anger management and cooperative dispute resolution had only met with mixed results because I didn't have the self-respect to be secure in my self.

There were many reasons for that. I had a number of hurdles to overcome. I had to come out the closet. I had to let go of other insecurities and denials. It wasn't easy at first, but the more I accepted myself for who I was, the less difficult it became.

That included more than just accepting that kicked puppy inside. I had to also accept the alpha dog. The alpha dog serves an important purpose in its pack. Like every other member of a well-functioning family, it takes care of the others, shares the burdens, tackles the problems its talents and strengths are best suited for, and trusts the others to handle those tasks for which they are best suited.

And the lesson I have been learning through all of this, is that bullies are just pups who desperately want to become the alpha dog, but they don't possess the self-respect to be who they are and be happy where they are.