Different types of bullying

When we talk about bullying, most people think about physical bullying, but there are several other types of bullying, such as mental and/or emotional bullying, which includes cyberbullying and self-bullying, both mental and physical.

Life itself can also be a kind of bully.

We all have to deal with challenges in our lives, but if we haven’t learned how to overcome them, these challenges can have a similar effect to a bully.

We tend to focus on bullies as other people, and rarely on us bullying ourselves.

But being bullied by someone else can cause your child to start bullying themselves.

If the bully keeps repeating an image of your child that is different from the one they have of themselves, their self-image can start to change.?

In fact, that’s often why kids become bullies, because they don’t feel good themselves.

Even when the bullying has stopped, this negative image can persist, sometimes for the rest of their life.?

While we are teaching our child about bullying, we should teach them about self-bullying so that, if it happens, they can recognise it without judgement and be in a better state to deal with it.

This is illustrated by Menno’s personal experience:

MENNO’S STORY

When I was eleven years old and in the last class of elementary school, I suddenly needed to go to the toilet. I had already been earlier that morning, but I had to go again, urgently.

I raised my hand and asked for permission, but I wasn’t allowed to go.

I tried to focus on the work I had to do, but I couldn’t hold it and I wet myself as I ran out of the classroom.

Although I was neither punished nor bullied as a result, I was ashamed of what had happened and became terrified of wetting myself again at school.

As I walked to school, I would hope it wouldn’t happen, and throughout the school day I would think about it.

This anxiety continued at high school, even though I had the opportunity to go to the toilet before every lesson.

I couldn’t focus on my schoolwork. Worse, because I was so focused on this anxiety, my mind created urges to pee, which felt real but weren’t.?

I would even go to the toilet and be unable to pee. To resist the urges or push them away, I constantly pressed on my lower belly.

This made me feel that I was the centre of everyone’s attention; I felt ashamed and insecure.

After high school, I studied physical therapy for four years.?

The first two years, I continued my destructive habit of being scared before classes, continuously going to the toilet and worrying about not wetting myself during class.

It was not until my third year of the course that I finally broke these habits.

Over a period of a decade, I must have thought about not wetting myself at least twenty times a day, five days a week, for forty weeks a year: a total of 40,000 stressful thoughts.?

I had allowed a single event when I was eleven to become a major trauma.

My parents didn’t know about any of this until I told them when I was in my twenties.

I don’t know why I didn’t ask them for help at the time, but I wish I had; it would have saved me ten years of pain and I likely would have done better at school.

If something like this happens to your child, don’t try to make it smaller or wave it away.

Think how their brain will handle it. They don’t have a strategy to cope with what has happened and recover from it.

We teach our kids how to protect themselves against physical dangers, from crossing the road to talking to strangers.

We must also teach them how to protect themselves against non-physical threats, both external and internal.

Self-bullying can become physical, not just in direct self-harming but in indirect ways, where the child doesn’t take care of their body, of their physical and mental health, so that their vitality slowly declines, which puts them at a greater risk of physical injury, disease and mental illness.

The decline can be so slow that it goes unnoticed for years before effects emerge.