– Communication doesn’t work on bullies. Telling a bully they’re making you feel bad is the wrong way to go. They want to make you feel bad. That’s the point.
– being kind to a bully doesn’t always mean they’ll stop. Sometimes it means they’ll just use your kindness to manipulate you while still continuing to bully you.
– not every bully has a sympathetically tragic home life. Sometimes people are just mean. Sometimes people just get off on hurting others.
– on that note, a tough home life is a reason, not an excuse. You don’t have to put up with bullying because somebody’s life sucks, just like you don’t have to let someone mug you because they’re broke.
– in order to forgive someone, they have to apologize first. If your bully has not apologized to you, you do not owe them anything.
– getting bullied as a kid can still mess you up in adult life. Maybe kids grow out of being bullies, but the marks they left often don’t go away.
– there are ways to get people to stop bullying you, but they almost all involve being mean back.
– as long as parents keep raising shitty bullying kids, there will be bullies. No amount of assemblies and hand-drawn posters will fix the problem. It’s the parents’ fault.
– It’s not your responsibility to fix your bully or to stop the abuse they send your way, but some adults sure will act like it is.
– Many times (especially in the case of girls) your friends can be your bullies. This makes things even worse as these are people who know you and your intimate secrets and use them to their advantage. If your friends are bullies, don’t take crap from them. Get new friends.
im gonna throw in that its never your fault, people will pick a target to gang up on because theyd rather it be you than them. even if you think “this must be because im weird”- everyone is weird, in different ways. anyone can be made a target. it’s not just you for some reason in particular, i promise.
One of the most useful things I’ve learned about recovering from trauma is that my decisions need to be judged according to the incomplete information that was available to me at the time.
So, say I’m deciding whether to eat chicken at a restaurant. All evidence is that it’s a good idea. I’m hungry for chicken, and I usually feel good after eating it.
I eat the chicken, and I get food poisoning. The resulting illness causes me to fall short of responsibilities, and creates numerous problems for me and the people who depend on me.
What happened?
Trauma brain says: “This happened because I am Bad At Making Decisions. If I had made The Right Decision and not eaten chicken, everything would have been fine.”
Recovery brain says, “According to the information that was available to me, the chicken was unlikely to make me sick. Eating chicken was a Good Decision with Bad Consequences. This happened to me because I had incomplete information.”
The “trauma brain” response makes all decisions really hard, because each decision involves the prospect of being judged by a future self that has more information.
“Should I buy the $2 mouse pad or the $3 mouse pad? If I buy the cheaper one and it doesn’t work well, it will be my own fault for not buying a better quality one…”
(Then I might end up paying myself $1-per-hour to agonize over which mouse pad to buy, which is probably an ACTUAL unwise course of action.)
But if I foster the “recovery brain” response, I can start to trust that my future self will judge my decisions kindly.
“If I buy the cheap mouse pad and it doesn’t work, then I only gambled $2 on it. If I buy the $3 one and even it doesn’t work, then I’ll have more closely guessed how much I need to pay for a mousepad of sufficient quality.”
And then later when the mousepad doesn’t work: “Well, that didn’t work. At least I made a decision. The outcome has given me more information about the options available to me going forward.”
(Meta level: Decisions you made prior to reading this post about how to treat yourself were probably good given the information you had access to about trauma and recovery!)
tl;dr: Bad results are not always evidence of bad decisions. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt about why you do what you do.
The amendment appears on a funding bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. If it remains in the final bill, the amendment would cut 15% of federal adoption funding to states and localities that penalize adoption agencies that refuse to place children in families that conflict with the agency’s “sincerely held religious beliefs or convictions.”
it hasn’t happened yet, so there’s still time to reach out to your representatives about it
also, i can guarantee you that no big media outlets are ever not bothering to cover huge stories that a lot of people care about
Chartreuse Abstruseness Export 