The Bully

If you are the most extreme form of Bully, you will not be reading this article. But those who have been associated with you will be. So, I guess I'm going to have to tell them about you. About the parts of you that you don't ever want anyone to see. You see, I know that you are not evil—even though that's what you want us all to think. I know that you are terrified of power—even though you want us all to believe that you are all powerful. I know that beauty and love are concepts that perpetually allude you, so that you malign them, even seeking, if you can, to destroy them—before they destroy you. So, I might as well get on with it here, exposing you for the vulnerable little child you really are.

See there are all sizes and shapes to the Bully identity, ranging from the growling verbal-abuser, through the manipulative, conniving and dangerous CEO, all the way to the serial killer and the dictatorial master of genocide. In this day of biological cures for just about everything, we tend to think of the Bully as “bad seed,” with many looking for the answers to the mystery of the Bully in his genes. Others would say that the Bully was a Bully, or the victim of a Bully in another life. Perhaps we can put the two together and say that incarnational energy is materialized in the form of genes. But the ultimate truth is that regardless of how we come here the final authority is how we identify in this life.

Identity is everything. It is how we see ourselves and how we see our worlds, even how we create our worlds. Identity is the only thing we know of the I AM. But unlike the I AM, which is the Authentic Self, identity is formed. And it is formed so early that most of us don’t remember it. We’ve all seen the 2 month old infant staring at his closed fist for lengthy periods of time. It’s as if he is absorbing the notion that his hand is attached to something he is beginning to assimilate as “me.” A few weeks later, he is reaching that hand out to pick something up. When he is finally able to actually grasp that rattle he’s been fingering, he puts it directly into his mouth, just as he’s been sucking on his fist until now. Now the rattle is also “me.” It takes some time for him to begin to be able to assimilate the notion that the rattle is not “me” but the hand is “me.” And that struggle between “me” and “not me” goes on for several years thereafter ending—I don’t know, does it ever end?

So, if a child, trying to assimilate “me” is absorbed in an environment of indifference and abandonment, and the frustration, over not being able to get the “me” out there to respond to the “me” in here, grows and grows over time, a certain indifference and Self-abandonment begins to take place. In other words, if I am that child, I must learn to make the longing, hungry, needy, vulnerable “me” go away, become insubstantial so that I can identify with indifference and abandonment. My external world is telling me that I AM not really important, I don’t really matter, I have no real needs, and furthermore, that I am an object, which can be moved around, propped up, lain down and fed or not fed, harmed or not harmed at random.

We can easily see now that this child is likely to grow up having reconfigured the microchip of “me” into an external mirror of his indifferent environment. But that doesn’t mean that there is not still a hungry, lonely, vulnerable child in there who has never been attended. No, that child is still in there, but it has become feral, so that now it howls at the moon at night. And that frustration over not being able to get the external world—thought to be an extension of “me”—to cooperate, has grown exponentially over time so that it is now push-button rage. So, there is this cool, calm indifferent exterior flooded internally with this rush and gush of rage that appears as randomly as the world feels to the Bully.

What has happened is that the Bully has found a coping mechanism. One that seems to him, to protect that vulnerable, little, hungry child. But wait just a minute here, not every Bully comes from an indifferent background, right? Right. Some come from homes that seem to be sincerely loving. And it is here that we get our theories that Bullies come from “bad” DNA.

In the previous blog, called “Mr. Guilt,” we talked about how sensitive children can absorb unresolved psychic issues floating around in the home. Well, all children are sensitive, even psychic. Of course, we teach them to get over that, but as small children their sensitivities are finely tuned to the environment, because they are trying to assimilate and distinguish “me” and “not me.” And the line between “me” and “not me” is very thin for infants, toddlers and preschool children. But as we’ve said, the struggle goes on, sometimes for whole lifetimes.

So, if a child grows up in a home with very “nice” parents or primary-caregivers, one or both of whom have unresolved issues of aggression, or unresolved bitterness and frustration that the outer world (the outer “me”) hasn’t cooperated, these can easily be picked up and identified with by vulnerable children. Now add to that the power of projection, and the need for some parents to literally “give” their children their own sense of “wrongness” or “badness” and you have a blooming Bully.

The Bully develops a belief system that no one can be trusted, that the world is a basically indifferent and uncaring place where his needs will never be met. His only resource then is his own ingenuity. He must trick them, before he is tricked. He must beat them at their own game. He must attribute his own aggressive actions to them as cause because that’s just the way “they” (the outer “me”) are. He is always on guard, sleeping with one eye open and his finger on the metaphorical or not-so-metaphorical trigger. There is a very thin veil between the always guarded, hard, steely-eyed exterior and his hair-trigger rage, which seems to appear randomly. Whether his rage takes the form of verbal abuse or goes all the way to serial-killing and genocide, its trigger has to do with that early frustration over not being able to get the world to hear, see and be with his truest, most vulnerable self.

So, what to do, what to do. How can we help the Bully, or do we just need to steer clear of him? Well, first, before we go any further, it should be acknowledged that I have and will continue to refer to the Bully in male terms throughout this article for two reasons: 1) it is easier to write in a single gender; and 2) we all tend to think of the Bully in masculine terms. But the truth is that there are many female Bullies out there. We’ve begun to see them a bit more on TV and in the movies so the concept of the female Bully is occurring to us to a greater and greater degree. She can be just as fierce as the male Bully, but can sometimes get away with her cruelties a bit easier because no one wants to think of a female Bully.

But again, what to do. Well, first like every other helping mechanism, the helpee has to want it. How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Well, six, but the light bulb’s got to want to change. Needing or wanting help is a concept that is extremely difficult for the Bully to recognize for three reasons. The first is that needing and wanting put him in touch with that vulnerable side, a side which is only allowed out into the light of day through rage. The second is that he doesn’t trust that help is really helpful. He has a deep-seated belief that helpers want something, that they have an agenda, that they are out to get something from him, or worse-yet, that they are really just tricking him and have a plan to outright hurt him. The third is that this Bully identity has worked for him for a long time, or so he believes, because it has kept him safe from the cold, cruel world.

So, the first thing we can do to help the Bully is to recognize that he’s probably not looking for help—at least not externally. And the second thing we can do is to be as sincere as we can be in dealing with him. Even though he won’t trust it, he’ll recognize that it’s different from what he is expecting. And the third thing we can do is inform him, through global education, that this way that he is acting, is just that, an act. It isn’t who he really is, and we know it. It is how he’s imagined keeping himself safe, but it isn’t who he really is. Who he really is is yet to be seen. But it has a lot more to do with that vulnerable, little, needy kid inside than it does with this guarded, cold, cruel, machine-like exterior. If Bullies could ever get that one concept, that this thing they are doing over and over again is a mask and costume they put on to survive, then they might begin to recognize another part of themselves.

Of course, the degree of willingness that they are going to have to even sit and listen to such an idea is going to be based on the psychic depth to which the mask and costume goes. Serial killers have done so much to prove to themselves and their worlds that they are bigger and badder than any other big, bad thing that it is going to be extremely difficult for them to even consider any other option. Power has become an addiction at this stage, and the bigger the power the Bully has been able to arrange in his life, the harder is going to be the fall.

That said, it doesn’t mean that we should stop saying it. The more information there is out there about the mask and costume called Bully, the more likely it is that we as a society are going to stop projecting all of our dark urges onto “those bad guys out there.” We only feed the mask and costume, making it bigger and badder, when we do that.

But let me be clear, I am not advocating for the self-sacrifice of the helper either. We cannot deny that the Bully is cruel or that his actions are harmful and even deadly. We don’t need to suffer the illusion that we are going to somehow save them. All salvation is self-salvation. No one saves anyone. Ever. In fact, no one helps anyone either. All help is self-help and all healing is self-healing. These things are all inside jobs.

But I am advocating for education. I am advocating that we be clear that primary care-givers, biological or otherwise, have a hand in this. I am advocating that we get the word out that Bully is a mask we wear, not a bad seed we carry. I am advocating that we take responsibility for our own dark urges instead of projecting them onto our children, or to the “bad guys” of our world. I am advocating that we educate ourselves with the idea that identity is everything. That children need parents who mirror that deep inner Self, attend to it and acknowledge it as real, rather than trying to mold it, or—as is all too often true in the case of the Bully—to dismiss it entirely. And then if, we can get the word out there to enough Bullies, that they are just wearing a self-protective mask, perhaps some, a few, will begin to find that deeper Self and honor it—finally ending the “me”/ “not me” struggle.

Till then, I’m going to keep telling it like it is,
Andrea