Bullying Pt 5 – Is there too much Like in your life?

So this post follows on from the previous one about the fact that only 50% of the world likes you at any one time!

I was attempting to look at my life as a child, bullied from the moment I entered school at 4.5, right up to when I left after A levels.

My mother was clearly over-involved in my life, and my father was hardly around, especially when I was younger and he wasn’t getting in until way after my bed time.

However, it’s not like I was spoilt, as both had considerable health issues and alcohol problems as well.  So when I was looking at the balance of support and challenge, I wasn’t so sure it explained howcome I was bullied at school.

Aha, but then the penny dropped.  Because my parents were very much older than was ‘normal’ then, I didn’t get much chance to play with kids my own age until I went to school, so I lacked social skills and hadn’t been taught the tougher social skills of dealing with people being nasty.

Plus I was very ‘responsible’ as a young carer.  So when adults or teachers came across me, they thought I was adorable, all curly haired, smiley and polite.

Therefore, when you look at the balance of the fact that not everyone in life is going to love you, it was pretty much a sure thing that I would be bullied at school.  In fact I remember that only 1 teacher in my whole school time disliked me, which was when I was doing my A levels.

Of course, because I was bullied from so early on, I gradually took on the persona of a wimp as well.  Which also attracts bullying, because it is attempting to help you to stand up for yourself, which I totally needed to do both at home and at school – I was always thinking of other people too much.

Also, although to me it felt that I was bullied ‘all the time’, actually it wasn’t all the time, and many of the kids that bullied me, would now remember being friends with me and being fond of me.  For them it would have just been every now and again that they succumbed to social pressures to have a go at me.

So this is why those ‘sunny’ little children get bullied at school.  The bullies are an extreme challenge, to balance out all the fact that everyone else thinks of them as so wonderful and to teach them how to deal with nasty people and grow a tougher skin.  (I was just a bit of a slow learner when it came to that!).