Bullying – Pt10 – What on Earth could be the benefits?

So, if you or your child is being bullied, then it may just be in a minor form, and so it’s not a huge button presser.  However, if bullying is a big deal for you, then it is really worth you checking out this post.  Keep an open mind while reading it please!  Remember, the reason I’m telling you all this is so that it is possible for you to change/shift the way that bullying turns up in your families lives.

I’m not an overly positive person, but my training has proved to me that the universe is not totally cruel, so the old-fashioned saying of ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ is true.  That means that there will be a ‘silver lining’ to when you are bullied or when you have been bullied.  (I do understand that this is a challenging concept when applied to harsher subjects, but I can promise you that there isn’t a single situation that I haven’t been able to find the silver lining for my clients for, however ‘horrific’ the event, and it becomes very comforting to them to know that it is there).

The important thing when looking for what someone gained from a situation, is to remember that everyone is different.  So what one person gains, would be totally different from someone else.  It’s important to think about what you value in life, to have or do or be.  What do you do, where do you do it, why, and how do you do it?

Normally when something happens, we will react in a certain way.  So why would did it help to react that way?

Then sometimes over time we change our behaviour and learn to adapt, e.g. by standing up for ourselves, or not getting drawn in.  So how did the adapting help out?

If you then look forwards to afterwards, what wouldn’t have been able to happen if they/you hadn’t been able to learn that skill?  Remembering, that we are just like toddlers.  Sometimes we have to experience something over & over again, before we truly learn, just as they put their fingers in a drawer over & over!

So if your child is being bullied, it will help you to see your way clear and what to do about it, if you can look for the silver-lining, because then the emotion will be reduced a bit.  Emotion is understandable, but it gets in the way of us parents finding a clear solution.  If your child is bullying, then you will be able to see them much more easily, if you can understand that when you bullied someone will have gained something from it, and the same can be said of the children that your child is bullying.

I’m not saying that just because there is a benefit to bullying, that there shouldn’t be any consequences for the bully.  I’m just saying that to really change the way it appears, we need to able to see the problem clearly.

For me as a child, the benefits were mainly that it made me very competitive academically.  I worked extremely hard and enjoyed it, whereas my brothers all focussed on sport.  It gave me an incredibly good foundation, the opportunity to do a degree, and a wonderful job for 13 yrs in IT.  As a daughter arriving to elderly parents 20yrs after their sons, there was the possibility of me being spoilt.  Whereas, the responsibilities at home and bullying at school, made sure that I didn’t become a precocious little brat (in my opinion anyway!).  Plus, as my parent’s health worsened in my teenage and I struggled with it, I was less likely to ‘get into trouble’ as I was quite old-fashioned.  I got used to being different, and even now I have studied the most cutting edge techniques that I know will make the most difference to Mums, in comparison to standard ‘personal development’ or ‘parenting techniques’.  I wouldn’t give any of that up, in order to have not been bullied at school at all.

For my little boy so far, it has taught me how to balance the scales of support and challenge very easily at home, as it was just is a minor, although scary situation for him (i.e. it’s not long-standing).  This balance, is giving him more consistency and a fairer balance between myself and my husband.  Plus, it will change my choice of school for him and clarified what I’m looking for in his present/next nursery.  I would probably have taken the easy route of leaving him at his present nursery until school, whereas now I’m much more likely to send him elsewhere for the final year.  We’ll see what he gets from that!