It’s harder than you might think to get validation for how painful and impactful the experience of peer group bullying in childhood is.
For all the lip service our culture pays to how bad bullying is, we pay surprisingly little attention to it in therapy.
Many of the people who seek out my help in their trauma recovery identify childhood abuse as one of the main contributors to their trauma.
Many people can identify childhood neglect as having contributed to their trauma (though many MORE people experienced neglect than acknowledge it— which is another pervasive cultural problem).
But relatively few people who seek out trauma therapy tend to identify peer group bullying in childhood as significant to their complex trauma history.
Speaking partly from personal experience, partly from my experience as a trauma therapist: peer group bullying is one of the most stressful, damaging experiences a kid can have growing up.
It’s also an experience that our culture loves to mock and trivialize.
Our culture kind of has this thing where a not-small subset of adults think bullying is kind of, sort of, good for kids.
It’s kind of this “tough love” idea— that kids need adversarial experiences to “toughen” and “grow.”
I’ve also seen the argument advanced that bullying in the form of social ostracism serves a constructive purpose— that it helps “weirdos” understand that only so much deviance from the social norm is realistically acceptable out there in the world.
Our pop culture entertainment features lots and lots of examples of bullying framed as funny or ultimately harmless— or, not infrequently, justified, depending on who is bullying whom.
The realty of bullying is, it can really make a kid’s life hell.
We almost never choose whether or where we go to school. We rarely choose who we go to school with. Every single day, victims of bullying are literally forced to share space with their bullies.
That leaves a mark.
The fantasy that adults can even sort of effectively intervene to stop peer group bullying among kids s a joke. Reaching out for an adults’ help can often make bullying worse— and even the best intentioned adults can’t be around at all times to protect a kid who’s being bullied.
That leaves a mark.
Complex trauma is trauma that occurs over time, is often entwined in our important relationships, and is perceived by the victim as inescapable (often because the situation is not, in fact, easily or realistically escapable).
Childhood peer group bullying hits each one of those points.
Sometimes survivors of bullying downplay the impact of what happened to them— much like survivors of MANY kinds of trauma downplay what happened to them.
We want to think that bullying is a thing that happened to us when we’re kids, and we just grew out of it.
It’s true that some peoples’ experience of having been bullied impacted them more than others’. But that’s also true for every kind of trauma. The impact on survivors varies depending on multiple factors.
If you need to dig into your history of childhood peer group bullying in your own trauma recovery— dig into it.
No shame. It’s not stupid or silly or weak.
Many peoples’ trauma recovery experiences are actually stalled due to their, or their therapists’, reluctance to explore if and how they were bullied as kids.
(And, yes— bullying isn’t ONLY a problem for kids, either.)
Most of us had to go to school (or other social situations, like summer camp) every day for years. For many of us, that meant we got virtually zero days off from being bullied.
That leaves a mark.
Many of us have to revisit the wound childhood peer group bullying inflicted if we want our trauma recovery to stick.
Use Your Damn Skills 