Bullying: LoA-approach

A woman posted on an LoA group I'm a member of, asking for advice in the following scenario:

Her niece is overweight and gets bullied at school. She came across some advice that might help her reduce weight and approached her brother about it. The result was a shut down of communication.

The scenario is really four events. To keep things clear, I will treat the four events as separate, even though they obviously intertwine.

Getting bullied for being overweight

No. You do not get bullied for being overweight. The weight is a hook that the bully invented. If there was not the weight, there would be the glasses or your shoes or your nose or your hair or anything that the bully can think of.

The purpose of the hook is that you swallow it. The bully finds the one spot that you feel is wrong about yourself. As soon as you take the bait, he just has to pull you in. Hence, if you accept yourself the way you are, the bully can say anything, and it won't hurt you. Because you know the bully is just full of it. It's like the bully saying "ha ha, you think 2+2=4, stupid you!" Well, 2+2 is 4, thank you very much.

Someone who feels good about and are confident in themselves can not be bullied. Bullies even avoids confident people, because confident people remind the bully that they themselves are not confident. So if you want to help a victim, the best thing you can do for them is to accept them the way they are and nurture everything that the victim feels good about AND make their "weakness" also something that they feel good about.

Advice to help reduce weight

Is being overweight bad for your health? There's science going both ways on this one. LoA pretty much boils this down to: You are what you think you are. So if you believe obesity is bad for you, then it is bad for you. Also, if you believe that you deserve bad health for whatever reason, then that is what you are going attract for yourself.

If you accept who you are, as you are, unconditionally love yourself and the life you're in, for good and for bad, you will automatically also do the things that brings you good health. So the way to recovery is not some hints in a magazine, it begins with your own attitude to yourself. And the only person who can change your attitude to yourself is yourself.

Unsolicited advice

No matter how well intended it is to give advice to others about parenting, anything unsolicited is always taken badly. Always. It's not your life, it's not your children. And the advice is usually unrelated to LoA in the first place.

I understand that you feel they are doing something wrong. If things are going wrong, it is because they feel wrong. Unsolicited advice therefore only reinforces this feeling of being wrong. It creates distance, not closeness. It generates bad feelings, not good ones. And the only thing that can help anyone is good feelings.

The appropriate approach is therefore to accept and love these people, even with what you perceive as their flaws. Go ahead and love them for who they are and use any chance to make them feel good. When they feel good, they will also change their behaviour to good, and your mission has been accomplished.

Shut down of communication

Of course, the unsolicited advice lead to complete severing of communication, which in turn made you feel bad about everything. Here's what LoA and prophylactic psychology says about conflicts:

1) Do your part. That is, apologize. If they won't take your call, send flowers with a note. Do it any way you like, just communicate that you're sorry.

2) Accept that you have done your part. The ball is now in their court. Until they come back to you, leave it at that.

3) If they decide not to accept your apology, then this has nothing to do with you. It has to do with their feelings, their perception of the world, the things that they attract to their lives. It is their lives, and they can decide to hold the grudge and let it rot them from inside, or they can forgive and receive the love you're prepared to give them. It is their choice, and there is nothing you can do or should do to affect it.

4) If they decide to hold the grudge, you don't need them in your life anyway. Though I understand they are family, you can still light a candle for them every now and then, and send love and appreciation their way, as long as you are able to hold on to the good feelings about them and ignore any bad feelings. It is easier to do when you accept that their grudge is a mental illness and not part of them.

Mental health at work

My department is especially vulnerable for psychic health: We are few, so if anyone is out, we have a real capacity problem. Despite this, we also have to accept that other people are frustrated over our capacity problem, and take it out on us. To survive, we have special focus on mental health and, to make it more tangible, we run a Burn Out Self-Test every month. This makes it easy to report mental health trends to top management, and also gives us a hint about when it is necessary to take some kind of action.

The first piece of action is to sit down and be open about what it is that bothers us. All stress issues can be related back to obstacles for the three motivating factors: autonomy, mastery and purpose. We then discuss what we can do to get rid of the obstacles and restore the motivation. If we do things right, it should be visible in the next test.

Mental health is something we have learned to speak openly about within the department. This openness fosters a culture of compassion and camaraderie. Our verbal suggestion box is not only about a ping pong table, but more so about compassion for the frustrated client swearing at us from the other end of the phone line. And if one person needs to vent, we give them that space. Someone else will deal with the difficult client.

Mastery, then, is no longer just about the tasks of the department. It is also about mastering one's own mind.

Bullying at work

"It is almost impossible to prove bullying at work," says LO-attorney Karl Inge Rotmo. While the employer has the burden of evidence that the physical work environment is in order and that there has been no discrimination, the victim must carry the burden of evidence in occurrences of non-physical bullying.

In my 10.2.2009 article in Vestlandsnytt "I was bullied", I pointed out that the victim does not necessarily know that it is being bullied. This is especially true for the work place. Alteration of the work environment to make someone uncomfortable is a way of making someone quit. It is, unfortunately, a common way simply because it is so hard to prove. Especially when the bullying is in the form of making the victim feel incompetent and worthless.

Bullying at the work place has many possible purposes: The bully's mental health, therein exaggerating other people's shortcomings in order to divert from one's own shortcomings. Squeezing someone out because of their success, which takes attention away from their boss. Squeezing someone out to make a vacancy for a friend or relative. At the end of the day, the bullying has a purpose, and it is therefore typically performed in a covert operation with subtle hard-to-prove alterations of the work environment.

Further, mental health is not seen as something very tangible. It does, however, have tangible ripples in terms of reduced productivity. If the mental health of someone who ends up quitting their job was the problem, then that one person quitting would be the end of the story. If you have a high turn over rate of employees, the problem is probably not the employee.

If you want to fight bullying at the work place, you have to look at root causes and prevent these causes from tainting the business. We know now that employees are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose. Bullying actually attacks at least one of these three (usually autonomy) and are therefore counter productive. The cure must therefore be to create a work environment that fosters these motivational factors. Not only is it productive, it also reduces the bully's need to bully.

Norway best at bullying

In the news, Norway is best at bullying!

And that's a "bad best". A total of 31% of children have been bullied the last 12 months, as opposed to the European average of 19%. The statistics are being revealed in a new book "Digital bullying", which I hope to see in my bookshelf soon.

Of all children asked, 18% of Norwegian children have been bullied in person, as opposed to European average 13%. 8% of Norwegian children have been bullied by texting, as opposed to European average 3%. Bullying on the Internet is 6%, the same as the European average.

I think these are interesting results, coming from a country that prides itself for its enormous effort to conquer bullying and even has the political "manifest against bullying."

Further, the author points out, "...research shows that the bullies are often also being bullied," which to me doesn't come as a surprise. Bullies and victims generally have the same root problem, they just cope with it differently.

I can't help but wonder what the statistics really are among adults. Because, as I have argued before, bullying can not be fought through focus on school only, it is a community wide effort. For all the nice words coming from politicians about what they want to do about bullying at school, they can start by showing some respect to their opposing politicians during their election campaigns and understand that the children are only mimicking those in power.

I was bullied (repost)

(Published in Vestlandsnytt 10.2.2009 - English translation on Gardistan blog 2.3.2009)

I was the victim of bullying.

Bullying takes many forms, and are therefore difficult to manage without seeing the full picture. The schools have received a special responsibility when it comes to bullying among children because that's exactly where they spend large amounts of the day. But the school is not the only place bullying happens. It is a phenomena that runs through all layers of society, age groups and bureaucratic systems. But, as I mentioned, it takes different forms.

It is exactly because of this shapelessness of the phenomena that it is difficult to put your finger on a specific definition (not to mention being able to "prove" that bullying is occurring). And without a good definition, it is easy to focus on specific forms and unique occurrences. Let me give a quick introduction to the simplest forms in the life cycle of bullying - from the age before cell phones and the Internet.

In elementary school, physical bullying dominates. It usually occurs out of sight, but easy to recognize when the bruises begin to show up on the body. In middle school, it slowly changes to a more verbal form. Verbal bullying is a lot harder to prove. Then, at high school level, the social exclusion and backstabbing begins. But this is not the end of it. The experiences from all this bullying activity is also used in work life, when one wishes to "remove unwanted elements".

The fact that the youngest are the most immature is reflected in the choice of bullying form. And that's exactly why one must also be aware of the fact that the victim not necessarily knows that it is being bullied. It could, in fact, take decades before one realizes the full impact of what happened.

The youngest also don't necessarily realize that there ARE methods of interventions that may stop bullying. Many victims fear that interference from adults will make the situation worse. After all, both bullying and retaliation against "snitches" occur out of sight. And the older you get, the more refined the bullying, the more difficult to prove and impossible to prosecute.

When Eimar Hagen (Vestlandsnutt 6.2.09) writes that the number of victims are increasing, it doesn't necessarily mean that more are being bullied. Rather, it might as well reflect that people have become more aware of the bullying. More comes to see the light of day, which one should consider as a positive trend.

Paul Sundnes (Vestlandsnytt 6.2.09) refers to the fact that the school has to discover (or be told about) the bullying to be able to react. But victims of bullying develop a skill in keeping their mask. When I went to high school myself, my teacher would tell my parents that I was always happy and smiling. This came as a real surprise to me, because I knew that in many ways, I was experiencing the most difficult time in my life, and I was alarmingly close to taking my own life. It was moving away and living years in voluntary exile that not only saved me, but allowed me to slowly realize and understand what had actually happened.

Moving the victim away has become the most used "solution" to the problem. Many victims (and their families) often complain that it is the bullies that should have been exiled, not the victim. But particularly when dealing with children, we must remember that the bullies are just as immature as the victims. They might be missing - probably - empathy? This, a self declared bully will have to answer, if they remember. My own experience is that a child can be best buddies in private, but bullies in group situations. Exile is also not a "solution" for something I see as a general problem of society at large.

"Removing" a bully or a victim from the local community is no solution. Both are bonded to the social network, tearing them out affects a lot of people. Such a distancing of people is a polarization that plays a role in breaking down society. Instead, one must find a way for the parties to cooperate.

Jane Elliot was "a pickup-length ahead"*) when she pioneered a role play experiment in 1968 to help fight racism in the USA. In the experiment, she announced to her school class that people with blue eyes lacked pigments in their eyes. Without these pigments, nothing protected the brain from solar radiation, and they were therefore more stupid than brown eyed people. She then taught the "brown eyes" to systematically bully the "blue eyes". After a couple of days, she reversed the experiment, so that all the brown eyes could experience the same discrimination. All the students developed empathy from the experiment and became more aware to prejudice and discriminating behaviour.



The experiment stigmatised both her and her family, which only increased her conviction that her work was necessary. Today, she lives from doing the experiment on adults. Those who have experienced it know that it isn't just about racism, but about all human interaction. http://www.janeelliott.com/

In the end, bullying in childhood is an experiment in strategic abuse of power. The victims are those who are strategically easiest to bully, and has nothing to do with what they "officially" are being bullied for. As an example, the victim could be bullied for being "fat", while the bully is actually fatter.

With adults, the techniques develop into operational abuse of power to secure their own position in the work place or society. The more insecure they feel, the more they step on others. Particularly, they step on co-workers that potentially could endanger their job situation and therefore need to know who "the boss" is. Again, this takes many forms. The organization Stopp JobbMobben (http://www.stoppjobbmobben.no/) has documented a double digit number of forms that bullying occurs at work. I have experienced some of them myself.

Children learn from adults. When adults back stab and speak prejudice against other people, they legitimise their own experimental discrimination of other children. This applies not only to parents, but also comments we do in media and what we call "politics".

Media lives off sensationalism, and it is therefore in their interest to polarise all stories. This way, media is a great proponent of a general attitude of "us" and "them" as opposites. It has become so ordinary that we often don't notice. Obviously, polarisation is part of what children copy in their experimental play with bullying.

Yes, play. I wish to emphasize that bullying during childhood is "play" for the bully, because he/she experiments with this role. It is obvious for the experienced adult that it is a catastrophe for the victim, but we can not assume our own maturity in the child. The child's play is a reflection of what the child observes in society at large.

Bullying and discrimination in all its forms break down society. Progress is only achieved through cooperation. If there is anything we can do to fight bullying, it has to start by encouraging empathy and cooperation before polarisation and competition.

Thanks the "Manifest against bullying", there is great focus on bullying in school. I think this will have only a limited effect if we are not able to see bulling other places. I therefore challenge everyone to come up with possible tangible actions we can take to prevent bullying in its entirety and share their suggestions and experiences with everyone.

Gard Abrahamsen Tuur-Eggesbø

Links and comments week 2013.33

How a big idea solved Seoul's parking problem
A smart answer to a seemingly big problem solved by thinking in three dimentions: Large amounts of gasoline spent every day just looking for a parking spot are now saved by making free parking spots more easily visible.

It only takes a spark
Touching story of a child who sees bullying in a completely different way than the parent. Or in other words, this kid has understood it. The answer to the bullying problem is not to avoid things that can get you bullied, but to stand your ground and love the bully anyway. Avoidance means you have already let the bully win. Which brings us to this article in Norway:

The cross is being removed from prayer houses
Being a right wing monocultural paper, I take some of the contents with a pinch of salt, though one can not get away from the basic fact: Public prayer houses, chappels and grave yards (formerly known as "church yards") have their crosses removed to make them "religion neutral". Since the places are public, there is also room for buddhists, muslims, etc. And while the extremists cry foul about the removal of "Norwegian culture", my observation is this: You do not build a tolerant society by hiding the diversity under a white cloth. That's like obtaining gender equality by forcing everyone to wear a burka, so you don't know who is man and who is woman. And you don't force a shopping mall to take down the advertising signs of the businesses inside to make the mall "business neutral". Nay, you do it the other way. Keep the cross and add the crecent, the wheel and Tha. Show off the diversity and be proud of it. Anything less is to cater for the intolerant.

Platform cut down while demonstrators are chained to the top
People demonstrating against exploitation of Sámi land in Northern Sweden built a platform, climbed to the top and chained themselves up. Police started to cut down the feet of the platform with the demonstrators still on board. In the Swedish police's defence, certain other nations would just run over everyone with a bulldozer, saying that "hey, they were in the way."

Letters of Note: People Simply Empty Out
A great letter from Charles Bukowski to his publisher, celebrating his own departure from his mindless post office job before he turned postal. Others who might go either postal or waitral are waiters, so also read this great article:
Observations from a tipless restaurant

Bullying yourself

Hannah Smith committed suicide after a longer period of bullying. Media focus on the last sprint of cyber bullying on a web site where you can anonymously ask someone any question. Questions and answers are public. After an internal investigation, the company concluded that Hanna Smith was doing most of the bullying herself.

A lector at the national centre for learning environment and behavioural science in Norway comments to Norwegian TV 2 that he has never heard of anyone sending bullying messages to themselves before. I quickly wrote to him, because I have heard of someone who did that before: myself. So if anyone is ever in doubt over this being a possibility, allow me to explain how this works.

Assuming you are already a victim of long term bullying, you build an image of yourself with no value, where people will find something they don't like about you, and when they do, they will make sure you know how much they don't like you. It's a line of thought that sits deep within you. It's a long line of assumptions based on how you have experienced years and years of bullying.

Even if you think you have come away from all the bullying, it takes only one comment about one specific thing you hate about yourself to set off a feeling of self hate. And when you hate yourself, you have no respect for yourself.

When this happens in a public forum, something more happens: Not only has this other person shown (or painted a lie) that you're flawed and therefore worthless, but everyone has seen it! On the one side, you want to defend yourself. On the other side, you feel flawed and worthless and perhaps the other guy is right. And so you fall for the temptation of all temptations: To become your own bully. To publicly make it look as one or more anonymous bullies are coming down hard on you.

In your self hate, you already are your own bully, because you doubt yourself. You have no respect for yourself. You keep telling yourself how worthless you are. You really need and want someone else to prove you wrong, to tell you that you ARE worth something. But who is going to do this, when you've locked yourself into your room and stare at a computer screen? Well, there's always "the audience".

So the idea of bullying yourself is to take the view that the bully expresses and turn up the notch. Show how ridiculous it is. Ridiculous accusation times ten. Times a hundred. Times a thousand. How far do you have to go before someone steps in and says "this is ridiculous?"

Truth is, "the audience" doesn't want to get involved. There is no response. There is noone monitoring the stream of accusations real time, stepping in, saying "Stop! You're a wonderful person! We love you!" Nobody does it because they're either not online, or they are surfing another website, or they are one of the bullies who have no idea how to step in when someone takes over their game, or they just don't want to get involved.

The involvement comes afterwards. When it is too late.

This logic doesn't hit you while you're at it. You're in a form of deep depression, you're focused on this one task of proving to yourself that the bully is right, or proving that the bully is not right, something is flawed, it's so hard to think straight, it just feels so bad, and you can put words on all these opinions that make you feel bad, because they have been repeated over and over again by others, and you can't think of anything that is good about yourself, and if there is anything, then it is worthless, because nobody else can see these things. Indeed, you want to be the victim, because then someone can feel sorry for you, but you don't feel sorry for yourself, because you understand how the bully somehow must be right. You become the bully and the victim at the same time, and can not see your way out of it.

I didn't commit suicide, I quit the club whose forum I was a member of. I never heard from the other members ever again, other than one of them telling me they had had a big clean up after I left, and anonymous posting was no longer possible.

There is no reason to believe that the last month of cyber bullying was the full reason for Hannah Smith's suicide. Something had been going on for a much longer time, during which she had completely lost touch with reality. She was then pushed over the edge, into a downward spiral so deep, she didn't find her way back out.

Victims of bullying become masters of hiding their desperation. Hannah Smith's empty reservoir of self love went unnoticed. The remedy lies in the continuing compassion and expressed love for those around you, because you never know who needs it the most.

Bullying: The village animal

The term "Bygdedyret" - the Village Animal - was coined by Norwegian author Tor Jonsson (1916-1951) as a common denominator for the negative sides of living in rural areas. It has since become a common term, particularly referring to how the culture of small town and villages enforce the Law of Jante.

Since the Village Animal operates at village level, and with individual and societal consequences, I see the animal as a combination of several elements that combined, and in a specific configuration, generate a hostile environment. These elements are:

1. Personal insecurity in the affected (mechanics of bullying).
2. Personal insecurity by those who propagates the Village Animal (mechanics of bullying).
3. Circular self feeding and/or external feeding of a splitting mindset (generating bullying environment).
4. Jealousy fed by personal insecurity and/or economic contrast (mechanics and/or environment).

Smaller communities are particularly vulnerable to these elements: It doesn't take many people to make up a large percentage of the community, and the short distance to local government also create a short distance to circular self feeding. External sources, such as media, national politics and the school system, also add to the signals and thought patterns that encourage an environment where bullies and victims are grown.

By smaller communities, we do not necessarily have to look only at villages and towns, we could also be looking at clubs and companies. Basically anywhere a community may occur.

On the bright side, this also means that small communities should also be quicker to change. It shouldn't require too much to do, though I do not currently see government as a player in this:

Top-down government policies against bullying have limited effect for numerous reasons, the main problem being the lack of a universal vision: They apply only for bullying at schools, whereas bullying occurs everywhere and in all age groups.

For this reason, the actual programmes that have been developed are not easily obtainable by the common man. Mostly, you have to apply to take part, you should be a school, etc. While they do see some effects, it does nothing to work on the root causes within society itself. Maybe there is a political reason for this. After all, top politicians love to trash each other on TV, thereby teaching everyone that it is acceptable to do so.

Looking for government intervention is actually to repeat the same problem that allows bullying, now on a larger scale: Outsourcing inner strength. So while one might find inspiration from the outside world, the real work can only start with yourself and with the community coming together to work for a common goal: To accept everyone in the community for who they are, and to help each other thrive.

Dealing with the village animal, therefore, I see as part of the same work as dealing with bullying. The solution is basically a two factor approach: First build your own core self, and second inspire everyone you meet to do the same. Realize that the two tasks are mutual catalysts.

Concern for others creates stronger self

His Holiness the Dalai Lama made a speech to the Japanese Parliament, where he basically says exactly the same as what I concluded in terms of bullying. The speech incidentally took place on my oldest son's fifth birthday:



That said, I also realized that my entire series of articles about bullying really IS about finding out, finding in.

Bullying: Social ripples

When I was in high school, filled to the brink with testosterone, I had great problems engaging any girls whatsoever. While some would blame my dress code at the time, there would be strange reactions or comments that made me wonder. I later mentioned this to my best friend, who made the following observation: "It seems that someone is purposely sabotaging you by talking behind your back."

After a lot of thought on this, I hypothesized that this was a social ripple effect from the time before high school.

The story

Very early on in school, we were divided between guys and girls. Incidentally, I had a red backpack, so some of the guys insisted that I was a girl and pushed me over to the girls. To start off with, I did my best to stand my ground. Through repetition, and obviously with the addition of the cooties, I took to heart a misconception early on, automatically linking contact with girls and being bullied. While this typically should not be a problem for your average Joe, the intensity and frequency (several times a day, every day for years) of this turned it into a problem.

Basically, anything that could be used as a reason to bully me would be used. So I avoided at any cost to reveal anything that would expand the bullies' options for bullying. And so, I learned to shut myself up.

There was one incident, where the two main bullies pushed me to ask a girl if she wanted to be with me, to which she said yes. In reality, I was happy to hear this, because I really liked her. A lot. Unfortunately, the next step was to tell her that I was only kidding. Which in reality I wasn't. And I wished I did not "have" to "call it off". I felt terrible doing it, and it's an incident that followed me far into adulthood. (Much later, I wrote a letter, apologizing, to which I never received a response, and I don't expect one. So in the sense of self healing, at least I did my part. But that's not what this story is about.)

This one incident was so intense that from then on, I didn't believe any girl who said they wanted to go out with me. I closed myself up and made up thousands of excuses why I didn't believe them, why I couldn't, and so on. In reality, I had one crush after the other, and I would never admit it for as long as I was in that environment.

So after compulsory school, half of the people disappear into other schools or work, bullies seemingly disappeared, there were plenty of new people who had no idea about my past, and as we have learned is typical among teens - I started to take risks. On the occasion that I might actually get a positive response one day, the same girl might have turned completely around the next. Something was going on, and I could not put my finger on it. Eventually, the 100% turn down rate was quite devastating to the little self esteem I had.

The hypothesis

Early bullying turned me into an introvert who, as we noticed, made me avoid expressing my attraction to girls. By doing so, those around me would see me as someone who was not attracted to girls, i.e. gay. When I approached someone who didn't know who I was, they might at first be interested, asked around about who I am, only to learn about a guy who is perceived as gay. Before the end of the day, the exchange of smiles were replaced with them responding with a frown.

I returned to the well established pattern that anything positive said about me was dismissed as an attempt to tease me. In my mind, I had no value to society. I had suicidal thoughts. And my teachers told my parents that I was the happiest person in class, always smiling.

Long term confirmation

I eventually left for "the big world". I was not in touch with anyone for ten years. Through an actual friend, I learned about the back stabbing still going on behind my back - stories about things that couldn't possibly have happened, since I was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean at the time it supposedly happened. And I started to wonder, what is wrong with these people who have a need to do me harm even 13-16 years after I had seen them?

Shortly after, I hit the wall, passed a kidney stone, spent a week in hospital, was diagnosed with hypertension. So I slowly recovered, I found a new job 1600 km away and stayed there for the next five years. Best move ever. The community I moved to built me up again, and I started to rebuild the spine I lost in primary school.

Again I returned home, for completely different reasons. Strange things still happened out of the blue, the typical red tape moves that occur when someone has decided they don't like me. So the other night, I was challenged with the following question: "Seeing who you are and what you do, you're helping people known or unknown, unselfishly, you do not carry prejudice against them; how is it that you still experience these things, as though you're still a bully victim?"

Simply, because around here, the place I grew up, the place where the bullying started, people still remember their own interpretation of the person I was and use that as their basis for interacting with me. Without realizing it, they are unsuspecting participants of a bullying project that should have ended 23 years ago.

The major difference between then and now: The ever evolving Me.
The difference will become: The ever evolving Us.
Let's focus on that.

Honour, stress and bullying

In the Art of Manliness blog, an interesting article series gives a good description of Honour, its function and in part 2, its decline. Of particular interest is the traditional immediate response to injuries to one's honour. While my first thoughts on honour practices is that this may increase stress, my latest studies of stress makes me now think otherwise.

Maintaining a strategy of immediate response allows the body to complete the full adrenalin-fight-rest-cycle. When the response is completed, the entire thing is over. This, however, is difficult to achieve in an honourless society. It is particularly difficult in situations where you have to battle a boss, who launches the insult friday night, and you can not respond until monday morning. Further, when you do make a response, it is not necessarily the end of the story, because it now has to go through lengths of red tape. The entire thing may last for months before it is resolved, which means that you're likely to generate adrenalin in your body continually for the entire period, wrecking your health.

Further, groups of people with horizontal honour increases social skills, which in turn also reduces stress and increases your support network. Honour is a guideline for personal integrity, which means you have to look inward to strengthen your inner core. It is this perspective that seems to be missing today. As I pointed out in an earlier article, looking outwards to support a fragile inner core is exactly what generates bullies and bully victims.

Which means that honour is another piece of the puzzle.

Bullying: Responsibility

The Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang recently had an article about a psychologist, practicing cognitive therapy, making a statement about the victims of bullying needing to take responsibility to change their thought pattern so that they don't feel like victims.

He also went further, saying that verbal bullying has great resemblance to freedom of expression. Because often, WHAT is being said is not actually illegal.

This caused a bit of a stir. The office of the Children's Ombudsman responded with a letter stating that bullying is NOT freedom of expression, and that it is never the victim's responsibility that bullying occurs. In an anti-bullying forum on Facebook, several people obviously sided with the Ombudsman, some even making statements about the doctor that resemble, well, verbal bullying. How dare he blame the victims? The victim is never at fault. (The moderator, I'm happy to say, understood exactly what the doc was sayin')

I believe, however, that the doctor is right, and that the Ombudsman and the others who respond negatively are simply blinded by the attitude that the bully has the entire blame for the bullying. Because what they make so much noise about is not really about anything the good doctor has said.

Freedom of expression

Yes, verbal bullying can be compared to freedom of expression. Let me explain how.

In a very simple explanation of psychology, something happens, this thing means something to you, the meaning generates an emotion, and you act on the emotion. Your action then causes something else to happen, which means something - and so on.

First scenario: "Something happening" might be that a bully tells you you're worthless. In your mind, this statement might be a confirmation about your idea that you are worthless. This gives you pain, and you start crying. Bully scored!

Second scenario: "Something happening" might be that someone drew a made a movie depicting Muhammad as a child molestor, and you learn that the US government is showing this movie in all TV channels in the USA. In your mind, this seems to indicate that the US government is building up a consensus to attack your country, and you and your family will be killed. So you become outraged and go put the American Embassy in flames.

The power of verbal bullying lies in the second stage: what this means to you, and the emotion attached to this meaning. And you have the power to change that meaning. So let us try the first scenario again with a different meaning:

Bully tells you that you're worthless. In your mind, you realize that the bully is trying to tear you down, so that he can feel good about himself, and so you get a feeling of petty and decide to give him a hug, telling him he doesn't have to tear other people down to get hugs, all he has to do is ask.

Responsibility

The thing is, the only person who can change what something means to you is yourself. Noone can do it for you, and therefore you are responsible for the change to happen. This also means that the victim is responsible for the change to happen within themselves. This is what the good doctor is trying to convey, and it is absolutely true.

But it is not the full story.

Newborn children does not understand these concepts. They learn from the people around them. And the people around them are usually not cognitive therapists. So if we want to instill the non-bully behaviour in our children and thereby create a better, bully free society, we all have to take responsibility to increase our own knowledge and skills, so that we can become better role models for our children.

Bullying: Media frenzy

I do not always agree with The Amazing Atheist, but he is my favourite Devil's Advocate. And picking up on the feed about Amanda Todd, he made an excellent point - there are so many people out there who have been bullied so far that they kill themselves, it is a great question why exactly Amanda Todd has been singled out and turned into a story. Even Anonymous has gone to lengths to find her bullies, but what about those who are responsible for similar suicides, not to mention those who are active bullies today?

Will this be yet another story that is forgotten as soon as the US presidential election is over? Or will there be an actual earth shattering change?

Please! Prove The Amazing Atheist wrong, let's explore the root causes of bullying and do some major change at all levels of society - on a global scale. Let's treat the illness, not the symptom.

Bullying: Amanda Todd

For those who don't know the case of Amanda Todd, her story can be found at the bottom of the article.

Bully apologism and death penalty

In the trail of Amanda Todd's suicide, a whole bunch of people - some trolling, some being honest about their opinion - see Amanda's suicide as self inflicted and well deserved. So what they are really saying is: If a woman shows her breasts and sleep with someone's boyfriend, she should be dragged to the city square and stoned. As usual, the guy is of no fault, so he gets to take part of the stoning.

I don't know about you, but I don't want women to grow up thinking there is a death penalty for showing their breasts. Nor do I want anyone to think there is a death penalty for a silly mistake they did in 7th grade.

Mental health

Amanda started getting mental illnesss after photos of her breasts started circulating on the Internet, which constitutes a major traumatic event. At that moment, her perception of her life was changed dramatically. She feels shame, a matter of "I am" rather than "I did". She crossed the clinical line. And as she moved from place to place, she got a constant confirmation from people around her, that she "is" a mistake.

This is, in my opinion, a flawed thinking that a lot of people do. In the bullying that followed, the perpetrator was able to make life hell for her only because all her friends looked at it as a case of "you are" rather than "you did". It should take little effort to realize that yes, people in seventh grade do make mistakes, and that a child pornographer should not be your source of knowledge about the worth of children.

So when we're talking about mental health, we need to see the whole system. Everyone involved in the bullying were basically just trying to show off that they were better than her. I don't think destroying someone you see as lower than yourself makes you a better person. A better person has compassion. A better person does not strive to show off that they are better.

Education

Indeed, a mentally secure and stable person does not have a need to compare themselves to others. My claim is that this shows a society-wide mental health issue. And it exists because children today are not educated in good morals and what it really means to be good. And possibly because it is being viewed as a task for the parents only, without giving the parents the tools needed to do this part of the job.

You have no friends

"Look around you, you have no friends," she was confronted with, as a way of pushing her further into the dirt. Why, a better person would have continued with "let me help you".

Today's TED is about shame.



Background: Amanda's story in her own words

Bullying: What is it?

In media today, the issue of bullying comes up at an increasingly frequent rate. Some stories similar, some stories different. There's the teen girl who committed suicide after being bullied, there's the politician who says "they're bullying me" and even representatives of a specific trade exclaiming "we feel bullied."

There are many definitions of bullying. I thought I had a good explanation when I defined my own "modes of bullying" to show how the operation changes as people grow older and the bullying evolves.

In 2002, the Norwegian goverment signed a "Manifest against bullying", which in turn prompted the Labour Inspection Authority to make a legal definition of bullying that would be somewhat managable from a monetary perspective: The work against bullying is limited to cases that occure "repeatedly and over time", and much effort is therefore also put into reactive policies.

My latest analysis of the mechanics of bullying, however, leaves me with an even simpler, psychological view: Bullying is when someone exerts physical or pschological supressive/destructive power against someone who is not likely to defend themselves. That is, if the target is someone who IS able to defend themselves and protect their physical and mental health, it is only an attempt of bullying. Whether the deed is repeated over time is irrelevant. If the target was hurt, it was bullying.

While my understanding of prophylactic psychology is limited to some books and one single lecture, I have no hestitation to state that the bully targets people who feel they have little right to be true to themselves. And by extention, the target is someone who is more dependent on external affirmation, rather than internal.

If we turn our focus to the bully, it is typically believed (I find little hard facts, so I intend to find some bullies to interview) that their behaviour is a method to feel better than others. They receive their affirmation by by-standers, "lieutenants" and the submission of the target. Similarly, "lieutenants" seek affirmation from the main bully. Indeed, there is a very thin line between bullying and crime - and often, this line is crossed.

To sum up, bullying occures between individuals who have low or non-existant internal affirmation. None of the people involved have really found "the right to be true to themselves". The roles they play in the bully game reflects the roles they have learned that statistically increase their external affirmation - up to the point that "being bullied" is an affirmation of your existance, even when it destroys you mentally and ultimately will drive you to suicide.

It is therefore clear to me, that preventive actions should be concentrated round the improvement of internal affirmation. Putting our efforts into this field would reduce the number of people who are susceptible to bullying (the bully's target-market), it would reduce the number of "lieutenants", it would reduce the bully's urge to hurt others, and more by-standers would dare to interviene.

As a bonus, I believe that average grades in school are likely to increase as well, as low internal affirmation creates mental stumbling blocks in students.