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.

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.

Dimensions of the Israel-Palestine conflict

It is possibly the most well known conflicts in the world, it has been going on for a while now. Not the longest war in history, but may very well end up earning the title.

Much can be said about the complexity of the situation. In a video from Prager University, Dennis Prager says that he studied "semester after semester discussing the Middle East conflict as if it were the most complex conflict in the world, when in fact it is probably the easiest conflict in the world to describe. It may be the hardest to solve, but it really is the easiest to describe."

The explanation then goes on about the "Israel wants to live, but surrounding Arab states refuse to recognize Israel" perspective. I see this as one axis of the conflict, and a natural conflict by karmic law. After all, the modern state of Israel was founded on the assumption that everyone wanted to kill the jews. Without this assumption, there would be no reason for the Israeli Jewish state to exist in the first place, and the assumption is thereby ingrained into the state at birth, and a task for the state to overcome. Though that is a slightly buddhist digression.

My experience studying various conflicts tells me that the longer a war has been going on, the more complex it becomes. As I have a fairly visual mind, I made a quick drawing of some of the perceived conflicts and a few interesting cash flows (green).

Each conflict by themselves can easily be described, as each conflict is one dimensional. Together, they make a messy two dimensional picture. I note a conflict between the Israeli military and the Israeli government, in that, as with any other government agency, they need to fight for its budgets. Indeed, this means that the military needs military conflict and demonstrated real threats to avoid cuts.

In short, any conflict is about one or more of: power, money, land, revenge. Politics. And as we know, conflicts by themselves do not kill, though they may verily be used an excuse. Therefore, I wish to introduce my three dimensional model, which is what is making this so much more interesting:

This is what would be the proper, religious and ethical axis. While everyone are looking at individual one dimensional conflicts to try to solve the two dimensional problem, the reason we get involved is how we feel about the third dimension, the axis of good and evil. The conflicts themselves may be legit, and conflicts do occur, it is how they are dealt with that is problematic.

As conflicts get deeper, people are pulled downwards, into a darkness where only conflict is perceived, terror and murder are permissible tools, and you're moving away from the divine. Those who manage to elevate themselves from the conflict and see the real madness from above just wish for peace.

In the Israeli/Palestinian area, there are people both above and below the surface. And as is typical, the evil side has a huge propaganda machine. Evil has used propaganda in order to turn "the enemy" into aliens you're allowed to kill. Good has typically not had such a propaganda machine. So if good is to win - that is, for peace to be accomplished - as many people as possible need to be lifted from the hateful abyss of the underworld to the peaceful overworld.

By doing so, those who are involved in each conflict will eventually find their own solutions, we don't need to interfere with every little detail of every little or major conflict, that will all just take care of itself. And this is the basis of many a religion; the fight is not between the Israeli and the Palestinian, it is between good and evil. If we want to help, what we need to find out is, how do we pull people up from the abyss and show them the light?

Fortunately, there seems to be a point where civilian populations just won't take it any more. And hopefully, the people will rise from being the people that everyone want to blow up - to become the people that loves everyone.

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.

Waffle heart

Wonder what it's like in Gardistan? This music video is built from cuts from the TV-series "Waffle Heart", recorded on the island (Runde). The song is the theme song of the TV-series, based on the book with the same name written by Maria Parr. It is possibly the best children's book I have ever read, it was very hard for me to put it down when the children fell asleep. I hate to admit, but I even fell a few tears on the saddest parts. It's not really a children's book, it's a story for everyone. About compassion, friendship, family, love, waffles and what it's like to live out here, on the edge of the world. International translations are in the works.  Music by Odd Nordstoga, who also played "the doctor" in the series. I hope the video works outside Norway.



Lyrics roughly translated to English:

There is light out there, that you can see from where you live
When you're afraid and alone, it's not like you think it is
It is not so, that nobody has thoughts for a small one
who lies there so alone and afraid
longing for the morning to lights and wind and weather
and is scared by the dark, big, scary

And it isn't so, that you don't have a best friend
No, it isn't so, that you don't have a best friend

There is a light out there, that my eyes rest on
when (the waves) break against the beach, but there is nothing you can see
It isn't so, that others aren't small, too
Because the ocean breaks even the hardest mountain
But out there, swipes a light for me and you
And show the way home to the quiet gardens

And it isn't so, that you don't have a best friend
No, it isn't so, that you don't have a best friend

Do you see the fence, go to the gate
Do you see the door, come in, then
Do you see the stairs, take a step and come inside

Because it isn't so that you don't have a best friend
No, it isn't so that you don't have a best friend
No, it isn't so that you don't have a best friend