Emotional Bullying
Understanding Emotional Bullying
Emotional bullying refers to the cases where a person is made to feel isolated and ridiculed largely through mechanism such as teasing, shouting, mocking and ignoring. This is a case where the bullying does not necessarily have a physical component and for that reason it is sometimes harder to spot or rectify.
Emotional bullying happens among adults and children. Like other forms of bullying there is usually no rhyme or reason as to what makes somebody a victim other than the random choice of the bully. Emotional bullies tend to locate a victim and they set out to make them feel small and unwanted. They tend to embarrass them in social situations and misrepresent them to other people. They may do things to provoke anger and tears in their victims and may resort to lying and cheating to reach their goals. There are sometimes racial and sexual components to emotional bullying.
This type of abuse leaves the victim feeling diffident and uncertain – there are long-term repercussions with the victim having to deal with low self-esteem and a diminished sense of self-worth. Emotional bullying can even lead to physical problems if the victim becomes depressed and despondent. Food and sleep can be affected and then this will become a vicious circle.
What is the best way to deal with an emotional bully? The traditional advice to avoid a bully is even more ineffectual in this case because even in a public setting an emotional bully can achieve their purpose. The best approach seems to be one of self-awareness and increased knowledge.
It helps to view the situation with a little detachment and to remember that the bully’s behavior is prompted by his or her own sense of inadequacy and emotional baggage. This kind of background analysis helps keep the bully in a manageable box, so to speak. Now that you have reduced the size of the bully in your head, you can work on managing your reaction to the emotional bullying. You have to figure out ways to reduce the impact of comments and smirks and treat them as addressed to someone else – half the joy of the bully is in getting a rise out of the victim. So, by not obliging, you may well be on your way to winning the battle. It helps to modify reaction to bullying if you figure out strategies for not taking the remarks personally.
It helps to also react in a manner that is atypical. If the bully is expecting you to cower and avoid, surprise the person by confronting and engaging. Be prepared for the fact that this will not immediately make for a changed behavior pattern but it will definitely help in reworking the balance of the relationship. You can also consider using humor as a tool to deflect a situation. Self-deprecating humor seems to work well in these situations rather than malicious or aggressive humor. This is very case dependent because a bully who is verbally malicious may need to be treated to a dose of their own medicine to know that targeted humor is not funny.
In certain social contexts, you may be able to co-opt the help of friends or teachers to counter the hostile environment that the bully is creating. Seek out time with friends or even like-minded people and set about creating a different circle from the one where the emotional bullying takes place. This will help limit the sense of being bullied and not feel like your whole life revolves around it. Taking up new hobbies and interests is also a good way to limit the impact of emotional bullying.
A combination of these coping strategies will be a good way to contain the impact of emotional bullying and making sure that it does not become a perpetual pattern.