Verbal Self Defense Tactics

External Bullies Create Internal Bullying

July 15th, 2010

The basic purpose behind a bully’s bullying behaviors are to share and/or project their negative emotions onto others in an attempt to relieve their suffering. (Check out the recent post on www.drdansays.com ‘Why Bullies Bully’) Not unlike a thought virus, feelings of being bullied … powerlessness, hurt, shame, etc. … are easily passed on through repetitive thought patterns — a target of bullying can take on those bad feelings by repeating the bullying experience in their mind over and over. In that sense a bully is able to successfully have their target take on some of their original feelings of low self-esteem.

The point at which this is accomplished is the moment the target of the bully begins to second-guess the way they handled the interaction. The most well known example people recognize are those times when you have sat around thinking back on an event wishing you could go back and change how you acted or what you said to the other person. It’s during this process of re-experiencing the negative feelings generated during the original incident that one’s inner bully is created and made stronger.

The more you allow your unconscious mind to re-live a bad experience the more you’re allowing your mind and feelings to emotionally bully you into feeling bad about yourself and your abilities to handle life. The truth is that the higher purpose of your unconscious mind doing this behavior is to help you learn from it and deal with the unpleasant feelings so you can let them go. This unconscious healing process, however, is not always successful because the act of re-experiencing something over and over — although occasionally beneficial — does not in any way address the problem of not having the proper skills to deal with the situation in the first place.

Only by avoiding this negative thought cycle can you stay out of the ongoing, negative emotional feedback and be able to overcome your inner bully. Taking the time to logically pull apart the facts of an experience and identify what you could do differently next time will you help your unconscious mind come to the conclusion that re-living the experience has served its purpose, and consequently be able to leave those bad feelings behind.

Alternatively, it’s possible that there is no identifiable lesson or learning to get from an experience of bullying — occasionally there is nothing you could have done or do differently next time … you did everything you could, the best you were able to based upon everything you know and have learned. In these cases the only thing to do is realize that you did your best and give yourself the praise necessary to help overcome and put an end to the negative thought cycle of inner bullying.

Whatever the case may be, the fact is that bullies in our external world are one of the truest sources of inner bullying which people live with on a daily basis. Negative self talk, bad feelings, and low self-esteem can easily start and end with bullying in one form or another — the important thing is to develop the strength and defense mechanisms to deal with inner bulling because there will always be people who say and do things (whether they mean to be bullies or not) that leave you feeling bad … the trick is to not let them influence how you see or speak to yourself and who you are and what you can do in this world.

As a side note, people in the field of NLP have noted that it can be very helpful to change the inner voice of bullying to one of more comical origin … like the voice of a cartoon character such Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse — as an example, any time your inner bully starts to negatively comment on your how you handle verbal conflict try changing that inner voice to the voice of Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants and see how it affects the validity of those arguments.