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Verbal Bullying – Audio

Hi, I’m AJ and welcome to this month’s VIP lesson. Our topic this month is a tough one actually, a painful one, verbal bullying; verbal bullying. Now, of course, verbal means spoken right, with words.

So, there are different kinds of bullying right? Someone can bully you physically. They can push you around and hit you and do things physically, but people can also bully verbally. They can use words to intimidate you. Intimidate you means, make you feel afraid, to harass you, to lie about you, to do lots and lots and lots of terrible things.

For example, what if you were falsely accused of being a racist, a sexist, of hating some group, of committing a crime, of saying something you didn’t say? What if people started attacking you and saying terrible things about you and calling you these names all the time? How do you deal with that? What if this happened to your child? What if your child was verbally bullied online or in person? What if a group of other kids decided to constantly insult your child, make them feel weak, miserable and sad and they were constantly doing it all the time? How could you help your child? What would you tell your child to do? Parents give advice about this, they usually give terrible advice to their poor kids that doesn’t help them, in fact, it usually makes it worse and their kids suffer even more.

So we have taunting. That’s when you say eh, people say stuff to you trying to make you upset; insults, gossip too. What happens when people do this to you or to your child or to a friend? How do you deal with it it’s really tough and sadly, it’s becoming more and more and more common? It has always been around, of course, but I think that social media is making it worse and just our media culture in general, corporate media is making verbal bullying much, much, much worse, even than it was for me as a child.

As a child I was verbally bullied a lot, especially around middle school age, early adolescence. I was a really small kid, kind of thin and not strong at all and I was very smart, got very good grades. My family they moved to a different state, so I came into a completely new school at that time in my life and I had a southern accent from the United States, the south. And we moved up to the north, so everybody started making fun of me and ridiculing me and then it just got worse and worse and worse. Over a two year period I was constantly bullied verbally.

They made fun of my accent, of course, but they also just said really terrible mean things to me, constantly insulting me. And also, I was physically bullied at that time as well. I had no idea how to deal with this, this had never happened to me before. I felt so miserable, so unhappy and my parents they just tried to give advice, just be nice. Just be nice and try to make friends. This was the advice of my parents, which was terrible advice, it didn’t help me at all. I tried to be nice and they just bullied me even more, because bullies see that as a sign of weakness. That’s the terrible sad truth.

And so, it was just very traumatic for me, that period in my life and I never figured it out. I failed. I didn’t know how to deal with it so I ended up, I used to be a very outgoing kid and I became a very, very shy kid, very quiet kid.

Now later as an adult I was working at a job as a social worker, and it was a job with a lot of women. Most social workers are women, in America. I was there and there was another guy that worked there, well, for some reason several of the women employees decided they didn’t like this other guy. They started gossiping about him, but they weren’t just gossiping about, saying stuff about him that was true they started to make up lies about him. About how he was a sexist and how he was doing all these terrible things and he wasn’t. I worked with all of them every day and I saw that they were lying, they were just lying, gossiping but they started to create a bully culture against this guy.

I don’t know why they chose him. I have no idea, and I tried to defend him. Again, I tried to be reasonable and rational and said look, no, he’s not a sexist. I know him, he’s a good guy. These things you’re saying are not true. I tried to be reasonable like we all want to be and I failed. They just got worse and worse and worse and then they even started to attack me a little bit, because I was defending him. Again, I failed to deal with the verbal bullies.

Recently, with this recent election in the United States, I had one more chance to deal with verbal bullies. I believe very, very strongly in free speech and the freedom of speech. For most Americans that is a super important right. I started seeing that people were being silenced. People were being banned, a lot of censorship happening and I felt like I had to speak up, so I started to speak up about it and when I did, oh boy! On social media, on my Facebook page and everything, my personal Facebook page, I started getting all these posts and messages about again, attacking me saying that was sexist and racist and all this stuff. Again, all these lies and it’s the same kind of verbal bullying.

But this time I’d done a lot of reading about bullying, not only physical bullying but also verbal, and I tried a different tactic. I tried a different way to deal with it, much different than in the past, and I did something very, very, very uncomfortable for me, something I really don’t like that made me just feel super stressed out, but I did it and it worked. It worked, the bullies backed off. They started getting a little bit quieter, a little bit softer and now they’re becoming silent.

So, let’s talk about what happened and why? What were my failures? In those two first situations when I was a kid for all those years, and it was really even into high school this happened, so I had like a four-year period in my life that was just miserable because of this. And see, I wanted to be reasonable, I wanted to be rational, I just couldn’t understand why would people attack me like this for no reason, so viciously? Vicious means very cruel, very mean. Why would they do this? And everything they said was irrational and this is the problem. We, nice people, nice kind people, we want to be reasonable. We want to be rational. We want to be kind.

But, the bullies, they’re irrational they’re not rational. They’re emotional. They’re fanatic. They’re mean. And so, I finally realized after all those years, you can’t fight bullies with niceness. You can’t fight bullies with reason. You cannot fight bullies with kindness, it doesn’t work. Yes, we want to be kind to most people and we should, but when people attack you irrationally like this, when bullies are attacking you physically or verbally you have to fight back in a very different way, something you probably don’t want to do but is necessary.

What’s the answer? The answer I finally found in a book that explained two kinds of communication. This goes back to ancient Greece, the ancient Greek philosophers. They described a couple of different types of communication. One is called ‘dialectic’. Dialectic is basically a type of speaking, a type of communication that is rational. You talk about your reasons. You give your intelligent points and then the other person maybe they give their counter points. It’s like a reasonable debate. That’s how most of us want to communicate.

But, there’s another kind of communication called ‘rhetoric’. Rhetoric is purely emotional. It’s just playing to emotions only. There’s not really much information in rhetoric, in that kind of communication. And then I realized that bullies use rhetoric. Everything’s emotional, they’re just attacking you emotionally with emotional language, it’s not a rational debate, even if they’re pretending to be, even if it’s in some area like politics. It’s not, mostly they’re just name calling and trying to intimidate you emotionally.

And so nowadays, the bullies are super, super, super rhetorical. Super, super, super extremely emotional, they just use extreme emotional language to try to silence you or scare you, intimidate you. And some of them will use it to make you lose your job or to make you just feel miserable and weak. Right, it’s about power and control for the bullies. So, what I finally learned just recently was that we must fight rhetoric with rhetoric. When bullies attack you verbally you must attack them back with the same kind of emotional language. You can’t try to debate them. You cannot just defend yourself rationally. Well, no, actually I’m not a racist because blah-blah-blah that doesn’t work, they’ll just keep screaming louder. No, you are a racist, you are, rah-rah-rah right or for kids they’ll say you’re a wimp, you’re a loser, you’re a wimp, you’re a loser. Telling your child to be reasonable is a bad idea.

Because, if your child says, I’m not a wimp please be nice. I just want to be friends. The bullies will see that as weakness. That’s a dialectic kind of communication, telling your child be reasonable, just try to discuss with these bullies. What you have to teach your child is to fight them back with the same emotional language. If they call your child a loser then your child should say, well, you’re an idiot.

Yes, it’s childish it’s not rational, it’s not nice, but that’s how you have to fight. It’s just like in physical self-defense, if someone attacks you, you don’t just try to be nice and sweet with them. No, you fight back viciously and you fight dirty. You do everything possible to survive, if someone is attacking you physically. You have to respond to their violence with equal or greater violence. It’s just the truth of life, I’m sorry.

Well, verbal violence is the same. We shouldn’t say verbal violence it’s not really violence, but verbal bullying is the same. When they attack you emotionally like that and they’re using name calling and insults, trying to intimidate you, trying to silence you, you must immediately stop any attempt at reasonable discussion and you just attack them back. In self-defense you don’t try to defend you just attack back and you attack harder. That’s how you protect your life. Well verbally it’s the same. When they attack you this way then no more debate, no more nice person, you attack back just as mean and meaner, just as emotionally. This is what works, it’s effective.

No, we’re nice people we don’t want to do it but this is what you have to do to survive. If you’re at a job and someone accuses you of racism or sexism, you better fight back or you’re gonna lose your job. If you apologize they will attack you even more. If your child is being bullied at school, for example, don’t tell them be reasonable be nice. No, you tell them attack back twice as hard. That’s what will eventually push the bullies back and make them stop.

All right, in the commentary I’m going to give you some clear step-by-step ways to do this so that you can defend yourself against verbal bullies.

See you in the commentary.