4 ms·

Could we normalize that being emotionally strong and having some amount of resilience is like, something desirable for all adults? Why can't these people shrug

Could we normalize that being emotionally strong and having some amount of resilience is like, something desirable for all adults? Why can't these people shrug it off? Just by math everyone can be expected to meet abusive people during their lifetime. Would be really useful...

pavel_lishin 5y ago
Sure, if we can also normalize accepting that emotional pain and injury is no less serious than physical injury. Some people can't just "shrug it off" any more than some people can't just "walk off" a broken ankle.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > if we can also normalize accepting that emotional pain and injury is no less serious than physical injury they are not. they are in fact worse. I suffered so many physical injuries when I was a kid that I stopped counting them, none of them traumatized me. They are now good stories to tell. On the other hand emotional pain was so unbearable that there are people I still don't talk to 35 years later, because I don't want to remember. You know why they are so terrible? Because people wanted to "share the pain" and made a big fuss about it and forced me to "confront my feelings" "live the pain" and all that hippie stuff, that only made it worse and gave me the idea that suffering was something you couldn't escape from. Now that I am a full grown up adult, I'm still sometimes scared by having the feeling of feeling something. If people could just normalize the fact that everything pass and everything goes away with time (except of course real traumas, like war or being abused) kids would realize that there'll be a day when they will stand up for themselves and the high school bully did a really bad job at ruining your life, there are so many worse things in life, that you kinda admire how stupid they were. > than some people can't just "walk off" a broken ankle. actually, most of the times you can walk off a broken ankle. Typically, a minor ankle fracture won't prevent you from walking.
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    It's disappointing but not unexpected to see your comment downvoted. There's a reason CPTSD is considered even more difficult to treat than PTSD.
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      > It's disappointing but not unexpected to see your comment downvoted. There's a reason CPTSD is considered even more difficult to treat than PTSD. As you have correctly pointed out: disappointing but not unexpected. I'm actually happy, it means that usually for people their worse experiences are high school bullies or broken ankles. It's a good thing. I wish it was true for everybody.
      - seattle_spring 5y ago
        The severity of bullying is a spectrum, and some of it can ruin someone for life. Claiming it's good because other things can be worse is another example of the fallacy of relative privation, and is not really a valid argument.
        peoplefromibiza 5y ago
        > The severity of bullying is a spectrum we are talking about school bullying The power imbalance of school bullying usually solves itself with age (like in a year or two). > and some of it can ruin someone for life yeah, it happens, rarely but it happens. that's why I specifically wrote "except of course real traumas, like war or being abused" > it's good because other things can be worse it's good if that's the worst people usually suffer. Never said it's good in absolute.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rajin444 5y ago
  I’m all for normalizing emotional injury if we can come up with a consistent framework for identifying it (same as a broken ankle). We currently lack the technical ability to understand emotion in an objective way. As it stands, people use it as a way to control others. Your post is a perfect example of this. You claim some people can’t “shrug it off” but you have no objective way of backing that up. Why are you saying it?
  - haliskerbas 5y ago
    Probably because some people get bullied to the point where they no longer want to live anymore. While we objectively cannot give a number to “ability to shrug it off”, it’s clear that some people cannot.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  So tired of the culture of stoicism, in which you are supposed to internalize abuse. you have to let it out sometimes. Make your frustrations and demands heard.
  - blueflow 5y ago
    You are not supposed to "internalize" it, internalizing is what will make you suffer endlessly from it. Stoicism is about not caring if you cant change it anyways. Bad things happened, but life goes on.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
doliveira 5y ago
I'd say that what defines bullying is when it can't be "shrugged off".
themitigating 5y ago
I think the frequency and intensity of the abuse is the problem. Not all people shrug it off, some shoot up their schools, commit suicide, or pass on the abuse. Since bullies cause exponential suffering why should the larger group of people, the victims, shrug it off when we can try to eliminate the problem?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Because you are not elimating the problem just one cause. People will encounter other similiar situations in the future. If someone is not trained emotionally to deal with these events you are harming that person.
  - fallingfrog 5y ago
    It's not about the hurt feelings as much as the social ostracizing and resulting loss of opportunities and friendships, not to mention that bullies often inflict actual physical violence.
  - hraedon 5y ago
    An adult is going to have very few instances where they are forced to spend hours of time around their abuser(s) relative to a child in school. "Training" someone to deal with being regularly bullied just means adding abuse from another direction, to me.
    - abduhl 5y ago
      I’d like to see the statistics on childhood bullying rising to the level of “abusive” versus, say, workplace harassment. I find your comment saying that serious childhood bullying is more prevalent than abuse difficult to believe.
  - praptak 5y ago
    It's like getting kicked in the balls to train oneself before a fight. It doesn't train for anything, it's just pure meaningless suffering. A kid doesn't have the mental toolset to deal with being bullied. Heck, even an adult can't be expected to deal with everything. That's why we have laws against mobbing, harassment and stalking.
fallingfrog 5y ago
One thing that's important to remember is that bullying and mocking can have real world consequences. It's not just a matter of hurt feelings. It can lead to being socially ostracized, to not being able to get dates, to missing out on opportunities, etc. And it can include physical violence or the threat of violence. It can cause you to be suspicious and aloof and never open up to people, lest you give them something that they can use to attack you. It can affect the whole course of your life. There's a big difference between good natured ribbing and real bullying.
- mopmopmop 5y ago
  Thats exactly how the constant bullying in school turned out for me.
kayodelycaon 5y ago
Personally, I was suicidal in 4th grade from bullying. Shrugging that off wasn't exactly easy.
- nosianu 5y ago
  I think he's talking about later in life, middle aged or later. It is clear that kids have much less maturity and ways to deal with things and need help when an adult usually does not. Even if they could, they have a lot less options to do anything by themselves, for example they can't just quit and move away (leaving aside that as an adult you still need a certain level of money to do that). Also, in all those discussions I think it would be safe to assume "statistically speaking" unless being able to show one individual counter-example proves or disproves a point being discussed. Usually statements are not made under the assumption to be valid for every single person unless it is explicit. (Edited)
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    A lot of this carried over into adulthood for me. I'm still uncovering traumatic things from my childhood that are affecting me in ways I wasn't aware of.
  - phkahler 5y ago
    PTSD doesn't just shrug off. If you follow the EMDR camp, it's due to experiences that have not been "properly" processed and stored due to the level of emotional association at the time. It can be "unstuck" and filed away but it's not always easy and not something one "just does". The lack of understanding around this in some of the comments is really eye opening to me.
    - nosianu 5y ago
      > The lack of understanding around this in some of the comments is really eye opening to me. I had my own physical bullying experiences in school, fortunately nothing constant. There was no way to get any help either (or maybe my uneducated and inexperienced kid brain just did not know any better), so I know the feeling of helplessness at least. But you mention PTSD, which is really really severe. As I said, are we talking about some extreme cases here? How frequent are those? The points made was as I see it for much less severe than "PTSD stage" things. When you get to PTSD it's criminal level and I don't think that this is what those people you claim have "lack of understanding" assumed was what we were talking about. I certainly didn't, and I still don't. I think extreme cases are something else.
at_a_remove 5y ago
Many, many moons ago I saw a study in children about trauma and they found a kind of bimodal distribution -- some kids "bounced back" and some kids very much did not bounce back. Of course, the replication crisis being what it is, who knows, but I suspect some people are geared for it and some people aren't. Evolution being what it is, I wonder, if this were true or true enough, about the tradeoffs are between the two groups.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  Measuring this is problematic. I'd probably qualify as "bounced back" because a lot of the damage wasn't apparent in my daily life. I survived and thought I was okay. It wasn't until I was 33 that I realized none of it had gone away. I'd just hidden and internalized the abuse and blamed myself for being the way I was.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
renewiltord 5y ago
Well, that is normalized in that the standard of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is about giving you the tools to deal with these feelings you have. There is a push among many to give one's emotions primacy, but obviously simply attempting to suppress them isn't a useful way to do things. It's about recognizing the way you fall into behaviour that isn't productive for you and stop it. And that's the normalized state-of-the-art in the field, so this is one of those "can we normalize building roads?". Yes, yes we have. As an aside, did you know 30% of soldiers experiencing severe combat trauma will not get PTSD and 70% of soldiers experiencing combat trauma will not get PTSD? I bet for those in that category, they will simply not understand why the rest feel how they do. But it is how it is. For instance, I can't relate to how it feels to be short.
tejohnso 5y ago
> Why can't these people shrug it off It depends what it is. And it depends on the person's circumstances. A strong support system at home can be a big help. Friends as well. Some people just get a terrible hand in all areas of life and there's a compounding effect. The amount of abuse that is allowed in schools is insane. It's like a separate social system where it's everyone for themselves. Nobody wants to enforce laws, or protect people, and this is where we send our most vulnerable.
deathanatos 5y ago
> Why can't these people shrug it off? Because humans are simply not wired to be able to shrug off unlimited amounts of verbal or physical abuse. > Just by math everyone can be expected to meet abusive people during their lifetime. In broader adult life, you have much more control over your interactions. In school, a classmate is your classmate, pretty much whether you like it or not. You might be forced to, e.g., sit next to them, change in the same locker room as them, etc. (There are some ways around this, such as transfers & home-schooling, but they take time, require parents who can be that involved — which is hard if they, e.g., working too many jobs to make ends meet — and from the child's view, risks backfiring.)
munificent 5y ago
Can we normalize focusing on our own resilience without judging others for lacking it when we don't know the larger context of their lives?
- blueflow 5y ago
  Why is she putting it up on public display, then?
  - thewebcount 5y ago
    Because as we can see from the comments, and from the way the perpetrator acted, a whole lot of people don't get it. It needs to be made much more clear for some people that acting the way the bully did in the article is not acceptable.

pavel_lishin 5y ago

Sure, if we can also normalize accepting that emotional pain and injury is no less serious than physical injury. Some people can't just "shrug it off" any more than some people can't just "walk off" a broken ankle.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> if we can also normalize accepting that emotional pain and injury is no less serious than physical injury they are not. they are in fact worse. I suffered so many physical injuries when I was a kid that I stopped counting them, none of them traumatized me. They are now good stories to tell. On the other hand emotional pain was so unbearable that there are people I still don't talk to 35 years later, because I don't want to remember. You know why they are so terrible? Because people wanted to "share the pain" and made a big fuss about it and forced me to "confront my feelings" "live the pain" and all that hippie stuff, that only made it worse and gave me the idea that suffering was something you couldn't escape from. Now that I am a full grown up adult, I'm still sometimes scared by having the feeling of feeling something. If people could just normalize the fact that everything pass and everything goes away with time (except of course real traumas, like war or being abused) kids would realize that there'll be a day when they will stand up for themselves and the high school bully did a really bad job at ruining your life, there are so many worse things in life, that you kinda admire how stupid they were. > than some people can't just "walk off" a broken ankle. actually, most of the times you can walk off a broken ankle. Typically, a minor ankle fracture won't prevent you from walking.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  It's disappointing but not unexpected to see your comment downvoted. There's a reason CPTSD is considered even more difficult to treat than PTSD.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > It's disappointing but not unexpected to see your comment downvoted. There's a reason CPTSD is considered even more difficult to treat than PTSD. As you have correctly pointed out: disappointing but not unexpected. I'm actually happy, it means that usually for people their worse experiences are high school bullies or broken ankles. It's a good thing. I wish it was true for everybody.
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      The severity of bullying is a spectrum, and some of it can ruin someone for life. Claiming it's good because other things can be worse is another example of the fallacy of relative privation, and is not really a valid argument.
      - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
        > The severity of bullying is a spectrum we are talking about school bullying The power imbalance of school bullying usually solves itself with age (like in a year or two). > and some of it can ruin someone for life yeah, it happens, rarely but it happens. that's why I specifically wrote "except of course real traumas, like war or being abused" > it's good because other things can be worse it's good if that's the worst people usually suffer. Never said it's good in absolute.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rajin444 5y ago
I’m all for normalizing emotional injury if we can come up with a consistent framework for identifying it (same as a broken ankle). We currently lack the technical ability to understand emotion in an objective way. As it stands, people use it as a way to control others. Your post is a perfect example of this. You claim some people can’t “shrug it off” but you have no objective way of backing that up. Why are you saying it?
- haliskerbas 5y ago
  Probably because some people get bullied to the point where they no longer want to live anymore. While we objectively cannot give a number to “ability to shrug it off”, it’s clear that some people cannot.
paulpauper 5y ago
So tired of the culture of stoicism, in which you are supposed to internalize abuse. you have to let it out sometimes. Make your frustrations and demands heard.
- blueflow 5y ago
  You are not supposed to "internalize" it, internalizing is what will make you suffer endlessly from it. Stoicism is about not caring if you cant change it anyways. Bad things happened, but life goes on.
AlgorithmicTime 5y ago

doliveira 5y ago

I'd say that what defines bullying is when it can't be "shrugged off".

themitigating 5y ago

I think the frequency and intensity of the abuse is the problem. Not all people shrug it off, some shoot up their schools, commit suicide, or pass on the abuse. Since bullies cause exponential suffering why should the larger group of people, the victims, shrug it off when we can try to eliminate the problem?

ipaddr 5y ago
Because you are not elimating the problem just one cause. People will encounter other similiar situations in the future. If someone is not trained emotionally to deal with these events you are harming that person.
- fallingfrog 5y ago
  It's not about the hurt feelings as much as the social ostracizing and resulting loss of opportunities and friendships, not to mention that bullies often inflict actual physical violence.
- hraedon 5y ago
  An adult is going to have very few instances where they are forced to spend hours of time around their abuser(s) relative to a child in school. "Training" someone to deal with being regularly bullied just means adding abuse from another direction, to me.
  - abduhl 5y ago
    I’d like to see the statistics on childhood bullying rising to the level of “abusive” versus, say, workplace harassment. I find your comment saying that serious childhood bullying is more prevalent than abuse difficult to believe.
- praptak 5y ago
  It's like getting kicked in the balls to train oneself before a fight. It doesn't train for anything, it's just pure meaningless suffering. A kid doesn't have the mental toolset to deal with being bullied. Heck, even an adult can't be expected to deal with everything. That's why we have laws against mobbing, harassment and stalking.

fallingfrog 5y ago

One thing that's important to remember is that bullying and mocking can have real world consequences. It's not just a matter of hurt feelings. It can lead to being socially ostracized, to not being able to get dates, to missing out on opportunities, etc. And it can include physical violence or the threat of violence. It can cause you to be suspicious and aloof and never open up to people, lest you give them something that they can use to attack you. It can affect the whole course of your life. There's a big difference between good natured ribbing and real bullying.

mopmopmop 5y ago
Thats exactly how the constant bullying in school turned out for me.

kayodelycaon 5y ago

Personally, I was suicidal in 4th grade from bullying. Shrugging that off wasn't exactly easy.

nosianu 5y ago
I think he's talking about later in life, middle aged or later. It is clear that kids have much less maturity and ways to deal with things and need help when an adult usually does not. Even if they could, they have a lot less options to do anything by themselves, for example they can't just quit and move away (leaving aside that as an adult you still need a certain level of money to do that). Also, in all those discussions I think it would be safe to assume "statistically speaking" unless being able to show one individual counter-example proves or disproves a point being discussed. Usually statements are not made under the assumption to be valid for every single person unless it is explicit. (Edited)
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  A lot of this carried over into adulthood for me. I'm still uncovering traumatic things from my childhood that are affecting me in ways I wasn't aware of.
- phkahler 5y ago
  PTSD doesn't just shrug off. If you follow the EMDR camp, it's due to experiences that have not been "properly" processed and stored due to the level of emotional association at the time. It can be "unstuck" and filed away but it's not always easy and not something one "just does". The lack of understanding around this in some of the comments is really eye opening to me.
  - nosianu 5y ago
    > The lack of understanding around this in some of the comments is really eye opening to me. I had my own physical bullying experiences in school, fortunately nothing constant. There was no way to get any help either (or maybe my uneducated and inexperienced kid brain just did not know any better), so I know the feeling of helplessness at least. But you mention PTSD, which is really really severe. As I said, are we talking about some extreme cases here? How frequent are those? The points made was as I see it for much less severe than "PTSD stage" things. When you get to PTSD it's criminal level and I don't think that this is what those people you claim have "lack of understanding" assumed was what we were talking about. I certainly didn't, and I still don't. I think extreme cases are something else.

at_a_remove 5y ago

Many, many moons ago I saw a study in children about trauma and they found a kind of bimodal distribution -- some kids "bounced back" and some kids very much did not bounce back. Of course, the replication crisis being what it is, who knows, but I suspect some people are geared for it and some people aren't. Evolution being what it is, I wonder, if this were true or true enough, about the tradeoffs are between the two groups.

kayodelycaon 5y ago
Measuring this is problematic. I'd probably qualify as "bounced back" because a lot of the damage wasn't apparent in my daily life. I survived and thought I was okay. It wasn't until I was 33 that I realized none of it had gone away. I'd just hidden and internalized the abuse and blamed myself for being the way I was.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

renewiltord 5y ago

Well, that is normalized in that the standard of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is about giving you the tools to deal with these feelings you have. There is a push among many to give one's emotions primacy, but obviously simply attempting to suppress them isn't a useful way to do things. It's about recognizing the way you fall into behaviour that isn't productive for you and stop it. And that's the normalized state-of-the-art in the field, so this is one of those "can we normalize building roads?". Yes, yes we have. As an aside, did you know 30% of soldiers experiencing severe combat trauma will not get PTSD and 70% of soldiers experiencing combat trauma will not get PTSD? I bet for those in that category, they will simply not understand why the rest feel how they do. But it is how it is. For instance, I can't relate to how it feels to be short.

tejohnso 5y ago

> Why can't these people shrug it off It depends what it is. And it depends on the person's circumstances. A strong support system at home can be a big help. Friends as well. Some people just get a terrible hand in all areas of life and there's a compounding effect. The amount of abuse that is allowed in schools is insane. It's like a separate social system where it's everyone for themselves. Nobody wants to enforce laws, or protect people, and this is where we send our most vulnerable.

deathanatos 5y ago

> Why can't these people shrug it off? Because humans are simply not wired to be able to shrug off unlimited amounts of verbal or physical abuse. > Just by math everyone can be expected to meet abusive people during their lifetime. In broader adult life, you have much more control over your interactions. In school, a classmate is your classmate, pretty much whether you like it or not. You might be forced to, e.g., sit next to them, change in the same locker room as them, etc. (There are some ways around this, such as transfers & home-schooling, but they take time, require parents who can be that involved — which is hard if they, e.g., working too many jobs to make ends meet — and from the child's view, risks backfiring.)

munificent 5y ago

Can we normalize focusing on our own resilience without judging others for lacking it when we don't know the larger context of their lives?

blueflow 5y ago
Why is she putting it up on public display, then?
- thewebcount 5y ago
  Because as we can see from the comments, and from the way the perpetrator acted, a whole lot of people don't get it. It needs to be made much more clear for some people that acting the way the bully did in the article is not acceptable.