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For the people who think bullying isn't a problem: Replace "bullying" with: Parental neglect/abuse, unfair rejection/blame, or being backstabbed in a situation

For the people who think bullying isn't a problem: Replace "bullying" with: Parental neglect/abuse, unfair rejection/blame, or being backstabbed in a situation that you can't really do anything about it/no one will believe you. It gets at what the end-feeling is like. Bullying in its raw form seems acutely more harmful than say, parental abuse, which only manifests as "bullying" years later, but it's the same overall kind of pain, and I am amazed at how many people from broken situations who should easily understand have taken a hard stance, and missed the point on bullying. It's not the same as "getting one's ass kicked", because there is no productive lesson to be learned, it's more of a feeling of obvious rejection or being singled out in some way that hijacks the human evaluation system in a highly damaging way, that can stay with you for years - unfairly. Worth solving: Of course, but who knows how? Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish.

pdonis 4y ago
> Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish. This is the part that few people seem to want to acknowledge: top-down "solutions" to problems like this end up being worse than the problem they purport to "solve".
jimkleiber 4y ago
I've been focusing on a very bottoms-up approach: how to respond to micro-attacks. So practicing responding to getting rejected, ignored, blamed, even idolized, and complimented—anything that makes me want to disconnect more and more from the person and from myself. I've found that in getting better at these very simple, micro-interactions, I start to get better at the bigger things. One of the things I've noticed the most in classes is that being attacked is often a subjective experience from the receiver, often oblivious to the giver. I have people intentionally try to reject the other and it seems very uncomfortable to try to do it intentionally. Anyways, I find it neither dystopian nor hellish. One person who took a class said, "Jim, your workshop it f*cked my feelings but they needed it, thank you." I don't mean to advertise here, more just to say I believe there are ways to approach it that I feel excited about.

pdonis 4y ago

> Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish. This is the part that few people seem to want to acknowledge: top-down "solutions" to problems like this end up being worse than the problem they purport to "solve".

jimkleiber 4y ago

I've been focusing on a very bottoms-up approach: how to respond to micro-attacks. So practicing responding to getting rejected, ignored, blamed, even idolized, and complimented—anything that makes me want to disconnect more and more from the person and from myself. I've found that in getting better at these very simple, micro-interactions, I start to get better at the bigger things. One of the things I've noticed the most in classes is that being attacked is often a subjective experience from the receiver, often oblivious to the giver. I have people intentionally try to reject the other and it seems very uncomfortable to try to do it intentionally. Anyways, I find it neither dystopian nor hellish. One person who took a class said, "Jim, your workshop it f*cked my feelings but they needed it, thank you." I don't mean to advertise here, more just to say I believe there are ways to approach it that I feel excited about.