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as kids we don't know what is normal. this is the whole insidious thing with any form of child abuse. the bullying i experienced was limited to frequent teasing

by em-bee 1y ago

as kids we don't know what is normal. this is the whole insidious thing with any form of child abuse. the bullying i experienced was limited to frequent teasing but i never made any friends at school and at home my parents were not very emotionally supportive (not their fault, they had it worse growing up). i was unconsciously searching for that emotional support all my life, but it took me decades before i finally understood what i was missing and how it affected me. i also don't remember much from my childhood because i repressed memories from that time.

ryao 1y ago
The students were not the only ones to bully me. I can recall three incidents where teachers bullied me: * One teacher lifted me by my tie off the floor (to the point where I was on my toes) and yelled at me for the audacity of trying to help her with a computer issue. I forget what the issue was (although I believe it involved printing), but I recall that I had encountered the problem in the past and had regurgitated the solution in an effort to be helpful. * The same teacher hit me repeatedly on the head in class while telling me that until I had a college degree, I was not to tell her how to do her job, again for having had the audacity of telling her to how solve a computer issue. She later took my advice and solved it, but tried to hide that she had taken it. Either this or the previous incident had been over my telling her to press the insert key to disable overwrite mode in Microsoft Word. She had been puzzled on how to disable overwrite mode until I tried to help her. I am not entirely sure which incident correspond to which issue. * Another teacher, upon hearing that I could solve all of the math problems given to us in class mentally, started yelling at me while the class jeered. Then she wrote a bunch of numbers on the board and demanded I tell her the average while she loudly counted down and the class was making a racket. All of the noise caused an off by 1 error in my computation and she then concluded that I was incapable of doing mental math. I had known that I might be off by one, but I did not have enough time to repeat the computation, so I picked one of the two possibilities and unfortunately picked wrongly. Ironically, I later won a mental math competition in the school that had people solve questions that far exceeded those the we were expected to solve using a paper and pencil. That said, my mother somehow learned about the incidents involving the computer teacher. I had no idea at the time why she was upset and threatened legal action if it ever happened again. Many of these incidents were a blur when I was a student as I had repressed them. My mother had to learn about what had happened by asking my classmates before she was able to pry the details out of me. I started to remember many of these things years later when my circumstances had improved and the memories had resurfaced as intrusive thoughts, which in a way, victimized me again years after the events were long past. There is nothing quite like going about one’s day only for memories of past abuse to resurface for an attack on one’s psyche.
- em-bee 1y ago
  damn, that's rough. sorry you had to go through that. how are you in finding friends? this sort of experience really ruins your trust in others. for you it's probably worse than for me. i don't trust people to be supportive which limits most friendships to the level of friendly acquaintance. i always hope for the best but when they let me down then i just shrug it off as if i had expected it. that's the self defense mechanism i developed. (btw feel free to contact me at the email in my profile if you prefer to talk in private)

by em-bee 1y ago

ryao 1y ago

The students were not the only ones to bully me. I can recall three incidents where teachers bullied me: * One teacher lifted me by my tie off the floor (to the point where I was on my toes) and yelled at me for the audacity of trying to help her with a computer issue. I forget what the issue was (although I believe it involved printing), but I recall that I had encountered the problem in the past and had regurgitated the solution in an effort to be helpful. * The same teacher hit me repeatedly on the head in class while telling me that until I had a college degree, I was not to tell her how to do her job, again for having had the audacity of telling her to how solve a computer issue. She later took my advice and solved it, but tried to hide that she had taken it. Either this or the previous incident had been over my telling her to press the insert key to disable overwrite mode in Microsoft Word. She had been puzzled on how to disable overwrite mode until I tried to help her. I am not entirely sure which incident correspond to which issue. * Another teacher, upon hearing that I could solve all of the math problems given to us in class mentally, started yelling at me while the class jeered. Then she wrote a bunch of numbers on the board and demanded I tell her the average while she loudly counted down and the class was making a racket. All of the noise caused an off by 1 error in my computation and she then concluded that I was incapable of doing mental math. I had known that I might be off by one, but I did not have enough time to repeat the computation, so I picked one of the two possibilities and unfortunately picked wrongly. Ironically, I later won a mental math competition in the school that had people solve questions that far exceeded those the we were expected to solve using a paper and pencil. That said, my mother somehow learned about the incidents involving the computer teacher. I had no idea at the time why she was upset and threatened legal action if it ever happened again. Many of these incidents were a blur when I was a student as I had repressed them. My mother had to learn about what had happened by asking my classmates before she was able to pry the details out of me. I started to remember many of these things years later when my circumstances had improved and the memories had resurfaced as intrusive thoughts, which in a way, victimized me again years after the events were long past. There is nothing quite like going about one’s day only for memories of past abuse to resurface for an attack on one’s psyche.

em-bee 1y ago
damn, that's rough. sorry you had to go through that. how are you in finding friends? this sort of experience really ruins your trust in others. for you it's probably worse than for me. i don't trust people to be supportive which limits most friendships to the level of friendly acquaintance. i always hope for the best but when they let me down then i just shrug it off as if i had expected it. that's the self defense mechanism i developed. (btw feel free to contact me at the email in my profile if you prefer to talk in private)