To apologise for bullying 25+ years ago

[KM99]

Back in my school days (I'm in my 40s now) I once did something pretty cruel to one of my classmates. A gang of us actually did it, not physical but emotional. We got found out, hauled over the coals in front of the whole school and made very public and private apologies. Which was exactly right and I thoroughly deserved the sickness I felt in my stomach for weeks afterwards.

I've often thought about it since (especially as I was bullied constantly at school myself for being fat). While I know I was only young, immature, lacked the empathy that comes with life experience etc I sometimes think back on it and feel horrible.

So, the person involved is on Facebook. I keep feeling compelled to write to them to say sorry. They were frequently picked on by many people and I feel shitty for having been involved, albeit once.

So - I need objective opinions. Does this seem a good idea or am I just being selfish wanting to ease my own guilt from misdemeanors past?

I mean, I'm not sure what I'm expecting really. I guess I'd like to know they are ok after a pretty rough school experience.

Don't sugar the pill in your responses. I'd like brutally honest opinions.

Thewifipasswordis yeah, I get that. In fact living with the guilt is both a healthy reminder of what I did wrong and also a reassurance I didn't grow into a bully. I think that one off is probably the only bullying thing I ever did. It did stay with me for the rest of school and I was much more careful with my words and behaviour.

as someone who was bullied c25 years ago, I would say yes, apologise if possible. However, Facebook is the wrong medium for the contact. Communication on Facebook opens up each others profiles like a friend link, makes the algorithms suggest you as a friend, could be very unwelcome.

if you can find a different way to contact then yes, apologise. Don't try to make excuses though, or ask forgiveness - that makes the contact for your benefit rather than theirs. I think they will appreciate a sincere apology from you as an adult who has realised the magnitude of what you did, far more significant than the forced apology from you-as-a-child which could have been entirely insincere.

Yes i would like an apology i wasn't bullied but my best friend was and i got the brunt of it for defending her. I've seen her over the years and still can't stand to look at her. I've spoke to her because i've had too but just for her to acknowledge and say sorry for the way she behaved would be enough. Yes it would make me feel better and not look back and think she ruined my teenage years. She has a daughter who seems so timid compared to mine and i did think as awful as it sounds if she gets bullied you'll finally feel how i felt.

I wouldn't want to hear from anyone who bullied me - I'd be embarrassed they'd brought it up and wouldn't appreciate being reminded out of the blue. I would also find it self-serving

A boy I went to Primary & Secondary school popped up via Facebook a couple of years ago in order to apologise, 10 years after we had left school. I personally found it quite odd. He hadn't been the ringleader or taken any active role in the bullying but he felt that as we'd known each other since the age of 4 that he should have taken steps to 'protect me' from the issues I had at Secondary school.
I was the only girl that went from my class to that school, along with him and one other boy. I don't think he'd had a particularly good life after school and made some poor choices. He was insinuating that his treatment of me was the point in time he looked back at as the turning point that his behaviour changed for the worse.
As a quite empathetic person I tried to be a shoulder for him to work out his feelings and hopefully help him turn around whatever he felt had gone wrong. However very quickly this escalated to him calling me whilst he was drunk whenever he felt like it to just repeat himself and apologise. It began to wear a bit thin after a while, at this point it was just for his benefit, his reassurance and to make him feel better.
I stopped answering and he got the message.

I have a slightly different perspective. I was bullied by two boys in school when I was 14/15. It came to a head one day when I refused to go to school because I was so scared. My parents knew the family of the boy who was the chief instigator and my father phoned his father.

I don't know what he said to him because I was in my room with a pillow over my head because I didn't want to hear but knowing my dad I doubt it was anything aggressive.

The next day the two boys came and apologised to me. They said that they thought they were teasing and hadn't realised the effect it had on me.

Years later he apologised to me again and said how awful he had felt when he realised the effect it had on me.

Over the years I have come across several people who were horrible in school and have found that they have grown up to be perfectly normal human beings.

I'm not saying you should apologise again now as an adult but it could well be that your apology could be healing for them. You say you were the victim of bullying. How would you feel if someone from your childhood/youth wanted to apologise to you? If you would accept the apology then go ahead and apologise. If you feel it would bring up awful memories for you then just leave well alone.

Glad you're avoiding the route of self-indulgence

The girl who bullied me for years at secondary school apologised to me on Facebook after I added her, after encountering her in a professional situation.

It was really cathartic for me actually.

I was bullied 35 years ago at school by my peers and so called friends through most of my education because of my looks. They made my life hell, when I all I wanted was to fit in and be liked. I’m lucky in that social media did not exist then. Personally I would not want to hear from any of them ever. 35 years is a long time, but I remember some instances as if it was yesterday. You cannot absolve yourself of guilt, you were mean and horrid and you cannot turn the clock back to make it all better. Leave well alone.

If my bully contacted me to say this I would tell them to go and fuck themselves, that I was not interested in helping them feel better about their shitty behaviour.

You sound genuinely sorry, which is good, but frankly it isnt your victims job to heal you.

If I received a message from a past bully asking for forgiveness, 25 years on , I would be really pissed off. The fact that they have to live with their actions is their penance.

If I received a message saying 'I was a nasty piece of work in high school. I am ashamed of the way I treated you and I'm sorry. '
I would reply 'Don't worry, it took me a while to work out who you are. I hope that you have managed to work on your issues since then. All the best'

I was bullied by one girl throughout my time in secondary school. Something embarrassing happened to me in my first year at school (period related) and this girl told everyone. She continued to tell everyone for seven long years and I was so humiliated.

I wouldn’t want to hear from her. I see her via mutual friends on Facebook and I still dislike her as much as I did twenty years ago. I have recently changed jobs and she works on the periphery of some of the areas my work covers, it is inevitable that we will meet each other again over the next year or so.

More than anything I want her to understand what my parents went through because of her. They kept trying to find the happy child that was in there somewhere. She is a parent herself now and I want her to experience the pain she caused our family. I don’t expect her to have changed over the years and if I saw her I would not want to speak to her, I would not want to engage with her.

Leave them alone. It is just to make you feel better.

When I was at college I bumped into one of my school bullies. He said how sorry he was and how much he had changed blah blah blah. I actually suspect what he said was true but he still made me feel like a scared school girl and I just couldn't get out the words to tell him to get lost.

He felt better afterwards no doubt but I didn't. He made me relive it all and made me feel powerless again. It also added the extra dimension that as a young adult I still couldn't stand up to him.

You can't undo it and you can't make them feel better.

Well, the person accepted you as a friend on Facebook. So they can't harbour that much upset / dislike towards you otherwise they'd have never had you on FB or deleted you.

Why not. Why not send a message asking how they are and how nice it is to see people happy and doing well on Facebook. You have fond memories of them at school and that you still feel very sorry about the incident. You wish them well and hope you might run into each other someday.

Then forget about it, don't think about it anymore & move on. It was a long time ago.

I was back home having a drink with a mate when someone from the olden days of school appeared. They bullied me and I still have a scar I can see if the light is right. At the pub they were very friendly, but I was surprised by the voice in in my head shouting "danger! danger!" and how the interaction left me feeling depressed and unsafe. This was after a couple of decades.

If you bully someone, and they get away from you, then if you're going to do anything for them it's to leave them alone. Once and for all.

No, you don't stop hating the people who bullied you. And they don't want you in their lives afterwards. Apologies, public, private or retrospective don't cut it.
Even if they make you feel better.

Especially if they make you feel better, actually.

Someone once wrote to me and apologised.

It just stirred up emotions for me and I wanted to tell him he was a cunt

I’d rather he just have stayed away tbh

Don't contact them. Even if it is subconsciously you will be trying to unburden yourself, which will then bring up past feelings for the other person.
You could maybe start a conversation about other things firstly. I suppose it would feel nice after the initial shock if a bully apologied.
I do get it I done things in school never directly bullied anyone but I was tough enough having survived juniors.

I was severely bullied in school by a group of three. Two have tried to contact me in the past few years. I didn't even read their messages, I just blocked them. It brought it all back to me and I suffered anxiety for which I needed to seek help to try to put it all behind me, again. I've no idea what their messages said and I've no interest at all to know. I hope I never see or hear from those people ever again.

I have only read your OP. Someone who was part of the Cool Kids Gang at school apologised to me during a fortieth birthday party, saying he'd sort of half realised that I was being picked on but never done anything at the time and wished now that he had.

Poor chap was deeply disconcerted when I burst into tears, but to give him his due escorted me back to my DP supplying tissues and a swig of Sauvignon Blanc on the way.

More importantly it kick-started my 'Bollocks to the lot of you I'm me and I absolutely REFUSE to continue to be upset by childish silly pathetic mindgames stuff from secondary school' campaign.

However it still fucked up the first twenty five years of my adult life.

I'm really surprised by the responses.

I personally would appreciate an apology. I still think of one girl in particular as a toxic person even 30 years later, and still feel a bit angry with her when I think about the way she continually undermined my confidence. So in a way she does still hold some power over me.

I think a short, heartfelt message that doesn't make excuses and which does not imply a response/expect forgiveness, would go some way to alleviating that. I guess I'd find it comforting to know that the person who bullied me doesn't exist in the world anymore and is actually a reasonable empathic adult who for whatever reason made some bad decisions when she was a kid.

I bullied a friend at school, along with our other friends. Eventually our friendship group split and this girl disliked us for the rest of school. As I got older I realised how bad we were to her and how it must have affected her. We had a 6th form reunion drinks years later and I apologised to her for it. She said she appreciated that. I'm glad I did it and I genuinely meant it. I was also horribly bullied at school and if someone apologised to me and really clearly meant it, I feel that would be great.

I'd put it slightly differently. When someone is bullied it can leave a wound and for some people it doesn't close up and heal. But they get on with their lives and arrange things to avoid irritating the wound. When the bully contacts the victim to salve their own feelings, it's like poking a stick into the, still open, wound.

That's why self-serving contact is an astonishingly selfish thing to do. Any remorseful bully should process what they've done by themselves. And a therapist if necessary.

From somebody who was 'moderately' bullied (as in, it needed to be dealt with by teachers and went slightly beyond 'kids will be kids' nonsense, but, equally, it's not caused any long-term physical or emotional 'scars'), I would just do what you want. If you were one of my bullies, I'd probably read it, reply to it with 'apology accepted' and then forget about it. I've moved on. So whatever, do what you like. It doesn't really bother me because 30-something me really doesn't care about you in the same way 16 year old me did!

BUT from what I get from other people who were bullied - apologies are generally appreciated when it's done from a standpoint of 'Hey, I've grown up a bit and I realise what I did when I was younger was crap and I never said sorry and I feel that it's a bit crap that I never said sorry so, well, sorry it's late, but I'm really sorry'. They're generally felt as being just rubbing salt in the wounds when done in a 'Hey, I feel really bad about what I did and I really need to ease my own guilt because it makes me feel bad and I don't like feeling bad so forgive me so I can stop feeling bad.'

So, in a non-sugar-coaty way, if you have an inkling it's the latter, don't do it (although your updates make it sound like that's what you've landed on already!).

Let sleeping dogs lie - if someone tried to talk to me about how they mistreated me as a child they would regret it