Were you unkind at school?

[Sunshinescramble]

For those that were bullies or unkind at school, do you feel remorseful as an adult? Do you question why you did it?

I dont think I was a bully at school but i did say some mean things to a friend about her appearance on a few occasions. (Around age 12/13). 32 years after leaving school i still feel an incredible amount of guilt. We were never not friends and never fell out over it but I still feel incredibly awful.

I'm not sure if I was just trying to fit in at school and act like the "cool kids". I feel an idiot even just typing that. I came from an unloving, uncaring family with no morals. I guess I was just influenced by the people around me. It's not an excuse I know. I desperately wanted to be a part of the friendship group but never really fit in. I think they saw me as the odd one out and I retaliated. (I once heard them laughing about the clothes I was wearing , we couldn't afford to shop at trendy shops)

I was on the receiving end of name calling too. One girl used to call me a really horrible name throughout school to humiliate me so I knew how it felt.

I've raised my children to be good kids and be respectful of others. I've never subjected anyone to anything unkind since. I think people would describe me as a good person.

I'm no longer in contact with this girl but part of me wants to contact her and apologise. Would this be weird after so long?

I was neither, never a bully, not bullied myself, although one girl in the year above was nasty for a very short time.

I most definitely wasn't a bully but was horribly bullied between year 7 and 9. Some of it was quite sexualised as well by the time I got to year 9 (in the nice legs, shame about the face vein, but cruder)- it wasn't just mean girls. I was clever in a school that did not generally value clever. Once we got set during year 9 I found my crowd and it stopped. There was a dreadful pack mentality and it was the 'popular' crew that did it. Every time I told a teacher it made it worse. I do sometimes wonder if they realise how it made me feel and I do think it's made me more chippy and defensive as an adult.

If one of them wanted to apologise I'd think that was overwhelmingly about them and not me and would tell them to fuck off.

Anyway, living well is the best revenge etc. Interestingly one of them was a twin and one of the twins was quite nice. As far as I know none of them had a terrible home life but who knows I guess.

I was actually wondering this yesterday. I was badly bullied and I was wondering whether the girls who were so horrible ever reflect and hold a different perspective with age and (in most cases) having kids of their own.

I can remember the feeling it was just as if everyone she mentioned was a massive threat to me and I was scared ? I felt as if I had to confront that threat head on and it was mixed with such intense jealousy as well that I wasn’t seeing anyone as a person with feelings I was just permanently in a state of high alert and under threat. It was only from 12 when one person didn’t respond to me how they usually did that I think my mind made some kind of ‘good’ connection. I think I’d felt weak as she had seen my mother screaming at me and I was trying to do the usual bullying and the fact she saw through that and to ask to be my friend on top of not being scared of me just made me instantly realise this wasn’t what usually happened and I didn’t need to do this to keep or gain my mothers love but that my actions could get me other people who like me ? But as I said I then went so much the other way and was obsessive about friends and became a people pleaser. It took a long time to get a balance

A girl in my class was an absolutely awful bully.
Her daughter is now an infamous meme (not a very pleasant one) and I often wonder how she feels about that.

My best friend from 12 to 14 probably thought I was but she was very intense and needy. Looking back, though we got on really well and had lots in common, I couldn't deal with the intensity and wanted to have other friends. So sometimes I'd just hang out with them, one in particular, and she'd sulk, rather than join us. She moved away at 14 but we'd stopped being friends by that point and lost contact. I missed her for years but have never been able to track her down on social media.

I suspect now she had issues as it was kind of like being in a coercive relationship. Once she even tried to get us to kiss as if we were 'getting married' - that gave me the ick.

You've gone through your whole life without ever making a single mean comment to someone?

I applaud you.

There is a difference between tit for tat and bullying imo.

@Aichek I hear you .If I were to apologise to my victims it might cause them to remember the bullying they would have tried hard to forget. I don't want to retraumatise anyone. So my amends to them is to be a better person and not make the mistakes I made.

@Pinkmoth I relate a lot to this, as from a similar abusive background (I attempted suicide to escape from my father more than once) and similar issues with people pleasing also. May you continue to heal.

No but witnessed it. One lovely lad reported the bullying (tough popular girl from local dodgy family v tiny cringing middle class boy) as he couldn’t bear it. The boy who reported it was lovely. Think he went to work on cruise ships the most cheerful lad ever.

Teacher admitted at 6th form dinner that the bully girl was from a terrible background but I felt then and still feel now that was no excuse for her cruelty.

Not sure about the “never regretting a good deed”. Dd2 aged about 13 reported bullying at school and the girls involved then gave her name to the school as part of a shop lifting investigation! She wasn’t even there. Dd vowed that was the last time she put her head above the parapet for someone else just led to a load of trouble

It's not really about the remembering; it's about the bully re-centring themselves in the narrative to make themselves feel better. One girl did apologise to me at the time and I accepted that because she obviously realised in the moment she'd been awful.

There's a great podcast called Heavyweight where the host will go back and investigate incidents from people's childhood- often they're about bullying, or abandonment. What's really striking is that the bullies often claim to not remember at all- often they say they don't even remember the person. Whether that's self preservation on their part or whether the person really was just collateral damage in their own adolescence, who knows.

My nephew is at the same secondary school I was and the bullying is still awful, so maybe it is, also, generational in some way. It's an area where there's not a lot of movement in and out of the area.

On the other hand, my entire career has been about social justice, which is not un-linked I think.

I look back and I think, at the time, I thought I had a sort of Chandler Bing-esq humour. Very sarcastic and sharp and (I thought) witty. Now I realise I was a bit of a b_tch! This was amongst my friends and, at the time, I thought myself very clever and 'no nonsense', I wish I'd just emulated someone else and been soft and nice!

It’s a reason.

It is. That said, maybe the victim also has a difficult background. At my primary school excuses were made for some of the bullies because of their difficult background. It felt hollow to me because nobody has a perfect family most families have some dysfunction or conflict. So it goes both ways.

I used to wonder why kids with less than ideal parenting were excused bullying when bullying actually can cause PTSD or CPTSD in their victims. Yeah a difficult background is an ACE (adverse childhood experience) but bullying causes long term damage. In my experience at primary school the bullies were coddled a lot,
which didn't help either the bully or the bullied. Sometimes a bit of tough love is needed, so these kids can see that everybody had problems. It's easy to get caught up in a "poor me" mentality . I did as a secondary school age bully. I didn't consider that other people had issues too and that we all have problems.

I never set out to be proactively mean to anybody. I didn't fit in, because I was a year too young, clever, and on scholarship at a posh school, when my parents had almost no money. I was also best friends with the only non-white person in the class, who was also clever, on scholarship. So we were both very unpopular and social misfits - very much rejected by the huge majority - too poor, too young, too nerdy, charity shop clothes, uncool....

I did have a quick tongue and also would physically retaliate if someone tried to bully me. I remember a girl on the first day of secondary school, grabbing my apple for no reason and throwing it into a bush. I tackled her to the ground and knelt on her neck until she apologized. I guess that was disproportionate force, but she never bothered me again. I think I was generally seen as a disliked outcast but a dangerous one, so escaped the worst of bullying. Just dealt with isolation every day, hugely alleviated by having one close friend.

I had to grow a pretty thick outer layer of not caring how unpopular I was. So I told myself I was better than them, to make the rejection less hurtful. And I didn't suffer fools. Probably most people at school would say I was arrogant. But I think it's honestly true I never once initiated any form of hostility.

Decades on, I still have a feeling of being fundamentally unlikeable, which I'm sure connects with having so many people look at me for 14 years through school, like I was something revolting to them.

I hear you on the fundamental feeling of being unlikeable. It hasn't left me. I honestly consider that the bullying has affected me as much or more than even the sexual abuse.

I always assume that people won't like me. It doesn't help that I'm socially awkward, but it all stems from the years of bullying. I didn't fit in, had no friends, just used to sit on a bench in the playground by myself.

I feel so sad for the younger me. These days schools seem to do more, but back then nothing was done and even the teachers weren't bothered and just accepted I was an outcast. No thought to my mental health.

Yeah.... it's been really interesting to hear the theme of jealousy/ unhappiness and insecurity prompting people to be bullies..... I can see that with adult eyes, but I just absorbed that I was wrong, wrong, wrong.... repulsive in some way.

I was never a bully and I was never deliberately unkind. I was bullied - and I would like to take this opportunity to ask Becca and Sally, in particular, whether they realise what an effect they had on my whole senior school experience and indeed on the rest of my life and, if so, would they like to apologise?

Yep. Still feel that way. It's embedded deep.

Some of my primary school bullying was definitely born out of me being the smartest in the year. I let them know that I knew how jealous they were.

I was badly bullied and it affected me for a long time - but now I don't really think about it. They don't deserve to have affected my life.

My mum still lives where I grew up and pretty much all of the bullies now have lives that are 'worse' than mine. I do occasionally think 'karma' and if they apologised now I wouldn't care to be honest.

A girl who was very mean to me at school ended up being one of my son’s teachers at high school. He really liked her and she seems to be generally very popular with the pupils. She used to make remarks about the way I spoke and my mannerisms and described me as dopey looking. It was all pretty low level, but I have never forgotten it and it led me to wonder how I came across to people over the years, as she wasn’t the only person to assume I was a bit dim or slow. But really, I was just a bit socially awkward and didn’t always pick up on what was going on around me. I’m quite likely ND. My eldest son is. There were probably loads of children with undiagnosed ASD/ADHD back then who were bullied or had mean comments made about them. It still happens now in our supposedly enlightened times.

@Tessisme You’ve just reminded me of a girl who teased me for being poor and put my new school shoes in the bin (it was rare for me to have new shoes!) and called me a “dirty rat”.

Well she’s now a head teacher for a local secondary school. It makes me feel a bit weird tbh! She tormented many girls!

I can only assume she’s forgotten what she did. But hopefully she’s grown into a wonderfully caring adult. I know she has the capability to care as she was lovely to the people she could relate to (similar family incomes and cleverness)