My own bullying is coming back to haunt me!

[Harperhan]

I am struggling terribly. My DS in Year 8 has struggled at school socially since Year 3. It has knocked his confidence, made him miserable and he seems to suffer from general anxiety. The school have been good and he has an open ticket to see the Well Being Counsellor. They are acutely aware and monitor him constantly. He now has good days and bad days.

I seriously think part of the issue is me. I was bullied as a child and it is all coming back to haunt me. To think of my DS feeling as I did as a child is heartbreaking. I start to feel myself having panic attacks and have become obsessive about it. For example, at my sons school the whole family is welcome for breakfast. He will go off to sit with some peers and I will then spent the whole time watching body language and how the other boys are reacting to my DS. Some days it will all be fine and others the age old "seats taken" trick is rolled out.

Why do kids have to be so horrid to each other?

Hi Harper,

I am so sorry to hear that you are struggling. I came on to this section for the same reason. I was badly bullied over 20 years ago and it has never really gone away. I feel that I has affected me by now as an adult by having no real friendships and being stuck in a rut in my job instead of having the confidence to move forward. I see ones of my age now being qualified and doing high flying jobs while I just do an admin job and really haven't progressed as I should have and I put it all down to lack of confidence. Anyway from time to time the bullying rears it head in my dreams and then this puts me in bad form as it brings it all to the surface again and last night was one of those nights and today I feel like shit.

I was older than your son and there was 4 nasty pieces of work who seemed to make it their mission to make my life a misery. I was such a shy naïve girl that I just took it and it gradually just wore me down until what little confidence I had disappeared to zero.

I now have two children, one is confident and outgoing so I don't really worry about her. The other one has a disability. So far everything has been ok but I do worry about her as she gets older as she walks differently and I know that children can be very cruel when you are different to the norm.

I don't know what the answer is. There is all these anti bullying campaigns now and they talk about it in Schools now which didn't happen when I was being bullied. It still happens though.

I hope you are your son feel better soon. Take care X

I wasn’t so much bullied at school but in hindsight realise I had some form of aspergers and was not good at making friends and therefore generally not popular at all

My children are both outgoing and confident (yeah) but I find myself at times slightly OTT in terms of monitoring things for being bullying in a way someone who had not had my experiences wouldn’t .

Sounds odd but my worst fear other than health issues would be for my children to be bullied and I would place that above being top of the class or whatever. When you have been there you know the misery and lack of confidence it brings .

Can only say I understand x