Was anyone else bullied at school?

[theamazonstar]

Sorry for such a miserable topic on a Friday night but I have to get this off my chest.

I had a miserable time at high school. I was horribly bullied and ended up with bulimia and severe depression. I contemplated suicide too. As soon as I could I left for uni and I was much happier there but still very slow to trust people. I've recently moved back to my home town for family and work reasons, and I've run into a few of my classmates. I can't talk to them, even of they didn't bully me. I start shivering and gibbering and I bloody hate it- I'm not the person I was back then but seeing someone brings it all back. Is this normal?

Help :(

quicklookbusy
sorry about your rotten experience.it's disgusting ESP the adult teacher collusion. someone I know had exact same experience, derided for being english and so called posh.school turned blind eye too

KissMittz, funnily enough I've recently had counselling too and I too have been totally sifting through my friends and ditching anyone who treats me badly. I had so many 'friends' that weren't proper friends at all. I've fallen out with a couple who were really bad but other than that I've just let things drift, to the point where now, I actually don't have that many friends, but the ones I do have are proper friends and I feel so much happier.

I was bullied a lot as a child. First of all in another country because I was foreign and then back in the UK because I had lived abroad! Also must have moved to 5 different schools.As a teenager I had it bad but one day beat one of the bullies to a bloody mess and they never bothered me again.
No way was I going to harm myself before I did THEM serious damage first!
If you act like a victim you WILL be bullied.
Don't take nonsense from anyone anymore.

sorry don't agree
not acting like a victim,is in fact victim blaming
if it were simple fact of snap into non victim mode of behavior,then people would just do it

I agree one can learn strategies, approaches, try change

Beat them before they beat you! That's why they pick on certain people they think they can't fight! And yes victims are to blame because they can be pathetic. That's all I have to say on the subject. Believe what you want.

Yes

Ripeberry you sound an utter delight! I hope your children never get bullied at school because you'll end up blaming them!

Thank you so much to everyone who has posted on this thread.

Especially the stuff about how it affects you now- where you chose to sit, how you feel in new/ group situations. I thought this behaviour was my own weirdness, now I can see that it is a direct response to the bullying in endured at school.

When I got to secondary school I thought I had the chance to start again, that the bullying might go away. Although given that someone spat in my hair on the practice day I'm not sure why I thought that. On day one lining up outside the form room Lisa and sammy some girls pushed me back and got everyone else to shove past me so I was last in the room. In that instant as it was happening, age eleven, I concluded that I might get friends when I got to university. Fortunately for myself it got better (but never truly went away) once I was a sixth former.

It puzzles me how everyone from teachers to my parents to the gp diagnosed me with asthma after I had what I can clearly recognise as a series of panic attacks at school.

Oddly/ironically I work in education now albeit in considerably naicer schools I do still see bullying and I drop down on the perpetrators like a ton of bricks when I can, but trouble is the insidious stuff is so damn hard to prove. Rest assured they certainly don't get made prefects on my watch though!

Oh Sarcalogos, so sorry to hear what you went through. Hugs to you.

Have you had any counselling at all? It might help you to develop a sense of acceptance and deal with some of the anxieties the bullying has left you with

you believe bullied people deserve it cause they are weak?not hitting back
then you are a bit of a bully too
if your child is bullied,will your view be don't be such a pussy stand up for yourself? their inability to deflect bullying,would that be reason to bully them?

"Beat them before they beat you! That's why they pick on certain people they think they can't fight! And yes victims are to blame because they can be pathetic."

Bloody hell. I don't think I've ever heard anything so stupid and short sighted!

It may work sometimes in some scenarios, but not all by any stretch of the imagination.

As for the victim being to blame? Don't be so bloody stupid.

ripeberry why would anyone want to fight? School is not a place children go to fight FFS.

victims are to blame because they can be pathetic
that's are really shitty thing to post
I hope you don't imbue your kids with such odious views

I was bullied too, by a group of boys right through secondary school. I was called fat and ugly constantly, and I distinctly remember one boy saying to me 'I'm not going to call you Luigi anymore. Your name is now Ugly as that's what you are'. Unsurprisingly when I left school, and even now I have not a lot of self esteem.

I wear little to no make up, dress in very plain clothes, and if I see someone looking at me I look away and try to get out of their line of sight as quickly as possible.

I think the thing that make me the saddest though is the fact that I have had no confidence to follow the career I wanted to follow in music because of my lack of confidence. When I was quite young I played an instrument with reasonable talent, after the bullying started I never practised or played for anyone except family as I didn't want people to laugh at me and call me stupid. I am only now starting to play that instrument again, but it is too late for me to do anything professional with that.

Like another poster I also have problems processing stress and that has given me gastro disorders to the extent that I am going to need more than one operation to fix this.

If my ds starts to get bullied I will be all over the school until they do something- the lack of teacher intervention with me also made things worse.

ripeberry I am guessing you are a bully if that is your attitude or one who joins in to boost your self importance. I am so proud my son has such integrity and doesn't aspire to be like the plastics who think they are so great and can treat others like shit.

Ripeberry - I actually had three fights with three different bullies (all the same group of girls) and I won each one of them. However, this simply resulted in the bullies taking the ostracising even further. In short, I was completely blanked for another 2 years (apart from the occasional slap around the fact when they passed me in the corridor).

So, as you can see, fighting back didn't actually change anything!

SM Odious is definitely the right word! Especially to come and say something like that on a thread where people have been victims in some truly awful situations

it's disgusting to be so odious when people are disclosing such heart wrenching experiences

ripeberry I see what you're trying to say but it really isn't that simple. I hit back a lot of times but it didn't stop the bullying. Yes being confident and secure keeps bullies away but it's really hard to achieve that when you've been bullied and used to doubting yourself.

All this is reminding me of one of my favourite books about a boy being bullied: www.goodreads.com/book/show/1212696.Inventing_Elliot. He's moved schools to get away from them and is trying to avoid being bullied in his new school. I recognised a lot of this in myself.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/1212696.Inventing_Elliot

I have read this thread with tears streaming down my face. I was verbally bullied and totally ostracised at secondary school for 5 years. 20 years later I still have many of the issues mentioned above. I have no friends because I cant believe that anyone really likes me and so I shy away from meeting people or making friends. I live in dread of bumping in to one of the girls, I don't know what I would do. Now that I have a dd I worry that I will taint her with my anxieties, if she doesn't get invited to a birthday party at school I think it's my fault. Like many of you I hate to think that people are looking at me, I couldn't walk into a cafe on my own if I am meeting dp somewhere he knows he has to be early or I will just freak out and go home.

Big hugs to you too Nancy, and also to everyone else on this thread that had a hard time at school. Bullying sucks :(

Ripeberry- I also fought back on 3 occasions once when I was 9 I broke the bullys, leg again when I was 13 I split another bully's scrotum & again @ 15 I kicked the bully's ass each time it went from physical back to mental/emotional which can be just as bad if not worse.

Before the bullying I was confident etc nothing about me was victim like.
It started because my perants divorced & my mum was very poor without my dad so I was no longer fashionable etc
my confidence changed after the bullying.

I agree with scottishmummy, I really hate the train of thought that being quiet, or meek, or inoffensive in itself becomes 'enabling' for bullies and abusers.

It is vile.
I am nothing special and when I meet someone who is shy, or just reserved, my default thoughts aren't to abuse/bully them in any way.

ettiketti to me, that part of you that feels for her situation despite how she treated you, doesn't show you as weak and pathetic in my opinion, it shows your humanity.
There are people who have no place in my life, but I have never wished any of them to suffer.

Ripeberry, what about small children who are bullied by adults in authority? Are they supposed to strike first too? Of course, they are weak in comparison with the adult; how does that change things? Or does it?

Suspect Ripeberry was either bullied or bully herself.