Helen Speaks

I was thinking this morning how there are so many bits of generic advice we parrot without thought and I could genuinely write a series on these useless platitudes, or to be more brutal, bullshit wisdom.

“Bullshit wisdom” is hard to spot because we say it so often and repeat it so much that we often believe it, when in reality it’s just an easy thing to say that makes us feel like we’ve done something, and more crucially, gets the person asking us off our backs.

Nadiya Hussain, the British celebrity baker, author and general all-round national treasure, talks about her experience of being bullied as a child that still affects her to this day. She says how she was often told to “ignore it” as if that would stop the bullying… and what terrible advice that was, because it just didn’t work.

It’s no surprise, really. “Do nothing and your problem will fix itself” feels like the most disempowering thing you could say.

We have a lot of bad advice about bullying, and like the poem above, it becomes obvious that the real reason the person gives that advice is so often to save themselves the trouble of actually doing something to help.

The other advice that gets given is “stand up to them” which is probably better than “ignore them”, “Take your books on the roof, my lamb”, but still flawed.

A few years ago I was struggling with anxiety due to some repeated harassment from my neighbours and I decided to have some counselling.

I talked about bullying with my counsellor, and I said I had a horror of the idea that children in the school I worked at would be bullied and I wouldn’t be able to stop it.

She said, “but do bullies stop because someone has told them to stop, or is it when their victim stands up to them?”

This sat uncomfortably with me for a week, not least because I was a massive people pleaser and really wanted to agree with my counsellor.

But when I looked back at my experience with bullies, I saw that I hadn’t “stood up to” all of them, not in the dramatic television sense of shouting or dramatically daring to hit back or whatever. Often I’d done exactly what we tell children to do – I’d gone to an adult and said how the other child’s actions were upsetting me. And they had got into trouble and then the bullying had stopped.

Not cinematic, in the slightest. A very boring episode of Grange Hill, or insert-high-school-drama-here.

When I looked back at an experience of difficult colleagues: feeling undermined, criticised, belittled, judged, left out, laughed at… The bold action I had taken to stop the bullying wasn’t to stand up to them, it was to leave. (I also, pleasingly, went on to follow my ambitions and get a much better job where I was also doing a lot of the same things for about 3x the pay. I’m sure if I do make a series, “living well is the best revenge” will feature as potential bullshit advice, but it’s also not entirely wrong.)

The next week, I told my counsellor she was wrong. I didn’t stop my bullies when I stood up to them… I stopped them when I stood up for myself.

The problem with our everyday, common sense bullshit wisdom, aside from being something busy adults say to shut children up, is there is no nuance at all.

Ignore them? Yes, this can sometimes make sure that the bully doesn’t get the satisfaction of seeing their actions get a reaction. But in my experience, bullies often know that someone trying to pretend they aren’t there is a reaction. They get to see their victim shutting down and being small.

“If they hit you, you must hit them back.” A lot of bullies know how to hack this one, managing to be more subtle than their victim, who subsequently gets punished. Not to mention that getting into a full on fist fight is pretty dangerous. I grant you, the advice “you must tell a teacher” can also be pretty useless, as the poem above illustrates. 

In truth, bullying is often hard and it’s complex. 

Another thing I told my counsellor was my shame of having been a bully – around the age of 10 or 11, I’d felt threatened and jealous of another girl and found various ways to strike at her insecurities. Looking back, I understand why I felt as I did and there were ways I was also being victimised by others at the same time. But that can never excuse the fact that I tried to hurt someone else in order to feel better about myself.

Which of course adds a little credence to the bit of bullshit wisdom “they’re only mean to you because they’re jealous of you”. Unfortunately that doesn’t help and they’re also mean because they’re assholes and they think they can get away with it.

That said, there’s a difference between a bully and a common-or-garden asshole. There was a girl at school who seemed to hate me for no real reason. Every time I ended up next to her in a line, she’d say something like “oh, not you again” and berate me.

It was annoying. But I wouldn’t call her a bully, mainly because the chief effect of her berating was annoyance. I would think “What’s her problem?” and because she was a year below me, it even seemed a bit funny.

Like, “aw baby hates me, does she? Baby finds me annoying? Aw poor baby.”

The thing that makes bullies The Worst is that they cause actual harm. They dig right into your insecurities. Or perhaps they even try to turn others against you. You can’t just ignore them.

Telling a victim of bullying that there’s some simple thing they can do to stop the bullying is minimising and even a bit cruel. If it’s as simple as ignoring them or telling someone in authority, then chances are, they will have tried that.

In fact, this is why it’s so complex. On one hand, making it sound like defeating bullies is easy just leads to the person experiencing bullying feeling even more wretched and powerless. They feel that they should be able to ignore it, they should get the courage to punch back, they should insist that an authority figure deal with it, but they aren’t or they tried and it didn’t work for them.

And on the other, there absolutely are things we can do in the face of bullying. But they aren’t always simple quick fixes. They aren’t always obvious and the effects might vary.

But here is my advice… (And please remember that advice is often flawed):

– Remember that they are to blame for the things they are choosing to do. They’re picking on you because you’re too short, tall, fat, thin, have a big nose, have a small nose, have something about you that they think is worthy of bullying? And they’re mocking, name-calling, pushing around, excluding, gaslighting etc? Then they’re the one making bad choices. You don’t need to change yourself to avoid bullying… They need to stop bullying. 

And then, perhaps paradoxically:

You can’t make it all about them. The idea of showing them that you’re stronger/better/smarter than them, that gives them power. The idea that you have to win against them is making them a character in your story, and they don’t deserve that. Don’t take the goal to beat them, but do figure out how you can eliminate them as an obstacle. Does that mean a confrontation where you tell them you won’t stand for their behaviour? Or does that mean leaving a toxic workplace? Does it mean finding an ally, or learning to trust yourself?

Here are some things we can say instead of “ignore them”, “stand up to them” or “tell a teacher”:

• You don’t deserve to be treated like that.
• Is there something I can do to help? Or
• Is there someone who could help you?
• What is it they’re doing that makes you feel upset?
• They are being cruel and unkind, and you deserve better.

Question: Have you ever stopped a bully? How did you do it?

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