Learning To Accept The Role Of A Victim
It took me a really long time to figure out what was wrong with me. For several years, I've had a constant nagging feeling that something's bothering me, something's hurting me, but it was really hard to pinpoint the origin of that feeling or what it even meant. Since the year 2017, I've experienced a variation of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and unexplainable terror. I tried thinking back on my past and figure out of that had anything to do with the way I was feeling, but I wasn't able to make a connection between the two for one very specific reason.
It was just bullying, and bullying doesn't traumatize you in the same way domestic or sexual abuse does.
Even today, I feel like I'm not necessarily stuck on the things people have said and done to me. I'm not thinking about what happened to me all the time. But when it comes to bullying and what kind of effects it can had on the bullied kid, we usually talk about poor self-esteem and distorted image of the self, like body dysmorphia. Currently, I feel like those are not the biggest problems that I'm dealing with. It's something else, my pain is something else than what is typically associated with bullying. And to me, it seems like the biggest difference stems from the way we define bullying as a society and what the official definition for bullying is.
acceptance.
How can you be traumatized by somebody coming up to you and calling you ugly once? How can you be mentally scarred by somebody giving you a stupid nickname for your big nose? You can't, really. But that is what people tend to think of when they hear the word 'bullying'. Bullying is kids saying stupid shit to each other at school, quietly laughing at the weirdo of the class, and thee boys stealing a little kid's baseball cap. Sure, these things can be classified as bullying, but there is one very crucial point missing here, and that is frequency.
Psychology professor and leading researcher of bullying in Finland, Christina Salmivalli, has always stressed the importance of frequency and intensity in her researches and models of interventions she's developed for the anti-bullying program KiVa Koulu. What differentiates bullying from random mean remarks is how often the action takes place and how deliberate it is in the intention of hurting the receiving party. Kids being mean to each other changes into bullying when it happens regularly, to the same target, by the same people. That is when this deliberate and regular attacking starts affecting the target, especially their perception of themself and their mental well-being.
'Bullying' as a word has been watered down into a meaningless mantra a long time ago. You can see this particularly well on the internet, but it is also visible in schools and other environments where kids interact with each other. The word has lost its meaning and importance, it no longer holds any value as a term meant for describing kids abusing each other. Because that is what bullying is – kids abusing other kids.
When we're talking about abuse and the people who have faced abuse at some point in their lives, we usually use the word 'victim'. We talk about victims of domestic abuse, victims of sexual abuse, and that's because that is what they are: they are innocent victims who have been subjected to terrible, terrible things that they did not do anything to deserve. The people who have faced abuse typically say that they have been abused by someone, or that someone abused them. 'Abused' here is used as a passive verb together with the 'be' verb, 'is'. When it comes to naming themselves in the context of the abuse they went though, they don't call themselves the abused ones; they call themselves victims.
In the language we use in everyday life, bullying is not classified as a form of abuse. It is not referred to as abuse, it is classified as its own thing and referred to as such. And because bullying is not a form of abuse in the everyday language, the people who have been subjected to it are not victims in everyday language either. The only word they have left for describing themselves is the passive verb 'bullied'. And so that verb becomes a noun, a name used to call the targets of bullying. There is no victim mentality: people who have been bullied don't view themselves as victims because they don't think they have been abused. You cannot be a victim of abuse if you have never been abused to begin with.
Some might say that all of this is just pointless semantics, and to some extent, they might be right. But I'm a linguist by heart, I study languages at university, and I see the importance of the language we use in everyday life in a way that someone else might not. Because bullying is practically never referred to as a form of abuse, you will never interpret it as such. The only way we as a society refer to bullying is calling it just that – bullying. And because bullying is never conceptualized as abuse in our heads, it is impossible for the bullied kids to view themselves as victims of abuse. There just is no connection between the words 'victim' and 'bullying' because one crucial nominator is missing: the concept of abuse.
For the majority of my life, this is how I saw it. I wasn't able to understand why I was hurting so much because for my brain to be affected by something in the past, I would have needed to be abused at some point. I would have had to be a victim of some sort. But I wasn't; I was just bullied. So why was I hurting so much?
The language we use matters. It took me nearly ten years to accept the fact that I was a victim because of the language the society around us separates bullying from the rest of the forms of abuse. You need to accept the role of a victim before you can start healing. Because if you weren't a victim of abuse, what are you even healing from? Bullying is just bullying, you do not heal from it – you get over it.
Just get over it already.
Accepting my wounds,
ichigonya
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