What is Bullying? “Bullying is conduct that cannot be objectively justified by a reasonable code of conduct, and whose likely or actual cumulative effect is to threaten, undermine, constrain, humiliate or harm another person or their property, reputation, self-esteem, self-confidence or ability to perform,” claims BullyOnline.org, a Narcissistic Abuse recovery website devoted to exposing workplace bullying specifically in all its toxic and hyper-extending forms.
People who situationally abuse victims then lie or blame shift while smear campaigning the credibility of victims behave in covert manners for incredibly scary and disheartening reasons. Shame is the name of game toxic people play in order to make themselves feel better at other people’s expense each and every day.
The first reason people situationally abuse is that they are of sound mind and know full well the difference between socially appropriate behaviors and what they say or do. Hiding guilt — rather than proudly proclaiming the truth about their covert actions — is a power play used to dominate and persistently re-traumatize their victims.
Yes.
But those are not the real reason why abusers do nasty or naughty things to children, pets, and other people in secret.
They hide the abuse because they know it is wrong to do. By the time any human is 12, if they are even remotely intelligent and don’t have a physically debilitating mental handicap, they know instinctively the difference between right and wrong.
Kids who have good natures will always strive to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason, introspecting regularly in order to grow their own situational ethics experiential knowledge banks.
Those who are narcissistic and/or who show anti-social personality traits will actively engage in materialistic pursuits, will pitch fits and temper tantrums to upset and embarrass (translation = control) adults, and won’t hesitate to do things like to bully or lie to get their selfish and borderline sociopathic ways.
If a person fails to control their temper during family arguments but appears cool as a cucumber when authorities are called, you have the biggest indicator right there that A) their bad behavior is a choice and B) they actively know that what they are doing is morally wrong or in some way illegal. The very real fact that a violent domestic abuser can control themselves in workplace environments around co-workers or clients they are striving to impress means their temper is ALWAYS under control.
Abusive people bully others by verbally attacking them or trying to intimidate them physically when and if they want to feel powerful and choose to assault a target. Then, after doing so, they see nothing wrong with their actions — only something wrong with a victim or traumatized witness who chooses to bring the truth out into the light.
Such victims are socially ostracized by people who are abusive by nature, with the strongest predators leading the victim shaming smear campaigns, telling their lies and gaslighting stories, and invariably striving 24/7 to mislead other people while avoiding responsibility entirely and striving to impress.
People who laugh at victim pain or ridicule scapegoat targets are sadistic by nature. They have low Emotional IQ — meaning no matter how intelligent they are on an academic rubric when it comes to being a decent human being — if there is a God paying attention they inevitably earn a huge karmic “F”.
People who make up stories about other people to embarrass and socially damage are guilty of being such types — utterly narcissistic and caustic to any social conversation or environment to which they bullish or stalwartly play intercessor. Their opinions from a subjective standpoint stop having credibility from the first moment they lie with the intent to deceive, manipulate, shift blame, or con.
Truly, there may always be more than one side subjectively to a story — but when there are only two people who were present to exchange dialog and one is lying?
Then, you are only left with the truth, the victim’s subjective experience assertion, and a person who knowingly, intentionally lies and manipulates while deliberately manufacturing convenient fictions in an attempt to drive the real victim up a wall with frustration.
Gaslighting is invalidation to the extreme — a conversational and psychological mind-control strategy capable of doing everyone involved great harm.
[Note, for the sake of disclosure, the writers of this page tend to measure success by the good produced for all rather than one. As such, a narcissistic family who succeeds in “beating” their perceived scapegoat targets and rivals to self-advance are actually spiritually, mentally, and psychologically backsliding down the evolutionary ladder rung by decayed and tarnishing rung.]
Bullying, then, is gaslighting one person into believing they somehow deserve abuse or in any way brought some unfair, unjust, and fundamentally illogical version of great punishment on themselves.
It is being shown by experience that being fat makes you the J-Lo butt of all jokes rather than appreciated and recognized for actual things in life a person can accomplish as an individual of quality.
It’s being picked on for being 6 foot 4, feeling like for some reason you should hunch your shoulders or not wear high heels (if you are a tall girl) for some other reason than you don’t want to bash the top of your head each and every time you walk through a door.
Bullying can be mild or wild, depending on the personality of the antagonist leading the charge. When one person targets another for abuse, it’s called bullying. When they entice others to join in trouncing the victim in the worst of all reckless Tigger-esque pounce-bounce events, it’s called mobbing.
Mobbing bullies are typically led or socially influenced by stronger predators. A church congregation, for instance, like Westboro Baptist Church, may have started out in its infancy as a social collective of people who were seeking community through faith.
If a religious leader had a Cluster B personality disorder or the church leaders exhibit pack-mentality behaviors, then their gaslighting arguments are likely to be based on illogical arguments form a LOGICAL FALLACY in the philosophical debate sense coupled with fear promotion mixed with a twisted variant of Pascal’s Wager thrown in for substance.
People who bully socially en masse like church congregations, ISIL, or the KKK teach their members from the earliest of ages that they are fighting a way of life. They constantly strive to manufacture chaos and upset for other people while striving to make themselves feel better.
Sadly, the fact they must resort to hurting other people to elevate their own emotions is an incontrovertible poker tell that a person is not only narcissistic but that their personality type has an element of reckless and feckless anti-social competitiveness.
What does that mean?
It means when they show their ass, they reveal not only egocentrism but a propensity for sadism.
Bullying, then, as a social coping strategy, is being used to give pleasure to the person doing the tormenting. Nothing more, nothing less.
People who bully strive at all times to destroy others. When they are successful at knocking another person off a trajectory path for success, they feel pleasure.
When human beings feel pleasure — whatever the psychological or physical source — a cascade of positive-feeling emotions rushes through them. Conversely, adrenaline is produced in a hunter, with only toxic “flight or fight” chemicals being flooded through a victim.
As such, when people with Cluster B personalities say something awful to hurt, shame, humiliate, or embarrass a target, really all they are doing is clearly demonstrating they are unable to control their own selfish emotions. They hurt others to physically alleviate boredom as well as to produce in themselves a gushing wave of pleasurable sensations.
That’s why they never see self-sabotage the same way other humans do, narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, or anti-social people. Because they are predatory by nature, their biological impulse leaves them absolutely at the mercy of their own psychology and human biology.
Bullies and the Flying Monkeys who enable or mob attack with them typically are the sort of people with a limited capacity to feel the physical sensation of empathy as an emotion (meaning noun) or as an act involving complex fluidity to emotional conception.
They simply don’t “get” what average or above-average people are even referring to when they discuss empathetic behaviors. They don’t get it because it’s how their brain’s physically developed over time due to influences of genetics as well as experiences.
If neural synapses never formed properly according to healthful childhood development, people — meaning brains with bodies — “grow up” stunted. Functional incapacitation of empathy responses that serve to protect humans as a species can be literally and figuratively speaking choked off in the mind of a child forced to endure or witness trauma.
The trauma connection is the key to both readily identifying abusers and abuse victims. It’s also what is likely to be the determining factor in the future of Forensic Psychology.
With technology improving at rapid rates, it has become clear to scientists that some human minds physically — from a physical level, referring solely to biology — have a space in the brain that lights up when people feel or express empathy.
For people biologically incapable of feeling the emotion, the stimulus is applied and nothing happens. Something else curious has been found… and parents of children with Childhood Conduct Disorder or Oppositional Defiant Disorder or adult children of Cluster B narcissistic parents should pay careful attention.
Studies are showing — not subjective studies but literally screen capture versions of machines measuring and photographing brain function — that people who have a thinning of the membrane where feelings of empathy typically manifest on a brain scan both appear to be and report they have less empathy than other people.
Most people with this sort of thinning tend to have NPD — meaning they have been formally or informally diagnosed from a clinical standpoint with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
These folks are easy to spot bragging about their own lack of care and concern for other people, their ability to manipulate (sales targets especially), and truly are those most readily inclined to spend time actively trolling to cyberbully. The more covert they are about hiding their NPD nature, the more likely they are to use social media and other websites to harm rather than support growth and human learning.
They are also the most likely to situationally abuse the taunt victims, saying things like, “Who are they going to believe?” if a victim threatens to tell parents, police, court officials, family, a schoolteacher, a boss, or friends when and if they are a malicious sadist proud of actively having deceived them.
As such, whether you are 9 or 90, the likelihood you will encounter at least 12 or more bullies who pathologically lie, con, situationally abuse, smear campaign to socially destroy rivals for no reason other than to produce self-benefit, or worse are statistically probable.
Over 6% of the human population living on planet Earth as of the year 2015 is reported to meet or exceed diagnostic criteria for having NPD. Another 4% meet or exceed criteria based on the DSM5 publication for having Anti-Social Personality disorder. Another 2% meet criteria for Borderline Personality disorder and so on.
It does not take a Vegas pro gambler to figure out the odds someone you know, hang out with, or have to work with is likely to have a Cluster B personality disorder. People who call other people things like, “Psycho” and “Narcissist” as if it’s some form of heated insult truly make themselves look foolish, uneducated, and spiteful.
Victims all over the world would love to see personality problems like NPD and narcissistic tendencies rooted out wherever and whenever possible. Science finding the defective “alcoholic gene” are on the front line, spearheading the march to help those who cannot help themselves self-regulate find the necessary inner biological peace and piece to internally learn to regulate themselves.
It just takes one smart clinical researcher reading an article such as this to figure out that Narcissism, as a biologically driven impetus, cannot be cured through traditional psychological “talk it out” methods alone. Sorting the wheat from the proverbial chaff is going to be key in the next 100 years of medical advancement.
If machines learn to detect early on with an image scan that a growing child’s brain is failing to make the empathy pathway neural net, simple behavior management strategies and NLP techniques can be applied to a subject to determine if growing the capacity to experience the emotion we call empathy is even a remotely functional possibility.
If it’s not but behavior that is problematic can be re-trained, then children born with a propensity for sadism or egoism may — over the course of their own lifetime even — be empirically saved.
To strive to help decrease the abusive tendencies and/or actions of a toxic person is not offering to forgive them. It’s also not excusing, rationalizing, or justifying their behaviors.
When a dog is bad and bites humans with relish, you chain it, muzzle it, and if it cannot be properly socialized you PUT IT DOWN.
Humans are animals who follow instinctive patterns.
If a person who ended up narcissistic or anti-social because of the environment they were raised in from birth to age 4 was a hostile or unsafe one, regressing them to their earliest state from a hypnotherapy standpoint then working diligently with them to recover memories and re-train their brain may produce a flock of thirty-somethings, forty-somethings, and fifty-somethings running around with adult IQ but the EQ of young and developing children running around… but seriously.
Wouldn’t you rather live in a world filled with hope that the sheer number of humans on the planet who have Cluster B natures due to nurture rather than strict biological impairment could be reduced by practical application of proper parenting and communal socialization than the world Fox News swears on their life we are living in now?
Just asking — because empathetic parents of children born with NPD, BPD, ASPD, or HSP natures and adult children of alcoholics, drug users, sex addicts, and Narcissists are struggling on the front lines, trying to save their toxic adult children from themselves.
The plight has nothing whatsoever to do with co-dependency or enabling in such cases.
Why do people bully or abuse in secret?
Because it truly is a bizarre and unsoothable cry they collectively make while attention-seeking. Perfectly happy the way they are, their life plan is to continue to willfully harm others. Imagine their surprise if it came to their attention they were a much better “fix”.
Truly, the rush of feeling like you are a part of something loving, wonderful, and bigger than yourself is an emotion Narcissists and most psychologically traumatized people seldom if ever have the emotional capacity to experience.
Empaths understand (which is why we keep striving to problem solve on their behalf). It’s not a co-dependent thing… showing mercy. It’s also not a co-dependent thing to want success for yourself simultaneously with others.
The human mind is like a computer. You might be a bully if you have defective hardware or software.
For that reason, before you name call a bully in a baiting, provoking, or antagonistic (non-compassionate) way, consider using academic psychiatric terms to describe the behaviors you witness, go gray rock while depersonalizing attacks, and figure out a way to HELP.
The human mind is like a computer. You might be a bully if you have defective hardware or software.
