School bully confronted 35 years later -- you need to see this

[< <Samson> >]

I love this guy - I swear!


Anything posted by - you/him reminds me of the gimp from Pulp Fiction

[diesel101]

I was the short fat kid from another school that moved there in the third grade. I was bullied for 3 years by 2 assholes. One day I had had enough I drove my fat little fist into the ones eye socket as hard as I could. He came up crying and his eye had already started to swell and turn black.
No more bullying for me and the strange part is we became best friends and 40 years later we are still friends.

It definitely changed me and made me the man I am today. I believe it really made me the protector type personality I have today.

[Fluidic Kimbo]

It definitely changed me and made me the man I am today. I believe it really made me the protector type personality I have today.

This is something that really became very clear to me when I was in rehab in 2015 -- the whole "protector of others" thing.

Having seen it so blatantly obviously when verbal arguments broke out among patients in the rehab, and having seen how the facilitator brought it to our attention in the next group session immediately afterward, I really have very fine-tuned radar for it now. I notice it when a person enters into "protector of others mode".

Back in January I was on holidays in the Canary Islands; I was attracted to this one girl who then went on to do loads of little things to get my attention. Another lady who was present at the time didn't think that I was a suitable courter for the other girl, and so she approached me by herself in a very unfriendly and hostile manner. After a minute or two of conversation, I realised that the lady who approached me was stuck in "protector of others mode", and that she was on a mission to save the world -- irrespective of whether she had anyone else's permission to do so. Some people just want to turn 18 and take control of their own life, but a pathological protector always slides into their protector role whether or not anyone asked them to.

I also realised that there's a very fine line between a protector and an abuser -- because if a protector identifies a threat, they will fight against the threat. If the protector later discovers that they misidentified the threat, then they'll look back and see that what they did was abuse and that they were an abuser for that short time period. When I was on holidays in the Canaries, the lady who approached me got impatient with me and yelled out loud "Stay away from her or I'll get you battered". About a dozen people at nearby tables overheard her say this, and they turned their heads and looked at me -- I didn't react -- and then one or two of them went over and sat at her table. A couple of minutes later I could hear light-hearted conversation start back up, and then they spent the next few days trying to butter me up and become friendly with me again, but I just wasn't bothered wasting my holiday time and holiday energy reconciling with someone who mistakenly thought I was a piece of shit. Another week or so went by without us conversing at all, and then they went home to England. Do not confuse forgiveness with reconciliation.

It's a life-long process of learning to know where the fine line is between letting life happen, and stepping in. It really gets old very quickly when a protector can't see that you need someone else's permission to protect them -- unless of course it's an extreme case where the person is unable to take care of themselves at all (be it a mental disability, or severe emotional trauma), but even in those cases you should probably tell the person in charge. If there's no person in charge then at least mention it to a few other responsible adults before stepping in.

Diesel I'm not saying that you personally are one of those pathological protectors that over-reacts to situations and makes the situation worse; I just saw how you mentioned being a "protector" and it reminded me of my own life experience.

[< <Samson> >]

^ that worked out well


I’m thinking a cross between Buffalo Bill/Bob & the Pulp Fiction gimp

Sounds spot on


He puts the Joe Dirt in the hole

And




LMAO

Ha Ha

[Honkey_Kong]

Kimbo tell us more about these "little things" she did to get your attention and more about why you think the other woman went in to protect mode. Was there a situation that prompted her?

[Fluidic Kimbo]

Kimbo tell us more about these "little things" she did to get your attention and more about why you think the other woman went in to protect mode. Was there a situation that prompted her?

Little things = Mostly non-verbal communication, the way she moved her body in front of me. Her hotel room was facing the road but mine was facing the sea, and I said about how I left the porch open all night in my room to hear the sea, and she was like "I'd love to listen to that all night". Obviously I can't accurately describe her tone of voice and body language in a written post like this on an international trans-inclusive forum, but suffice to say that the girl was falling all over me and kept saying 'thank you' to me even when I didn't do anything.

Long story short, the protector lady heard that the girl was 19 and that I was 30-something. So she came over to me saying "I'm 36 and and I wouldn't pursue a man younger than 26". I tried to explain to her that her appraisal of the universe has absolutely nothing to do with me nor with any other mortal being, but she didn't quite understand that she wasn't the centre of the universe. She should have written all her rules on a slip of paper and nailed it to the door of a church like that German guy who started the reformation.

[Fluidic Kimbo]

I’ve heard of kids bullied out of our school physically and what I think is worse and more prevalent, by cyber bullying. Needless to say, it doesn’t happen in my room, under my watch.

[ Names and nationalities have been changed in this post but I've kept the jist of the story ]

I was a teacher for 2 years in Asia. For some of that time I taught to kids. Mostly mathematics.

Dealing with bullying isn't straight-forward. As 95% of us know from our own youthful school days, bullying can be very well-known to all the students but the teachers might be oblivious to it.

Of all the kids I ever taught to, one in particular was very antisocial. Let's call him Gilbert. Gilbert was only about 12 but he already didn't give a fuck. Didn't care about his exam results, didn't care about being respected by his teachers or peers. Of course I could be sympathetic and say that his home environment must have been lack-lustre and that he needed guidance, but back then I had a class of 30 kids to teach and I couldn't give 20% of my attention to one student -- especially if that 20% of my attention was all for disciplining him (it wouldn't have been so bad if it was attention given to help him with slow learning). Plus he just pissed me off, I found his demeanour repulsive -- I know, I know, I know, he was just 12 years old, but still they can bug you.

Most of the kids in the school were the same nationality, but a handful were foreign nationals. I had two Malaysian girls in my class, they were nice and they did their work, they really wouldn't have any social connection to Gilbert. So one day one of the Malaysian girls puts her hand up to say that her calculator has gone missing. She says that she had it just a minute ago, but now it's gone. I knew straightaway that there was only one little dickhead in the class who would annoy the Malaysian girls like that. The same little dickhead who was going around the school taking teachers' shoes and hiding them. Gilbert.

Dealing with bullying isn't as simple as just calling it out, "Hey Person A, stop bullying person B". If you do that, it can make things a hell of a lot worse depending on the environment.

In any given environment, a person simply exist, or they can thrive. But in some environments, there is no possibility of thriving. In some environments, the best you'll ever do is survival. The school environment that Hughinn described earlier in this thread sounds to me like an environment in which he only would have survived. In a survival environment, you hit first, you hit hard and you go to war at every opportunity. You'll never thrive by behaving like that, but you'll get through it.

In an environment where it's possible to thrive with friends and hobby groups, you're only hampering yourself by getting a reputation to be feared. When people are afraid of you, they don't invite you into hobby groups.

But anyway, if you're a teacher or a responsible adult dealing with bullying, you need to first assess the environment and determine if survival is the best possibility. In survival environments, you might be making a person's situation much worse if you step in. The bullies, who previously were just slapping him and tripping him up, might wait for him after school and beat him so badly that he spends a few days in hospital. Back when I was a teenager in school, this is what happened to two Iraqi brothers -- they reported that they were being bullied, and then one of the days after school that week, they were set upon and had bones broken.

One trick that some teachers do is that they call the bully-er and the bully-ee into a room together and act like it's a bilateral conflict. Instead of acting as though one of them is bullying the other one, the teacher tries to put them on a level playing field and say stuff like "You two need to stop this antagonism back and forth". This sometimes works but you're running the risk of victim-blaming and having the victim feel like even the teacher's against them.

Some environments are so bad that the best the management can do is ignore bullying. It sounds absolutely horrendous, but some survival environments are so bad it's better to let a student get bullied moderately for 5 years instead of stepping in and having them end up in hospital, or their family having to move to another town.

It's common in Catholic environments for a person in a position of power to deflect any reports of bullying that they receive. I've seen this in Catholics children's school and also in a Catholic rehab. They'd rather not deal with it.

[< <Samson> >]

Puts the lotion ON - or gets the hose again!

[Fluidic Kimbo]

Puts the lotion ON - or gets the hose again!