If you were a Bully in grade school how do you feel about it now? [edited]

The other day I ran into an old grade school classmate, someone I have not seen for about forty years. I did not recognize “Bill” at first because he was fat and bald but he remembered me and said hello aren’t you Icerigger from school. I then, using my imagination remembered him. “Bill” was a complete jerk in grade school a bully who did attack me on the playground more than once. He made life a living hell for more than one of my fellow class mates. I must say it did feel good to see him as a wreck.

This got me wondering about all the bullies and jerks that existed in school, how do they feel about their behavior now as adults.

Moderator could you please change the title to:

If you were a Bully in grade school how do you feel about it now?

I was not a bully in school in West Texas, far from it. But in junior high and high school, I knew a pair of twin bullies. One of them I learned eventually got religion and became a preacher. But a Republican, so I guess still essentially a bully.

I was bullied in seventh grade. I turned around and did the same thing in eighth grade.

I really regret it, and I feel terrible about the one kid I picked on (on our school bus rides)—probably hellish for him, as it had been for me. I don’t blame myself much, though. I didn’t have any coping tools, and certainly nobody helped me at all, either when I was bullied or by intervening when I was bullying. Looking back, it’s hard to believe I didn’t realize what I was doing, or that I didn’t know better, but I didn’t.

It’s horrible that people have to suffer because some kids are not raised right / not getting what they need. I know there’s at least two people out there who must really hate me for what I did to them, and I don’t blame them at all. At least one of them went on to do the same that I did to a younger kid.

Humans are just horrible sometimes.

Done!

Probably many bullies feel the same about themselves as you do about shitting on someone for being overweight and bald.

I was a bully. I knew it at the time. I grew up in a house with brothers, it was a battle of the fittest. I fought or got trampled. It carried over to my grade school life. I hate it now, but I can’t make amends. So I just live with the fact.

That is actually a very common pattern. Bullying is very much a learned behavior, and being bullied is one of the main ways people become bullies.

Indeed. Domestic violence follows a similar pattern. When someone is abused as a child, that is the parenting model they learn & they often go on to abuse their own children.

I ran into an old classmate, and told him there was something I had to do. Punched him in the arm and reminded him he used to beat me up on the way home from kindergarten.

He looked chagrined; “Sorry, I really don’t remember. But it sounds like something I would have done. I was a jerk. You feel better now?”
“Actually, YEAH! That felt like justice.”

I remember exactly who I bullied and my reasons/excuses for doing it. I truly would hate to run into one of my victims now.
But, I was not abused or bullied in any way at home. As for my brothers, I gave as good as I got. One brother actually tells of horrors I committed on his person every chance he gets. At school I really had no mercy. I do feel bad about it. But what can I do? I did stop the bully-ing at my doorstep by teaching my children not to be bullies or harrassers. I went steps further with my son, to teach him how to treat a woman. I took it very seriously. And I was successful, so far. Lessons are still being taught, now that they have kids of their own. So I hope karma doesn’t treat me too bad. ( fingers crossed )

I confronted one of my bullies once, shortly after we became Facebook friends. I didn’t get it as bad as some other kids, or if I did, it just didn’t get to me as much, but this guy was a serious pain in my ass. He sat next to me in band, and sometime in 8th grade, he said, ‘‘So I was watching this movie last night, called the Beast.’’

''Really? Was it scary?"

‘‘No, I have to sit next to you every day.’’

From then on, my nickname was Beast. Not just from him, but from every goddamn person in the band. Anytime anyone used my actual name, he corrected them. Eventually I just sort of took ownership of it, and even my friends called me Beast. And I don’t mean ‘‘for a while,’’ I mean I was Beast until I graduated high school. I made the best of it, but there is no possible interpretation in which this is a desirable nickname for a teenage girl. I had some bandmates who didn’t even know my real name.

The guy was just relentless. Always making fun of my pale skin, calling me ugly, or just generally making a nuisance of himself, and I had to sit next to him for eight fucking years. And he was known for being a genuinely nice, Christian guy, he was kind to everyone else, he always said that he was never mean to anyone but me and he couldn’t explain why. This is the kind of person that if he wasn’t such a dickhole we could have sat down and had some nice, intelligent conversations and shared values. It was so fucking weird and frustrating for exactly that reason. He was nice to literally everyone but me. He also had a policy of always being nice to me on concert days, just to add to the mindfuckery.

So years later, I messaged him and asked him ''Why me?" I told him he didn’t exactly ruin my life or anything, but it was just shitty to have to deal with that day in and day out.

And he said, ‘‘I was a teenage boy and I was an asshole and that’s really the only explanation I have. I am truly sorry.’’

It’s not like an apology after eight years of torment can mean much to the person who was tormented. But I favor breck’s restorative justice approach. Teach your kids not to be abusive assholes and facilitate inclusiveness for the rest of your life.

In my experience, bullies rarely gain insight. They just become bully adults instead. My guy was a weird case, I doubt he ever bullied another person in his life. Just, for some reason, I was the one human exception.

Oh, god, that just hurts Spice, one of my victims was called Creature because of me. She owned it too, which kinda fucked with my head alittle. I didn’t quit though. I just doubled down. Man I feel awful about it. I am gonna find that girl and apologize, I swear.

I had a weird response to bullying. I recognized that an injustice was being done and it frustrated the hell out of me, but it had little impact on my self-esteem.

I was bullied a lot by many others, particularly in middle school. The most annoying thing about bullies is they know how to act like victims around adults. When I was in third grade I had a babysitter whose two children were bullying little assholes, one of them tried to shove a snowball down the back of my shirt and I whipped my arm back, giving one of the kids a bloody nose. Oh, poor innocent baby, he was. Another kid pelted me with stones when I was in grade school, followed me around calling me ‘‘fatass’’ and threw my clothes into the lake when I was swimming, ruining my shoes. He was a poor, besotted victim, too. As he explained to his mother, he was only trying to protect his friend, who I once threw a snowball at. :rolleyes: I had so many goddamn bullies in my neighborhood, even people were who nice to me were backstabbing assholes. That guy who threw stones at me? His drunk-ass Dad once came out into the street, stopped me from riding my bike and starting telling me to stop riding my bike down his street. He claimed there were witness to my bullying his son. (I’m guessing someone saw me flip the kid off when he muttered ‘‘fatass’’ under his breath.) This grown-ass inebriated adult then realized where I lived and went off on this rant about how I had nobody parenting me and how could anyone reasonably expect I would know how to behave with such shitty parents? I was 10.

I got in a physical altercation with one girl in my neighborhood who really wanted to fistfight me for some reason and showed up with two guys who were also asshole bullies. To make it even weirder, my parents were there, they pulled out lawn chairs and sat in our front yard to watch the fight. They wanted me to fight this girl because they believed it was the only way to get her off my case. She was about four years older than me. I spent the entire time during the ‘‘standoff’’ telling her I had no desire to fight her. She punched me in the mouth, I literally said, in surprise, ‘‘Damn that hurts.’’ I kicked her in the crotch, then I said, ‘‘This is so fucking stupid, I have no desire to fight you,’’ and walked back in the house. She limped home and told everyone that she beat the shit out of me. I didn’t give a shit what she believed as long as she left me the fuck alone. And she pretty much did.

Is it necessary to mention that I grew up in a trailer park?

People in high school tried to make fun of me for being uber-religious (which I was, or starting to transition out of) and I waved my hands and mockingly cried, ''RUUUUN! BEFORE JESUS SAVES YOUR SOUL!" I didn’t take it seriously at all. By the time I got to high school, the band guy was the only significant bully I had left, and I told him probably eight times a day to fuck off and die.

I wasn’t what I would call an easy target. For this reason I didn’t get the worst of it, and for this reason I stood up for people getting the worst of it at any chance I could get. I was not by a long shot the most bullied person in my band. Most people liked me. I would light into people in public for bullying other kids. I once publicly excoriated the most popular kid in our school for writing the word ‘‘fag’’ on the blackboard. I shamed him into an actual apology on the spot. Then I heard a rumor that a bunch of the guys in my (trombone) section held another guy down and shoved a stick of deodorant into his asscrack. Holy shit did I rip them new assholes. Oh my god, I’m pissed off just remembering.

I don’t know why it didn’t get to my self-esteem more. But I had some serious shit going on at home so it’s all relative I guess. That’s the worst thing about the victims, they are usually victims at home, too. It’s fucking unreal how unfair life is for some people. I don’t consider myself a ‘‘victim’’ of bullying, I never suffered the way many did. These people were thorns in my ass, not sources of trauma.

Sorry, this thread is for former bullies, not people who were bullied.

I think bullies are unlikely to gain insight or change because bullying allows them to get their way, for the most part. What motive is there to change?

I was not a bully in grade school. Instead, I got bullied in grade school. No need to say more than that.

Let’s go forward 35 years or so. I’ve moved across the country, but I’ve got a Facebook profile. Former Bully stumbles across it and sends me a message. Basically, he apologized for being such an asshole when we were 12, 13, 14 years old; and he hopes we can be Facebook friends, at the very least. OK, I’m a forgiving sort, and accept his Facebook friend request.

We messaged. He’s now an educated and respected engineer. We laugh about a lot of stuff from the old days, but he’s never stopped apologizing.

I used to be a bully. One day, I noticed I get offended easily. Then I came to realize if I get offended very easily by small things how much more others, every time I mess with them. I just don’t like the feeling. Then I started to change. It wasn’t easy quitting something that’s become a part of you but hey, bully no more here!!

What I’ve noticed, Spice, at least in the circles I travel in, is the following:

At elementary school, bullies develop.

At middle school, they mature. They leave on top of the heap: “O’Doyle rules!” to quote an Adam Sandler movie. This is the high point of the bully’s life, because…

At high school, they are knocked down a peg. As 14-year-old freshmen, they cannot measure up to 17-year-old senior bullies. They bide their time until they are the 17-year-old senior bullies.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are maturing also, and realizing that 17-year-old senior bullies are nothing to be frightened of. When one is 17 or 18, “I’m gonna make you cry, you little pussy crybaby!” is met with, “Yeah, why? What’s your point?” while friends gather behind the victim. The bully is disarmed. “Yeah, well, screw you.” And the bully walks away, and the matter is over. Again, the bully is disarmed.

An anecdote is never data, but this is the path my former bully followed. He found that if he wanted any friends at all, going forward into his 20s and 30s, he had to be nice to everybody he encountered. Further, he had to be apologetic to those he had bullied in the past. In short, we all grew up, shook hands, and kept on keeping on.

Note that my experience should not make light of those suffering online bullying today. We did not have to deal with that in my day. I feel sorry for the kids that do, as home was always a safe haven. Now that bullies can get into that so-called “safe haven,” via social media, I don’t know what to say. I will suggest that by the time one is 20 or so, bullies will have lost their power, just as in my day.

I was never a conventional bully. I was a shy nerd and haven’t been in a fight (except with my brothers) in my life.

But I do remember passing jokey insulting notes about one of the girls in my 7th grade class, which was definitely bullying of a sort. Vicious, asshole-ish, mean, and completely undeserved. She never did anything to me to merit that kind of jerkiness.

The woman in question actually sent me a friend request on Facebook a few years back. I was amazed she remembered me and would still do that. I accepted and apologized of my own volition (40 years too late). She said she didn’t remember it, which I hope is true. She turned out to be a wonderful person who would have made a great friend, if 13 year old me hadn’t been such a dick.

So now you know my darkest, evilest childhood secret.

I had kind of the opposite problem, physically I was so much stronger than all the kids I felt kind of like a freak so made every attempt to play it down. It ended up hurting me in sports and somewhat even in other areas of my life because I hated the feeling of being singled out. Whenever older kids or bullies from other neighborhoods came around I was always expected to handle them. Once in high school it got even more serious as now we were dealing with inner city gangs and my size difference was becoming neutralized as the kids had caught up to me in growth and were lifting weights and working out. I stopped growing at 5’7" but was still a very hard body at 175#. I was thought of as a bully even though I never was, just the opposite for that matter. The nerdy kids stayed away from me and all the gangs clubs were trying to recruit me. I stayed to myself most of the time. Took me years into my adult life to feel like I was fitting in.