This is in no way a Snark-bashing thread. He is making his peace in his own way and I wish him luck.
I just wanted to respond to posts by Dr Matrix and JTR, but thought that it would be poor taste to do it in that thread.
JTR said
Dr Martix followed that up with
I just wanted to say no. I disagree. If you think this then I think you underestimate the effects bullying can have.
My girlfriend has two brothers. I thought that she only had one until I’d been basically living with her for 6 months. The one she loves is a couple of years older than her but there is another 10 years older. I found this out when we she started crying uncontrollably one day. As far as she is concerned she only does have one brother. Never thinks about the other except for the dark moments when some childhood trauma comes out. When this happens there ain’t nothing I can do except hold her.
A bullying sibling can be the worst thing of all because there is no escape. Home life turns into a nightmare.
You may be right. However, knowing Snark’s flair for the dramatic, I believe that what he was beating himself up over was probably normal behavior. And this is about what Snark needs to do for himself; he needs to begin to help himself before he can begin to repair the damage done to others.
In spite of being a wimp myself, somehow I managed to avoid being bullied in school. I have one sibling - a younger sister - and I wouldn’t call our fights abuse.
My SO, Cajun Man was bullied all through school by classmates, so I have some idea how you feel about your girlfriend; he graduated in 1969 and he still hurts from it.
I am sorry about your girlfriend. It sounds like her pain runs very deep. If her older brother felt guilty, what would you suggest he do? The damage cannot be undone. The first order of business, I think, should be for him to repair his own psyche.
All true of course. Nevertheless it is possible to be overly dismissive of what for all we know could have been very serious behaviour. Since this one felt a little close to the bone, I felt that it warranted a response.
I know that nobody meant any harm and that all advice to Snark was well meant (and good advice). That’s why I posted a new topic instead of replying in that one.
Feeling guilty and repairing your own psyche is the only thing that can be done. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is all okay again.
To be honest I don’t really know what my point is, merely that I wanted to say something. No explanations, reasons or responses necessary. Really.
That’s a fair comment, kabbes. Real and genuine abuses do occur, and I don’t wish to minimize them. But that sounds like rather an extreme case, and not the more commonplace types of bullying I was referring to.
Any child psychologist will tell you that children don’t come out of the womb with refined social skills. Sibling rivalry for parents’ attention, enforcement of rigid pecking orders, crude manipulation, name-calling, and even the occasional shoving, hitting, and wrestling are to be expected. This happens especially in larger families, where the parents simply aren’t able to monitor all the kids’ interactions. Even with all that, many psychologists say that large families are a very healthy environment for kids. In addition, when kids are screwed up by their family, it’s much more frequently the result of dysfunctional relations between a child and a parent rather than the result of dysfunctional relations between siblings.
When I dismissed the bad effects of bullying, I was referring to the more common, mundane types of petty rip-offs that children routinely perpetrate on each other. I wanted to emphasize this point for Snark because it seems to me that Snark is generally too quick to criticize himself. I suspect that he sees things through a simplistic prism of “virtue-versus-sin,” without much allowance for the mundane imperfections of normal human life. I don’t accept at face value his evaluation that he is “evil and a monster.” I don’t see that kind of person in his posts. I suspect that he might be romanticizing the way childhood should be and then castigating himself because his own childhood didn’t live up to that ideal. I may be completely wrong in my estimation of him, of course, but we all take that chance when posting here.
In summary, I appreciate the reminder that bullying can be taken to extremes, and that it causes real harm. But I stand by the comments that I made to Snark, based on the little bit that I know of him.
Incidentally, I hope that this thread will NOT become an opportunity to dissect Snark’s childhood. I think it would be very helpful for him to talk with a professional counselor and get a fresh, unbiased opinion as to how he should deal with the problems he has described. But I don’t think that Snark’s childhood should be rolled out and displayed in detail on the SDMB for the vultures to pick at. We don’t do counseling here. And Snark deserves better than we can offer him here.
One quick comment on the abuse-of-brothers aspect. Like many another phenomenon, it has both positive and negative aspects. Certainly nobody is looking to justify the bullying of smaller children as okay. However, siblings do fight, and healthy psyches and relationships develop from this. In the case of my adoptive grandkids, Brandon, now 5, spent his early childhood as a fairly introverted and quiet child, rarely being particularly self-expressive. However, his three-years-older sister is one of the bossiest children I have ever encountered. (She has many virtues, too, but her authoritarianistic attitude is what I want to focus on here.) And the result of her bossing Brandon around has forced him to “fight back” – occasionally physically, but mostly in terms of the leader/follower relationship – and become much more assertive and self-confident. So there is a beneficial aspect to this sort of thing, in moderation, as well.