Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Aldous Huxley
I allowed myself to be bullied because I was scared and didn’t know how to defend myself. I was bullied until I prevented a new student from being bullied. By standing up for him, I learned to stand up for myself.
Jackie Chan
The people who are bullying you, they’re insecure about who they are, and that’s why they’re bullying you. It never has to do with the person they’re bullying. They desperately want to be loved and be accepted, and they go out of their way to make people feel unaccepted so that they’re not alone.
Madelaine Petsch
Recently, the night after the US election in fact, the Bully Archetype visited me in my dreams. Though few details were clear to me on awakening, there was no doubt in my mind that the bully had paid me a visit. The dream left me in an energy field of conflicting contents: the bully’s dark, threatening energies, and the more uplifting frequencies of the ensuing courageous responses to his antics. As the new day dawned, powerful childhood memories were reactivated.
Like many kids, bullying played a significant role in my early life. Though I can clearly remember often being at the receiving end of this cruel behaviour, there are no doubts in my mind that, on occasion, I also behaved in the same monstrous way towards others, especially those smaller than me.
Children can be very cruel to each other. This cruelty gets played out if our caregivers are not sufficiently present and tuned into what is going on. Under such circumstances, they can’t protect the children, whenever necessary, from hurting each other. This lack of awareness and presence on the part of the adults is probably due to the untended childhood wounds they, themselves, still carry.
My fate as the butt of the cruelty of other boys was initially due to my physical frailty, total lack of sporting agility, and a deeply ingrained fear of being on the receiving end of a physical pummelling. Where that came from, I do not know. Perhaps the answer is encoded in even earlier memories, still frozen beyond reach, in the lower echelons of my unconscious.
The result of my ineptitude at sports was that, when the two most athletic boys were selected by the teacher (boys-only school!) as the respective captains of teams for some improvised game in the school yard, and they went through the process of selecting their teams, I was generally the second-but-last boy to remain standing at the fence. There was always some misfortunate who was an even less attractive candidate than I was, a fact which, I now cringe to admit, gave me a modicum of self worth. The repeated experience of this humiliation weighed heavily upon me.
Many adults bully each other also, and the children entrusted to their care. Men bullying women is also widespread in our culture, as is the abuse committed by those in positions of authority upon those they are supposed to be serving.
Bullies come in various shapes and sizes. The first to be encountered are generally the physical versions. More subtle manifestations such as the intellectual bully, psychological bully, or the spiritual bully are less easy to spot, and perhaps even more dangerous than their more obvious counterparts.
Walt Whitman once quipped, for example, that: `God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.´ From the very beginning of my life, that bully was always present. This was thanks to my traditional Irish Catholic upbringing.
Of course, my current understanding, or non-understanding, of the Great Spirit, or Holy Spirit, has nothing to do with this tyrannical image. It is the projection of generations of unresolved bullying, trauma, and abuse, visited throughout the ages by one unconscious generation upon the next, reflecting the primitive moral attitudes of the Old Testament. Though the New Testament is over 2,000 years old, we are still in the very early stages of manifesting the more refined message of justice, compassion, and unconditional love contained therein.
Let’s take a closer look at the make-up of the bully. He is incessantly angry, usually because, deep down inside, he is scared. His fear and anger can be traced back to the neglect or abuse he experienced as a child, wounds he never had, or took, the opportunity to address. Left unchecked, a multi-generational chain reaction will inevitably result. This is true of individuals in families just as it is on the collective level, among tribes, societies, and cultures.
Sometimes the bully is angry because he feels he hasn’t gotten the breaks in life he thinks he should have had. Or he may have been saddled with impossible expectations by adults who, unbeknownst to themselves, were instrumentalising their children rather than being true to themselves by fully living their own lives to the full.
When challenged, the bully lashes out, feeling threatened by the truth. Inflicting pain on others is a form of self-medication. It deflects from inner pain, which may be vaguely felt but of which there is no conscious awareness, and helps him feel less disempowered, less terrified by his own demons and dark memories.
Bullies desperately need to be loved, yet they live in emotional isolation because no one likes them; most of us are scared of them. This is simply a reflection of the fact that they don’t like themselves. This reinforces the bully’s warped idea that the world is against them, and that making life difficult for others is justified, in addition to being an effective recipe for experiencing power.
Sometimes, when the bully has amassed worldly – financial and political – power, he may attract lesser, would-be tyrants around him, and an authoritarian gang is born. Whether fascist, neo-liberal, or communist does not really matter. The key factor at play here is the destructive energy of the unresolved Bully or Tyrant Archetype.
So, the wounded child becomes the religious zealot, political tyrant, or the domineering parent, living vicariously through the child, to make up for his own disappointments and failures.
For him, nothing is ever good enough. Sometimes the bully may be an emotionally tyrannical mother, or another female whose way of dealing with her own past or present experience of being humiliated, dominated, or violated is to exert control and domination over weaker fellow beings, by means of emotional terror or drama.
In my experience in dealing with bullies, I have discovered that even though they’re desperately unhappy, they become arrogant and dogmatic through the exercise of their tyranny. Caught up in this perception disorder, they become incapable of seeing reason. They live in their own world, enjoying inflicting abuse, expecting abuse, and using abuse to create even more of the same. It works for as long as they are at the top of the pecking order, so they are highly invested in securing its consolidation and maintenance.
The way I endeavour to set healthy boundaries is by cutting off the supply of abuse. Don’t try to fight fire with fire. Don’t stoop to their level. The starting point is to bring my own inner clarity to the situation.
By not taking the words and actions of the bully personally, by sticking to my own values and intentions, it is possible to establish a type of firewall which protects from abuse while, at the same time, remaining permeable to compassion.
Don’t negotiate, accommodate, or try to please them. The more you try to do for them, the more their power of manipulation is affirmed. Maintaining the healthy boundaries while stating my own position, in terms of values and intentions, is key to the success of any such interaction.
My experience of this recent dream brought the following to mind: Shadow work, rooted in Jungian psychology, involves exploring and understanding the unconscious, darker aspects of our personality. This helps in bringing the supressed, unconscious elements of our personality out of the darkness into the light of awareness, of integrating these often suppressed or overlooked aspects into our consciousness. This fosters healing, growth, and compassion for self and others.
The archetype of the Bully (Tyrant), in this context, symbolizes control, dominance, and abuse of power. When its four main aspects – critical, punitive, prohibitive, and smothering, – are explored, the archetype model provides a platform to investigate, identify, and redress my own tendencies to be controlling, cruel, dismissive, or domineering towards self, others, or circumstances.
The Bully archetype, with its commanding presence, serves as a reflection of authority, control, and power dynamics within the psyche. Engagement with both the conscious and shadow aspects of this archetype offers insights into my relationship with agency, power, and control.
As I reflected on recent developments in both personal and world affairs, it quickly became clear that the inner work of growing towards emotional sobriety, engaging with the shadow, and tending the wounds (trauma) of childhood, has never been as important as it is today. Feeling encouraged and emboldened to continue this work and to share my findings with anyone who may be interested, my hope it that the encouragement may prove infectious.
