h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It is interesting to discover that very few people really understand what it is that truly causes bullying.

It is in many a sense, what you feel when someone has chopped your hair off or have missed a bus that zooms on past you when you want to run and catch it but it's as if the bus just laughs at the misery and dissapointment you feel! - just how disempowering it really is.

I am an adult and work with adults and bullying goes on in my workplace as it does in many other workplaces. There is a common theme and I have recognised it for some time but had to do a lot of material digesting and rationalizing as an inquiring adult to fully understand what indeed causes it. I went through it as a child too and disagree that we are all responsible for it when we each can and do take responsibility for our own actions whether we be children or adults. - We need to be informed and educated of this destructive behaviour and the chances to adapt to change.

I have found that many bullies don't want to change and they are either ignorant of their own behaviours or fully conscious but refuse to acknowledge or make attempts to stop what they are doing. We live in a far more informed society than we did some twenty years ago and with so much emphasis upon people-skills and anti-discrimmination practice, those in the know of it have consciously educated themselves to do some internal work on themselves and want to operate and exist in it to the best of our ability.

We want to evolve beyond our baser instincts and this is so acheivable and sustainable and is what bullies hate more than anything because to them it is like a supremacy - a kind of concquership of the self they can just barely manage to attain emotion. They are in a sense, stuck in their own self-loathing and are not wanting to be in touch with it because to them it is just easier to spray everyone else with it.

The effect or result is to diempower and it is as simple as that. The bully's aim or intention more conscious than not, is to make that bully feel empowered and approved of and to feel accepted by those joining in. Those who don't, are in some respect made to fear and they either join the bully or don't. Bullies are not usually the questioing types and do little to reflect or contemplate upon their actions they feel are justified in their actions and convince others that they are justified for their feelings that are inappropriate and out of context with the environmemt they choose to inflict their suffering onto others.

Bullies are often people who are shut down. They are cut off from what is going on inside and are generally very unhappy people regardless of external expressions they give to the outside world. They may be boastful and openly flirtacious with themselves all in the quest of gaining approval and acceptance that we all from time strive. There is a strong feeling of inadequacy in these people and I have had one woman I work with jump from her chair in rage as soon as I talk to another person because such is the fear of me gaining approval and acceptance that she has tried to destroy in others about me and she is twenty years my senior - 50 years old.

They also fear exposure of their behaviour and find very cunning ways of indirect bullying that only you seem to witness. In this instance get a menatal machine gun and bullet the person down when empathy has run out, but in most cases it is better to abandon an environment if the bullying is also heirachal. I am currently in such a position and no one I have tried to talk to listens. The bully will bully another regradless of whether it is me or another - they are going to be angry with the world or any individual whom feel unsafe to be assertive with the bully.

This is what they want. To mame or disgrace another person because that way, they will be given more approval, more acceptance. You are isolated and the only one who knows what is going on, but look more carefully, because often you will notice that they are bullying other people around them and have discontentions with more than just yourself as I have witnessed. It doesn't change the situation but it confirms that you are justified in your feelings of being bullied and re-asserts the knowledge that you are likeable and that you are worthy of being treated just as every other good citizen and keep developing upon assertiveness until no one will want to ever bully you again because you have the tools that make you better equiped to deal with bullies.

Over seven months of work-place bullying, I have endured a great deal and has been a learning experience despite the trauma I have faced. The female bully at 50, had lured a 19 year old man into her confidence and whom she has now regretted pouring all of her emotional states of unhappiness into and those of other young men far too young to deal with her adult complexity and has let it be known through this way that she is the problem so what goes round does come round for some of these people when what they say to others does not match up to what is actually happening or witnessed.

I truly feel for victims of bullying because I know what it really feels like and so much can be gained from that situation and used to an advantage. It just means that you are seeing what it is you don't want to become like and allow that to shape what you do next with your life and never let anyone take from you your own sense of personal empowerment because it is not theirs to have. You don't have to know what causes it as long as it is stopped and every individual that makes attempts to do so will eventually make society a much better place to live in.