> bullies don't leave you alone because you're awesome, they leave you alone because their bullying doesn't work on you (because you're resilient to personal attacks, or you pretend to not care until they exhaust the possibilities and leave you alone etc.) or backfires on them somehow.
I can tell from experience that this is not how it works. Real bullies never leave you alone until you stand up and fight back. It's the amount of energy it takes for them to bully, not the amount of damage they do.
They don't care how resilient you are or whether you care about the bullying or not, when their bullying doesn't have any bad consequences or the potential for bad consequences. Only if you make it hard for bullies to bully it stops.
I'm rather disappointed that whenever the topic of bullying comes up, everyone seems to just extrapolate from their own experiences and assume that all bullying everywhere is identical. Or worse, claim that anything that doesn't match their experiences "isn't real bullying". I think the broad lack of agreement among people's accounts should make it pretty obvious that not all bullies are the same.
Personally, I found ignoring the few bullies I encountered in school to be pretty effective, but I'm also aware that what I experienced was pretty tame compared to some stories I've heard.
How big an N do you have to get to go from anecdotes to data? Basically my entire family, for two generations, where bullied. I am pretty sure my grandparents would have been bullied too, except it was long enough ago that nobody cared when boys smacked each other around.
Our bullying stopped when we fought back, or moved out of school. And yes the bullying continues to hunt us to this day.
>Only if you make it hard for bullies to bully it stops.
One way of doing that, that many people have found successful, is to not let them bother you. If you're no longer interesting to bully, they'll ignore you for someone who is.
I wish it was easy like that. I don't know anyone who has successfully "not-bothered-away" bullies. They will stop as soon as it's socially no longer a gainful action for them. Not bothering may be part of it but it's certainly not sufficient.
It's hard to simplify something like bullying, but there can be a pecking order involved, where people who are bullied in turn bully other people whom they feel they can influence in some way.
So, in some cases you may only need to push back to the point where you're not the easiest target in the room. ie, you don't always have to be the fastest runner to get away from animal who is looking for easy prey. You just have to be faster than the slowest runner.
It's like stepping in the same puddle every day on the walk to school. It's not out-and-out fun, but it's a habit, a pattern, and if it might provide 3 seconds of entertainment, that's worth it. "Not being fun" won't make it stop.
That's a bit like telling people who live in dangerous areas that the best response to a mugger is not to let them impoverish you. Bullies select people who seem physically or emotionally fragile to start with.
It's more like telling people who live in dangerous areas not to walk around looking scared and confused. Which we do...
I have to agree with the sentiment expressed elsewhere in the thread, that bullies bully for different reasons. The only time I have been bullied, avoidance and not showing a response worked, because the bully had low self-esteem and was looking for acceptance from his peers by picking on smaller kids. When he saw that he wasn't getting anywhere with that, he stopped.
I can tell from experience that this is not how it works. Real bullies never leave you alone until you stand up and fight back. It's the amount of energy it takes for them to bully, not the amount of damage they do.
They don't care how resilient you are or whether you care about the bullying or not, when their bullying doesn't have any bad consequences or the potential for bad consequences. Only if you make it hard for bullies to bully it stops.