S2 EP304 – Healing Shame After Being a Bully or “Mean Child”

Okay, so one of our members asked if I would speak to the topic of dealing with shame, when you were a kid who may have been disobedient or rebellious or even a bully and maybe hurt others, she said, “You know it’s easy.” She thinks it’s easy for people who we became a good boy or good girl to forgive themselves and move beyond their shame, but how do you do it when you are actually hurtful to others?

Here’s what I want to encourage you to do, and this is what we always do. We go inside and we say to the wounded part, because if you were a bully, that part of you was your wounded self, the essence would not be that it’s always the wounded self.

And you say to that part of you, “There must be a very good reason. There must be a very good reason, that you were a bully. What were you afraid of? What were you trying to control? What were you trying to avoid? What were you trying to protect against?”

Because this is what was happening. And in my experience with working with people who were bullies as kids, there were many things that may have been going on, they may have been being bullied in their families, either by parents or by siblings, and so there’s a tendency to act it out on others. They may have felt so out of control in their families over what was going on with them, that they wanted some control over others, and bullying is a way to try and have some control.

They may have been being physically abused, sexually abused, and that was their way of managing it, because when you’re being physically or sexually abused, you’re so out of control and you are being so violated and you are being taught that it’s okay to violate it’s okay for somebody to violate you, and then it gets taken out on other kids.

So it’s really important not to tell yourself you were a bad person, but to go inside and really see what was happening. The fact that you feel shame about it is, I mean, it’s not great to feel shame, but in a sense, it’s good news because people who are sociopaths, and if you’re interested in learning about people who are sociopaths, you can read a great book called The Sociopath Next Door.

But about 4% of the population are sociopaths, and they’re born with a part of their brain missing and they cannot feel shame. They do not feel shame, they do not have a conscience. And so one in 25 people are like this, they can do great harm without any remorse, any conscience, any shame whatsoever. Like somebody like Putin who’s killing hundreds of thousands of people, feels no shame at all over it, just wants control, just wants to win.

That’s where a sociopath are, just win. It doesn’t matter who’s hurt, so the fact that you feel shame is good news. It means you’re not a sociopath, it means you’re a person who has been hurting, who was hurt as a kid, who learned to take it out by being disobedient and rebellious and perhaps bullying other kids, but it doesn’t make you a bad human being.

And so when you go into your heart and you open to learning and you invite your guidance in, and you do step three with the part of you that was the bully and saying, “There must be very good reasons, what was going on for you then?”

I remember reading years ago, I read a book called, I think it was called One Child, and it was about a little girl who actually set another kid on fire. It was horrible. But then they realized, I mean, what’s going on with this kid? And they found out that she was being horribly sexually abused, horribly sexually abused, and that was her way of expressing it.

And as they worked with her, then of course a lot of healing took place. She wasn’t a bad human being, she was a hurt human being, a hurt child. And so unless you actually are a sociopath, and I doubt that you would be on the call if you are because you wouldn’t care about learning to be a loving adult, then you had good reasons. You had good reasons for acting out this way.

And in fact, when people work with kids who are bullies, that is how they need to work. What’s really going on inside? You know, what’s the hurt? What’s the pain? We don’t treat others that way unless we’re hurting, and very often bullies are kids who feel very one down, very insecure, not as good as the other kids, and they feel one up by bullying, trying to control another kid.

That’s what the wounded self always does, the wounded self does feel one down and tries to feel one up. And bullying is one way of doing that, putting people down, ridiculing people, adults do this a lot because they feel one down, they’ve got to be one up.

And if you’re a person who has been at the other end of that, it’s really important to not take it personally to recognize that that person is in some way threatened by who you are and they’re hurting. They feel awful about themselves, and they feel awful about themselves for good reasons because of what’s going on with them, and especially with kids.

So it’s so important when you feel shame about something, to go inside and do Inner Bonding, go inside and look for the good reasons. There’s always a good reason, the good reasons are your fears and your false beliefs, and they came from somewhere, they didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. They came from your experiences.

And of course, we absorb the wounded selves of our parents and caregivers, and then we start to treat ourselves that way. And then it’s very easy once we’ve treated ourselves badly, to then project onto others how we’re treating ourselves, and so that’s another thing that goes on with bullies.

They’ve learned to treat themselves badly, they learned to feel bad about themselves, they learned to feel shame about who they are, and then they project that out onto others and try and control others because they feel so helpless and powerless on the inner level.

So it doesn’t really matter whether your coping mechanism was to be a good girl or boy and comply, or whether you resisted and became disobedient, rebellious, and a bully, it’s the same process. I had to do this with, I mean, I was the good girl, I was the complier, I had to do this, I had to go in and say, “It must’ve been a good reason that I gave myself up all over the place.”

And of course, I had to go in and see what was going on in my past that led me to completely abandon myself and become the good girl, just another way to control. Whether it’s being a good kid or whether it’s being a bully, it’s just another way that the wounded self has learned to control.