By Neill Neill, Ph.D.

We all know people who bully their way through life. Through bluster and intimidation they get what they want at the expense of other people.

This column is not about schoolyard bullying. It’s about the models we provide to our children who then become bullies or their victims.

The bullies in adult life are the bosses who exude the message "My way or the highway." They are the men and women who hijack a committee by jockeying themselves into the position of chairperson, and then through force of position and personality, get the committee to endorse what they want. Your choice is to go along with them or resign.

Bullying is the antithesis of leadership. The leader inspires people to bring out their best while pursuing a common goal. The bully intimidates. The leader has a high respect for others. The bully respects no one, except, of course, a bigger bully.

We find bullying in the workplace, in government, in places of religion in education and in the family. Our children are exposed to these models every day.

Bullies play on the negative emotions of others. They unabashedly use fear, shame, embarrassment and the threat of harm to get what they want.

The key to understanding bullying is that the bully identifies and manipulates the negative emotions of others. The key emotional consequence of being bullied is the presence of lingering resentment.

But who is the biggest bully of all, the ultimate bully, the tyrant that cannot be denied? You won’t find him sitting on a throne somewhere. He is among us. We meet him or her in all walks of life and in all social strata.

Look at the word "tyrant." Now rearrange the letters and with a bit of license you get "martyr." The tyrant and the martyr are two sides of the same coin.

Martyrdom is bullying on steroids.

The martyr adds guilt to the arsenal of negative emotions to stimulate and manipulate in others to get what she wants. And she does it so effectively that we often not even aware that we are the object of bullying.

You can stand up to the obvious bully, or you can avoid him. But the martyr sucks you in; how can you confront this bully if you don’t even recognize you are being bullied?

Even if you do recognize the martyr and try to ignore her, you’re still left with the fear that something bad might happen to her. And often that lingering fear can pull you back into subservience to the martyr/tyrant. You still end up resenting this type of bully.

To get a clearer picture of both styles of bullying, think of the alcoholic who controls his family primarily through verbal violence, intimidation, and threats of abandonment. He is the classic bully. His wife may want to leave him, but she is afraid of what he might do.

What happens if he cleans up and stops drinking? Does the absence of alcohol change his personality? The short answer is, no. That would take a lot of personal work over a significant amount of time. The only thing that has really changed is the alcohol consumption.

His family still tiptoes around him, because they now live with a clear message that if they upset him in any way, he might relapse into drinking. They now have even more to lose. They still live in fear, but in addition they are guilt-ridden about "causing" his anticipated relapse.

Make no mistake; he is still the family tyrant. He has simply escalated his principal method of bullying from verbal abuse to martyrdom. He is now bullying on steroids.

And that is why I call the martyr the ultimate bully.

If our children are to learn to live as neither bullies nor victims, they need much better adult models of being bully-proof.

Neill
Practical Psychology for Capable People