When I was teaching at school,
I remember
Articulating to children what it was.
It wasn’t one event, it was successive, targeted.
What I feel about my own experiences of bullying is that it is
PAINFULLY NORMAL
I recently had a very physiological and emotional reaction to a past event.
First my body closed tight.
Shook like it was tensing,
I realised it was anger so opened up and really let it pass through me.
The pain wanted to come out, tell me something.
As it was passing, I asked myself, why are you angry? Why are you scared?
It was that no-one was going to save me.
It was the normalisation of it.
The way that as a society we often pretend it isn’t happening.
When I experienced it at school, I was told “play the game, don’t let them know it is affecting you”
When I experienced it at work, I was told “stay professional, don’t let it affect your work”
And in my relationship “Don’t say anything”
Domestic abuse isn’t always physical yet people say “just leave”
But all our wires are connected to being loved and pretending that painful things aren’t happening.
It can be the ones we most entrust with our care that do those things to us.
Recently, another adult has targeted me and my children.
Someone even said “be nice to them” “Confuse them”
And so it stays stuck.
I watched a film recently called “hypernormalisation”
And no-one really knows what they are feeling as they have been pretending so long.
That is my fear.
That it is real pain that is pretended away.
Yet chokes our throats, supressed anger boiling in our spleens
brings strokes
High blood pressure, depression
Dreamless anxious sleep
Silently murdering our souls
My body really feels it so deeply and when I have been supported to talk about it and heal it the same thing comes back to me.
It is normal.
I want to normalise talking about the pain of bullying and abuse.
So my body knows what has happened
So my soul can rest
I want to normalise crying, understanding.
We don’t heal anything by pretending it isn’t there and getting on with it.
We heal it by understanding that those who have done these things thought they were behaving normally and playing a human game.
They learnt the rules well.
And so we can stop the game
By speaking our truths
I had a dream once of being trapped in a field with the rest of humanity unable to escape
Someone else called someone to save us.
There was no one.
We had trapped ourselves so had only ourselves to save us.
Apart from waking up with the pounding reality of this fear being true, I could sense this deep and painful truth.
Would save us.