The urge to bully someone is like the urge to vomit

[MeGrownMind]

The choice to bully someone is like having to vomit, and instead of turning my head to vomit away from the person like a decent human being, I hurry towards them, grab them by both shoulders and throw up on their horrified face. Had there been obstacles in my way to reach them, I would have choked down the vomit long enough to hurtle past the obstacles, and then after long last violently unleash the torrent into their face.

 

This image struck me so suddenly, with all of the brutal and uncensored clarity of the moment itself. It is a powerful analogy for me as I think about the moral nature of the bully; it reflects my own urges, and my own past when I acted on such urges. It makes me want to gag in real life.

[Donnadogsoth]

Perhaps you're right, but why does the bully wish to do this?

[MeGrownMind]

Perhaps you're right, but why does the bully wish to do this?

This is where the analogy begins to break down for me. But I will continue with a stream of consciousness, just to see what comes up:

 

I perceive something about you (how you look, how you behave, what you represent) and this something provokes the urge to vomit. As the provocateur, you are now in my sights. You have burrowed yourself into the bowel of my thoughts, like a virus. This dominant position you have in my thoughts, you the focus of all of my attention, makes you very powerful. In real life you may be completely oblivious of the power you have over me: you could be standing in line at the grocery store, reading a package label. But in my mind an epic battle rages across continents. I push you out of my system by obliterating you. I tease you, humiliate you, to purge you from my system.

[RCali]

Were you bullied by your family or in school? How people behave and think later in life is closely related to their infancy.

[Donnadogsoth]

This is where the analogy begins to break down for me. But I will continue with a stream of consciousness, just to see what comes up:

 

I perceive something about you (how you look, how you behave, what you represent) and this something provokes the urge to vomit. As the provocateur, you are now in my sights. You have burrowed yourself into the bowel of my thoughts, like a virus. This dominant position you have in my thoughts, you the focus of all of my attention, makes you very powerful. In real life you may be completely oblivious of the power you have over me: you could be standing in line at the grocery store, reading a package label. But in my mind an epic battle rages across continents. I push you out of my system by obliterating you. I tease you, humiliate you, to purge you from my system.

 

I submit that the virus is not initially bowel-sickness, but heart-sickness.  Bullying originates in the love impulse, the drive to improve that which one sees is ugly, inefficient, or stupid.  Young men call each other "fag" to improve one another.  But if the "sickness" festers due to an innate infantile frustration that the proto-bully realises can be temporarily relieved by the fun of sadism, then it moves into the belly (belly, bully) and becomes a kind of hostile infection, a rage and a lust to annihilate.

[Matthew Ed Moran]

I think the context in which you feel this urge is important. 

 

I was bullied once for a few days in a row by someone I considered a close friend. This was some of the most significant bullying I remember having to experience from a peer in my post-adolescent youth. I think I was a young teen. We were playing basketball, four of us, and my teammate was criticizing me with a tone of anger and frustration while we were playing. I felt anxious, shameful, and humiliated in response to how he chose to criticize me. It was very hard to play well with these emotions. 

 

We lost and my friend threw the ball at me multiple times really hard. He would wind up, until his hand was behind his head. He then went on a verbal tirade, mocking me, showing his disgust towards me, and he would not stop. I endured it for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, which actually felt like an eternity, because mostly no one was speaking beside him. He was calling me insults and mocking me in ways I found incredibly offensive and humiliating. I did not say anything back, as I stood in a single place for the duration. I did not feel like he was going to stop, so I left with my head down while he continued to verbally accost me for leaving.

 

This "friend" was Muslim and had a very large father - over 6 feet tall - who criticized him when he was a youth playing basketball. My "friend" was very skilled at sports but his father showed (this is what I infer from when he briefly mentioned this) no praise. Apparently he only criticized, no matter how well his son did. From the phrasing my friend used, it was apparent to me that it was inflammatory and degrading criticism; the kind used to cause hurt.

 

I think bullying in my friend's case was a spontaneous reaction to the fact that his father was in his head, "sitting on the bench," criticizing him. He knew the consequences of losing, and so besides managing his own play, he felt it necessary to manage the play of his teammates. Because even if he performed well, but his teammates did not, he would lose and this would be a source of vulnerability for him to present to his father.

 

As a timid and anxious child who did not defend himself, I was a perfect victim for him to unleash his vitriol upon. I was not going to fight back. And in fact, since I found it more difficult to play when being criticized, the fact that I did worse in response to his criticism levied him a challenge; a battle between his inner father and his conscience. Was he going to sympathize with me playing worse in response to criticism, which would reveal his inner-father as abusive and sadistic and counter-productive? Or was he going to up the ante (so to speak)?

 

What I mean to point out is, I was a reflection of what his father was doing to him, but it was a particularly painful reflection because I was downtrodden, anxious, confused, and humiliated. He could not accept that his father did this to him and so he unleashed his rage upon me. The rage was was all the more intense and brutal for him, because he had to say with his actions that he does not accept the plight of the victim, and that he will destroy the image of the victim; because to him, to recognize the victim would be quick death to the compliance he needed to show his father to survive his childhood. He left consciousness in his rage, and he entered his past to avoid seeing the present reality right before him.

 

To summarize, I think to ask yourself what service the bullying provides to you might be helpful. Ask yourself what it would mean to remain present and conscious of the situation, rather than to enter hatred and rage. Notice your environment, the moments that lead up to you entering this state of mind, and exactly what you are witnessing when you feel triggered. Ask yourself what metaphor is right in front of you that is triggering you, and what you are trying to escape or avoid, crush and erase, by entering your rage and hatred. Look for constancy in the themes and see if you can relate them to understand why it was necessary for you to develop this tactic in your childhood.

 

Daniel Mackler and others make the argument that our unprocessed trauma is triggered when we unconsciously witness metaphors or reflections of our childhood trauma, and that by unpacking these metaphors, we can understand our spontaneous emotional reactions more acutely and process what our unconscious is trying to tell us.