You’re making a very black and white assertion about something that seems quite obvious: that there’s a grey area to communication, especially between people with different expectations, communication styles, etc. I don’t think you’re entitled to an example after being so reductive about the topic.
I don't think I've ever pointed out to someone they were being a bully, and they didn't respond with, "Hey, I'm just trying to show you tough love and honesty, it's not my fault you're too much of a wimp to accept it." Conversely I've never found stating my opinion tactlessly or hurtfully to be effective, and the only times I've been able to communicate an uncomfortable truth successfully has been in a blameless and empathetic manner.
No one is entitled to an example, but it's a good suggestion to clear up possible miscommunications. Especially if we're talking about complex situations potentially involving cultural clashes.
> the only times I've been able to communicate an uncomfortable truth successfully has been in a blameless and empathetic manner.
I think I mostly agree with you, and your comment about bullying sounds like a great example of your point.
Mitchell Rosenburg (author of Non-violent Communication) talks about this a lot. He would point out that calling someone a bully is a negative judgemental statement. Who are you to say they're being a bully? Maybe their intent really is to show tough love and honesty. People almost always get defensive when we feel attacked and judged. The decision of whether to feel attacked and judged is made on the receiving end of a statement.
The NVC approach would recommend that instead of "you're being a bully", you could say "When you said XX, I feel rejected and small". Its a much more vulnerable statement, but its much more powerful to hear. Hearing "you're a bully" makes me want to put my walls up. Hearing "ouch, hearing that makes me want to cry" will open my heart right up.
I think I mostly agree with you too, and what you've said has been interesting and I appreciate it.
> Who are you to say they're being a bully? Maybe their intent really is to show tough love and honesty.
I think there are two places where we differ.
1. When you are being bullied, you know you are being bullied, and you are the expert who can say it's happening. It's possible to misinterpret this, and the tactics you propose are correct, but I don't like the implication that there's simply no way to know. In my view, a relationship is an epistemology; you know someone is bullying you by the process you know that someone loves you, it may not be possible to describe, it may not be infallible, but it is real. (Perhaps part of the difference in thinking here is that I'm saying you can know someone is being a bully in this way, not whether they are, in their heart of hearts, a bully.)
2. Their intent to show you "tough love and honesty" is not at all inconsistent with being a bully. Consider the character of Tony Soprano, if you're familiar. One of his central struggles is that he deeply cares about people, but the only way he can relate to the world is through violence and intimidation.
When I say that the bullies I've encountered in my have justified themselves through "tough love", I don't mean to say that they were lying. Only that, as GGGP pointed out, it's not an acceptable way to communicate.
> when you’re being bullied, you know you’re being bullied
When I was much younger I had a hard time being teased. I genuinely didn’t realize that this was normal among my friend group, and I was totally misreading the situation because I was too caught up in my own head. I don’t think I was correct about my interpretation of the situation.
I’m essentially disagreeing with any statement of the form: two people have different interpretations of a subjective situation / interpretation, and one of them is always right because they have they think X.
> I'm essentially disagreeing with any statement of the form: two people have different interpretations of a subjective situation / interpretation, and one of them is always right because they have they think X.
Well, I wouldn't agree with that either, but that's not what I'm saying. As I mentioned it is possible to misinterpret. What I am saying is this is knowable. I can understand how you took this from what I said, and I'll try to express myself more clearly in the future, but allow me to highlight part of my comment:
> [I]t may not be possible to describe, it may not be infallible, but it is real.
Something to consider is that your criticism works both ways. If Fred feels that Bob is bullying him, and Bob feels he is offering tough love and not bullying Fred, by your logic we can't dismiss Fred's assertion.
> The NVC approach would recommend that instead of "you're being a bully", you could say "When you said XX, I feel rejected and small". Its a much more vulnerable statement, but its much more powerful to hear.
Telling how you feel instead is self-sacrificial as it intuitively feels promoting further bullying and trauma, since these feelings must be what the bully wants. To the bullied saying something like that may feel as digging own grave.
But yes, assuming bullying is assuming what goes on in another's head. I can more than identify that mild tease can be an indication of familiarity and rapport.
So the best way to stop bullying is from the outside. If you suspect bullying intervene, if it's not obvious right away you don't need to flat out presume bullying takes place but you can engage the participants and get a better picture based on their responses.
One of the problems with labelling someone's behaviour as "bullying", is it risks derailing the conversation from focusing on the actual behaviour and the problem it is causing, to semantic disputes about what counts as "bullying". I don't think there is a single universally agreed definition of the term; and even with an agreed definition, employment lawyers will make whole careers out of litigating the boundaries of that definition
I think it can be much more constructive to focus the conversation on (1) what is the behaviour, (2) why it is a problem, (3) what could they do instead. That's a useful strategy, whether some problematic behaviour counts as "bullying" or not.
> If you suspect bullying intervene,
If you see a problem, see to it the problem is being handled appropriately. Depending on the situation and your own position, that might be either directly intervening in the problem yourself, or maybe just making sure the appropriate people are aware of it. That's true whether the problem counts as "bullying" or not.
> If you see a problem, see to it the problem is being handled appropriately.
This is not what I meant. I meant that bullying is a special case, it is insidious because it both traumatizes and the only way to handle it properly is often from the outside so it is different from many other problems that can (and often should) be resolved between parties involved.
> So the best way to stop bullying is from the outside.
I don't know about anyone else, but I can't recall anyone ever sticking up for me or intervening when I was being bullied. Frequently this happens outside anyone else's view. In the context of school bullying, the teachers never seemed to believe me, or would "both sides" the issue and punish everyone involved. In the context of bullying online, many times this happened to me directly in front of mods who didn't really give a shit.
So I'd encourage people to intervene sure, but is that really the most effective strategy...? I think being able to call this out is a life skill, and being able to recognize you're on a path to bully someone and managing those emotions is also a life skill.
If there is no one fair enough, you can only help yourself. But if others are looking and doing nothing that will additionally make you think you deserve it in a way since no one cares.
Yeah. That's true. I guess there's a different between what's most effective and what's having the most impact. I'd agree it would be a lot better if people stood up, but I think the strategy that is having the most impact is unfortunately standing up to people individually.
The catch is that the bullied is often not well positioned to tell reliably whether bullying happens or not. We can assume it's friendly banter while it's bullying. As a child the idea that someone might want to hurt me just did not compute and caused a paralysing response. Or we can assume it's bullying even though it's friendly banter. After being bullied I saw any tease or taunt as a personal attack and this cost me close friendships in uni years.
Here's a test; if you express discomfort in a defensive way and they double down, it's probably bullying. If they back off, it was probably good natured. If someone interprets your discomfort as vulnerability they can exploit - there you go. (It's probably not worth conducting this test, josephg's advice to get sincere instead of defensive elsewhere in the thread is probably the best response in either case.)
Not foolproof but I think it's a solid rule of thumb. I dunno if I just have a different set of social gifts and deficits from other people in this thread, but I don't feel like I have much trouble determining when someone gleefully manipulates my emotions to wind me up. People who are genuinely just teasing don't get excited if they upset you.
I think the difference in thinking is that when people think of bullies, they seem to be thinking of being a child or young adult. But I've been treated in ways I regard as bullying at every point in my life. I'm sure that I was just as prone to misinterpretation as a child as anyone else.
So I'm thinking of applying the emotional sophistication of an adult to the situation, and it seems clear to me that this is something you can figure out, because I do it once or twice a year. I'm guessing other people do too, but they probably think of those people in different terms, like "asshole."
Yes, that's what I did, express discomfort and they backed down. But that put me basically outside of those circles, since close friends would tease each other as a sign of familiarity. If you indicate you don't like that and want people to be polite with you, it creates distance. That's basically what politeness is, walls and emotional distance.
> since these feelings must be what the bully wants. To the bullied saying something like that may feel as digging own grave.
Maybe. Its a vulnerable move because what happens next is up to the bully.
Almost everyone in life needs to find a way to tell a hero story of themselves. If the bully is telling themselves a story that "its just some lighthearted fun", then that story will struggle to survive the uncomfortable reality of whats going on for you. Almost everyone I've ever met is like this. Decent people instinctively respond to vulnerability with vulnerability.
But yeah - sometimes people are actually sociopathic and want suffering for its own sake. Giving sociopaths more power is rarely a winning move. I can count on one hand the number of people who've responded to me expressing vulnerability by doubling down on their awful behaviour, or weaponising that against me. I don't think I've ever regretted burning people like that out of my life.
When one is working as part of a team (in a professional context), it’s one’s responsibility to ensure the delivery of one’s message doesn’t “clash” with others in a way that may feel as harassment or bullying.
If that’s unclear, most companies introduce etiquette and guidelines on what constitutes acceptable forms of behaviour and communication at the office/during work hours. It’s also a topic one can bring up with their therapist for additional tips and guidelines.
> When one is working as part of a team (in a professional context), it’s one’s responsibility to ensure the delivery of one’s message doesn’t “clash” with others
I think communication involves mutual responsibility, for both sender and receiver. When it goes wrong, sometimes the sender has failed to meet their responsibility, sometimes the receiver, sometimes both, and sometimes it is just one of those regrettable misunderstandings which is neither's fault.
> etiquette and guidelines on what constitutes acceptable forms of behaviour and communication
It is impossible to craft guidelines which explicitly cover every possible circumstance. Guidelines may reduce the incidence of cross-cultural misunderstandings (although one may be sceptical about how effective they really are in doing that), but they can’t possibly eliminate them.
> It’s also a topic one can bring up with their therapist for additional tips and guidelines.
I remember my father telling me about how, in the early 1990s, he got a job with a US-based company, and he started going on regular business trips to the US. He was rather struck by how some of his American colleagues would talk at work about having therapists - the way they’d talk about it, it sounded like they just assumed everyone had one (which is how you’ve talked about it here). Judged by the standards of Australian culture, it was rather odd - if someone felt they needed to see a mental health professional, they’d be unlikely to tell random people at work about it, and talking to work colleagues in a way which assumed they did have that need could cause offence. My father didn’t take offence, he was just amused by the strange ways of Americans-but someone else could have.
I think it’s extremely odd as a younger American. And frankly, I think the reality is that many people agree with the Australian/my perception, but know to just keep it to themselves instead of trying to change the culture.
My biggest gripe is that (1) not everyone has easy access to a therapist and (2) it’s not a magic bullet. Additionally, (3) it’s inconsistent with the norm of avoiding personal health topics in professional environments.
I guess what I’m saying is that many, many Americans agree with you, even if that doesn’t come across in the corporate or pop culture zeitgeist.
I agree that this is the rule in polite society, and I agree that its a reasonable goal 95% of the time. But its an impossible standard to meet 100% of the time. Alan Watts makes this point - we can only guarantee that we're inoffensive when we're dead. Or when we act like we're dead - taking up no space and sharing no opinions.
Walking boldly in the world will necessarily elicit reactions in other people. We don't get to control the reactions other people have to us. If the only thing you're allowed to do when someone hates you is shrink into yourself, then you cannot ever be noteworthy or famous in any way. (Because you'll get haters if you're noteworthy, no matter how lofty your goals are.)
You can also swing this argument the other way around. Nobody knows the exact shape of our childhood traumas. Growing up requires that we revisit those places that still hurt in us to be able to heal our wounds. I don't want anyone trying to protect me from that process, because I need to go through that pain in order to grow into the healthiest version of myself.
Shying away from telling me something because you're afraid I'll get hurt also blocks any possibility of deeper intimacy.
I wasn't making a universal claim about all communication, I was just saying it's possible to be honest without being a dick
> I don’t think you’re entitled to an example after being so reductive about the topic.
Am I the one who's being reductive here, or are you the one who's taking an ambiguous comment, interpreting it in a black and white way, and then posting this hypocritically reductive response here?
