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.

I don’t think I agree at all with

> 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.