Breaking the Bully Cycle

My journey through anxiety, insecurity and addiction

I always blamed myself. I never could have imagined that anyone else was responsible for my pain. I somehow felt like I always deserved it. Like it was the role I was destined to play. As though my oddness compelled others’ behavior toward me.

When I was little, I’d withdraw. Never the aggressor — I just wanted to fit in.

Too bad my hair was bright orange, my ears too big for my head and my thoughts too fast to share. Socializing just felt unnatural. I was constantly one foot in, one foot somewhere else. I’m sure it looked like an awkward, halting exchange.

Combined with my genetic ginger jackpot, my inability to effectively articulate myself left me a soft target. Easy picking for the more advanced kids born well before my late-May birthday.*

When we started reading books out loud in class is when it really got hairy. The automatic relay of visual sensory input to verbal output was thrown off by the goat rodeo churning away in my mind. My attention would pivot from reading to thinking about others hearing me reading to judgement about my reading in the moment.

The words just didn’t come out right for a while — which only made me feel more disconnected. Seeing private tutors to get myself on track only added to my view of myself as someone on the outside looking in.

I couldn’t break through the invisible bubble until 5thgrade. A teacher named Mrs. Anderson set me straight. I don’t remember exactly what she did or said, but I got special attention, the kind of special attention that actually made me feel valued and a part of everyone else. She gave me permission to stand up for myself, implicitly agreeing that the other kid was an ass.

My next tense encounter was during recess on the waterlogged field. I grabbed him by the arm and threw him headfirst into a muddy puddle in the long jump pit. I had to see the principal, but it was a formality that propped up my pride. My justification was reinforced by figures of authority, and that’s how I learned to stand up for myself and step out of the internal monologue of my mind.

Higher Education

My focus shifted from fitting in to outperforming in sports and school. I wasn’t the smartest or the fastest, but I hovered near the top. My anxieties were still there, but I’d learned how to channel and hide them better. Achievements became a temporary salve to my insecurity.

Scenes changed, and the bullies shifted. Instead of smart-alecky, rich and entitled — they morphed into jocks too cocky for their intellect, high-functioning alpha @ssholes and the counterculture druggies.

I played soccer year-round and had cobbled together some talent — so I was called up. That’s when I really got it bad. As a sophomore on the first squad, I had become a soft target again.

With intelligence comes more sophisticated and creative ways to attack a pressure point. Instead of a “fireman,” my now dark red hair earned me the moniker of “dirty tampon.” The targeting and put downs went much deeper than stupid name calling. My confidence teetered on my daily performance, and failings were opportunities to strike deep and demonstrate superiority.

I couldn’t hide my insecurities from seniors who inhabited a new world with booze, drugs, parties and sex. It wasn’t hard for them to sniff out the insecurity and shame that I’d only just learned to hide.

I struggled through the beating my body took on the field, withdrew into myself again and fell in with the smokers. As an already anxious person, weed would elevate my nerves and the cacophony of my thoughts, but it changed the source of my anxiety. I decided paranoid and dulled out was better than insecure, desperate for validation and frightened of failure.

The drugs gave me a new crowd. Druggies didn’t talk sh*t like the older alphas. So, I stayed a floater, friends with everyone and close with a handful. I adapted the chameleonic talent of people pleasing to prop up my flagging confidence. Along with steadily increasing consumption that shifted to alcohol, the approval of others sustained me through college and my first job.

The Stress Starts to Show

I jumped into the public relations agency world one month before the housing crash. A staff of 12 became 9. I was terrified but “too cheap to fire” or so said my dad. I learned quickly. It was the only way. I just had to force myself past my fears and perform. I usually didn’t have time to worry.

I’ve described it as walking an ever-shifting tightrope between rising client expectations on shoestring budgets and increasing reporter irritation and skepticism. I climbed the ladder, but the stress probably took years off my life. I was often tapped as the fixer (i.e. this client is going to fire us — so fix it).

I worked long hours against tight deadlines on an eternal hamster wheel where “more” was never enough. Agencies wanted more hours, clients more work, juniors more life and finance more money. It often felt as if each one of my limbs were tied to a different horse, all pulling in opposing directions.

Imagine, if you will, a few scenarios:

· You are told to terminate someone 30 years your senior

· An abusive client, who emails daily starting at 5 am, repeatedly tries to have members of your team fired for his own mistakes

· If you fail at saving a broken account you’ve inherited, 5–10 people will lose their jobs

· You are contacted at 11:30 pm and told that your client is a title sponsor for a show that depicts the murder of a caricature of Trump the next day

The details don’t matter. The point is that the level and variety of stress could easily crack a normal, well-adjusted adult. Well-adjusted I was not — so I increasingly became reliant on self-medication with alcohol to keep it together. What I didn’t know at the time is that dependence on alcohol actually upped the ante and elevated my stress baseline to toxic levels.

The Cult of Personality

Take that PR pressure cooker and top it off with a healthy handful of bullies, manipulators, narcissists and psychopaths for good measure.

“You just happened to have picked an industry with a disproportionally high number of people with personality disorders. The people you work with step over dead bodies every day on their way into the office.” — My psychiatrist who has multiple industry patients

Now, I know sociopath and psychopath are not words to be taken lightly. I realize that a psychopath has a very specific diagnostic criterion in the DSM-V.

And yet, the word psychopath rings true. The “th” lingers in my mind like a coiled snake hissing, focused intently and primed for a strike. I’m still haunted by the dead stare, void of emotion but full of excitement accompanied by glossy lips curled into self-satisfied smile. There can be no doubt.

In speaking with these special colleagues, it immediately became clear that their lives were based on different set of moral assumptions. Empathy and social justice were signs of weakness to be exploited. Self-interest appeared to be a moral imperative. Their confidence in their self-centered justification confused and disturbed me to my very core.

Role Playing the Past

I found it strange how often I ended up in close quarters with people who were emotionally abusive bullies or simply just enjoyed manipulation. I would assume the role of protector and try to help what I viewed to be vulnerable employees, which often led me to become a primary target for their ire.

What I failed to realize during the experience was that I was actually replaying bully scenarios from my childhood. I found them just like they found me. As a perfect match in our dysfunction, we each played out our roles to perverse perfection.

I also played right into agencies’ model perfectly. As a people pleaser, I was primed to seek ever more validation, which meant that I would put in substantially longer hours than others would allow. I enabled work to cannibalize my personal life by never erecting sturdy boundaries and rarely saying no. If I ever did, a little guilt trip and ego stroke could easily manipulate me into working through yet another weekend.

Eventually the pressure just became too much. The duct-tape no longer held together. My body couldn’t contain the red-lining pressure, battle against the bullies, protect my back, please everyone around me, help my family manage my mother’s health issues and continue to guzzle pure poison.

All my masks, defenses and hiding places simply shattered, and I lay there on the floor in a puddle of my raw pain and emotion.

I needed to feel the pain to move past it. I needed to stare down my fears and insecurities. I couldn’t walk through them until I genuinely understood what they were.

After shedding all the posturing and removing others’ expectations from my shoulders, I learned to embrace the truth that I’m enough. There’s nothing wrong with the little kid who just wants everyone to be nice to each other. He’s fine just the way he is.

I have built back my strength and esteem brick by brick from within, free from conditional attachments. I no longer need to live the life I felt trapped in before, forever doomed to play my role. My empathy is my core strength. I have embraced my talent and switched careers to help others to find a way through their own pain.

It would be easy to look back and view all the pain as a waste and continue the cycle of blame and shame. But I’m glad that I shattered.

If I’d never broken down, I could never have built myself up. If I was never terrified by my darkness, I could never fully embrace my light. If I’d never been pulled to the ground by the weight of my attachments, I could never emerge with so much weightless freedom to select my authentic path.

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*Note: I’d never considered the influence of my birthday timing until this Christmas Eve dinner in Hilton Head at which the waiter tried to pull a fast one on my iced red coffee and steal my sobriety (that’s a story for another day). Undeniably, the difference between a birthday in early September and late May is a giant gap when you’re 6. So, toss a late school-cycle Gemini into that ginger jackpot.