How to deal with bullies

There’s this piece of advice that often gets repeated in conversations about bullies that I consider to be very unwise at least, and extremely harmful at most. It seems to be thrown around by people who have either never experienced bullying first-hand (I have), or just told it to their very young kids and it somehow worked out so they feel compelled to teach this to others.

When someone assaults you physically, the advice often given by veery brave people is:

Just fight back, dude.

And it’s very wrong. I will explain why later on.

So, what’s really the first thing you should do when someone bullies you?

The simple answer would be that every situation is different and it wouldn’t be a satisfactory one. But we can narrow down the circumstances to be able to give a better answer to the question. Today’s post is about violence in schools. Bullying at work doesn’t concern us here.

Ok, so what do you actually do when someone bullies you?

Identify the threat and assess the danger.

It’s the first step that will tell you whether you actually CAN fight back or not.

How do you do this? Simple.

Bullies are classified into two main categories - pussies and pussies. Both are the same with one small difference - some of them remain pussies even when in a group of other pussies. Some of them don’t.

When you get attacked by either a single individual or a group of people wearing expensive clothing, stylish trendy haircuts and generally a not poor appearance, you are dealing with the most pussified type of a bully.

This really reads like pseudoscience (which it kinda is) but bear with me. What’s the psychology between people that clearly don’t have that bad in life attacking you? Trying to make their peen feel longer for a second? Trying to feel a bit more powerful? No idea. But that’s not our problem. The real question is - will they continue if you fight back?

Answer: usually not. You’ve been picked as the one bullied because you look weaker, seem weaker, or maybe even are weaker. No retaliation is expected from you. If it was, you wouldn’t be bullied in the first place.

Now let’s get to the second group - it’s the guys with three stripes pants, bald or almost bald heads, usually skinny. Awfully loud, generally non-caring, provocative, probably abusing drugs.

Now these guys may be scary. Their appearance suggests a particular subculture - it is likely they were involved in several fights through the course of their lifes. And even if they weren’t, which is also a possibility - the “subculture” poses a problem.

Now we are getting closer to the point.

Upon retaliation, you might scare your attacker - especially an unprepared one. The one who doesn’t expect retaliation or is scared of getting into a real fight. Even if you are weaker just showing that you aren’t going down without a fight will likely solve the problem. But only with the first group I described.

In the second scenario, we have two outcomes after you fight back:

The first one - you hit back and your opponent realizes that you ACTUALLY are way weaker than him. Previously he just thought it was the case. Now he KNOWS it.

And you’ve got yourself into a pickle. No amount of fighting back wins you this. You lost and are at the mercy of your attacker.

Ok, but what if you win? You scare off the attacker and he stops assaulating you. You won, right?

Yes, but only if you identified the threat correctly.

The first group backs off as they were looking for a victim that doesn’t fight back. The second group comes back. And will come back as often as possible to make you regret fighting back.

There’s no winning if the attacker has nothing to lose, and more importantly - has friends that aren’t fearful of you as well.

This is how these bullies operate - he knows he can bully you, because even if you fight back and he loses, he still has other bullies to support him. And you - a normal person will never find as many depraved people as them to protect you.

So the deal is simple - when fighting back, think whether you really can. Remember that you can’t show a sign of weakness. And the way to confirm to a bully that you are weak is to directly show them your physical strength.

As an addendum, to really differentiate the groups you need to know that they seek a different kind of weaknesses in victims. The first looks mostly for mental weakness - you are scared to fight back. The other one - when you are UNABLE to fight back.

And how do you know I’m not bullshitting you?

Well, I dealt with both of these characters. The first was simple - I did exactly as I’m saying - fought back against a group of 7, maybe more people. Was left alone and never had any more problems with that group. They were looking for mental weakness.

The other situation - it was one guy. A guy 2x bigger than me, that knew half of the town and some really devious characters. What got me out the situation was me knowing a guy that knew him and was able to talk some sense into him. Otherwise I don’t fucking know what would happen. I would still fight in order not to show weakness but that could have ended very badly for me as I described previously.

Stay safe people.