Excerpt From the Revised & Updated Edition of
My Feet Aren’t Ugly
“I was bullied a lot in middle school and it took my confidence completely away. I think kids bully because they have low self-esteem and need to make others feel worse than them.”
This is a comment made from a teenager in high school about his feelings about being bullied. I think he is right about why kids bully. I find that the biggest bullies feel the worst about themselves.
The need for the bully to make others feel inferior so that they can feel better about themselves. If you bully, even a little bit, it’s time to go inside and ask yourself why? The effects bullying has on the bullied can be very damaging and the effects on you if you are a bully might be even worst.
When you do things, (not treating someone nicely) that you know aren’t nice, it effects your self esteem. So being a bully puts you in a perpetual state of not liking yourself. You feel badly about yourself, so you go pick on someone, then you feel worse about yourself. The more you bully, the worse you feel and the lower your self esteem goes. When you look at the qualities you like in others, one of those is probably kindness. It’s going to be hard to like yourself if you aren’t being kind to others. If you don’t like yourself, your self esteem takes a beating. So, even though you may be beating someone else up, you are actually beating your self up as well.
If you want to feel good about yourself and have confidence, you have to be someone you would like. Take a good look at yourself and your actions and be honest with who you really are. If you need to make some changes in the way you act, good for you for noticing. Bullying doesn’t have to be just a physical action, it can be saying bad things to someone to get them to feel bad. So, look closely and see what actions you can change. Let me know how it is going if this is an area of difficulty for you.
