The first two bullies in my life were my father and my brother. My father
used yelling, anger, slaps, trips, and occasional punches to give pain and get
my attention. He was very strong and liked to use his finger to jab me, which
felt like a spike especially to an eight-year-old boy. I remember one time when
I was four years old, I had an ear infection and I was on the couch being
cradled by my sister and crying from the pain. My father loomed over me,
screaming for me to stop crying, slapping me in the head and shouting at me
saying “if you don't stop crying I'll give you something to cry about." My
sister was yelling at him saying he does have something to cry about, he has an
ear infection and we need to take him to the hospital.
My brother was mean and hurtful before he left for Vietnam.
When he came back he was relentless. He would punch me, pinch me, pull my hair,
and make me cry, which would shame me in front of everybody. He would jump at me
when I walked by and I was always tense and on edge when he was around.
Sometimes he’d be talking, then jump out of his chair and tackle me and tickle
me so roughly that I would have bruises. He would verbally abuse me and
criticize me, and point out to anybody who would listen that I was putting on
weight and that I needed a bra. One time when I was in the bathroom he posted
his Doberman pincher outside the door and told the dog to guard the door.
Every time I tried to leave the bathroom, the dog would snarl and snap at me. I
was only rescued when an adult needed to use the bathroom. What I never
understood was that my mother allowed these two grown men to bully and abuse me
and would only intervene when I was either really crying hard or in noticeable
and extreme pain. It wasn’t bullying, it was boys being boys I guess.
I began martial arts training at my allergist’s suggestion. I wanted to, not
just because it was the Bruce Lee/ David Carradine
craze or to improve my
health, but really because I wanted to defend myself from these two abusers. I
wanted to learn how to hurt them. Of course I never thought of them as abusers or
their treatment of me as abuse, maybe because they were family. I never thought
of my father as a bully, just mean.
I
did think of my brother as a bully. When I would learn martial arts I only had
two opponents in my own life. They were the ones I researched how I could
defend myself from and what I could do to hurt them, to cripple them, to even kill
them, to get them to stop or to defend myself when they confronted me. And yet
I never considered telling anybody, talking to someone, that I was being
abused. We never use the words abuse or abused. In those days you just didn’t
say anything. So I trained my martial arts diligently, consistently, and with
deadly seriousness.
The day came when I had many years of training under my belt, no pun intended,
and I was strong. Scary strong. I was working driving a produce truck and
throwing boxes of fruit and vegetables around all day long and training martial
arts every night. Weekends were marathon training sessions. No girls. No beer.
No fun. Except martial arts fun. I slept four hours a night and practiced
tung-sze kung. One day when I went to the house, my father and I got into a
confrontation and my father began to verbally bully me and tried to intimidate me
physically by stepping into my space. I angled my body slightly, looked him in the eye and said "let's
go.” I saw my father hesitate, and then for the first time in my life, I saw
doubt in his face. And then he did what all bullies do when facing real
resistance. He caved. He walked away saying "the day I can’t beat one of
my kids with my fists is the day I get a gun and shoot them." I took that
as a full victory and never backed down from him again. The day he died was the
day I stopped training martial arts to hurt people and begin training for my
own well-being and peace of mind.
Like all bullies, my brother kept an eye on my martial arts progress, sizing up
his victim, and was always wary and on guard around me. It's a good thing
because I was always on guard around him, ready to unload and go to any
extreme. He quickly stopped putting his hands on me and later when he became a
broken-down, over-weight, has-been bully, I actually regretted not having it out
with him when he was in his full prime and a worthy opponent.He's not dead, just dead to me.
As I said, because they were family I basically rolled over and played dead to
these two bullies. I did have a third bully in my life. He was my
classmate in
fifth grade. A lot bigger than me, and with my asthma, he was also a lot
stronger and healthier than me. He would also physically abuse me and verbally
abuse me all under the guise of being my "friend." One day out on the
playground at recess he wrestled me to the ground, which he done many times,
and tickled me violently, which can truly be a form of torture when you don't
want to be tickled. I was a weak little boy. I could not resist. This day, a
Friday, I will never forget it. After he had me on the ground, he reached
between my legs and grabbed one of my testicles, and began to squeeze. It was
excruciating. I was both writhing in pain and paralyzed at the same time. I
begged him to stop and he wouldn't. To make it worse in my eleven-year-old
world, four girls were watching the whole proceeding and I was mortified to
think that they saw him squeezing one of my balls. He was laughing and
experimenting with various pressures and at one point I thought I was going to
pass out. The girls were laughing too. I was in agony both physically and
emotionally. Only the bell ringing stopped his rampage of my being.
That whole weekend I stewed over it. I was angry and ashamed and then an ice
cold feeling of vengeance came upon me. I didn't care if he was bigger than me
or that he would beat me to a pulp when I took my revenge. He had accomplished
what my father and brother had started. He had destroyed me and there was no
one left. I decided the first thing I would do when I saw him Monday morning
was to punch him in the head as hard as I could.
The whole weekend I thought about it, visualized it, and even practiced it.
For once I couldn't wait to go to school! As soon as I got in the hall and I
saw him standing at his locker. I went over to him with full intention in my
stride. When he saw me he smiled, that smile of knowing, like he got away with
the craziest thing with me and now our relationship has truly changed. He
started laughing and said hi to me and that's when I hauled back and I hit him
as hard as I could. He was able to turn his head but I caught him full in the
ear and it smashed his head against the locker. I braced myself for his return
onslaught. He was big, he was strong, and he was used to hurting me. It never
came. He sat down and held his ear and said “what did you do that for?” He
started to cry a little. I said it was for what you did to me on Friday. He gave
the most cowardly answer he could, “I didn't mean to hurt you, I was just
playing around."
Bullying equals abuse and needs to be looked at that way, felt that way, and spoken about that way until
we stop bullying on all levels. With the new bullying law in
Minnesota and all
the different social and psychological
ideas about how to handle bullies, in my
personal experience, the only way to handle a bully is head on...
