The body is significant, because unlike our mind, the body is always in the present. It does not have our mind’s ability to be in the past or future, and when we are really fortunate, to be here in the present. It does not get distracted. Despite all of this, the body can still be confused. When I say confused, I mean that experiences of trauma can disrupt how our bodies can be in tune with the things happening around us. Trauma disrupts the body’s equilibrium.1
This passage comes of Lama Rod Owens’s powerful 2020 book Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger. As those of you who have read my own recent book, Fatherhood Is Learning, will know, I’ve devoted a good deal of reflective writing and inquiry toward how anger shows up in my own life, often in the form of unskillful attempts to banish anxiety or lack of control from my immediate experience.2 This has been a big area of growth for me, because if parenthood is anything, it’s a relinquishing of control over the content of one’s own experience, with and on behalf of one’s kids. So, when I learned about Owens’s book about anger as an instructive energy that, with practice, can be channeled into constructive action, I jumped on it.
But that passage I quoted above took me by surprise: “…experiences of trauma can disrupt how our bodies can be in tune with the things happening around us. Trauma disrupts the body’s equilibrium.”3
When I read that passage, memories of recoiling from connection with other men in adulthood came to consciousness first. There was my body, there, out of tune with the social possibilities of, say, connecting with other dads at a kid’s birthday party.
I wrote about withholding myself from friendships with men in Fatherhood Is Learning, too.4 I talked about the in-the-moment anxieties that I understood, like the fear of not measuring up; about how, when I became a stay-at-home dad, I struggled without the resource of a competent work persona to prop me up conversationally.
But another question remained unspoken in my previous attempts to understand my disconnection, heal, and move on: why was my anxiety so much more visceral and unnerving in the presence of other men, as if something inside me simply shut off?
That passage in Love and Rage pulled the cork out of a deeper bottle, and out came a torrent of memories of being bullied by other boys in middle school. Such memories had already been leaking out for weeks, but now they’d arrived in full. My stomach dropped, my throat got tight, my shoulders slumped, and I had to put the book down.
This is the first of several essays about bullying that I’ll be posting in the coming weeks.
Today, I share some of my own experiences of being bullied in middle school. I do so, I hope, as a prelude to healing; because I think it’s important to speak aloud how bullying is interpreted and internalized by the bullied; and because I know I’m not the only guy who carries such wounds within. Maybe you do, too. Maybe you feel alone with those wounds. You’re not alone.
A content/trigger warning:
Today’s essay includes descriptions of physical and psychological violence, including a scene wherein one of my bullies kills a small lizard. If this kind of thing is too painful for you to read, please take care of yourself: skip this essay and try the next one.
I was bullied in middle school, as the 1980’s gave way to the 1990’s. Given the passage of time, my memories tend to arise in an atemporal jumble, one clinging to another without respect for their real-life sequence, and most temporal precision is lost to me now. But the memories, some of which I share below, cohere around three different contexts:
6th grade gym class.
The school bus and my neighborhood bus stop.
Losing a friendship and the dividing line of male puberty.
6th grade gym class
Gym was my first class of the day when I started 6th grade. I’d change clothes in the boys’ locker room before and after class, which took place across a hallway, in the gymnasium. There were showers in the locker room, but no one used them: there was an unstated but unmistakable norm against full nudity in front of peers. Looking back, I feel bad for the teachers who taught our respective classes later in the day, because they had to cope with some very ripe odors.
Gym class is where I met my first bully, who I’ll call “S.” S was small like me, but he was charismatic, and that was sufficient in the early days of middle school for him to attract a couple of like-minded boys who helped him carry out the bullying. It started with taunts and tripping during in-class running exercises. S and I didn’t share any other classes, but sometimes we saw each other in the halls or in the bathroom, and these were occasions for verbal taunts, including sexually degrading comments about my mother. This was my first introduction to misogyny as a tool for bullying among boys.
Sometimes, I fought back. During one after-lunch encounter, S and I tangled with each other, each struggling to force the other to the ground; it ended in a draw. And I would sometimes revenge-trip S during running exercises in the gym—which, of course, would prompt him to come after me harder. You’d think that running would be a physically joyful or tiring experience, grounded in the act of running itself, but I was mostly preoccupied with tracking S’s whereabouts and protecting myself.
Things took a darker turn one morning before gym class. Inside the three-point line at one end of the basketball court, S’s two collaborators grabbed my arms and held me in place, my body undefended, and S kicked me hard in the stomach.
Sometime after that, I finally told my parents what was happening. They accompanied me to school early the next morning, and I told my story to the grade-level principal.
I don’t know what transpired later between the principal and S’s family, nor do I know what the principal said to our gym teachers. The gym teachers’ “solution” to the problem was to tell S and I to each pretend that the other didn’t exist. The solution lacked any kind of accountability or reparation, and it required very little from the adults around us, but at least it was an improvement: being ignored by S was better than being bullied by him.
If there was one silver lining in my experience of being bullied by S in gym class, it was that I wasn’t totally alone. Another boy, who I’ll call “T,” was also targeted, and he and I bonded. We looked out for each other in gym class as best we could, and we shared many other classes, too, so we became friends. We ate lunch together, and we did the occasional sleepover on a Friday or Saturday night.
The school bus and my neighborhood bus stop
T and I lived in different neighborhoods, so I couldn’t depend on his support at the bus stop or on the bus, which is where I became a target for some older neighborhood boys.
My most frightening memory of the bus stop is of my head being slammed into the ground one morning, when an older boy decided to perform an entertainment wrestling move called a “DDT” on me.
These were the days when wrestling superstars like Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Ric Flair, and André the Giant commanded a great deal of public attention, and the DDT was a move I heard discussed regularly, along with body slams and the like.
To perform a DDT, the wrestler entraps his opponent’s head beneath his armpit, arm about the head, and falls backward, so that his opponent’s head appears to slam into the mat of the ring. When performed by professional stunt athletes, the “opponents” are actually partners in telling a story. As the video below shows, the move is highly choreographed: the wrestlers are working together to avoid head trauma or other injuries.
The older boy who entrapped my head beneath his arm that morning had no such training, and neither did I. He was bigger and stronger, I couldn’t get away, and no one stood up for me. The DDT that he inflicted on me wasn’t a collaborative performance: it was an act of dominance.
The older boy fell backward, and the top of my head slammed hard into the ground. Pain shot through me from the top of my head. As I slowly lifted myself, I noticed a metal utility clean-out sticking out of the ground, not far from where my head had struck. Had my head hit the utility instead of the ground, the results could have been catastrophic.
As it was, I had a terrible headache for the entire school day; looking back on it now, I suspect that I’d suffered a concussion, though I’ll never know for sure. I still had the headache when my mother picked me up from school that afternoon, and I told her what had happened.
It wasn’t until many years later that I learned what had happened next. After learning about what the older boy had done to me and the day-long headache that had resulted, my father called the other boy’s parents and had a strong conversation with them about their child assaulting me. The older boy never touched me again.
Bullying took place on the school bus, too.
Sometimes, the target was me, as on one afternoon bus ride when an older boy called my name from several rows behind. I turned around and looked toward the voice. In that moment, the older boy spit a mass of saliva and mucus that struck and covered one lens of my glasses. He laughed, while I wiped the disgusting mess from my glasses.
But I wasn’t the only target. One day, a new girl who’d joined the bus route became a target to taunts and spitballs—and I took part in the bullying. I was thrilled at the temporary feeling of power that came with being part of the dominant group for once, even if only contingently and tangentially. Seated as I was in a middle row of the bus—the liminal zone between the dominant boys in the back, whose approval I craved and abuse I feared, and the less-dominant kids at the front—I became the active front line of the taunts and the spitballs, taking actions that, on a different day, could easily have been inflicted on me.
Later that afternoon, there was a knock on my family’s front door, and my mom answered. It was for me. When I arrived at the door, I saw the girl from the bus and several older, very big boys.
“I don’t want to talk to them,” I said. My mom, knowing something was up, didn’t let me escape.
The girl stood by, now the powerful one, as her older brother and his friends confronted me about my actions. Whether they’d wanted to kick my ass that day or simply put the fear of a beating into me, I don’t know, but the underlying message was clear. While my mom stood by, I tried to talk my way out of it. I blamed one of the older boys for my actions. Eventually, they left.
My parents were extremely disappointed in me, as they should have been. My dad put it bluntly: I should never be acting in a way that inspires some older brother to come around to beat me up. I should talk with the girl, he said, and try to make her feel at home, maybe even be friends.
But as my dad spoke, I knew I would not be reaching out to the girl in friendship. As the boy on the bus who’d been DDT’ed into the ground and spit on, my dad’s call for me to be a better person was drowned out by my fear of how the older boys would treat me if I did the right thing. Better to just lay low, I thought, and that’s what I did.
This is my most painful memory from middle school: taking part in the torment of another person and being too scared, feeling too small, to do the right thing. This regret dwarfs any other wound.
Losing a friendship and the dividing line of male puberty
The visible onset of puberty among some boys and not others divided still-small, “late-bloomer” boys like me from the ones who were starting to develop serious adult muscle. I both coveted and feared the veins atop other boys’ muscular forearms and the newfound power visible in their calves. Often, these were the athletic boys, including many of the most popular.
T, who’d been my ally in our 6th grade gym class, was becoming one of those bigger boys: taller, stronger, more visibly muscular.
He’d also become my new bully.
I don’t remember how the transition from friend to bully happened, whether gradual or sudden, and I’ll never know why. Had I done something, or was I simply an easy target for anger that had nothing to do with me? All I know is that T could exercise physical power over me when he wanted to, and that gave him power over my experience in the latter half of middle school.
There were moments of physical cruelty. In 8th grade, I broke my left arm accidentally while playing basketball on my family’s driveway, which put my arm in the cast. Not long after, on the front steps of the portable building where T and I shared an English language arts class, T grabbed my broken arm and twisted my cast. It hurt a bit, but far worse was the fear that he would injure my arm further within the cast and mess up my recovery. There were other kids around, people who knew me, but no one intervened. English language arts—usually one of my favorite classes—became a stressful place, suffused with anxiety about protecting myself from the bully who sat in the same room.
There were moments of psychological cruelty. In one particularly vivid instance, T bullied me into inviting him over to my house, as I might have done happily in earlier days. I hadn’t told my parents about T’s bullying, and when I acceded to invite him over, I tried to keep up appearances. I didn’t say anything to my parents that would complicate their friendly image of him, and my parents provided us the kind of space to talk and play that friends usually enjoy.
We started out playing Nintendo in the living room, me going along with whatever T wanted to play. Eventually, we went out to the back yard, and that’s where T found a little green anole lizard, which were common where we lived. A green anole, if grabbed by its tail by a predator, can detach its body from the tail to escape harm, and a new tail grows in place of the old one. This anole did not escape.
T picked up the anole and thrashed it violently several times on my family’s driveway. Then he took its broken body from the concrete, its face misshapen and eyes badly bruised, and held it for me to see. I was horrified but too scared to say so. I didn’t tell my parents or any other adult about it.
I don’t know why T did what he did that day. But the underlying lesson of his visit, as I internalized it, was pretty clear: I wasn’t safe, because T could bully his way into my home; and I should be afraid, because I had no idea what violence he might be capable of inflicting.
And there was the stormy day when, during our lunch period, T and I ended up squaring off in each other’s faces, while seemingly the entire lunch population crowded around us, beneath a covered outdoor walkway. T threw periodic insults at me, including sexually degrading comments about my mother. “Doesn’t that piss you off?!” called one of our classmates, seeming to suggest that such cruel mockery of my mother ought to trigger, necessarily, a violent reaction. (There it was again: misogyny as a tool of bullying, with an unmistakeable message about what constitutes a “real man.”) Another boy mimed a punch to the face, encouraging me to hit T.
I was mindful enough in the moment to understand what was happening: T was trying to goad me into striking first, so he would have license to hit me back. Even more disturbing: many of the kids that surrounded us seemed intent on the same goal. Everyone could see that T was taller and bigger than me; if we’d fought, I would have lost badly. Some people in that crowd, including some who knew me and shared classes with me, hoped to see me get hurt.
I refused to be baited, and I kept refusing until, finally, the school bell rang at the end of the lunch period.
The crowd began to dissipate, and T and I moved away from each other. Another boy with a tough reputation stood by as I gathered my school bag, and he escorted me to class. I’d had a run-in with this same boy once before: while I’d been using a urinal in one of the boy’s bathrooms, he’d come up behind me, grabbed my backpack, and pulled me backward. “What are you doing, using my urinal?” he’d demanded, while I’d tried desperately not to pee all over myself or the room. Then he’d pushed me back up against the urinal, saying, “Take your piss.” But now, here he was, that same boy, walking me to class.
As we walked through the middle school’s inner courtyard, I saw T ascending one of the stairwells. Following behind him, leering down at me, was S—the same boy who’d bullied me and T in 6th grade gym class. S was still small, like me, and in that moment, his sole power derived from playing sidekick to the bigger, stronger kid he’d once bullied. The earlier puberty of others hadn’t been kind to him, either.
I never saw T (or S) again after middle school, but I was left with disturbing questions.
Why would a friend turn on me cruelly like that? Is friendship truly so contingent and untrustworthy?
And why were other people willing to see me hurt, at least some of the time? Perhaps that’s not a fair question: perhaps the idea of sticking one’s neck out and standing up for another person was too scary to consider, as when I’d refused to befriend the girl on the bus. Or, as when I took part in bullying her, perhaps it’s all too easy to get caught up in the cruel power of the group, especially when one is also vulnerable. But when kids are surrounding you and encouraging a fight you can’t win, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that some people, some of the time, want to see you hurt.
Where were the adults?
That’s what my wife wanted to know, when I finally shared these memories with her after nearly 20 years of partnership. The memories had been welling up for weeks, dragging down my spirit for entire days, and I’d finally disclosed the wounds to her.
My parents had done everything they could. They showed up for me in every instance when they knew I needed help—I just didn’t tell them everything, and that was my fault.
But where were the gym teachers? The school administrators? The staff on lunch duty? The classroom teachers? The bus drivers? The neighbors who lived near the bus stop?
Had none of them noticed? Had they looked away? Did they tell themselves, “boys will be boys,” or “middle school is terrible for everyone,” or some other such abdication of adult responsibility?
The one time a school adult had intervened with meaningful authority on my behalf was after my parents accompanied me to tell the assistant principal about S’s bullying in gym class. Though I’m grateful for that intervention, it should never have come to that. Someone should have noticed—should have considered it part of their job to notice. There certainly hadn’t been any kind of systematic, proactive instruction that I can recall about what a positive school culture ought to look like, including what it means to resolve conflicts and how to be an up-stander and an ally, rather than a bystander, when you see one peer abusing another.
“The adults failed you,” my wife said.
I’m 45 years old now, and it’s been more than 30 years since I was bullied. Yet, the memories resurface, even now, as untreated wounds.
Before reading that passage from Lama Rod Owens—the one I quoted at the outset of this piece—I’d understood the importance of the word “trauma” primarily as it pertained to others. I never thought I had much claim on the word, compared with people who have been systematically oppressed by virtue of their race or ethnicity or their gender or sexuality.
But then I read Owens’s insight that trauma disrupts “how our bodies can be in tune with the things happening around us,”5 and it all came flooding back into my body, the past within the present.
Oh.
Deep breath.
No more running. Time to heal.
In the next essay, I’ll trace some connections between these old wounds and the man I am today, and I’ll discuss what some researchers are learning about how bullying in adolescence may impact the mental health and well-being of the bullied in adulthood.
Until then, may we all be well.
Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2020, pg. 127.
See my essay “Learning To Forgive the Man I Don’t Want To Be” in Fatherhood Is Learning.
Lama Rod Owens, op. cit., pg. 127.
See my essay “Learning To Connect” in Fatherhood Is Learning.
Lama Rod Owens, op. cit., pg. 127.