From Bully to Bullied A Personal Reflection from a Counselor’s Point of View
- Mar 23
- 7 min read
For nearly 14 years, I've helped individuals navigate the complex landscape of addiction in order to achieve recovery. Nicknamed "The Casual Counselor", my approach is unconventional but undeniably effective.
“Sticks & Stones can break our bones, but names can never hurt us,” they said. It was the biggest and most painful lie I was told when I was just a little boy. And, boy! Was I little! In fact, up until the age of 16, I was a paltry 5’3”. I barely weighed more than 100 pounds. By the time I’d turn 17 and a half, I’d shot up to a respectable 6ft tall, and I had put on more weight to support the spurt. But previous to that, I had always been a pipsqueak. And I had always been scared.
Knowing that I was forever outsized physically by my peers, the little girls included, I learned early on to use my voice. Strike that, I learned early on to use my mouth. I was a wise-cracker.
The consummate class clown: sarcastic, sardonic, obnoxious, and, on some occasions, funny, I would rely on my quick wit and sharp sense of verbalized ammo to defend myself against the cruelty of childhood, and of other children.
Without realizing it, between the ages of 6 or 7, up until I was 10, I had become a bully. I would tease other children for the pleasure and accolades and laughter of my peers at the expense of anyone who was different. Whether it was another child who was overweight, the kid who was wearing clothes not en vogue, a youngster whose hygiene was poor, or just the heralded “geek”, “dork”, or “nerd”, I was always at the forefront of publicly mocking them and making them feel small.
I didn’t feel good about doing this. I wanted to make other people feel small, smaller than I felt on the inside and the outside, in the hopes that it would elevate me, make me ascend and grow as big as the bigger boys, and that it might bring me some semblance of popularity amongst the crowd I most wanted to emulate. “Cool Kids”. What it was that made them “cool” to begin with is one of life’s own mysteries. Whether it was attributed to conventionally good looks, expensive outfits, the hard-to-get sneakers of the moment, or just the naturally confident, I wanted to be embraced by those people.
And for my sins of being cruel to others, I was punished by the acceptance of the cool kids into the echelon of popularity and the feeling of being revered. I was also pretty cute and charming to begin with, and awfully vain on the outside. On the inside, I was in a perpetual state of dysregulation, disharmony, disdain, and disgust at the body and the person I inhabited. It felt like I was full of poison, and that maybe if I could just spread the poison to someone else, it could finally be drawn from my bloodstream.
It only caused harm. Sticks and stones. Bruises and cuts on the body heal in due time. Words, on the other hand, words meant to hurt they cut and bruise the unlucky recipient deep into their soul. I didn’t know that then. I know that now. I’ve done many things in this life of which I am not proud. But we don’t get any do-overs in this life. We just carry the memories of the stories and the feelings they bring. Feelings that hurt.
When I was ten, I took a hard tumble while skiing. The next morning, my urine was tinged with a brown color, and I told my father. The day was spent seeing a total of 3 doctors. First, my pediatrician. She sent us to Boston Children’s Hospital, where I was X-rayed and then received my first and only ultrasound. Then, I was introduced to the head of whatever department it is that specialized in kidneys.
See, my dad thought I had just bruised my right kidney when I took a wallop on the mountain. It turns out that the medical experts had discovered an abnormality that they usually see when an embryo is still in utero, and one that is easily fixed with routine surgery while the child is still an infant. They were seeing it now for the first time. A blockage. One that would have to be repaired surgically. I remember my dad being scared. I remember myself being excited.
Kids. At any rate, my kidney was fixed. I was in the hospital for a week. Out of school for a month. And by the time that the traditional 5th-grade field trip to our Nation’s Capital was happening, I was given the ‘all-clear’ to attend, though I was still in a fair amount of pain and discomfort and had to use crutches to get around. I didn’t want to miss that trip for anything. No parents. Me. My friends. Staying up late in our own hotel rooms, and to hell with the monuments.
What I didn’t know was that there would be other schools from other districts joining. Schools that were packed with kids I didn’t know. None of us knew them. Some of them, it would turn out, were pretty intimidating. They emanated an air of toughness and, like the old saying goes, “if you spot it, you’ve got it,” a penchant for teasing. For bullying. For cruelty. Still a part of my popular pack of peers, I was a walking wounded little target for them. The tiny kid on crutches.
That tiny kid’s ears had grown before his head had ever had a chance to catch up. We’d travel by bus to see the sights of Washington DC each day, and each day, a group of 6 or 7 strangers would make it their mission to track me down within the throng of youngsters, and get their recreation by giving me a hard time, teasing, mocking, and being cruel to me. “Dumbo”, they’d call me, and the group surrounding us would laugh and laugh.
That’s what I remember most. A portion of the kids who were laughing at my expense, as my cheeks blushed with fear and angst, they were kids from my school. From my friend group. And not one of them to a person ever got in between me and the bullies to stand up for me. It was in those moments, for 5 days straight, that I finally got a taste of my own medicine from the impact of the insults that were being hurled at me to a raucous applause by all of the onlookers. I had never felt so alone in my entire life.
The worst of the bunch of bullies, it’s funny, later on in high school, we would actually become pretty good friends. He was relentless in his torment of me. I’d find myself walking around with the teachers who were chaperoning the trip rather than with the other children I would have wanted to be with. It made me less of a target and alienated me more from my peers. That trip to DC wounded me in very deep and painful ways. But the ringleader of the bullies, I think it was on the last day of the trip, well, he ended up where I had been in the days preceding.
In the hot seat, as it were, I remember we were visiting the tall obelisk of the Washington Monument, preparing to board the buses to whatever the next stop was, and he was visibly distressed and having a conversation with one of his own teachers, squirming and clearly in distress. The teacher was trying to calm him. I remember watching this from about 50ft away. I didn’t know what the problem was until I, and everyone in his proximity, smelled the familiar and foul smell of feces emanating from his direction. He had pooped in his pants.
For the next day and a half, he walked with his head down, to other kids, some of his own group, including hurling mocking insults in his direction. They were calling him “Shit-Stain”. And I saw he was blushing. And I was glad and grateful that no one was paying attention to my ears that stuck out anymore. And I wasn’t joining in, because looking at him, I knew beyond doubt that he had never felt so alone in his life.
After that experience, and up to the present day, I made and kept a promise to myself: that I would never become a bully again, and that I would always try to stand up for anyone I witnessed being tormented by another. I’ve had the privilege to step up and step in for some kids being mocked and teased and treated cruelly by others, and I’ve made some friends along the way for doing that. Letting them know that they weren’t alone. It has never made me feel small doing that for someone else. It has always just made me feel right.
Not right in the sense of the ego. Right in the sense of the heart. People aren’t born cruel. They’re shown. They’re taught. By their families. Their loved ones. By the media. By neglect. By abuse. By divorce. By being exceptionally good-looking or being raised in a wealthy and privileged household. By insecurity. By feeling less-than. By hurt. Deep, soulful hurt that cuts way deeper than any bone could help to prevent.
Poison. People in our American Culture, young people in particular, who have the poison of trauma coursing within them, are not taught or supported in what to do with the feelings and impulses that are informed from the acidic hurt going on within them. It’s a natural assumption that if we just spread it to someone else, whether we believe they deserve it or not, than it surely will find its way out of us and bring us to an idealized place of inner peace and contentment and safety.
Instead, it worms its way through countless generations, on a large scale, an endemic of infected and desperate souls who feel so small and so alone that the notion of cruelty and anger begins to look like a viable antidote for the wounds that are festering inside of them. And so, they find scapegoats. They find people who cannot defend themselves, or who they perceive to be unusual and different, and they sling their arrows at whomever it is they have in their target’s sightline.
The current cultural paradigm and the wars therein are tangible evidence of the greatest lie ever perpetrated on the young people of this country and just how damn destructive it proves to be: that words will never hurt us. Children so often don’t know better when they are acting in a way that can be described as cruel.
To the adults reading this essay, I ask of you only this: What’s our excuse?
Read more from Joshua Bennett-Johnson
Joshua Bennett-Johnson, Licensed Counselor & Owner of JBJ Counseling
After working for 7 years in an amazing clinic, I launched into private practice in 2018. I love my job. I can say that without reservation. Watching people rebuild their lives is something that is worth more than any dollar amount.
