Speaker 2
I was just thinking about it and just just met me so unbelievably sad to think about it. Look,
Speaker 1
I was lucky in the sense that, as you know, I had a beautiful family growing up in a really safe, supportive, loving environment. And so that was protective, right? And you guys as well, you know, that our extended family was so loving and so supportive. It did protect me through those years, but school itself was, was not great for a while there. And it was like, I think it might be helpful, you know, I'm sure a lot of people listening have experienced bullying in different forms. But we could perhaps think about the different kinds of bullying that people experience. Right. So clearly there's verbal and physical bullying. These days, there's cyber bullying as well that kids and young people have to navigate. But there's also kind of discriminatory bullying. And, you know, in terms of gender, sex, whatever else that we might discriminate. But then I think there's also relational bullying, right, which is within our relationships, whether it's at home or at school. And it might be kind of subtle power dynamics or people leveraging their social power against you. And that's, that's what I experienced. So my bully was the most popular kid in the class and had incredible social leverage and could turn the room on a dime. So you wanted to be his friend. And I was a lot of the time, but on a whim, he could quite easily decide, I don't like you anymore. And then not just hurt you in subtle or not subtle ways, turn your friends against you as well. And, and isolate you, you know, so that's what I experienced quite a bit. And as I started to kind of reflect on this, because I really honestly have not thought about it for a long time, I tried to, you know, as well, I guess we'll get to once I kind of found myself confidence again, sort of year 11 and 12, I tried to sort of not look back. But I think it's helpful to look back.
Speaker 2
So that's others in grade, Southern grade four, is that three or four? Yep. And then it went through to when you're in secondary school. So did that bully go to the same
Speaker 1
school? Yeah. By strange coincidence, this person went to my kindergarten primary school, first high school and second high school. Oh my God. So we went all the way through together. It does have a happy ending of sorts, though. So remind me to tell you that. Yeah. And once we're done. But yeah, it was very challenging. So I thought of a couple of stories, if that might be helpful, sort of illustrate. And in a sense, they might sound a little bit superficial, or, you know, like they don't mean too much. But when you're a kid, of course, your school is your world. And that's all you know, that feels like everything. And it also feels so important, you know, the things that happen there. So if you feel isolated at school, it can flatten you. And I'll get to the story in just a moment. But I think it's helpful, sort of think about from a developmental point of view, which is obviously what I studied. Thinking about the kind of big ideas about life and our sense of safety and security and loveability, likeability, these ideas are really, we learned those early, right? They're like the foundation stones about our personality and sense of self. And in a developmental framework, sometimes you can think about like a pyramid of self, how those big ideas we sometimes call them schemas, like they build your sense of self. And if there's kind of a fracture or something that goes wrong in one of those building those foundation stones, it reverberates through the structure, you know, the structural integrity of what we put on top of it. So that can be really helpful in terms of thinking about when I work with my clients, well, where are the chips in the foundation stones or which ones are reverberating upwards? That's going back through your
Speaker 3
past. And yeah,
Speaker 1
to find those really critical ones, because we never actually, our child self never leaves us. They're still there. Those vulnerabilities we felt as a kid, the way that we felt when we were younger, it's still there.