course description

Once we understand how bullies are made, our attempts to unmake them can be truly effective and long-lasting. Most prevailing approaches to this problem assume that bullying is either learned behaviour or the result of failure to acquire social skills. In contrast, Dr. Neufeld dissects the bully syndrome to reveal its deep instinctive roots in the dynamics of attachment and vulnerability. This course has very practical implications that can be applied in a variety of settings. .

course objectives

1. to provide a working definition of bullying that will enable participants to recognize the bully dynamic in its myriad manifestations and across a multitude of settings

2. to make sense of the bully from inside out and from a foundation of understanding, to outline the steps required for lasting change

3. to create an understanding of the role of escalating peer orientation and of current parenting practices in fostering the bullying dynamic

4. to convey why conventional discipline and social learning approaches can make matters worse

5. to provide the conceptual tools - specifically attachment theory and vulnerability theory - to dissect the bully syndrome and uncover its instinctive roots

6. to provide basic guidelines for addressing the bully problem that can be employed in a variety of venues and settings

7. to outline the most significant factors in keeping students safe

course format

At least a day is required to deal effectively with this daunting subject and to provide a sufficient understanding of the problem to support creative intervention.

suitability and applicability

Bullies come in all ages and exist in all settings. The dynamics discussed apply to all. This course should therefore be of use to anyone interested in taking a more in-depth approach to bullying. The primary focus of this course however is bullies in the school setting.

a synopsis of the material

the bully enigma
Most attempts to change bullies, or even to teach them a lesson, are not only futile but counterproductive. The reason for this is that most interventions are blind, devoid of an understanding of what makes a bully in the first place. Part of the problem is that the bully is an enigma. There are at least three reasons for this. First of all, very few bullies would identify themselves as such or confess to the act. Secondly, bullies lack self-reflection and so cannot tell us about themselves. Thirdly, the violating nature of the bully's behaviour distracts from the salient issues and underlying dynamics. The symptoms are social but the dysfunction is psychological. The arena of violation is in children's relating to each other but the genesis of the problem is in relationship to adults. The demeanor is one of toughness yet the sensitivity to slight is acute. The behaviour is pushy and demanding yet the personality is highly dependent and immature. Unless we can shed some light into the internal workings of the bully, our interventions will inevitably be off base.

the bully syndrome
The key to making sense of the bully is not in what the bully does, but rather in what is missing in the bully. When one gets past the violating behaviour to the underlying functioning, gaping holes become apparent. Firstly, the bully lacks a sense of responsibility. There are usually two reasons for this deficiency: a) a lack of an underlying sense of agency or b) the child is too defended against vulnerability to feel responsible. Both appear to be true in the bully. To spend effort trying to make the bully accountable does little to change this state of affairs and only convinces the bully that adults are against him or her, which hardens the bully even further. If the bully was capable of feeling responsible, he or she would not be a bully in the first place.

Secondly, the bully lacks adaptive functioning. The bully cannot deal with change and therefore seeks the familiar. The bully does not learn from mistakes, benefit from negative experience, or change as a result of failure. Bullies are neither resourceful nor resilient. Adults who are unaware of this dysfunction will inevitably insist on upping the ante: applying more consequences, teaching a lesson they hope the bully will never forget. If the child was adaptive, he or she would not be a bully in first place. Consequences work wonders for those who can feel the futility of a course of action. On the other hand, consequences only enrage and provoke those who cannot .

Thirdly, the bully lacks integrative functioning. Not only do bullies fail to mix well with others, at least not without someone having to do the accommodating to keep the peace, but they lack mixed feelings. That is the reason they are so untempered in experience and expression. They are impulsive, compulsive, rigid, brazen, dogmatic in their personality and inconsiderate and insensitive in their relating. This deficiency cannot be cured by training in social skills or by confronting the lack of empathy. This integrative dysfunction is deeply rooted in psychological immaturity. Unless these kids become unstuck they will remain untempered for life. If they remain untempered, they are also more likely to be uncivilized unless their behaviour can be orchestrated by someone they can look up to.

In addition to this lack of normal functioning, the bully does not properly depend upon those responsible for him or her and does not experience life in a vulnerable way. These missing elements when properly understood, tell the story of the bully and explains much of their personality and behaviour. When such children are mixed with others, bullying is bound to occur.

how bullies are born
The bully syndrome is the offspring of the union of two deep-seated problems. Each of the problems are fairly common and do not, in isolation, result in bullying. It is the combination of these problems that gives rise to the bully syndrome. One of the deep-seated problems is disordered attachments. Instead of seeking to depend upon those responsible for him or her, the bully seeks to dominate. This aberrant attachment pattern can be caused by a number of conditions that will be outlined in the course.

The second problem is one of emotional hardening or desensitization. Somewhere along the line, the sensitivities of a bully-in-the-making have become overwhelmed. The result is a child defended against the feelings of vulnerability and often perceptions that would lead to feeling vulnerable. There are a number of reasons this can happen, some within, but many outside, a parent's control. A child who is defended against his own wounds is not likely to be sensitive to the wounds of others. Besides, when a child is too defended against vulnerability for 'mad' to turn to 'sad', frustration turns foul and leaves the child with a mean streak. Adding frustration to the equation in such a child only pours gasoline on the fire and puts others at risk for getting hurt.

how bullies are unmade:
Attempting to treat a bully without addressing the contributing conditions is at best ineffective and, most often, counterproductive. Key to the bullies unmaking is proper attachment hierarchy and a tolerance of felt vulnerability. Strategies are presented that are grounded in understanding and that can be applied in a wide range of settings.

 (top of page)

genesis of the material

The experiential root of this material was working with young offenders. Once the mystery was unravelled, the bully syndrome became readily recognizable in other populations and settings and in children as early as toddlerhood and the preschool stage.

The conceptual roots of the material are in an understanding of the dynamics of attachment, vulnerability and psychological immaturity. These three keys unlock the mystery of bullying and reveal how bullies are created. These dynamics also point the way to change and the unmaking of a bully.

The didactic roots of this material were in the desperate requests of educators for something with a bit more depth and psychological accountability than what is usually offered.

chapter on bullying from Hold On To Your Kids

Bullies have always been with us, as anyone familiar with the swaggering but cowardly character Flashman from the Victorian boys' classic Tom Brown's School Days will know. We can all recall episodes of bullying from our childhood, whether we were participants, witnesses or victims. For all that, the phenomenon of bullying has only very recently reached such proportions as to become a subject for widespread social alarm. According to The New York Times, “in one of the largest studies ever of child development, researchers at the [U.S.] National Institutes of Health reported that about a quarter of all middle-school children were either perpetrators or victims (or in some cases, both) of serious and chronic bullying, behavior that included threats, ridicule, name calling, punching, slapping, jeering and sneering.”

It is rare now to find a school district in North America that has not found it necessary to institute anti-bullying programs or issue edicts of “zero tolerance” against bullying behavior. Yet the sources of bullying are little understood. The measures proposed to deal with it are predictably ineffective because, as usual, they seek to address behaviors rather than causes. In 2001, for example, The New York Times reported that, in the aftermath of a deadly high school shooting provoked by episodes of bullying in Santee, California, the Washington State Senate passed legislation aimed at cracking down on the problem. According to the report, “the bill's supporters say it may just help to avert more violence, but skeptics noted that the California high school where the shooting occurred already had antibullying programs, including provisions for anonymous tips about students making threats, and programs to help teenagers get along, like one called 'Names can really hurt us.”

In a study mentioned in the previous chapter, researchers from York University studied videotapes of fifty-three episodes of playground bullying among elementary school students and found that more than half the time the bystanders observed the taunting and the violence passively while nearly a quarter of the time some of them joined in picking on the victim.

A murder that drew international attention in 1997, that of the Victoria, B.C., teenager Reena Virk by her peers, was nightmarishly reminiscent of the Lord of the Flies. Reena was fourteen-years-old at the time of her death, and her accused killers were within a year or two her contemporaries. As in the William Golding novel, a group of adolescents turned on the most vulnerable of their group, their frustrations and rage not fully vented until her body lay battered and drowned. One of the murderers reportedly smoked a cigarette while nonchalantly holding the victim's head under the water. Many who didn't directly participate witnessed the beating, no one making any strong effort to intervene, no one afterwards being moved to report the incident to the authorities. No adult found out about the killing for several days.

In Lord of the Flies, a group of British choir boys are marooned on a tropical island. Left to their own devices, they spontaneously divide into bullies and bullied, to the point of murder. The interpretation many have put on the Golding novel is that children harbour an untamed savagery underneath a thin veneer of civilization and that only the force of authority can keep their innate brutalizing impulse in check. This impression is reinforced by the proliferation of media reports of kids victimizing other kids. Although it is true that the non-presence of adults in children's lives is a major cause of bullying, the real dynamic involves not missing adult authority, but the dearth of adult attachments. More accurately, the waning of adult authority is directly related to the weakening of attachments with adults and their displacement by peer attachments. With bullying, as with the legacy of violence in general, we see the effects of peer orientation. We can actually observe the same phenomenon in the animal world.

In a laboratory of monkeys at the U.S. National Institutes of Health a group of infants was separated from adults and, by default, reared only by each other. Unlike with adult-raised monkeys, a large number of these peer-oriented animals displayed bullying behavior and became impulsive, aggressive and self-destructive.

In a South African wildlife reserve, park rangers become concerned about the slaughter of rare white rhinos. Poachers were originally blamed, but it later transpired that a group of rogue young elephants was responsible. The episode drew so much attention that it was reported on the TV program 60 Minutes. An Internet account provides details:
The story began a decade ago when the park could no longer sustain the population of elephants. [Rangers] decided to kill many of the adult elephants whose young were old enough to survive without them. And so, the young elephants grew up fatherless.
As time went on, many of these young elephants roamed together in gangs and began to do things elephants normally don't do. They threw sticks and water at rhinos and acted like the neighborhood bullies… A few young males grew especially violent, knocking down rhinos and stepping or kneeling on them, crushing the life out of them…
The solution was to bring in a large male to lead them and to counteract their bully behaviours. Soon the new male established dominance and put the young bulls in their place. The killing stopped.

In both of these cases we see that bullying among animals followed the destruction of the natural generational hierarchy. Among human children as well, the bullying phenomenon is a direct product of the subversion of the natural hierarchy, following on the loss of adult relationships. In Lord of the Flies the children are left to their own devices in the wake of a plane crash that none of their caregiving adults survive. In the killing of Reena Virk in Victoria both the victim and her attackers were young people from troubled family backgrounds who were intensely peer oriented, having lost emotional attachments with adults. Even the Victorian-era bully Flashman was the product of a system that took very young boys out of their homes and placed them in institutions where peer values dominated their social life and relationships. Bullying has always been an endemic feature of British boys' schools.

The underlying problem is not the behavior itself but the loss of the natural attachment hierarchy with adults in charge. When youngsters can no longer look to parents to orient by, they are reduced to instinct and impulse. As I'll discuss, an instinct to dominate arises when there is a loss of appropriate attachments. Unfortunately, the dynamics of bullying behavior, so deeply rooted in instinct and emotion, are often overlooked. Only what's immediately visible to us, the bullying behavior and its deplorable impact on the victims, draw everyone's concern.

What's especially grabbing our attention is the epidemic of bullying in our schools. The traditional North American stereotype of the bully as a social misfit, socially disadvantaged, preying on the weak and the vulnerable but ostracized by the mainstream no longer holds. In our children's world, bullies are not outcasts. They often enjoy a large supporting cast, at least in school. A study published in 2000 by the American Psychological Association found that “many highly aggressive and anti-social boys in elementary school are rewarded with popularity.” The main author of this research was Philip Rodkin, a professor at Duke University in North Carolina. “When we think of aggressive kids, we tend to think of kids who are losers, stigmatized and out of control,” Dr. Rodkin said. “But about one third of these aggressive kids are ringleaders of groups in the classroom. These kids can have a lot of influence on their peers and on the classroom as a whole, even if they're a minority, because of their high status.”

It is popular but misguided to believe that bullying originates in a moral failure or stems from abuse in the home or a lack of discipline or from exposure to violence in the entertainment media. Some aspects of bullying may arise from such sources, but bullying itself, I am convinced, is fundamentally an outcome of a failure of attachment. In each of the earlier examples, the children and animals had been orphaned, physically or emotionally and psychologically. To study the effect of peer rearing, the monkeys had been separated from their parents; the elephants' parents had been killed in a cull. The adults in Lord of the Flies had died, and the Victoria teens were cut off from their parents. They all--animals and children alike--suffered from an intolerable attachment void. Their bullying behavior was an expression of immature beings not properly ensconced in a natural hierarchy of attachments. What research exists supports just such a conclusion. One study reported in The New York Times suggested that the more time young children spent in peer company and away from parents, the more prone they were to develop bullying behavior. According to the Times article, “Youngsters who spent more than 30 hours a week away from mommy had a 17 percent chance of ending up as garden-variety bullies and troublemakers, compared to only 6 percent of children who spent less than 10 hours a week in day care.”

Domination Without Caring
Why do a child's subverted attachments predispose him to becoming a bully or, for that matter, to becoming a victim? I have explained that primary role of attachment in human life is to make it possible for a mature, nurturing adult to take care of an immature and needy young child. To this end, the first item of business in any attachment relationship is to establish a working hierarchy. As discussed in chapter 5, under normal circumstances the attachment brain assigns the child to a dependent mode while the adult takes a dominant role. However, the instinct to assume either a dominant or a dependent position can be activated in any attachment relationship, even if both parties are immature and neither is in a position to look after the other's needs. The dependant looks up to the other to cared for, while the dominant one assumes the responsibility for the well-being of the other. Between children and adults, the appropriate division of roles is obvious, or ought to be. When the subjects are children and children, the outcome can be disastrous. Some children seek dominance without assuming any responsibility for those who submit to them, while other children become submissive to those cannot nurture them. The result of peer orientation is that powerful attachment urges force immature kids who should be on equal terms with each other into an unnatural hierarchy of dominance and submission.
Some dominating children do in fact become the mother hens, looking out for the younger ones, taking care of the needy ones, defending the vulnerable and protecting the weak. There are heartwarming stories of children taking care of children in the absence of adults. Alpha children may be bossy and prescriptive and inclined to order their brood around, but it is for the purpose of taking care of their dependents and executing their responsibilities. Somebody must do it, and these children rise to the occasion. Despite their bossy ways, they are not bullies. They do not pick on the weak, only on those who mess with the children they are taking care of. They don't attack vulnerability when they see it, but only others who would take advantage of it. They have no mean streak, only a fiercely protective instinct. They may indeed fight or argue but not to elevate their position, only to defend their dependants. The American classic, The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner, is a beloved fictional account of children assuming responsibility for each other. Four orphaned brothers and sisters decide to care for each other rather than to seek shelter with a grandfather none of them know. Henry, the oldest, even finds work to help support his siblings.

Children (or adults) become bullies when the striving for dominance is not coupled with the instinctual sense of responsibility for those lower in the pecking order. The needs of others are demeaned rather than served, vulnerability is not safeguarded but exploited, weakness evokes mocking instead of helping and, in place of concern, handicaps trigger ridicule .

Dominance does not elicit caretaking because the bully's flight from vulnerability is usually so desperate that he (or she) has become hardened against feelings of caring and responsibility. Bullies are, above all, psychologically shut down against an awareness of anything that would increase their sense of vulnerability-anything that would open them to experiencing consciously their capacity to be emotionally wounded. Bullies are blind to their shortcomings and mistakes. For bullies, invulnerability is a virtue--being tearless and fearless. To care is to be emotionally invested in something or someone. To feel responsible is to be open to feelings of inadequacy and guilt. "I don't care" and “It's not my fault” are the mantras of the bully.

Bullying arises when the attachment-driven need to dominate one's peers is combined with a hardening against the feelings of caring and responsibility that should accompany a dominant role. The bully's defence against vulnerability bends domination in a destructive direction.

It is no wonder that bullying has burgeoned in the world of our children.

What Drives Bullies to Dominate
A person who dominates is far less vulnerable than one in a dependent position and so the children who are the most emotionally shut down are also the one most predisposed to seek dominance over others.

To be sure, some kids are psychologically set to become bullies before ever being peer-oriented. In such cases, peer orientation-even if not the cause-provides amply opportunity for the child to act out his impulses to bully.

Sometimes the drive for dominance can be traced to a painful experience while the child was in a dependent role. When a parent or caregiver has abused her position of responsibility by lording over the child, by trampling on his dignity, by hurting him, it is not surprising that he would develop a wish to avoid a dependent position at all cost. In any new attachment situation, he will instinctively seek the top spot. As a young boy, Frank had lived with a stepfather who beat him regularly. When peers replaced parents as the attachments that mattered to him, this twelve-year-old was desperate to come out on top. He emulated exactly what was done to him. In this way, and not through genes, can bullies beget bullies.

A child may also be predisposed to become a bully if the parent has failed to give her the secure sense that there is a competent, benign and powerful adult in charge. The child, as much as she may resist parental direction and strive for more autonomy than she can handle, yearns to feel that she is in the hands of someone strong enough and wise enough to take care of her. The failure of parents to establish attachment dominance seems to be escalating, due in part to contemporary parenting practices and the devaluation of parenting intuition. It seems that many parents put their children in the lead, looking to them for cues on how to parent. Some parents hope to avoid upset and frustration by doing everything in their power to make things work for their children. Children parented in such a manner never come up against the necessary frustration that accompanies facing the impossible. They are deprived of the experience of transforming frustration into feelings of futility, of letting go and adapting. Other parents confuse respect for their children with indulging their wants instead of meeting their needs. Still others seek to empower their children by giving them choices and explanations when what the child really needs is to be allowed to express his frustration at having some of his desires disappointed by reality, to be given the latitude to rail against something that won't give. Still other parents look to their children to fulfill their own attachment needs. Many parents in today's highly unstable socio-economic climate are present for their children physically but are too preoccupied with the stresses of their lives to be fully present emotionally.
If parents are too needy or too passive or too uncertain to assert their dominance, the attachment instincts are going to move the child into that dominance position by default. Such children can become bossy and controlling. As one five-year- old put it to his mother, "How can you say you love me when you don't do what I tell you to?" Another preschooler whispered in her mother's ear "If you don't listen to me, I'm going to kill you when I grow up.” When parents fail to take their rightful positions in the relationship with their children, the attachment becomes inverted. If my own practice is any indication, children are coming increasingly to bully their parents. When these children become peer-oriented, their brain naturally selects the dominant mode. They will go on to bully their peers.

How Bullies Seek Dominance Over Others
The establishment of dominance can take many forms. The most direct way of elevating oneself is to boast or brag, presenting oneself as the biggest, the best, the most important. The most common way of elevating oneself, however, is to put others down and the bully is usually preoccupied with showing others who's boss and keeping them in line. The tools of the trade are plentiful: condescension, contempt, insults, belittling and demeaning, humiliating, taunting and teasing, shaming. The bully instinctively scans for the insecurity in others and seeks to exploit it for her gain. Bullies take great pleasure in making others look silly or stupid or in making them feel ashamed. To inflate themselves, they instinctively deflate others. They don't have to learn how to achieve such ends: the necessary techniques arise spontaneously from the psychology of the bully.
What a bully wants of course, is what every child wants--something to satisfy the hunger for attachment. For the bully, such satisfaction must be accomplished in the least vulnerable way possible. Of the six ways of attaching I listed in chapter 2, being the same as someone is the least vulnerable. On the other side of this coin, differences become the primary targets of insult. Anything that stands out, anything that renders a child unique, anything that is not valued in the peer culture makes that child a target for the bully. Bullies are repulsed by differences and they dominate by attacking the differentness of others. Another of the less vulnerable ways of attaching is to be significant, to be important in the eyes of someone. In their grasp for superiority, bullies exploit any apparent inferiority in others, just as they mock and devalue any perceived superiority in others. Bullies cannot stand anyone to be more important than they are.
Another way of achieving dominance is to intimidate. By provoking fear, the bully gains the upper hand. He is therefore preoccupied with alarming others through threats, dares, stories and other scare tactics. To consolidate his position, the bully must never be seen as being afraid of anything. Some adolescents go to ridiculous lengths to prove their fearlessness, burning or cutting themselves and showing their scars to prove they are not afraid. The power of these instincts must not be underestimated. Talking sense into such children is impossible, because our sense makes no sense to them.
One of the most primitive ways to establish dominance, of course, is to gain physical superiority. A teenager testifying at a Toronto trial in which he and three of his peers were accused of having beaten a fifteen-year-old boy to death reported that his friends had engaged in bragging after the assault. They were “bigging themselves up,” he said.
There used to be significant gender differences in this contest for domination as well as many culturally defined rules for how to do it. Peer orientation has reduced the gender differences, stripped the contest of its socially accepted rules and made the pursuit of dominance more desperate than ever. Girls are now also establishing domination through physically attacking others. Sometimes this girl fighting is interpreted as girls being less prim and proper, less inhibited than in times past-an expression, in other words, of “girl power.” That is far from the case-girls bullying each other is a sign of emotional regression, not of liberation.

Yet another way of attaining dominance is to demand deference, the bully's signature behaviour. Children perceive the bully as having to get her own way and stopping at nothing to achieve this end. What makes bullies so demanding? Again, we need to look to the dynamics of attachment and vulnerability. Although they are not aware of it, bullies are full of frustration because of the loss of their attachments with adults and their impoverished attachments with peers. Too psychologically defended to know the reason for their discontent, they make demands that are far removed from the sources of their frustration. They are trapped. They can never demand what they truly need-warmth, love, relationship. Deference-or the external trappings of it-is a poor substitute. Thus whatever bullies receive in response to what they do demand--no matter how fully their demands are met--can never satisfy the fundamental hunger for emotional nourishment. Their attempts to fulfill their craving are fruitless, but since they cannot permit themselves to experience the true futility of it all, they cannot let go. The bully's demands are perpetual.
Deference is demanded because it is such a powerful sign of loyalty and submission. It does not seem to matter to the bully that the signs of deference are given not from the heart but only on demand or under threat. Bullies don't hesitate to demand what they cannot command, to take what is not freely given. The futility of such an endeavor never sinks in; the bully is unable to differentiate between the external signs of respect and the real thing or to grasp that closeness and contact given on demand are not genuine and can never satisfy. Since the deference he extorts forcibly fails to satiate, both the bully's hunger for attachment and his frustration grow ever more intense. What he really wants-emotionally satisfying relationships-he can never get in these ways.

What Triggers a Bully's Attack
The bully is provoked to attack whenever his demands, even if unstated, are frustrated. For example, bullies are extremely sensitive to lack of deference. Even looking him the wrong way can trigger a reaction. Walking through a hallway containing bullies is like walking through a minefield, trying ever so carefully to avoid making a wrong move for fear of setting something off. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what that wrong move is until too late. For one child, Justine, it was brushing up against a bully's tray in the cafeteria. For Franca, it was dancing with a boy the class bully had marked as her own. For both these girls, their mistakes earned them months of threats and harassment, making their lives miserable and affecting their marks despite the fact that both children were pretty savvy, usually able to stay out of harm's way.

Many children are completely incapable of living without getting into trouble in a world where bullies reign. Unfortunately one of the primary impacts of peer orientation is to provoke defenses against the vulnerability required to read signs of hostility and rejection. When the alarm system is muted, children are less able to read the cues that should move them to caution. In this way, peer orientation not only creates bullies but prepares the victims. These unfortunate children are forever walking into harm's way. This was the story with Reena Virk, the beating and drowning victim in the Victoria atrocity. She was intensely peer oriented, but defended against feeling the wounds of her rejection. The more she experienced rejection, the more desperately she tried to belong. Even near the very end, she was reportedly begging her enemies to be nice to her and pleading with them that she loved them. Instead of being alarmed and moved to caution, she blindly walked toward her own demise. This dynamic, in less severe forms, is repeated hundreds of times every day in schoolyards across our continent. Children are walking into danger because they've successfully tuned out the social cues of rejection and the spoken or unspoken messages that should alarm them.

In addition to perceived disrespect or non-submission, the other primary trigger for bullying is a show of vulnerability. A child must never show a bully how he can be wounded or he will pay for his mistake. Reveal that something hurts and the bully will turn the knife. Reveal what is important, and the bully will find a way of spoiling it. To appear needy, eager or enthusiastic is to make oneself a target. Most of our children know this and carefully camouflage their vulnerability around those who might attack it. They can't say they miss us or they would become the laughingstock of their peers. They must not admit to being hurt by a comment or they will be taunted unmercifully. They can't confess to sensitivity or the teasing will never stop. They must learn to hide their fear, never show alarm, deny their hurt. To survive in the world where bullies reign, our children must carefully cover all traces of vulnerability, erase all signs of caring. No doubt, that is why so many children suppress any feelings of empathy for the victims of bullying.
In the skewed hierarchies created by peer orientation, some of the children become submissive. In this, they are governed by instinct as much as those driven to dominate. Faced with a dominating peer, submissive children automatically show deference. Part of demonstrating submission is to show vulnerability, much as a wolf in a pack turns over to expose its throat to the more powerful leader. The wolf is presenting the most vulnerable part of his body, indicating submission. This behavior is deeply rooted in attachment instinct. Under natural circumstances, showing one's vulnerability should beget caretaking. Saying that something hurts should elicit tenderness. In the eyes of the bully, however, such unabashed vulnerability becomes like a red flag to a bull, inflaming the urge to attack. Both the victims and their bullies are only following their unconscious instincts, but with dreadful consequences to the victims.

Backing Into Attachments
Among the dark predispositions of bullies is a peculiar process that I call backing into attachments. An emotionally healthy person approaches attachments in a straightforward fashion, head on, as it were. He expresses his needs and desires openly, revealing vulnerability. For the bully, it is much to risky to seek closeness openly. It would be far too frightening for a peer-oriented bully to say "I like you,” "You are important to me," "I miss you when you're not here,” "I want you to be my friend.” The bully can never admit to his insatiable hunger for connection-nor can he even feel it consciously much of the time.
So how does the bully attach? Remember that attachment has both negative and positive sides. I described this in chapter 2 as the bipolar nature of attachment. Here, then, is a second, negative way to establish connection. The bully attempts to move nearer to those whose closeness he craves by pushing away from people with whom he doesn't want to have contact. Though indirect and much less effective, this approach also carries far less risk of getting hurt or rejected. It allows the bully never to appear to care about the outcome, never to betray any emotional investment in a desired relationship. Instead of voicing her yearning for contact with the desired individual directly, the bully will resist contact with others, ostentatiously ignoring and shunning them--especially in the presence of the person she is really pursuing. In place of imitating the ones she secretly wishes to pursue, she mocks and mimics others. Emotionally too frozen to open up to those who count, bullies keep secrets from those who don't count to them-or will even create secrets about them.

Thus emerges the personality of the bully--distancing one person to get close to another, pouring contempt here to establish a relationship there, shunning and ostracizing some people to cement a connection with others. There is danger in loving but none in loathing, risk in admiration but not in contempt, vulnerability in wanting to be like someone else but none in mocking those who are different. Bullies instinctively take the least vulnerable route to their destination.

Those on the receiving end of this instinct-driven behavior are often at a loss to make sense of it. "Why me?" "What did I do to deserve this kind of treatment?" "Why does he pick on me when I'm trying to mind my own business?" No wonder they're confused and bewildered. The truth of the matter is that it is rarely about them. The targets are only a means to an end. Someone has to serve that purpose for the bully. It is nothing personal; it rarely ever is. The only prerequisite for being picked on is to not be someone the bully is attaching to. Unfortunately, when the unwitting pawns in this attachment strategy take such treatment to heart, their psychological devastation is all the greater. It is difficult to keep some children targeted by bullies from assuming that something must be wrong with them personally or that they are somehow responsible for how are being treated. If the children targeted are not shielded by strong attachments to adults, they are at great risk or being emotionally wounded, for a deeply defensive emotional shut down, for depression or worse.

As the bully population increases, so will the likelihood of children's finding themselves targeted. Wherever two or more peer-oriented children are gathered they are likely to back into their attachments with each other by ostracizing others. "Don't you just hate her?" "There goes that loser.” "She's such a snob." "The guy's a jerk.” The trash talk can be incessant. In the eyes of adults such behavior can be bewildering since, in another setting, these same children can be polite, charming and engaging. Some children's personalities can turn on a dime, depending on whom they happen to be with and towards which pole, negative or positive, the attachment magnet is being pulled.

The Unmaking of a Bully
It is important to remember that bullying is not intentional. Children don't want to be bullies--nor do they even need to learn how, for bullying can arise spontaneously within any culture. It is a mistake to believe that a bully's aggressive behavior reflects her true personality. Bullies are not simply bad eggs but rather eggs with hard shells, eggs that parents and teachers have been unable to hatch into separate beings. Bullying is the outcome of the interaction between the two most significant psychological dynamics in the emotional brain of human beings--attachment and defendedness. These powerful dynamics camouflage the child's innate personality.

If we are to rescue the bully, we must first put the bully in his place--not in the sense of teaching him a lesson, punishing him or belittling him, but in the sense of reintegrating him into a natural hierarchy of attachment. The bully's only hope is to attach to some adult who in turn is willing to assume the responsibility for nurturing the bully's emotional needs. Underneath the tough exterior is a deeply wounded and profoundly alone young person whose veneer of toughness evaporates in the presence of a truly caring adult. “I once asked a bully how it felt, having everyone afraid of him,” a middle school counselor told me. “'I have many friends,' he replied, 'but really I have no friends at all.' And when he said that, he just began to sob.”

When a bully no longer feels bereft, no longer has to fend for himself to satisfy his hunger for attachment, bullying becomes redundant. In the film version of The Two Towers, the second part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, we see a poignant example of how aggressive behavior becomes superfluous to a person once his attachment needs are met. Gollum, a slimy, twisted and emotionally starved creature, full of bitterness and hatred, engages in an internal dialogue with himself when he becomes attached to the hobbit Frodo, whom he calls “Master.” “We don't need you any more,” he says to his distrustful, manipulative and even murderous other self, “Master is taking care of us now.”

If, in summary, we were to describe the essence of the bully, we would speak of a tough shell of hardened emotion protecting a very sensitive creature of attachment, highly immature and hugely dependent, who seeks the dominant position. Although this behavior can be caused by other circumstances, it is a predictable result of peer orientation which both leads to and exacerbates bullying and which, among children today, is the most prevalent source of bullying. All the attributes of bullies stem from the combination of these two powerful dynamics: attachment that is intense, inverted and displaced, and a desperate flight from vulnerability. The offspring of this union is the bully: a tough, mean, highly demanding kid who picks on others, taunts, teases, threatens and intimidates. In addition, the bully is sensitive to slight, easily provoked, fearless and tearless, preying on weakness and vulnerability.

Peer orientation breeds both bullies and their victims. We have been dangerously naive in thinking that by putting children together we would foster egalitarian values and relating. Instead we have paved the way for the formation of new and damaging attachment hierarchies. We are creating a community that sets the stage for a Lord of the Flies situation. Peer orientation is making orphans of our children and turning our schools into day orphanages, so to speak. School is now a place where peer-oriented children are able to be with each other, relatively free of adult supervision, in the lunchrooms, halls and schoolyards. Because of the powerful attachment reorganization that takes place in the wake of peer orientation, schools have also become bully factories--unwittingly and inadvertently but still tragically.

Most approaches to bullying fall short because they lack insight into the underlying dynamics. Those who perceive bullying as a behavior problem think they can extinguish the behavior by imposing sanctions and consequences. Not only do the negative consequences fail to sink in, but they fuel the frustration and alienate the bullies even more. It is not the bully who is strong but the dynamics that create the bully. In the peer culture the supply of potential victims is also inexhaustible.

The only way to unmake the bully is to reverse the dynamics that made her in the first place: reintegrate the child into a proper attachment hierarchy and then proceed to soften her defences and fulfill her attachment hunger. Although this may be a daunting task, it is the only solution that offers the possibility of success. Current methods that focus on discouraging bullying behaviour or, alternatively, on exhorting children to behave towards each other in civil ways miss the root of the problem: the lack of vulnerable dependence on care-giving adults. Until we see bullying as the attachment disorder it truly is, our remedies are unlikely to make much difference.

Similarly, the best way to protect the victims is also to reintegrate them into depending on the adults who are responsible for them so that they can feel their vulnerability and have their tears about what isn't working for them. It is most often the children who are too peer-oriented to lean on the adults who are at greatest risk.

I recently participated in a Canadian national television special on bullying that included a number of parents whose children had committed suicide in response to being bullied. Also on the program was a girl whose life had been made miserable by bullying. The mother of the girl recounted that the daughter would burst into tears almost every day after school and talk about her distressing experiences. After the show, the hostess of the program expressed concern to me that this girl might also be at risk for taking her life. On the contrary, I responded, her dependence on her mother and the words and tears she spilled in the safety of their relationship were her salvation. The kids who had taken their lives were enigmas to their parents. Their suicides had been complete surprises. These sad victims had become too peer oriented to talk to their parents about what was happening and too defended against their vulnerability to find their tears about the trauma they were experiencing. Their frustration mounted until it could no longer be contained. In these particular cases, the children attacked themselves rather than others. In this way too, the bullies and the bullied are often cut from the same cloth-both lack adequate attachments with nurturing adults. No matter what unhappiness they may at times feel, children are not at risk for attacking themselves or others as long as they are able to lean on their parents, deal with what distresses them and respond with the appropriate feelings of futility.

Some people, including those regarded as experts, see the problem of bullying as a failure in the transmission of moral values. The perception is true, as far as it goes, but not at all in the sense usually assumed. The failure is not one of teaching our kids the values of caring and consideration. Such human values emerge naturally in children who feel deeply and vulnerably enough. It is not the breakdown in the moral education of the bully that is the problem but a breakdown in the basic values of attachment and vulnerability in mainstream society. If these core values were taken to heart, peer orientation would not proliferate or beget bullies and victims.

(top of page) - (return to Home Page)