Hello and welcome back to Second Chance to Live my friend. I am happy to have you around my table. I will be 59 years old later this week. Yup. That’s right. It is my birthday. Recently, actually over the past month I have been experiencing some thing I had a hard time putting my finger on. This morning, as I meditated what I had been experiencing came into focus. Some thing that I do not remember experiencing in a long time. I mention that I am turning 59 years old to put this matter into perspective. What became clear to me was that I was experiencing bullying. Experiencing bullying from several adults in their 40’s. Not physical, but mental and emotional. Bullying done in retaliation for boundaries being set with them. Bullying done to me to intimidate and silence me.
Although I could not put my finger on what was happening at the time, I began to take steps to protect myself. The steps that I took involved documenting what I experienced in response to the boundaries that had been set with them. With each documentation, I made the parties setting the boundaries aware of the behavior. Documenting, as I have come to understand; is to let you, know that I know that we know. Documentation in real-time manages future he said, she said occurrences.
Bullying in the form of intimidation. Merriam Webster defines intimidation as: to make timid or fearful : frighten; especially : to compel or deter by or as if by threats. Dictionary.com defines intimation as: to make timid; fill with fear, to overawe or cow, at through force of personality or by superior display of wealth, talent, ect., to force into or deter from action by inducing fear.Vocabulary.com defines intimidation as: You can see “timid” in the middle of intimidate, and to be timid is to be frightened or to pull back from something. When you intimidate, you frighten or make someone afraid.”To frighten” or “make fearful” is at the root of the verb intimidate. Intimidation can be mental, emotional, spiritual and physical or a combination of one or more ways.
As individuals living with brain injuries we are in the process of figuring out how to live our lives and what works for us. Because we are in the process of figuring out how to live our lives, we may feel vulnerable. In our vulnerability we may find ourselves guessing at what is normal. In the process of trying to sort things out we may find ourselves questioning our judgment. We may also be struggling to trust ourselves. In response, we may find that we are trading our judgment for other people’s judgment. In the process we may unknowingly entrust ourselves to untrustworthy people. In our vulnerability these individuals may seek to take advantage of us. Once we invite them into our lives, they may use different ways to control, manipulate and intimidate us for their own agendas. For their own gain.
Being vulnerable can leave or open us to up to being bullied. Being vulnerable can lead you and I to being susceptible to being bullied. As a result we may be led to believe that we can not trust ourselves. By not trusting ourselves we may led to believe what other people want us to believe about ourselves. Through buying into those beliefs, we may find that we deserve to be mistreated and bullied. Such treatment and bullying can lead us to believe that we don’t deserve to be more than we are led to believe about ourselves by those individuals. Individuals who take advantage of being vulnerable. A vulnerability that we may have experienced even before we sustained our brain injuries. In November 2007 I wrote a 2 Part article to share some awarenesses that helped me to understand what set me up.
What set me up to be vulnerable. What set me up to be believe that I deserved to be bullied.
Click on the below 2 links to read what I discovered that set me up to be vulnerable and believe that I deserved to be bullied. What set me up to be vulnerable may have also set you up to be vulnerable. What set you up to be vulnerable may have also led you to believe that you deserve to be bullied.
Traumatic Brain Injury and the Identified Patient – Part 1 and Traumatic Brain Injury and the Identified Patient – Part 2
To read the conclusion of this series in Part 2, please click on this link: Brain Injury, Vulnerability, Bullying and Intimidation Part 2
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