Stand Up to Your Bully

Bullying is defined as a form of aggressive behavior in which someone intentionally and repeatedly causes another person injury or discomfort. I am sure enough of us have watched movies or tv shows in which bullying is depicted in some way. So I am sure we all have some kind of image we conjure when we hear the word bully. For some of us we might picture the kid who was held back a year or two that towers over his or her peers demanding they hand over their lunch money. While other might imagine someone more subtle that is just insecure and therefore wants to make everyone feel as bad as they feel. But this is not the bully I am talking about when I say stand up to your bully.

The bully I am referring to is not a physical person. The bully I am referring to is inside of us. And this bully is otherwise known as anxiety.

Now it is true that everyone worries and “listening to out gut” can help protect us from putting ourselves in harms’ way. Anxiety is an entirely different monster. Anxiety does the exact same thing a bully would. Anxiety has been known to call us names, make us doubt ourselves, remind us of all of our shortcomings, bring up failures in the past, over-exaggerate EVERTHING, and just overall paralyze us with fear so much so we avoid people and/ or places.

So how you stand up to your bully? You can start by questioning everything the bully says. Don’t be afraid to ask for evidence to back up the things it tells us. You could simply ignore the bully. Typically bullies want a reaction for you so ignoring them could discourage them. Another possibility you could try is externalizing the anxiety. Externalization is naming the bully in your brain, taking that tricky creature out of your head and placing it before you for judgment in the real world. Another possibility would be to externalize the anxiety or naming the bully. By treating anxiety as another entity in the room with its own voice and opinions, it makes it easier to disagree. By mentally separating from anxious thoughts, we get to see the bully as the annoying trickster it is trying to scare us into doing what it wants. The act of naming the bully helps us have a better perspective on how realistic anxiety thoughts are. This makes it more easy to detach from worry thought spirals.