imagining bullying: is this normal?

I frequently, very frequently and maladaptively, daydream about being bullied by a "mean girl." I imagine she's just teasing me and being playful. Bullying in and of itself is not something I enjoy, but I imagine it within the context of someone being concerned or just playing around trying to make me into a better person, maybe like a big sister would do to her little sister. I miss those kinds of relationships, because I feel like they insulated me from those harsh words children inflicted upon me when I was a kid (and as an adult, too). I've been told that I shouldn't have such masochistic desires, but doesn't it make sense, it does to me, to want something to become less scary and less scaring? When I was a child, none of my classmates who teased me really played with me. They went for my emotional main arteries and sliced right through them. They teased me until I felt anger and strong self-loathing and didn't really care how I felt about the situation. I did make one friend outside of school, though, who did tease me playfully, and maybe I got this desire from him. I also started watching a TV show where teasing other people because of the way they look was made to look normal and even inviting. I laughed along with him as I watched it. I was super sensitive at the time and didn't really know how to react to anything, but gradually I started to enjoy it. Now that I'm a 30 year-old woman, I still find my mind seeking it out. Part of my desire is just wanting to "win" socially, to show people I can take a joke, even to show people I might be able to make some of my own.

I was also diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder a few months ago, so if this seems like odd social behavior, maybe that's why.

Yes, I believe it is perfectly normal, and I do it as well. First of all I think the most important thing to know is these kinds of thoughts are defenses. It's like a scar over a cut. It will always look ugly, it will always be there, but it is there to strengthen a previously injured place. Those arteries have healed, just not perfectly. I too have been bullied, and still am (although quite frankly I am paranoid, these could be people trying to befriend me, and I don't know if I can exactly relate to some of these more severe bullying stories but I'll try my best), and what I often remember is looking at myself in a negative light and seeing the bullies as above me, somehow better. But in reality, it's just a large petri dish with a bunch of bacteria fighting each other, and once we are able to isolate ourselves from the verbal warzone we are almost literally above these more basic people who choose to live inside themselves and abandon connecting with others in order to feign a happy life. They will never be happy, stable, or content with themselves, and that is a provable fact.

Sorry, forgot to include I am also on the Autistic Spectrum as well, and most of my problems lie in acknowledging others body language and micro interactions as I like to call them.

I have the same problem and i would like it to stop. it is over 5 years now.

Yep, I'm still daydreaming about it. I usually imagine an older much more sophisticated woman teasing me and acting like sort of a social coach. This has gone on for years, and it really sometimes makes me somewhat dissatisfied with my life. I should be able to find a relationship like that in real life, I guess, but I think it would be breaking a lot of social rules. Older women don't normally tease younger women unless they know them well, and I imagine a sophisticated older woman would have better things to do than "entertain" a wounded thirty-year-old by role playing memories from her childhood. I guess it's a little weird to want that, but I feel like I need some kind of "fixing." Having a friend who could play with me, like a "mean girl" would, only in a friendly non-threatening way, would satisfy this desire a little.

The bullying at an early age would have reinforced the idea that you had low self worth and you probably felt to an extent that you deserved the treatment.

Telling you now that you are a strong, wonderful person who deserves happiness won't have much effect on you as you will not believe it.

However, if you have this image tainted with mild abuse then it becomes more believable and so is more acceptable to you.

justonemoreperson wrote:The bullying at an early age would have reinforced the idea that you had low self worth and you probably felt to an extent that you deserved the treatment.

Telling you now that you are a strong, wonderful person who deserves happiness won't have much effect on you as you will not believe it.

However, if you have this image tainted with mild abuse then it becomes more believable and so is more acceptable to you.

I agree with your reasoning. I felt bullied by my mom as a teen and when she would treat me bad, I did feel I deserved it. Like I felt glad I was getting what I felt, at that time, was what I deserved. Bullying messes with your mind. I am not sure if my abuse was mild or not because I cannot compare it to others similar abuse, but it is hard for me to believe and sometimes to even trust another person completely. Every time a good friends hurts me in some way, I withdraw and it becomes hard to trust again. But I do trust again, it just takes me time and I feel I have matured as a person because of my "lessons" (as I'll call them) in life. I have a lot of friends. I feel blessed.

quietgirl2538 wrote:

justonemoreperson wrote:The bullying at an early age would have reinforced the idea that you had low self worth and you probably felt to an extent that you deserved the treatment.

Telling you now that you are a strong, wonderful person who deserves happiness won't have much effect on you as you will not believe it.

However, if you have this image tainted with mild abuse then it becomes more believable and so is more acceptable to you.

I agree with your reasoning. I felt bullied by my mom as a teen and when she would treat me bad, I did feel I deserved it. Like I felt glad I was getting what I felt, at that time, was what I deserved. Bullying messes with your mind. I am not sure if my abuse was mild or not because I cannot compare it to others similar abuse, but it is hard for me to believe and sometimes to even trust another person completely. Every time a good friends hurts me in some way, I withdraw and it becomes hard to trust again. But I do trust again, it just takes me time and I feel I have matured as a person because of my "lessons" (as I'll call them) in life. I have a lot of friends. I feel blessed.

This is what's interesting about bullying, at least not bullying itself (as bullying is fairly weak) but the process of controlling a person.

It's not so much the affect it has at the time but the effect it has over the years that follow.

Do you feel a connection to the person who abused you? It might seem counter-intuitive but I suspect that a part of an abused person subconsciously attaches themselves to the one doing the abuse.

You justify your abuse by calling it a life lesson, so would that not mean that in some part of your mind you're grateful to the person who did it for helping you grow? You have a lot of friends, you feel blessed. Assuming that they're not words you use to try to convince yourself that you have a better life than perhaps you feel you should, you wouldn't have that happy, blessed life if it wasn't, in part, for the abuse you suffered.

All human interaction moulds us, we choose to put "good" and "bad" labels on it.

Maybe that's what this person is referring to; that in some way the bullying is making them feel safe, familiar and worthy of attention.

Yes, I feel a connection. She's my mom and I seem to want to forgive her over and over again. I feel the "life lesson" was something I learned so that later, I would not allow myself to be treated that way again. That is easier said than done.

I am leery, at times, wondering if my friends will treat me right, at times based on their behavior. For example, they can be jealous and believe I am dismissing them so therefore they are rude to me for no real reason. That is one example that actually happened. Trust is very hard once someone has been mean to me. You believe you will will be treated wrongly and become defensive.

I feel blessed that I have also experienced knowing good people who have treated me with love because yes, of having gone through a "bad" life with my mom.

It's hard for me to guess exactly what this person is actually saying. But I do relate to wanting to feel safe and worthy of attention. Lastly I believe everyone deserves respect from others.

quietgirl2538 wrote:Yes, I feel a connection. She's my mom and I seem to want to forgive her over and over again. I feel the "life lesson" was something I learned so that later, I would not allow myself to be treated that way again. That is easier said than done.

Actually, I would have thought that it would have been extremely easy, from the perspective that no one is going to be able to have the same effect on you again as you only have one mother. It's unlikely that anyone would have such a profound hold over you. You mother wasn't a choice you made; she was impregnated by your father, I assume, and you were the result. You had no choice over your upbringing. Every other relationship following your mother was a choice to an extent.

I am leery, at times, wondering if my friends will treat me right, at times based on their behavior. For example, they can be jealous and believe I am dismissing them so therefore they are rude to me for no real reason.

Is this true? You say that they have no reason to but below you say that you expect to be treated badly and become defensive. I would imagine this to be very frustrating for people who were not part of the reason why you're defensive. Maybe it's not jealousy. Maybe you've become so used to having defensiveness as a go-to that you can't see it objectively. What you perceive as jealousy might be frustration; "Here we go again."

That is one example that actually happened. Trust is very hard once someone has been mean to me. You believe you will will be treated wrongly and become defensive.

Hard or impossible? You don't trust your friends. If you did then you wouldn't become defensive as you would trust that they were acting in your best interest, as most friends do. So, either you're very bad at choosing friends or you put pressure on the friendship due to stuff that happened when you were a kid, which you expect them to suck up. So, if they are treating you like this and they weren't the ones to cause you issues then they're treating you with a certain amount of frustration but i wouldn't say that they were treating you wrongly, just that they're treating you in the manner that you're behaving. You expect this, deserved or not, and it reinforces your mental picture of yourself as being someone who deserves to be abused.

I feel blessed that I have also experienced knowing good people who have treated me with love because yes, of having gone through a "bad" life with my mom.

Most people are good, some people are bad. You're not "blessed" with knowing good people, you just know a statistically average number and type of person. Most people don't feel "blessed" to have good people like them, they just assume that they deserve it, the same as they treat other people well. The fact that you feel blessed probably just shows that you believe that you're getting more than you deserve.

It's hard for me to guess exactly what this person is actually saying. But I do relate to wanting to feel safe and worthy of attention. Lastly I believe everyone deserves respect from others.

No, actually we don't deserve anything. There isn't some guiding force that dishes out rewards and punishments, weighing us up in the balance to decide what we deserve.

We get what we get; how we choose to react to that then creates the environment for what we get next.

If you really thought you deserved it then you wouldn't mention it. Naturally we don't respect people from word go, we blandly accept people at a default level and then learn to either respect them or not. Respect is a verb; it requires action otherwise it's meaningless.

People who have been abused find a certain comfort in it. It removes a level of personal responsibility from them and allows them to behave in a way that is self-serving "I'm defensive but my friends treat me unfairly" is a contradiction to illustrate this.

A victim doesn't have to be as successful, or as confident, as anyone else and pity can take the place of genuine friendship if your expectation of a relationship is based on how people treat you superficially.

Look at your own signature; you list a pile of drugs to identify who you are. People might think I'm picking on you with this comment and their first thought would be "You shouldn't pick on her, she's broken." Is this what you want? Do you really want to go through life as an accumulation of pill bottles and pity?

The biggest challenge facing someone who has been abused isn't trying to get the image of daddy's penis out of their mind, it's being able to identify objectively which behaviours they deserve and which they don't.

kmb501 wrote:I frequently, very frequently and maladaptively, daydream about being bullied by a "mean girl." I imagine she's just teasing me and being playful. Bullying in and of itself is not something I enjoy, but I imagine it within the context of someone being concerned or just playing around trying to make me into a better person, maybe like a big sister would do to her little sister. I miss those kinds of relationships, because I feel like they insulated me from those harsh words children inflicted upon me when I was a kid (and as an adult, too). I've been told that I shouldn't have such masochistic desires, but doesn't it make sense, it does to me, to want something to become less scary and less scaring? When I was a child, none of my classmates who teased me really played with me. They went for my emotional main arteries and sliced right through them. They teased me until I felt anger and strong self-loathing and didn't really care how I felt about the situation. I did make one friend outside of school, though, who did tease me playfully, and maybe I got this desire from him. I also started watching a TV show where teasing other people because of the way they look was made to look normal and even inviting. I laughed along with him as I watched it. I was super sensitive at the time and didn't really know how to react to anything, but gradually I started to enjoy it. Now that I'm a 30 year-old woman, I still find my mind seeking it out. Part of my desire is just wanting to "win" socially, to show people I can take a joke, even to show people I might be able to make some of my own.

I was also diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder a few months ago, so if this seems like odd social behavior, maybe that's why.

Back to your original post. To sum up my thoughts to you. Yes, some people are just plain mean people and it's important to see them for who they are, mean people. I hope you find nice and good people who are genuine in your life. Wishing you the best.