Should You Forgive Your Childhood Bully?
Forgiving your bully requires assessing the consequences of their action and determining if they are worth your forgiveness
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F00a3e06b-8e4d-41af-bf92-83f69f9b5540_2372x3722.jpeg)
Maybe you had a bully in childhood, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you were the bully.
Welsh actor and comedian Katy Wix recently published a story where she recounted her experience of childhood bullying. When she was a teenager, she made a friend who was fun and with whom she did all the things that teenagers consider fun. They were best friends until they weren’t. Her best friend, Erin, became her biggest enemy and, even worse, her bully. In public, Erin would make fun of Katy’s hair, her speech, and her looks. In our teen years, we are just beginning to come to grips with how we look, and our self-esteem is still as fragile and soft as the inside of a medium-boiled egg. In these formative years, bullying and unfounded criticism could profoundly affect our ego and affect the way we think of ourselves in adulthood. Erin said some terrible things about Katy’s teenage shoulders, and Katy Wix didn’t wear a sleeveless top in public until she was 32. She also speech therapy, to get rid of the lisp that Erin was so mean about. Katy also had to spend some time in therapy. Although she doesn’t say what for, it wouldn’t be a long shot to guess that some of the issues she discussed in therapy were probably related to her childhood bullying.
One day, Katy was surprised to get a text from Erin. More than 20 years had passed, and adult Erin wanted Katy’s forgiveness. Erin’s text read “I’m so sorry I was such a bitch. Can you forgive me?”
Katy replied in short and crisp words “I don’t forgive you”.
There are many stories online of people who were contacted by their kids — now adults — who bullied them in high school. Most of them take the course of Katy’s story. After what must seem like a million years, a person who made your life a living hell and made you think about suicide as a kid looks you up on social media and sends you a message asking for your mercy for making your teenage ages the worst time of your life. Only a tiny fraction of these stories have the same end as Katy’s. In most stories, the victim forgives the bully, and with good reason. There is a strong case to be made for forgiving one’s childhood bully.
One argument is that forgiving your bully is the path to finding emotional healing. Bullying cuts deep, leaving a lot of deep psychological wounds that the victim struggles to heal from. When a person hurts you this deeply, it is normal, maybe even expected to have strong negative feelings towards them. Anger is one of these feelings. You could be angry at the bully for being such a devil, and also angry at yourself that you couldn’t stand up to your bully. Since this bullying happened in childhood and now you are an adult, you would have had plenty of years to imagine how you would get back at your bully if you ever came across them in public. Maybe you couldn’t help but imagine yourself punching him/her in the face as a drool rolled down your mouth. The sheer pleasure!
There is only but a little problem with this strategy. Anger, resentment, and that nagging feeling of revenge have negative effects on our physical health and emotional well-being. Actively harbouring these negative feelings can be stressful to the body and detrimental in the long term. This is one reason people forgive even their harshest bullies. Research has shown that forgiveness can be a coping reaction that reduces stress in the individual. In one study, people were asked to think of an event that greatly offended them and process them both in a forgiving and unforgiving way. While they were doing this, researchers were reading their blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductance, and muscle sensitivity — all measures of stress. The study finds that forgiveness reduces stress levels, and these individuals had better physiological readings.
Another reason frequently cited for forgiving a bully is the need to get closure. The American Psychological Association defines closure as the act, achievement, or sense of completing or resolving something. By forgiving the bully, people hope to bring a sense of resolution — if even a one-sided one — to the toxic relationship they had with the bully. Not everyone is lucky enough that their bully reaches out to them to ask for forgiveness. In a lot of cases, there is no way of contacting the bully (for different reasons) or the memory of the bullying experience is so traumatizing as to preclude any type of communication with the perpetrator. In cases like this, getting closure means forgiving your bully — even in absentia — and moving on with your life. Recognizing that most kids who bully other kids have a history of physical and mental abuse, live in broken homes, or have dysfunctional relationships with the principal adult figures in their lives can provide the kind of understanding that helps to facilitate forgiveness. These types of kids use bullying as adaptive behavior. In a lot of cases, being the bully puts the perpetrator on a pedestal in front of their peers, opening the door to other physical, social, or sexual resources.
But who says forgiveness is the only way to go?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Purple Messenger to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.