You Can't Break What's Already Broken: What Childhood Bullying Taught Me About Boundaries

I used to think that I was bad at relationships and I always destroyed them. This is a common theme with those who struggle with CPTSD or a similar disorder where they report that the disorder affects interpersonal relationships. Of course, it does affect interpersonal relationships because the symptoms can be hard to understand and work with, but I believe I was wrong that I “destroy” relationships. You can’t break something that is already broken, right?

For CPTSD Awareness Month, I want to explore more of what causes Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder so this article will focus heavily on childhood bullying but also includes the parental actions that can also compound the effects of childhood bullying.

There are many times in my life where I shut down relationships because I was scared of getting too close to people, but that idea that if I get too close to people I’ll only get hurt was formed by my experience with relationships that were close and did break. I always thought it was my fault that these relationships went bad or people didn’t like me, but the more that I heal the more I realize that those relationships ended because they weren’t good for me.

Over and over again I have asked myself the question of why I repeatedly attempted to form close relationships with people who treated me badly, and the answers I come to, after a lot of research and soul searching, relate back to how I learned, or didn’t learn, to set boundaries. In previous articles I discussed ways that dysfunctional families manipulate, and in this article, I want to look at how childhood bullying contributes to childhood development.

My First Introduction to Childhood Bullying

I am no stranger to childhood bullying. I was always the shy kid, but I do have a natural charisma, or perhaps, charisma by accident is a more appropriate way to describe it. My early childhood, as far as I remember, was pretty okay, but we moved a lot around New Jersey. Eventually we ended up in a small town in New Jersey when I was halfway through my second grade year (8) and that is where we stayed for the next 13 years, until after I graduated high school and started community college. This is where my life began to go solidly south.

Being the new kid in a small town school made me a target right from my first day of school. On my first day at this new school a girl who had volunteered to show me around wiggled a secret out of me and then told everyone so my place as being the gross weird new kid was solidified before I even had a chance. When you’re a kid, especially that early in development, you don’t understand ulterior motives, you just want to be accepted and have friends like all of the other kids your age. I went to school day after day to be made fun of which had never happened to me before. In all of my other schools I was accepted, I made friends, and I liked school for the most part. In this new school I went in every day to be tortured by my classmates, and some of the teachers were mean too.

That girl who pretended to be my friend and then betrayed me on the first day continued to do mean things to me for years. She always had dirty looks, she talked about me behind my back, accused me of copying her, and even tried to convince me I was sick when a teacher assigned us a few other students to be in groups together. In addition to her, the girl who lived next door to me kept demanding to be my friend and then making fun of me, spreading rumors about me, sharing secrets, stealing my things, breaking my things, and seriously would not go away. How many times do you need to tell someone you don’t want to be friends? Yes, she was a few years younger than me, but that doesn’t excuse the behavior. Yes, she lived in a very broken home, but she brought all of that abuse to me.

When the Bullying Turned Dangerous

When I was 11, the girl my age who lived at the end of the street tried to kill me with a German Shepherd that her family was taking care of who was a trained attack dog. Because both of my parents worked, I had no one to watch me after school so my mom insisted that I go down to her house after school so I could be watched by her mom. Why? I really don’t know because her mom wasn’t home. This wasn’t the first time she made me go, and I hated their house. I never felt safe there, the girl was always mean to me and up to something, and there was waste from their dogs smeared into the carpet. Their house was nasty. I pleaded with my mom to just let me stay home, and she forced me to go to their house.

One day after school we were all outside, and the German Shepherd was outside. This dog was very pleasant and I had been friendly with it on previous occasions. We weren’t fighting, or talking about anything heavy. One minute everything was pleasant, and the next she got an evil look in her eyes and called the dog and told it to attack me. I tried calling the dog’s name once thinking everything was fine, and then realized it was going to kill me and I ran and climbed up the jungle gym they had in their yard. The dog just so narrowly missed taking a chunk out of my butt because when I looked at my pants later there was a hole in them, and they were not loose fitting pants.

I just remember her down there laughing like it was the funniest thing she had seen in the entire world that she almost killed me, and I was now trapped in her jungle gym. I pleaded with her to put the dog up, and finally she called it off and I ran home as fast as I could crying. I told my family what happened, and the cops were never called. Her mom immediately gave the dog back to whoever they were watching it for, but the cops were never called. My mom continued to try to make me interact with them by making me talk to them. I was terrified and there was no one to protect me from whatever this girl, or anyone else wanted to do.

I remember a time later that this girl was down at my house in my driveway and I told her to leave and she just kept laughing at me and wouldn’t leave. So I tried to push her and get her to leave and my mom calls from across the street to yell at me for wanting her to leave when she wouldn’t, but wouldn’t make her get off of our property. My mom was always mad at me for “acting up” when I was a relatively good kid having a natural reaction to people not respecting my personal space, harassing me, and trying to kill me.

Where Was I Supposed to Learn Boundaries?

Where was I supposed to learn boundaries from? How did I learn about how you were supposed to be treated in relationships? I guess as long as they don’t kill you, everything’s fine right? These are only a part of the story that shaped my development over the years, and looking back on it, it’s easy to see how I repeatedly ended up in friendships and romantic relationships with people who were abusive in some way and then blamed myself for standing up for myself and the relationship subsequently ended. All I ever wanted was to be appreciated and loved, and the only way to get that was to let people use me. If someone abused me there was nowhere to go, and I’ve become homeless from leaving abusive situations three times in my life. There was never any help, or sympathy, and everyone always blames me for it.

Victim-Blaming and the People Who Enable It

I’ve learned that victims are so often blamed for their own abuse because that is what enablers do. So, the decisions to end a lot of friendships really were not always mine, because why am I going to stay friends with people who chose my abuser? Why would I continue to talk to anyone who thinks I should make amends to people who used me as a dishwasher slave? Why do I want to continue to interact with people who exploit blood relationships to help themselves to my personal property? I’m not condoning going “no contact” for any boundary that is crossed, but I am pointing out that is the natural condition of having self respect to not continue to be around people who think less of you than you do, or put you in emotional or physical danger.

How Trauma Teaches Us to Blame Ourselves

However, we of the traumatized persuasion have learned that we are the problem in anything that goes wrong in our lives. We take all of the pain of the things that have been done to us, and the trusted people in our lives telling us what we did to deserve it, and we internalize the blame on ourselves. We learned early that the world didn’t care about our feelings so we take abuse. We ignore red flags of abusive people because they seem like the same kind of people we have always known, and have no starting point of healthy relationships to use as a template.

It is not our fault that bad things have happened to us, or that people have made bad decisions that had negative impacts on us. However, it is always easier to blame someone else or ignore a problem than it is to admit that there is an issue. This is the type of family that my mom grew up in, and it was the energy that she brought forward into hers. What she did or didn’t tell my dad about what happened, I don’t know. I know that my dad tried to warn me about the friends I had not being good, and would have done anything to protect me, but my mom might not have told him because she didn’t want him to “overreact.”

My mom grew up with an abusive father, and I think that she still followed the same rules she had to follow for her abusive father even though my dad was not abusive. I think that because she grew up in an abusive household is a lot of the reason that she reacted the way she did to boundaries, and calling the cops, but I’m not making an excuse for her actions.

Learning Boundaries as Adults

In conclusion, much of the reason that many of us have to learn boundaries as adults while we are in the healing process is that a lack of healthy boundaries is often part of growing up in dysfunctional families. We learn to take agency of ourselves as we grow and if we are unable to take agency of ourselves, the frustration seems to come out in other ways such as acting out in school, emotional dysregulation, isolation, impulsivity, and self harm. Setting boundaries often results in losing people that aren’t good for you because they were enjoying taking advantage of the lack of boundaries you had. Once you become “difficult” by standing up for yourself, you naturally distance yourself from those taking advantage of you, even if it is just emotionally distant. It is difficult to get out on your own and really remove yourself from the situation entirely, and for some, it can be a dangerous process.

As an adult, I learned to settle for being treated badly, as many who suffered some kind of abuse as a child do, because I never learned that it was okay to assert my boundaries or healthy ways to do so. Learning social behavior is more than just lip service — it happens through the everyday interactions you have with your child and the resources you give them to keep themselves safe. Every time you tell a kid not to cry, send them away for disagreeing with you, or force them into social situations they don’t want to be in, you are chipping away at their sense of agency.

Were you a victim of childhood bullying? Have you had similar experiences? I'd love to know in the comments!

The Diary Of A Flopping Fish and any posts or articles published on Diaryofafloppingfish.com are not reviewed by a therapist or medical or mental health professional. Resources are cited, and opinion is opinion. No advice or opinions in any articles replace professional advice from a doctor, therapist, or any other kind of health professional. The author is not a licensed professional of any kind.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault or harassment, support is available through the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or online at rainn.org.

Say It With Your Chest Out is a series about saying the hard things boldly and standing proud while I say them. Shame teaches survivors to shrink and whisper. Here, we do neither.

This post is part of Say It With Your Chest Out. These subjects carry so much shame, but we didn't earn that shame and we don't have to carry it. Say it loud. Stand tall.

Did you like what you read and want to support Diary of a Flopping Fish?

Check out the shop here

You can leave a tip