Bullying

Recently I was asked by a reporter to write about my experience with teaching kids with bullying problems. I thought I'd also post what I wrote to her here in case it can help someone.

A couple of years ago I taught a free course for a group of kids from our local youth mentoring program. Essentially the program is the same as the big brothers, big sisters program. These were mostly teens an all of them came from some sort of dysfunction. The head of the mentoring program had approached me about this and asked that I structure the program around anti-bullying. She said that the majority of the teens were regular bullies and their mentors had been struggling with this.

Our program is a personal defense program. We teach how to handle a street attacker. This is our focus. We do not teach sparring or any type of competition such as forms competition. So this means that the art is focussed around teach HOW TO fight but of course at the same time teaching how not to. Because of this the mentoring advocate was a little reluctant but she trusted me and we did the group to see how it went. She, at first, could not fully understand how teaching them fighting skills could turn them away from violence. However we have a very good reputation backed by a lot of people and she went ahead.

I took the stance that these were bullied kids rather than being bullies. I had mentioned to them that their mentor advocate had told me they were having bullying problems and I was going to teach them how not to be bullied. They, of course, assume I had gotten the message wrong from the advocate but kept quiet.

So I started the class by teaching some pretty brutal self defense moves. I knew it would probably horrify the advocate but I also knew I had to get the attention of the kids right off the bat and I had to hold it. It did the trick. I continued this for a bit. Showing them how to absolutely devastate an attacker. Teaching them that no one had the right to hurt them.

Once I knew I had them I changed things up a bit. I them started talking about why those bullies would do what they did. Basically I taught them a little about their emotions. I gave them that there really truly were only two emotions, love and fear. Love was equated with strength and fear with weakness. It became obvious to them that emotions such as anger were actually very closely related to fear. As we went through the day we talked about examples and showed how in each case the aggressor was actually acting out of fear. That a bully is really "cutting off the heads of others to make himself appear larger".

Eventually we got to a point of empathy for bullies. They talked about feeling sorry for bullies and that they would help bullies by not reacting to them. That true strength was through love and that really bullies were acting out of weakness.

I think this class had profound influence on these kids. Their entire concept of strength versus weakness had been reframed. They had a new way of looking at things and became stronger when faced with a situation.

At the end of the day the mentors were overwhelmingly pleased. It was a very profound experience for them and their mentees. And I had a lot of fun doing it.