The Book On Bullies:

Foreword

 

Is there anything worse than a bully? Bullies can steal away happy childhoods and make school a minefield to navigate. If the predator is in your own family, then home becomes an internment camp. The good news is that you graduate from school and leave home, so at last you are free of the abuser—or are you? You start a career, and guess who is the supervisor or colleague? It is someone strangely familiar—the bully.

          The worst part of the bully scenario is that all the unfinished business from the past emotionally loads the present experience. We are reacting not just to what is being done to us today but to all that was done before. We may even believe the bullies’ propaganda: that by speaking up or confronting them, we’ll only make things worse. This belief system keeps victims in their place. They remain fodder for bullies.

          On the other hand, bullies are also victims. They may have been bullied themselves    as children, and, because of those experiences, they see the world divided into two groups: victims and bullies. Determined to never be victims again, they pick on anyone smaller or weaker, which gives them the reassurance they are powerful and invulnerable.

          Not every victim or bully has the above-mentioned background. Some people are born introverts and are more passive or reserved than others. That passivity, viewed as weakness, can make them targets for abusive people.

          Along the same line, not all bullies had abusive childhoods. There are those who were overindulged as children and never learned there were consequences to their actions. And still others were born with impulsive and aggressive tendencies. Whatever the reasons, there is a mind-set for victims and a mind-set for bullies. Changing that mind-set is the goal of this book.

          This book is being written to help all people, particularly Christians, who struggle as victims of bullying but don’t want to become bullies themselves. As a therapist, I decided there needed to be a practical handbook to enable people of faith to live their values as Christ directed: “You have heard that it was said to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43 NIV).

          As long as society sees meekness as weakness and so many of the reality TV programs and movies glorify quarrelsome, aggressive personalities, Christian ethics will not necessarily be held in high esteem. Demonstrating Christ’s love for the abusive and abrasive while still standing up for what is right is a tough balancing act.

How can Christians act and not merely react? Answering that question is the purpose of this book. A natural response to being bullied is to pray; to avoid the bullies who terrorize, hoping it will be over soon; or fight back with like tactics.

However, Scripture gives us an insight into fighting back: “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretense that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3–5 NIV). The war is on the inside as much as on the outside.

The intention of this book is to give concrete biblical strategies to empower people to know when and how finally to take action. Fortunately, the Bible is rich in true stories of heroes under fire who took control of their lives and the lives of others who suffered under the tyranny of bullies.

Christians have a mandate always to love and pray for enemies. However, today we are going to determine when it is time to turn the other cheek and when it is time to turn the tables