https://www.powerofpositivity.

com/bully-behavior/

Bullying is as old as humanity and rises from a single primordial source: fear. Fear is a
common emotion for everyone and everyone deals with their own fear in different ways. Some
ways are healthy and rational and some are destructive and harmful. A bully, at heart, is
afraid. They are insecure in their feelings about themselves and so they fight that fear by causing
fear in others. Anyone has the capacity to be a bully if they are fearful enough.
It is easy enough to spot a bully if you are the victim, but it is much harder to tell if you are the
one doing the bullying.

HERE ARE 8 HIDDEN BEHAVIORS OF A BULLY (AND HOW TO

AVOID HAVING THEM):

1. A NEED TO CONTROL AND DOMINATE OTHERS

People are afraid they aren’t good enough, strong enough, smart enough or powerful
enough, and so they feel the need to prove to everyone, especially themselves, that they
are. They seek to control everything and everyone because they feel that their lives are
out of control, or they feel that someone can hurt them if they don’t have complete
control of a situation. They seek to dominate others in order to make sure that no one
can rise up and hurt them.
The best way to deal with this is to confront your own inner fears about your self-worth.
Confront the individuals in your life that made you feel unworthy or insufficient. Identify
your control issues and find the underlying reason you feel the need to control
everything and everyone around you.

2. QUICK TO ANGER

Part of a bully’s fear of being out of control is that their own emotions are not completely
in their control. They may be emotionally unbalanced or under a lot of emotional strain
and lash out more frequently because of this.
In order to deal with this, you need to find the underlying cause of your anger and deal
with that. Anger management classes and finding other ways to deal with powerful
emotions can help control those emotions better.
3. POOR IMPULSE CONTROL

Anger and fear can override our better judgment and eliminate obstacles to acting on
those emotions. People with poor impulse control struggle to control just about every
emotion. There are fewer mental breakwaters to drain the power out of a tsunami of
emotions. When a powerful emotion like fear or anger rises up, there is very little within
a bully’s mind to slow it down and prevent them from acting on that emotion.

Confronting the fears themselves will help with this as will attending anger management
classes. Being able to recognize when you are getting dangerously angry and then leaving
that encounter before things get out of hand is also a good skill to learn. Preventing
incidents is much better than dealing with the aftermath.

4. LACK OF EMPATHY FOR OTHERS

Dehumanizing someone makes it much easier to inflict mental or physical violence on

someone. When a person you are dealing with ceases to be a person and instead become
merely an obstacle to your will, then you are dehumanizing them. When you mentally
categorize that person by their job instead of by their name, then you are dehumanizing
them. It is easier to cuss out the customer service representative than Sally who has
two kids and works two other jobs to make ends meet since her husband got sick with
cancer.
You can stop a situation from escalating by recognizing that the obstacle in front of you is a
person with their own issues they are dealing with. Try to understand that they may be
having a crappy day just like you. When you can connect to another person’s situation,
then you are less likely to mistreat them.

INTOLERANT OF DIFFERENCES

People are social creatures and it is easy to identify with a group. It is an instinct to sort
ourselves out into “tribes” and anyone who isn’t one of “us” is a threat. Religious,
political, economic and social groups can easily dehumanize and demonize members of
opposing groups because they are part of another “tribe.” This stems from fear of the
other and from anger at perceived grievances between groups. Social media has taken
this to the extreme with “manufactured outrage” whereby you stir up the emotions of
one group against another group in order to make money.

When you accept those that are different than you and understand that everyone sees the
same things from different points of view, then you can try to find common ground and
meet in the middle. Instead of jumping to conclusions about someone’s opinions or
beliefs, try to understand why they believe those things in the first place.

6. DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ACTIONS

Serial bullies refuse to accept the responsibility for their violence and instead will shift
blame to someone or something else. They don’t see their bullying as their fault. They
are reactive rather than proactive. They are reacting out of fear and anger at someone
else’s misconduct. They see themselves as the victim or the hero. Most compelling
villains see themselves as the hero of their own story. They aren’t responsible for their
outrageous actions because they were just protecting something else like national
sovereignty, religious orthodoxy or racial purity.

Regardless of the situation, you are responsible for your own actions. You choose to act
or not to act by your own volition. You can choose to be gracious and understanding.
You can choose to educate the other person in a rational and reasonable manner. If
you threaten violence or use violence in order to get your way, then you need to accept
responsibility for that action because you could have chosen differently.

7. FEELINGS OF SUPERIORITY

Bullies often feel superior and use that feeling to dehumanize others as mere inferiors.
Bullies can feel economically, socially, racially or physically superior. They use that
feeling to justify their actions. When they feel that they are better than you, it gives them
the justification they need to treat you like crap.
Once you realize that no one is intrinsically superior to anyone else, you can empathize
with them. Everyone has something that they are good at, even though everything is not
compensated equally well. You might be the most successful investment banker in the
world, but without mechanics, computer techs, or carpenters, then you would have no
way to get to work, nothing to work on when you got there and nowhere to
live. Everyone has something special to offer the world.

8. BLAME THE VICTIM

Because bullies find it hard to accept responsibility for their actions, they often blame
the victim instead. “He/She made me do it,” is a common excuse. You are either in
control of your actions or you are not. No amount of hateful words or physical violence is
ever justified against a peaceful person or group.