Can we shift our conversations about bullying, gun violence, and mental health in a more compassionate and objective direction?
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Bullying is universal, it’s about everyone. That’s what I’ve learned in researching and preparing to make a short documentary that will revisit my own experience of being relentlessly bullied in one high school class over three decades ago. That episode left a lingering stain and a certain trauma that’s never really left me.
People who bully and those who are bullied often have similar psychological and social profiles, with those causing harm more likely to have been originally harmed elsewhere.
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Despite years of therapy and participation in the recovery movement, I return instinctively and sensorily to the class where this all transpired regarding all things psychological, professional, and sexual. But the amount of time and effort I’ve spent healing myself is more than matched by scientific research bearing out my experience.
Those statistics and data not only ultimately explain my underachieving spinsterhood but draw some remarkable and highly counterintuitive connections that are persistently under reported by the media. People who bully and those who are bullied often have similar psychological and social profiles, with those causing harm more likely to have been originally harmed elsewhere. Moreover, not long after Columbine, a U.S. Secret Service report drew a link between the then-history of school shootings and bullying/harassment experienced by perpetrators.
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That link between harm caused and re-perpetrated is palpable for me as a quarter century after my bullying experience, I attempted suicide. While superficially my concerns at that point were unrelated, the long view has born out a connection back to that original classroom. Moreover, I have since been able to acknowledge that the many homicidal fantasies I’ve been plagued with throughout my life are in one way or another a mental re-enactment of what I endured.
Approaching sex or love with men felt excruciatingly paradoxical, with an insatiable yearning for true intimacy that felt much easier to palliate through fantasy-driven yet impersonal hookups.
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The class, taught by an African-American man named James F. Brown, was in essence a mini-reform school, a prison-like microcosm where unruliness was ignored and studiousness was sanctioned. The other male students were for no reason either openly hostile or outwardly threatening to me, throwing objects or hurling homophobic invective. I eventually isolated myself in the class, sitting away from them and simply staring out the window, as if I were somehow being punished. Pleas to my then-guidance counselor fell on deaf ears, and only through the intervention of another teacher did I find a way out.
I eventually, and barely, graduated high school, and college, and like many people, shifted away from my original passions. That class experience though remained stuck within me as a reference point for stress, intimacy and ambition. To be challenged or threatened meant repeatedly acting out a delayed self-defense under unrelated circumstances. Approaching sex or love with men felt excruciatingly paradoxical, with an insatiable yearning for true intimacy that felt much easier to palliate through fantasy-driven yet impersonal hookups. And genuinely asserting myself professionally felt disorienting, on one level as if I’d never earned it, with nothing beneath me, and on another this concomitant need to prove my worth through one form or another of asinine behavior that was ultimately self-destructive.
I haven’t even begun to film this documentary yet there’s been an outpouring of support, validation and compassion validating the long-term impacts of bullying as something that needs much more media attention.
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Having connected with several other “survivors” of Mr. Brown’s class who had different but equally troubling experiences, my initial reaction to their stories was relief that I hadn’t endured what they had. As heterosexual men, they’ve married and made families, and for all intents seem blandly normal. But the detached social retina—the disconnect between my insides, the outside world, and my desires— that Mr. Brown’s class left me with leads me to believe otherwise.
I haven’t even begun to film this documentary yet there’s been an outpouring of support, validation and compassion validating the long-term impacts of bullying as something that needs much more media attention. This film already has been a catharsis of sorts in many ways and at various points. My main hope, though, is that it will help shift our national conversations about bullying, gun violence, and mental health in a more compassionate and objective direction.
Mr. Brown’s Class – crowdfunding video from Alexander C Totz on Vimeo.
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Photo: Getty Images
I was the victim of horrendous bullying in school and during my first year in college. It was a very traumatic experience