Dear Eric: I’m 75 and I have a problem I’ve dealt with for a long time. It has to do with bullies. In school, I had fists shaken in my face. I was laughed at because I was skinny, shy, and had bad pimples. I couldn’t wait to leave school each day.
At a very large company, I did well professionally; however, the bullying never stopped. It consisted of people talking over me at meetings or one-on-one, laughing when I walked through an area. At one point, management tried to make me supervisor over four people. One member was loud, outspoken, a bully, and would make fun of everyone.
To this day, I relive all the times I walked away from or endured bad treatment. I’ll never see them again, but the events still play in my head now and then. Since then, I’ve learned that they or their wives each had health problems. I say to myself, “What goes around comes around.” It’s easy to say “get over it,” but I can’t seem to. How do I get past reliving those painful events? Even writing this was painful.
— Living in the Past
Dear Living in the Past: I’m sorry for what you experienced. The way other people have treated you is not your fault. And, while you can’t go back and undo what’s been done, it is possible to change your relationship to the memory. This isn’t “getting over” it, but it does have the potential to disempower the memory and free you.
Right now, the pain of the bullying and the resentment that resulted are, understandably, taking up a lot of real estate in your mind. It sounds like this treatment, at school and at work, was never fully processed, which means that you weren’t given what you needed to heal from it.
Consider talking to a therapist about the experiences you had. You can go into these sessions with a simple goal: I don’t want to be tortured by the memories of bullying. A therapist can provide a safe space to unpack what happened, uncover other areas in your life that connect to this treatment, and help you develop healthy coping strategies.
Think of it as akin to the process of physical therapy, in which an injury in one part of the body might require you to strengthen another part of the body in order to heal. Sometimes recovering from trauma is the same. These bullies planted an idea about you in your head. It doesn’t have to be true, and it doesn’t have to stay in there.
(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)
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