Being Bullied

Children being bullied is a big, big issue. According to the Anti-Bullying Centre at Trinity College, approximately 30% of children will experience being bullied. Bullying devestates lives. People carry the scars of it for years.

I know this because when I work with clients on self-esteem issues, it often turns out that bullying in childhood is a huge factor in self-esteem problems in later life.

I had occasion many years ago to read a lot of literature about bullying, and one thing which struck me was that, while experts can never predict which child will be bullied, they can predict which child will NOT be bullied. And that's the child who doesn't care what people think of him/her. It's the child who, while not aloof, has that air of slight separateness, the child who knows s/he's his/her own person, whose opinion of him/herself is not dependent on others' opinions.

Somehow bullies know that this child will not give them the reaction they desire, and so they leave them well alone.

Fast forward fifteen years, and my then 10-year old son came to me and said that the boys in our local village were calling him names and laughing at him. He was understandably upset by this. I suggested we do some EFT on this issue. I didn't know what to expect, but it was worth a try.

The boys were calling him 'Freckle-Face' and 'Granny'. We tapped (i.e., used the EFT process) on the 'Freckle-Face' comment first, and using my skills as a practitioner, and the awesome power of EFT itself, soon got him to a place of very deep acceptance. He was a freckle-face, and if they were trying to use that as an insult, it wouldn't work any more, because it was just an aspect of him.

The insult of 'Granny' was even easier to dispose of. In no time at all, of using EFT on that issue, he was laughing at their absurdity and lack of imagination and stupidity.

And so, he went out again, and he and I were both confident that when the boys called him those names again, he'd be able to shrug it off.

A couple of months later I asked him how it was going. He had to stop and think about it, and then said, "They never called me names again".

Well! As you can imagine I was very interested to hear this. That was when I remembered what I had read all those years ago, and realised that at some level those boys had picked up that there was no longer any fun to be had from calling him names, and they just never did it.

I worked with one other boy to test this, a boy called Cian. Here's the letter from his mother. Note that Cian had to stop and think about the issue when she reminded him - it was so completely gone he wasn't even considering it any more. 

If your child (or indeed you yourself) is being bullied, then contact me and let's see if EFT can help them. I think this process will work better with emotional or verbal bullying. It works by making the bullying victim reclaim their power by not caring what the bully thinks or says, and of course we can't make somebody happy that they're being hit. Having said that, EFT could still help empower a victim of physical bullying.