Why can't these people shrug it off? Just by math everyone can be expected to meet abusive people during their lifetime. Would be really useful...
Some people can't just "shrug it off" any more than some people can't just "walk off" a broken ankle.
they are not.
they are in fact worse.
I suffered so many physical injuries when I was a kid that I stopped counting them, none of them traumatized me.
They are now good stories to tell.
On the other hand emotional pain was so unbearable that there are people I still don't talk to 35 years later, because I don't want to remember.
You know why they are so terrible?
Because people wanted to "share the pain" and made a big fuss about it and forced me to "confront my feelings" "live the pain" and all that hippie stuff, that only made it worse and gave me the idea that suffering was something you couldn't escape from.
Now that I am a full grown up adult, I'm still sometimes scared by having the feeling of feeling something.
If people could just normalize the fact that everything pass and everything goes away with time (except of course real traumas, like war or being abused) kids would realize that there'll be a day when they will stand up for themselves and the high school bully did a really bad job at ruining your life, there are so many worse things in life, that you kinda admire how stupid they were.
> than some people can't just "walk off" a broken ankle.
actually, most of the times you can walk off a broken ankle.
Typically, a minor ankle fracture won't prevent you from walking.
As you have correctly pointed out: disappointing but not unexpected.
I'm actually happy, it means that usually for people their worse experiences are high school bullies or broken ankles.
It's a good thing.
I wish it was true for everybody.
we are talking about school bullying
The power imbalance of school bullying usually solves itself with age (like in a year or two).
> and some of it can ruin someone for life
yeah, it happens, rarely but it happens.
that's why I specifically wrote "except of course real traumas, like war or being abused"
> it's good because other things can be worse
it's good if that's the worst people usually suffer.
Never said it's good in absolute.
As it stands, people use it as a way to control others. Your post is a perfect example of this. You claim some people can’t “shrug it off” but you have no objective way of backing that up. Why are you saying it?
Since bullies cause exponential suffering why should the larger group of people, the victims, shrug it off when we can try to eliminate the problem?
Heck, even an adult can't be expected to deal with everything. That's why we have laws against mobbing, harassment and stalking.
Are there any side effects from this training? What if it reduces empathy or causes you become more aggressive. It seems odd if you become immune to constant emotional attacks it would have no other negative effects on your mental well being.
Bullying in adulthood isn't as intense as well in most situations. If someone at work came up to me, pushed me, and told me to kill myself they would be fired.
You might think bullying as an adult involves situations where you get over charged by a plumber or you aren't that aggressive at work so you don't that promotion. I'll admit this does happen but for the most part people who are professional and mature succeed and aggressive behavior is also wrong.
Also, in all those discussions I think it would be safe to assume "statistically speaking" unless being able to show one individual counter-example proves or disproves a point being discussed. Usually statements are not made under the assumption to be valid for every single person unless it is explicit.
(Edited)
I had my own physical bullying experiences in school, fortunately nothing constant. There was no way to get any help either (or maybe my uneducated and inexperienced kid brain just did not know any better), so I know the feeling of helplessness at least.
But you mention PTSD, which is really really severe. As I said, are we talking about some extreme cases here? How frequent are those?
The points made was as I see it for much less severe than "PTSD stage" things. When you get to PTSD it's criminal level and I don't think that this is what those people you claim have "lack of understanding" assumed was what we were talking about. I certainly didn't, and I still don't. I think extreme cases are something else.
I know teachers are sometimes well aware of some regular abuse that is going on. Typical stuff, like verbal assault, theft, battery, threats of violence. All criminal offenses in the real world. But in school it's just a detention or a request to curb the behaviour. I think it's difficult to judge the difference between a situation where the victim needs to learn to toughen up, vs a situation where the offender needs to learn that society doesn't allow these behaviours and there are serious consequences.
They had to move me to a private school because school thought I was the problem. The school had started publicly pulling me out of class in front of everyone for "therapy" from a "licensed child psychologist". (This was the last in a steadily escalating series of public humiliations and punishments by teachers and staff over 4 years.)
It quickly became clear I wasn't the problem because I did very well in a small religious school that was willing to make minor adjustments for a child with ADD.
This whole thing is absolutely bizarre to me because the school was basically your Midwest standard American suburb in the 1990s. There was no religious or political motivation that would explain it.
One thing I learned from this is that parents are often a terrible judge of the situation, often don't believe their own children when they say something is wrong, and often are afraid to do their damn job and protect their child from harm. In my opinion, they should have sued the school or at least made a much bigger stink about it and gotten other parents involved (as I wasn't the only one being bullied by the teacher), but they didn't. C'est la vie.
Because humans are simply not wired to be able to shrug off unlimited amounts of verbal or physical abuse.
> Just by math everyone can be expected to meet abusive people during their lifetime.
In broader adult life, you have much more control over your interactions. In school, a classmate is your classmate, pretty much whether you like it or not. You might be forced to, e.g., sit next to them, change in the same locker room as them, etc. (There are some ways around this, such as transfers & home-schooling, but they take time, require parents who can be that involved — which is hard if they, e.g., working too many jobs to make ends meet — and from the child's view, risks backfiring.)
It depends what it is. And it depends on the person's circumstances. A strong support system at home can be a big help. Friends as well. Some people just get a terrible hand in all areas of life and there's a compounding effect. The amount of abuse that is allowed in schools is insane. It's like a separate social system where it's everyone for themselves. Nobody wants to enforce laws, or protect people, and this is where we send our most vulnerable.
Evolution being what it is, I wonder, if this were true or true enough, about the tradeoffs are between the two groups.
It wasn't until I was 33 that I realized none of it had gone away. I'd just hidden and internalized the abuse and blamed myself for being the way I was.
And that's the normalized state-of-the-art in the field, so this is one of those "can we normalize building roads?". Yes, yes we have.
As an aside, did you know 30% of soldiers experiencing severe combat trauma will not get PTSD and 70% of soldiers experiencing combat trauma will not get PTSD? I bet for those in that category, they will simply not understand why the rest feel how they do. But it is how it is. For instance, I can't relate to how it feels to be short.