....Pleasure asks a greater effort of the mind to support it than pain; and we turn after a little idle dalliance from what we love to what we hate!
William Hazlitt "On the Pleasure of Hating" (1826)
Indeed, love is work, but hatred is fun and easy. Clearly, many people confuse the two, treating conflict and intimacy as if they are interchangeable, or, more accurately, to attempt to wholly substitute conflict for love. Because that's simply how many people are raised, in a home full of conflict.
With that in mind, I'd like to share some of the things I've been reading recently about bullying. There has been a lot of publicity about bullying recently, and at least some actual research on the topic to identify the risk factors in raising a bully. And it now appears that there are three categories of people in the bully ecosystem: the pure bully, the victim, and the bully/victim.
Some pure bullies are probably narcissists, and they love life. They are the typical bad guy in the 1980's teen movie who will shoot your dog and try to rape your girlfriend and "You can't do anything because my daddy owns this town!"
But most real life bullies are more like the mean little Sid in Toy Story who was mean to his little sister and dismembers toys. The house is depressing, and he has trained his dog to be aggressive. From the way Sid yells indoors, we more or less assume that's how his parents behave and his behavior is identification with his parents. At school he probably has few friends and knocks other kids down.
If Sid is a typical bully, he suffers from a bad environment, bad parenting, anxiety, depression, a negative attitude towards school and poor academic performance, and a combination of low self esteem and aggression towards others. He has negative beliefs about himself and others.These bullies have low social status, poor social problem solving skills, and other kids can be a bad influence on them, leading to delinquent behavior where they encourage each other to commit antisocial acts.
Notice that this is a movie and it takes only a few quick scenes to establish Sid as a standard issue bully. IRL, it must suck to be such a cookie cutter stereotype, and no doubt even Sid is desperate to have some sort of meaningful personal identity, but no amount of being a nasty little shit is enough to make him special (until his mug shot shows up online). The only thing that gives a small child a real identity is love, and we understand intuitively that Sid got the short end of the stick.
But by the time they reach adolescence, they have overcome their social isolation. They don't really seem to pay a price for their actions. Wasn't Biff popular?
Although these bullies may have a long term greater risk of arrest, substance abuse, and psychiatric problems, many of them go on to do quite well for themselves. Look at Biff in Back To The Future II, where he has become a powerful and ruthless industrialist. Maybe in the movies they finally get what coming to them, often in some highly ironic fashion where they are wrecked by their own evil plot. In real life, karma often can't seem to find them, and they are tooling around town in a Mercedes convertible snorting coke from the cleavage of an NFL cheerleader.
There don't seem to be that many childhood bullies who are full fledged narcissists. Nearly all of our images of narcissist bullies are the mean girls with perfect hair and designer clothes. Here's the scene from Kick Ass 2 where Mindy gets publicly humiliated after a bit of a rape scare. It's also a nice example of the crowd basically saying "Shame! Shame! Shame!"
The whole concept of shame and group shaming deserves a diary all by itself. Note that even in this scene, shame has sexual overtones, and a lot of what has been written about shame is in the context of rape and child molesting. Shame is used by rapist and molesters and narcissists to control their victims, so that's a topic of it's own.
But in the scene from KickAss, the mean girls are so accustomed their roles of bullies and victims that they are unable to grasp there are people (Mindy) who are free in all the ways that they are not. if they really did understand this, we'd expect full blown-mob behavior. But even psychologists say, sometimes it's best just to let people have their delusions of victory and triumph, because what are we going to do, deprogram them like in "Clockwork Orange" through months of torture? It's probably better to let them have their endless victory parade in which they fantasize how they have crushed and shamed people. But hey, at least they've fully embrace their sadistic urges, and that counts for something, right?
Victims often have quite a bit in common with bullies. Victims also have low "social competence," anxiety, and low self-esteem. They may also experience isolation and rejection by peers. In many cases. they also have a lifelong risk of depression and loneliness. Furthermore the same people that were bullied as children are more likely to be bullied as adults. You will notice that this is similar to the upbringing and lifestyle of the stereotype "codependent" person, while the bully is likely to grow up as an abuser.
The Bully/Victim is both a bully and a victim, and they have the worst outcome of any of the groups. They are like the bully, but they are more socially isolated like a victim. They seem to combine every risk factor of the bully and the victim. They have the worst mental health outcomes, and they are are risk of incarceration, committing violent crime, addiction, and relationship trouble.
When we look at the possible bad outcome of these groups we are reminded of typical personality disorders. Maybe it's not surprising since they have all sorts of contradictory beliefs and images in their heads regards themselves and others. At this point we are shifting gears from "group psychology" to "ego psychology." The bully/victim seems to be leaning towards an Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) that is characterized by criminality and a lack of attachments to others. A victim who has fallen of the bottom rung of the codependency ladder is a Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) who attaches themselves to other people like a frightened cat using every claw. Probably the easiest way to distinguish these groups would to look for guilt, because the BPD will have quite a bit and the ASPD might have none.
Where would find people like this? On the internet of course. Conspiracy nuts seem to be terribly socially isolated. many of them seem to have thought disorders that prevent them handling even small amounts of ambiguity. Also notice the people that are unable to maintain a linear train of thought (although that's going to go over into schizoid problems). On the internet we also see how people want to categorize others as either "good" or "bad" in a very primitive and infantile way, and I use the words "good" and "bad' in the object relations sense.
Further research should show that being an adult bully-victim uses "persecutory fantasies" (back to ego psychology here) to justify retaliation against bystanders. This is subtle, but great stuff. As a child, the critical voice of the abusive parent is "introjected" and practically hardwired in. When they are older they have to preserve their "idealized image" (Klein gets too much credit for this, see also Horney and Adler) of being a sweet person despite that gnawing ball of anger in their gut.
But most people maintain their angelic self image by "projecting" the anger onto others and accusing them of being angry and then attacking them. Usually it seems like rage is the emotion that people need to deny and project. Of course I also wrote that diary about "projective identification," which is when someone manipulates the other person into actually being angry or depressed. I did in one case see a boss hound an employee about being "depressed" when it was the boss that almost certainly needed to be hospitalized for depression. Notice how trolls are on line pretty much their whole life trying to get other people to be angry at them? They can tell themselves and the world:
See, it's other people who are the angry ones, not me!!!!
Now that the bully-victim has got someone angry at them, now they can build the other person up into a "
persecutory figure" (like abusive daddy) in a "
persecutory fantasy." The bully/victim sees themselves as an innocent victim, and they have built their sense of grievance to the point where they can attack someone. They have projected their aggression onto someone else, and now they can "
reintroject" the anger which they now blame on the other person. It's like "victim" emails an angry letter to someone and when the other person replies the "victim" erases the header to make it look like the other person originated the letter. Now the "victim" cries "Look, this angry person is threatening me!!!"The internet is also a great place to observe peoples persecutory fantasies. For many people, that fire hydrant is wide open. This gives them license to attack anyone.
Now the bully/victim is able to finally embrace their sadistic urges and achieve an "identification" with their abusive parent, although there may be a lucid moment where they say "Oh my god, I sound just like my father."
Elliot Rodger seems to be a variation on the bully/victim. He changed high schools several times because he claimed he was bullied, although it does not seem as if anything really unusual happened to him. He seemed to suffer severe social anxiety, and this would qualify as "internalizing behavior" that includes "withdrawn, depressive, anxious, and avoidant responses." He was small and has often been described as somewhat effeminate, so it's likely he got pushed around at some point. And he was very aware that his family was not as rich as those of his classmates, and he had negative feelings about himself and his home life. His home life was somewhat chaotic because his parents divorced, and his father bankrupted the family by making a documentary that was sort of his personal international vision quest. He was obsessed with the idea that he was rejected, especially by women, and he made himself socially isolated. Notice the huge contradiction between his real self and idealized self image - he described himself as "the true alpha male," but he was extremely inhibited in action and small physically. He did have endless persecutory fantasies, which are common for narcissists. Specifically, he was an inhibited narcissist, with an Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) who could not stand to take any action at all because he could handle failure, until finally he tipped over into violent narcissistic rage. You might say "but don't all those negative self opinions contradict the idea of being a narcissist?" To which I would point out that he was a narcissist that was failing, and the absurd "alpha male" self image is pure narcissism.
Although Elliot's mother claimed he had Aspergers (AS), this seems more like a divorce strategy to gloss over his mental illness (which would have called into question her parenting skills). Also, Elliot was described as lying constantly and effortlessly, which is not generally not AS but frequently associated with NPD. Here's a comparison of Eliot's statements to those of the Columbine killers. Although they were first characterized as the victims of bullying, it seems that the Columbine kids were "injustice collectors" who isolated themselves and nursed their hatred of the world, much like Eliot.
If someone is looking at themselves and questioning their own motives, my rule of thumb for my own behavior is to look for the sense of self-righteousness. If self-righteousness is present, it indicates that my motives are questionable at best. Also, self-righteousness often indicates the presence of another party that is playing some specific role, and often that person is literally setting a trap. Self-righteousness indicates some sort of emotional back and forth of an unhealthy nature.
Other things to look out for would be the various risk factors for codependency. And of course, if someone lives on their computer, the more socially isolated they are in real life. (It did not even occur to me while writing this that it would be especially relevant for our resident HR dog pile champions. Note that they can often be found wailing about how they are "bullied" but can't seem to come up with examples.)
If someone says "Oh my god, I sound just like my father" and they are also experiencing the usual bad outcomes of victimhood such as depression and substance abuse, that should be their cue to go to whatever appropriate 12 step programs are available locally. If that describes you, there are lots of friendly folks out there anxious to help, and they have saved a chair for you. And if you feel guilt, that's a good sign because it means there is hope.
And finding a support group is much healthier than solving the problem of social isolation through playing the victim. Otherwise the bully/victim playing the pure victim can call for a "Rescuer." The alert reader will notice that we have changed gears again from ego psychology to Transactional Analysis (TA) where the roles of the Victims, Rescuers and Persecutors make up the Karpman drama triangle. Once more, we can join the modern concept of bully/victim to previous work. Because the TA roles of Victims, Rescuers and Persecutors are not stable, the Victim can almost instantly become the Persecutor. The TA framework can easily hold the the dual role of the bull/victim as the Victim, Rescuer and Persecutor roles spin like a carnival prize wheel.
In ego psychology, we'd describe this switch from Victim to Persecutor as the ego defense of "splitting," which also just happens to feature prominently in Borderline Personality Disorder. I don't think there are any theories of the personality that would rule out the reversal of the victim and bully roles, and it's probably always described in terms of one of the more severe problems.