Did My Bullies Get Away With It?

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I want to start this post on a personal note, not to unburden myself, but because personal experience is sometimes the most honest way to test whether psychological ideas actually hold up. This is not a story told for catharsis. It is a story told to explain why certain research-based recommendations for dealing with the aftermath of bullying actually work.

From roughly sixth grade until I graduated high school, I was bullied almost daily. If there was a day when I was not threatened, humiliated, or physically assaulted, I do not remember it. This was before social media, which meant the bullying mostly ended at the edge of the school grounds, but it also meant there was nowhere to hide during the day. I learned how to run home strategically, where to sit in class, and how to stay quiet and alert enough to reduce the chances of being targeted.

I also fit the profile of someone likely to be bullied at that time. I was overweight. I wore thick glasses. I spent years in braces. I had no athletic ability. I was reasonably intelligent, but the emotional toll of constant bullying made it hard to perform the way I probably could have. When I went to college and the bullying stopped, my academic performance improved dramatically, which in hindsight says a great deal.

For years, I did not think of these experiences as trauma. Only later, after reading more carefully about how trauma is defined, did I realize that my experience checked nearly every box. That realization led me to ask a question I have heard many times from clients who have been harmed by others: Did the people who did this ever suffer for it? Did they ever feel remorse? Did they quietly rewrite their life stories so they could continue believing they were good people? I do not have answers to those questions, but I eventually realized they were not the most useful ones.

What helped me most was understanding bullying through a social competition lens drawn from comparative psychology, where human behavior is examined alongside that of other social species (Gilbert, 2016). Across species, individuals sometimes respond to perceived threat or low status by asserting dominance rather than developing competence or cooperation, and humans are no exception. Bullying is not about strength or superiority. It is a maladaptive strategy for managing threat through dominance rather than skill or connection.

The bully does not need to demonstrate real ability or long-term success. They only need to convince others that a hierarchy already exists and that someone else belongs lower on it. That is what makes bullying so psychologically damaging. The goal is not to win anything meaningful, but to pressure someone else into giving up before there is ever a fair contest. Over time, this pressure can lead people to internalize defeat even when there is no evidence they would actually lose if the “competition” were real.

In the animal world, avoiding a fight can preserve life. In the human world, being forced to surrender symbolically can quietly erode a person’s sense of worth.

What also stands out to me now is how certain bullies often seem convinced they understand exactly how the world works and who is destined to succeed. That certainty is rarely based on evidence. It is maintained through cognitive dissonance, the human tendency to cling to beliefs that protect our self-image even when they cause harm to others. People will do a great deal to preserve the story that they know their place and everyone else’s, including hurting someone else to keep that story intact.

I remember being told, after winning a college scholarship, that it was “unfair” because I was not “the kind of person who is supposed to succeed.” That statement was not about me. It was about someone else desperately needing the hierarchy to remain fixed.

I am not writing this to claim victory or moral superiority. I am writing it because understanding bullying this way helped me stop personalizing what never belonged to me in the first place. It also helped me see why certain approaches to recovering from bullying-related trauma actually work.

Research-grounded recommendations for those who were bullied

• Call what happened what it was, rather than minimizing it to survive socially.
• Treat harsh self-judgment as a leftover injury, not an accurate self-assessment.
• Rebuild agency through action, not by waiting to feel confident first.
• Expect setbacks, because recovery does not move in straight lines.
• Limit exposure to people who invalidate your experience, even subtly.
• Allow meaning to develop slowly, without forcing forgiveness or closure.

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These recommendations helped me both personally and professionally. They work not because they are comforting, but because they align with how power, threat, and recovery actually function in human beings.

To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.