Bullying and other trauma can deeply impact us. How can we recover?

“It’s really hard to be hated on when you don’t know who you are yet.” Millie Bobby Brown

“I like to behave like an actor or how I thought an actor was supposed to be and that apparently provoked a lot of people into hitting me." Robert Pattinson

“I had some terrible, abusive experiences in the dark as a child. And I became afraid of the dark until I was 28 years old…I found EMDR therapy very effective…it truly removed the emotion that was linked to the traumatic memory or thought process.” Jameela Jamil

Bullying was labeled an “Adverse Childhood Experience” (ACE) by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2017. Cyberbullying Research Center

Adverse Childhood Experiences "can give us the message that I am not okay." Donna Jackson Nakazawa

Therapy “can help you reconnect to or to build your emotional resilience so you can process and heal from childhood bullying.” Psychotherapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz

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This audio is an AI-generated "podcast conversation" and summary of this article. (Created by Google's NotebookLM AI tool.)

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In her interview article, writer Emily Zemler comments about how much Millie Bobby Brown has been affected by fame and cyberbullying:

“Since the first season of Stranger Things premiered in 2016, Millie has become hugely famous.

“So famous that she can’t even go shopping without security…and she went to therapy to handle the constant bullying she has faced online.

“Before she deleted Twitter and TikTok, Millie had been constantly bombarded with hateful messages, angry threats, and even NSFW missives from adult men.”

“Over the years, Millie has struggled to understand why being herself generates so much vitriol.

“It’s really hard to be hated on when you don’t know who you are yet,” she says.

“Then you just start shutting down because you’re like, ‘Who am I meant to be? Who do they need me to be for them?’ …

She adds, “Then I started to grow more, and my family and friends really helped. It helped to be able to understand that I don’t need to be anything they said that I need to be. I just have to develop within myself. That’s what I did…That’s what I’m doing.”

From article “Millie Bobby Brown’s Year of Healing” By Emily Zemler, Allure Sep 2022..

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Musician and actor Lady Gaga was bullied at school, even thrown into a trash can.

She said, “I was called really horrible, profane names very loudly in front of huge crowds of people, and my schoolwork suffered at one point.

“I didn’t want to go to class. And I was a straight-A student, so there was a certain point in my high school years where I just couldn’t even focus on class because I was so embarrassed all the time.

“I was so ashamed of who I was.” (2012 New York Times interview.)

(At age 17 she achieved early admission to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. See related post: Lily Cole and gifted kids being bullied.)

These quotes are ones I’ve used in several articles, including Creative People, Trauma and Mental Health.

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One kind of trauma many of us experience is bullying

Psychotherapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz helps creative people in TV/Film, performing and fine arts. She notes in an article of hers:

“Many highly creative people have been bullied as kids. Are you one of them?

Perhaps you loved singing, writing poems, dancing, making fashion, or being innovative in other ways as a child.

When you were young, you invested in yourself fully in a creative endeavor.

Those early years were the foundation of the creative life and work you enjoy today.

Though these aspirations brought you joy, they also made you the target of bullies who made fun of, mocked, or ridiculed you.

You felt humiliated, alone, and scared.

In some cases, bullying can leave a lasting legacy of depression, anxiety, or PTSD.

A Psychotherapy Approach Called EMDR Can Help

In my clinical experience, I have found that many adults can trace their current emotional challenges back to being bullied as children.

Being bullied is traumatic and can have long-lasting effects on you.”

But, she adds, therapy “can help you reconnect to or to build your emotional resilience so you can process and heal from childhood bullying.”

• See more in her article What To Do When You Can’t Leave Childhood Bullying Behind

Also see more quotes by Dr Holtz, other therapists, and artists in article How Dealing With Intense Emotions and Trauma Can Release Our Creativity.

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An article on the Cyberbullying Research Center site points out:

”Bullying, widely considered a form of school violence, often occurs as a stressor that over time can have traumatic effects."

“Indeed, bullying was labeled an “Adverse Childhood Experience” (ACE) by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2017, and has been strongly and consistently linked (as is the case with many other ACEs) to poor outcomes later in life.

“Apart from the harm, what seems to be most important is the repetitive nature of bullying and cyberbullying because it disrupts trust in oneself, others, and the world.

“One study showed that the level of frequency of exposure to bullying is the greatest factor in predicting level of trauma.”

From article Trauma, Bullying, and Cyberbullying.

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Continued below with quotes by Dr Gabor Maté, Jameela Jamil (also podcast episode), Robert Pattinson, Zooey Deschanel, Evan Rachel Wood.

Also:

*video of Millie Bobby Brown addressing the United Nations on the issue of online bullying,

*link to class by psychotherapist Carolina Mariposa on "Supporting Sensitive Children Through Bullying Challenges.”

*podcast episode with Donna Jackson Nakazawa

What is trauma?

Dr Gabor Maté is a physician and educator in addiction, childhood trauma and mind-body health.

He explains in an interview:

“The origin of the word ‘trauma’ is the Greek for ‘wound’. Trauma is a wound. How I think about it is that if I wounded you, if I cut your flesh, the healing would involve scar tissue forming.

“If the wound was great enough, you’d get a big scar, and it would be without nerve endings so you wouldn’t feel, and it would be much less flexible than your normal tissue.

“Trauma is when there is a loss of feeling and there is a reduced flexibility in responding to the world. This is a response to a wound.”

From interview article Dr Gabor Maté on Childhood Trauma, The Real Cause of Anxiety, on HumanWindow.

He has also explained:

“Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically and then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you’re acting out of pain. It induces fear and now you’re acting out of fear.”

Along with other trauma specialists, he notes that a specific experience, such as childhood abuse or workplace bullying, is not so much the issue in itself, it’s more a matter of how we respond.

“Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”

See videos and more comments by experts, and artists including Sia, Mona Haydar, Jamie Lee Curtis, Alanis Morissette, Jewel and others, in my article How to recover from trauma – The Wisdom of Trauma movie and Talks on Trauma series.

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More comments by actors and others

Actor and mental health activist Jameela Jamil shared a personal story on social media about an incident where she was "locked in a closet" during her childhood

She recalls what led her to use EMDR therapy:

“I had some terrible, abusive experiences in the dark as a child. And I became afraid of the dark until I was 28 years old, couldn’t sleep in the dark, couldn’t be alone in a house, had to check in every cupboard, under every bed, in every single room again, and again. And again. I had terrible OCD around like my safety.

“And I couldn’t really sleep. So sleep deprived for like, basically 28 years, which made me incredibly depressed and suicidal.

“So I went to this EMDR therapy just for that, because I decided to move to America. And I was like, I can’t go there, this afraid. I can’t spend my 30s as afraid as I’ve spent the last three decades of my life.

"I found EMDR therapy very effective… it truly removed the emotion that was linked to the traumatic memory or thought process, it just sort of cut it off for me…”

Hear podcast episode:

Can EMDR therapy help us deal with PTSD and other emotional health issues?

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Actor Robert Pattinson "found himself the subject of physical bullying during his school years in large part because of his passion for acting."

He told Parade Magazine "I got beaten up by a lot of people when I was younger it was after I first started acting and I like to behave like an actor or how I thought an actor was supposed to be and that apparently provoked a lot of people into hitting me."

(From video 13 Celebs Who Were Bullied in School.)

Zooey Deschanel recalls “Seventh grade was horrible. I was teased relentlessly because I was chubby. Then in the summer I lost all this weight, and all of a sudden everybody liked me.

“It was weird, because then I didn’t trust anybody. … But I’m actually oddly thankful for a lot of these things, because when I was really teased and tortured and all these things, it made me really ambitious.

“It made me work hard. Friends weren’t something that I could rely on, but my love for performing was always a constant.”  [Mean mag. 3/4.2001]

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Evan Rachel Wood recalls getting beat up in elementary school for being an actor:

“I think it was because my SAG card fell out of my bag, and [the kids] asked what it was and I explained to them, and no more than ten minutes later I was getting spit on and slammed on the ground. By a boy!

“In junior high, the teachers were worse than the kids. They had it in their minds that if you’re an actor you’re spoiled and stuck up and you always get your way, so they wanted to give me the hardest time they possibly could.

“They knew that you have to keep up a certain grade point average to get your work permit. They would say in front of the class, ‘You know, you can’t be an actor if I give you a bad grade.’ So my mom pulled me out, and I did home school.” [Premiere Magazine premiere.com October 2006]

The Image is from article How Dealing With Intense Emotions and Trauma Can Release Our Creativity.

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One of the more common “excuses” for bullying is that some insecure kids [and adults] resent anyone who is exceptional, such as being creatively gifted and talented.

“Childhood bullying is something that a lot of multipotentialites seem to have experienced (apparently when you do origami at recess and play violin in an orchestra, other kids think you’re weird…)” – From post: Building Your Confidence from Scratch (a Personal Confession) By Emilie Wapnick.

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Although often destructive to confidence and self esteem, the experience of being bullied can have positive results for some people, as noted in a few of the quotes above.

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video: Millie Bobby Brown: “Young people don’t want to be talked about. We want to do the talking” Nov 20, 2019 United Nations

UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Millie Bobby Brown addressed the issue of online bullying. She said, “I am convinced that social media doesn’t have to be a place of fear, bullying and harassment. It can bring people together. It can be a place of love and support.”

Brown continued, “somewhere in the world right now, a teenager girl is being bullied online. She is scared, she’s vulnerable, she feels alone. My message to her is this: you are not alone, there are people who care about you and there are people who would listen if you reach out for help.”

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Helping highly sensitive children

Psychotherapist Carolina Mariposa notes "I know that bullying is real and that society does sometimes see highly sensitive kids as sort of less than the ideals that our society puts out there of strength and prowess and achievement."

She is one of the parenting experts in an event by HSP therapist Julie Bjelland:

"Supporting Sensitive Children Through Bullying Challenges: Join Our Next Intuitive Parenting Discussion.”

"This session features parenting experts Carol Huckle and Carolina Mariposa, who will offer insights and strategies to navigate the difficulties associated with bullying."

Free to members of The Sensitive Empowerment Community.

Julie Bjelland, LMFT is a psychotherapist and founder of Sensitive Empowerment, specializing in Highly Sensitive People, Neurodiversity, and Autism in Women.

Follow link to her site to learn more about many resources for highly sensitive people.

Related video with Carolina Mariposa: Bullying: "Society sometimes sees highly sensitive kids as less than ideal."

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Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES): "That dysfunction can give us the message that I am not okay."

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is an award-winning science journalist and speaker.

She comments about some early experiences:

"Because of that household dysfunction, our brains do a couple of really significant things: they begin to give us the message that we're not okay.

"Our little brains are so active and so busy trying to help us, but instead of saying 'My situation is not okay' - our developing brain doesn't have the wherewithal to do that - instead we go, 'I am not okay in who I am, in my body, in my being - I'm wrong, I'm terribly terribly wrong.'“

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