Bullying

Bullying is repeated behaviour that demeans, excludes, intimidates, or undermines. It can happen in childhood, in the workplace, in adult relationships, and online. It can be overt, direct verbal abuse, physical intimidation, or public humiliation, or it can be subtle: exclusion, being talked over, having your work dismissed, or being treated consistently differently from others without acknowledgement.

What most forms of bullying have in common is the power imbalance they exploit, and the way they make the person being targeted question their own perception of what is happening.

When bullying happened in childhood

Childhood bullying, whether by peers, siblings, or adults in positions of authority, can leave marks that persist long after the bullying itself has stopped. It can shape how safe it feels to be visible, how much criticism you can tolerate, how you relate to groups, and what you believe about your own worth. Many adults carry the effects of childhood bullying without connecting their current difficulties to that earlier experience.

For some people, sustained bullying in childhood, particularly if it was prolonged or came from adults, constitutes a form of relational trauma. The patterns it produces around self-worth, visibility, and trust can affect adult relationships and professional life in ways that aren’t always easy to trace back to their source.

Bullying in the workplace

Workplace bullying has its own particular dimension. Because it often occurs alongside professional relationships where power is unequal, it can be difficult to name, harder to report, and accompanied by a fear that speaking up will make things worse. If you have approached HR and not felt supported, or if the bullying has come from someone in a senior position, that experience is not unusual. It doesn’t mean nothing can be done.

Therapy offers space to think clearly about what has happened, to address its effects on your confidence and sense of self, and to work out what you need, separately from whatever practical steps you may be taking externally.

The lasting effects of bullying

The effects of bullying can continue well beyond the situation itself. Common lasting effects include:

Anxiety, including social anxiety and hypervigilance in group settings
Depression and persistent low mood
Shame and a diminished sense of self-worth
Difficulty trusting others or feeling safe in social and professional environments
Anger that is hard to place or express constructively
A tendency to minimise your own experience or pre-empt others’ judgement

How I work with the effects of bullying

My approach is relational and psychodynamic, which means I’m interested in the history behind what you’re experiencing as well as its current effects. Bullying that happened in childhood often connects to earlier relational experience, to what you learned about your own worth and how safe it felt to be yourself. Understanding those connections, and addressing the shame and self-doubt that bullying reliably produces, is often where the most significant work happens.

The aim is to understand the effects well enough that they lose their grip.