Bullying

Bullying involves repeated behaviour intended to hurt, humiliate, intimidate, or exclude. It can be verbal, physical, relational, or online, and it happens across all stages of life, in schools, workplaces, families, and intimate relationships. Whatever form it takes, and wherever it occurs, the impact tends to go well beyond the specific incidents.

What Bullying Can Look Like

Bullying is not always obvious. It includes behaviour that is easy to dismiss as minor or to doubt when it happens to you. It can involve:

Persistent teasing, put-downs, or humiliation, privately or in front of others
Being ignored, excluded, or deliberately left out
Intimidation, threats, or behaviour designed to make you feel unsafe
Taking credit for your work, minimising your contributions, or undermining your achievements
Treating you consistently differently from others in the same setting
Physical aggression passed off as a joke
Online harassment, including via social media, messaging, or email

A single difficult interaction is not usually bullying. What distinguishes bullying is the pattern: behaviour that is consistent, targeted, and that leaves you considering how to avoid the person responsible.

Why It Can Be Hard to Name

One of the most common experiences of people who have been bullied is doubt about whether what happened to them counts. The bullying may have been subtle rather than overt. Others around you may not have noticed or may have minimised it. You may have been told you were overreacting, or too sensitive. That self-doubt is often part of what bullying produces, not evidence that nothing happened. If what you experienced left you feeling consistently diminished, unsafe, or as though you had to manage yourself carefully around a particular person, that experience is worth taking seriously regardless of whether it fits a narrow definition.

The Lasting Effects of Bullying

The effects of bullying can persist long after the bullying itself has stopped. Childhood bullying in particular can leave marks on self-perception and confidence that carry into adulthood, shaping how safe it feels to be visible, how much criticism you can tolerate, and how you understand your own worth in relation to others.

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 can be hard to place or express constructively
Difficulty sleeping
A tendency to minimise your own experience or pre-empt others’ judgement by getting there first

For some people, sustained bullying, particularly in childhood or by those in positions of authority, constitutes a form of trauma. The relational patterns it creates can persist and affect adult relationships and professional life in ways that aren’t always easy to connect back to the original experience.

Bullying in the Workplace

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

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

How I Work With the Effects of Bullying

My approach is relational and psychodynamic, which means I’m interested in the history behind the experience as well as its current effects. Bullying that happened in childhood, particularly if it was sustained, often connects to earlier relational experience, to how safe it felt to be yourself in your family of origin, and to what you learned about your own worth in relation to others.

Understanding those connections, and addressing the shame and self-doubt that bullying so reliably produces, is often where the most significant therapeutic work happens. The aim is not to manage the effects but to understand them well enough that they lose their grip.

If you’d like to explore whether working together might help, get in touch at samanthamerry.co.uk/contacts.