How to Empower the Bullied Child

In today’s news, there is a terrible phenomenon that is happening too often in a conscious society. Bullied youth are committing suicide. We have to teach coping skills to empower our youth to deal with stress. The reaction to stress is determined by how it is interpreted. Being able to control how a traumatic event is interpreted can play a significant role in helping bullied children deal with their challenge. The best way to deal with a negative event is to learn how to grow and develop yourself as you deal with it.
People with chronic illness, who often deal with the fear of death, can use that situation as an incredible growth opportunity. That opportunity creates the ability for the patient to play an active role in healing. The same skills can be developed for the children that get bullied, creating an active approach for dealing with the trauma that forces them to grow.
Dr. Pergogine, a Belgian chemist, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977. He proved that, when an organism is under stress, it will either evolve to a higher order or be defeated. In a situation when people have a chronic illness, it is easy to see that they evolve or they are defeated. The social challenge of being bullied demands that same growth.
If children who are being bullied used that experience to develop inner resources, like a new self-image, self-trust and the ability to free themself from negative thinking, they could turn that negative experience into a positive growth opportunity. Unfortunately, when children are victims of bullying, they too often give up and assume a self-destructive escape. The most extreme of these is suicide.
People in a health crisis deal with their situation in a way that empowers them to be an active part of the healing process. Bullied children need to be empowered to play an active role in how they can consciously interpret their situation. Here are three techniques bullied children can develop to play an active role in coping with being bullied.
• They can learn how to change their self-image. If they have a negative self-image, they will naturally interpret events in a negative context. The technique has them identify the negative self-image and then create a positive self-image. They identify and give nicknames to both self-images. When they feel the negative, they have the ability to instantly switch and connect to their positive self-image.
• When they identify their positive and negative self-images by the nicknames they give them, this gives an opportunity for parents and teachers and anyone who supports that child to relate to them by the positive nickname. How people relate to you determines how you relate to yourself. If supportive people relate to them as their positive nickname, they would tend to relate to themselves in that same way.
• With a positive self-image, children have the ability to go deep within and enter “the zone,” a state of mind where they manifest at their full potential. Children may not yet have experienced the zone in their life, but they have sports heroes, musicians and many teen idols that know it well. That zone experience is to consciously live in the moment and deal with a challenge before you at your very best. Many teen heroes could basically say that living in the moment is the most important thing you can do. When troubled children or teens can identify with that, being in the moment can help them better deal with the challenge of bullying.

Too often, we relate to children as though there is a good way and a bad way of doing things. However, if the main focus was being themselves in a conscious moment, they could better deal with whatever challenge is before them. In the same way patients need to deal from their inner wisdom to work with their doctor and his treatments, troubled children need to work with supportive adults. This includes counselors and parents, but the children need to actively participate from their inner wisdom.

Bullied children can best deal with that challenge by being themselves in a conscious moment. Whatever they do in that conscious moment, they will do better, from family and friends to work and sports.

© 2010 Marc Lerner and Life Skills