Arm your child with the necessary skills to survive cyber bullying.
The utter heartbreak you feel when your teen is the target of bullying is absolutely devastating. Especially once you realize that there are limitations to how much you can protect your child.
In a 2013 study it was reported that 15 percent of high school students experience some level of bullying. In another poll 53 percent of teens admitted to cyber bullying, and 1 in 3 reported they had done it more than once.
So What Can You Do As Parents?
If you’re reading this article you’ve already alerted the school and exhausted your efforts trying to get some support. AND sadly you’ve learned that the school, like you, has limitations on how much protection they can give your child, particularly against cyber bullying.
BUT there’s a lot you can still do as parents.
The very first thing I recommend is to find a trained mental health counselor for your teen—someone that specializes in teen issues such as bullying.
I suggest this route for several reasons. One, your teen automatically has an ally other than his/her family. Two, teens will open up more to a counselor than they will parents. Believe it or not teens are humiliated that this is happening to them and they don’t want to drag their parents down emotionally.
Top 5 Skills a Counselor Can Teach Your Teen:
- How to build psychological boundaries. Teens learn how to filter out some of the insults that are hurled their way. For example, I teach teens to see themselves in a bubble and to visualize the hurtful things that are being said and done bouncing off the bubble and sent back to the bully.
- Learn self-soothing skills. Negative thought patterns are likely to spring up when teens are bullied. Teaching teens how to self-soothe helps alleviate acute panic attacks as well as quiet the inner negative reel. One mindfulness technique that I teach teens is how to separate themselves from the negative thought. Our bodies can’t decipher what’s actually happening (reality or fact) from a fictional thought or belief. In order to stop the physiological sensations as if the thought is true I teach teens to say: “I notice that I am having the thought that…I’m a loser”. They repeat the sentence in their head about ten times while they are taking deep belly breaths. After about the 8-10th time saying this sentence they start to feel a sense of relief from the physical symptoms and can regain their composure. They basically separated the thought from reality, allowing them to let the thought go rather than dwell in their mind.
- Teach stress relieving activities. Counselors help teens come up with a list of activities that bring them joy and stress relief. That way they can cope with the amount of daily stress in a healthy manner.
- Change the teen’s perception of the bully by understanding the psychology of a bully. Once your teen changes the way that he/she sees the bully it changes the amount of power the bully has. Bullies are not born overnight. They are groomed and forced to become more primal in order to get their basic needs met. If you look at the home life of a bully, chances are you’ll find abuse (physical, psychological, substance, and/or sexual) and neglect. The neglect can be in the form of having a father that’s unavailable because he’s consumed with his CEO career or a mother that’s too wrapped up in her social status to be emotionally available for her child.When such neglect occurs at home kids do what they have to do to get their basic needs met—the need for attention and some sense of control. I’ve had teens come in after school and once they understand the psychology of a bully they’ll admit to feeling bad for the bully. Even after they were still tormented that very day. Teens can find a sense of compassion for the bully and that takes away the power and the impact of the hurtful things said.That compassion turns into a shield for teens. It helps block the bad coming at them yet still allows them to peak around and truly see the bully for what they are. Parents that’s huge!
- Personal identity work. The final piece counselors help teens with, is the development of a strong sense of self.
Adolescence is the stage in development where teens answer the question, “Who am I”?
As you can imagine that would be an impossible feat for teens that are getting bullied. Such as a text my client received during one session: “You good for nothing A$$ whore. Go F@!*k yourself and die”.
So what the counselor will do is help your teen sort through the not true incoming messages and drill down to unlock his/her inner voice. Once teens can turn up their own voice they can construct a solid sense of self.
The Take Home Message
There’s a lot you can do as a parent even when you feel like you’ve exhausted all efforts.
Remember just like bullies aren’t born over night, neither are champions. Look around you every successful person you know has faced huge adversities.
AND do you know what? That was their training ground to help prepare them for the real world challenges that knock down bullies but propel and fuel the bullied.
I would never trade my small experienced being bullied nor would my husband. We are fighters, achievers, and compassionate human beings because of it. And so is your child.
Jessica is the author of Back 2 Love and How to Start a Mental Health Private Practice. She owns a practice in Minnesota where she lives with her husband and two kids. Join the conversation on Facebook.