Stop Excusing Hurtful Behaviour!

I recently read an article online (I'd link to it, but it made me rage-quit the Internet, without copying the page address), the gist of which was basically "everyone who behaves badly has a reason for their behaviour and we should be considerate and support them through it."

Now, that's a nice idea on the surface, perhaps, but this article was using bullying as their starting point.  It was suggesting that all bullies act the way they do because they're suffering some kind of great pain, or living with issues that they don't know how to deal with.  The unspoken message was that we should excuse bullies, because they only act badly because they're going through their own trauma.

And excuse me, but...

I've written here about my experiences of being bullied on the school bus and so this is a deeply personal subject for me.  I don't doubt that the people who made my life a living Hell were acting out because they had issues going on in their lives.  I'd like to think that no emotionally healthy person would ever spit at someone, or urge them to kill themselves, or tell them they're so ugly they don't deserve any form of love.  It's easier for me to believe that they were battling their own demons and that their behaviour came from a dark and unhappy place.  Otherwise I'm left with the knowledge that they simply took genuine enjoyment from pushing a twelve year old girl to a suicide attempt, and frankly, that's too evil to contemplate.

So, sure.  I'll go along with the "bullies act badly because they're going through their own crap" line.  

But it's not an excuse.  

I'm not going to sigh and shrug my shoulders, absolving abusive people of any responsibility (and bullying is a form of abuse, after all).  We all go through things in our lives that shape us and which sometimes cause huge emotional disturbances, but it's up to us how we deal with them.  We have to make a choice about the kind of person we want to be, regardless of what's happened to us in our history, or what's happening to us right now.  Sure, there are situations, illnesses and moments of emotional stress that cause us to lash out and snap at someone, or behave selfishly, or otherwise hurt someone's feelings.  But when that happens, it's up to us to recognise our own behaviour, apologise for it and make amends.  That is, if we choose to.

The thing with using any kind of personal trauma - be it illness (mental or physical), or just going through a really crappy time - as an excuse for bad behaviour is that a) it doesn't make it okay for a person to repeatedly behave badly without any kind of remorse and b) it assumes that becoming a lousy person is just the natural response to trauma.  Which is rubbish.

When I was being bullied, I was subjected to disgusting behaviour which caused me to fall into a deep depression, during which I lost all of my self-confidence.  Years later, I was still in a spiral of self-hatred and regularly dragged the pins from the badges I liked to stick on my bag, across my arms, leaving bumpy red scars, because I felt worthless and needed to feel a pain that was physical, rather than emotional.  

Regardless of what personal trauma my bullies had endured, I was now traumatised as a result of the way they treated me.  The difference between us is that I made the choice to try to never hurt another person the way they had hurt me.  And frankly, had I decided to become a bully myself, I wouldn't have deserved to be excused for it, because I was well aware of what it felt like to be on the receiving end; I would have had no excuse whatsoever for doling out that kind of abuse onto another person.

Fast forward into my twenties and I ended up in a relationship with a man who abused me.  And guess what?  He blamed his past traumas for his behaviour.  He expected me to swallow it as an excuse and, for a long time, I did just that.  But the truth is, whatever sadness was in his past, no matter what hurt he had experienced, he still made a choice to abuse me.  It wasn't inevitable.  And there isn't an excuse.

I have had enough of hearing reasons why we should excuse people when they behave in a manner that is selfish, inconsiderate or downright hurtful.

Yes, we should feel sympathy for a person who has experienced something sad or traumatic.  Yes, we should try to understand that there are certain circumstances in which a person may be under such stress that they snap and say something cruel, or behave selfishly; we should make some allowances for that, because frankly, if we didn't, then we could never expect anyone to make allowances for our own mistakes and let's face it, none of us are perfect.

But those allowances only stretch so far.  If a person is overly critical or cruel towards us and expects us just to take it because they have "issues," we're allowed to say "no, that's not okay."  If it's not just a one-off mistake which the person apologises for, but a prolonged catalogue of hurtful behaviour that said person seems to think they're entitled to exhibit, we are allowed to stand up to it.

Nothing - and I really do mean nothing - gives a person the right to treat people badly and yet be consistently "let off."  We all have to take responsibility for our actions and own up to our mistakes.  

We may not have a choice about the demons from our past that have shaped our character.  But we do have a choice as to the way we treat others.

Let's make the right one.

Analyse THIS...

Pictured: Me.  And probably another version of me.

I had a realisation this weekend.  Well, that's not entirely true; a "realisation" makes it sound like it was something I didn't know, beforehand.  In actual fact, what happened this weekend was merely that I came to appreciate something that I already knew about myself.

I am an analytical person.  When something happens, I like to think about why, how and what it all means.  Great for when some major emotional event takes place.  Not so brilliant when you're lying in bed at 1am, trying to work out what the previous night's random toilet-related dream might have been trying to tell you.

Probably that that extra drink before bed was a bad idea...

For years, I worried about my analytical brain.  And then I pondered why I was worried about it and what that said about my psyche, because of course I did.  I figured that I was reading too much into everything that went on in my life, when I ought to just let some things go.  After all, surely not everything happens for a reason?

But if I was being a tad over-analytical, over the years, I started to realise that it wasn't actually such a bad thing.  Sure, I need to stop obsessing over some silly things (I'm pretty sure that "Z" at the end of a friend's recent text message was a typo, rather than a confession that she is, in fact, Zorro), but being analytical has its benefits.  Especially when you apply that analytical mind to yourself and your own behaviour.

I recently wrote an open letter to EL James, inspired by her point-blank refusal to listen to any of the many survivors of abuse who recognise their experiences being romanticised in her Fifty Shades trilogy.  My frustration was that EL seems entirely incapable of critiquing her work, of taking other opinions on board, or of looking at her own behaviour in a critical manner.  And that's a pretty major problem.

Okay, so I over-analyse myself.  I don't need to obsess over whether I smiled warmly enough at that random old lady in the Co-Op, yesterday.  I shouldn't be fretting over whether something I said in jest might have been taken seriously, weeks after the event, when nobody has mentioned it since...

You're so wise, Elsa...

...but I think that being able to analyse my own behaviour - to openly admit to my wrongdoings and to understand why I feel the way I do about things - is massively important.

When you actually look at the way you behave and why, you start to understand yourself on a whole new level.  Very quickly, one realisation will lead to another, until you begin to feel as though you're getting to know yourself in a way you never did before.  If there are aspects of your personality that you're not mad-keen on (a short temper, for example), you can work out what causes them and put measures in place to lessen their effect.

This weekend, I reached the conclusion that I only still have the kind of celebrity crushes you're supposed to grow out of by the age of 14 because, despite being nearly 4 years down the line, I'm keenly aware that my last relationship was abusive and I'm terrified of putting myself in a position where I might get hurt again.  Best way to fall for someone and ensure they can't hurt you?  Fall for a celebrity.  And if you want an absolute cast-iron guarantee that they can't do anything to cause you pain, you can always fall for a dead celebrity (I know; you can't judge me any more than I judge myself at this point...).

Reaching that realisation and being honest with myself about it was a turning point for me; I also realised that I can't build walls around myself forever and that some day, I'm going to have to trust someone enough to take a leap of faith.  It's something I desperately want to do, so I'm prepared to work on my own weirdness in order to do it.

Yep.

Analysing our own behaviour helps us to understand the choices we make and, crucially, how the things we do might affect other people.  When we don't bother to think about what we're saying or doing and why, we're rather selfishly believing ourselves to be above criticism or challenge.

I don't think for a second that it would be healthy to go around analysing every single thing we do in our day to day lives.  That's what insomnia is for, after all...  But we should be looking at why we behave the way we do and whether we need to change something in order to make life easier for ourselves and the people around us.  If we don't challenge ourselves from time to time, how will we ever learn to respond to criticism from others?  The answer is that, much like EL James, we simply won't.  We'll believe ourselves to be above reproach and we'll stubbornly refuse to change the way we do anything.

So, the next time you can't sleep because you're fretting over whether you should have eaten the last chip at lunch, or whether you ought to have offered it to a friend, then for goodness sake, close your eyes and forget about it.

But when you're wondering whether you could have spoken in a nicer tone to someone, or whether you should have listened more to that person who chose you as a shoulder to cry on, maybe that is worth thinking about in more detail.  Maybe by analysing ourselves just a little more than we do, we can learn how to be the best versions of ourselves possible.

And now I'm going to click "publish" and overthink every single word I've written...