Bullies

I was bullied when I was very young.  The age where you're supposed to be protected from those kinds of things.  It left an impression, suffice it to say.  I figured, when I grew up and got through college, that I would be done with bullies.  There would be overbearing people, and people who didn't understand and didn't want to, and I didn't have to like those.  But not angry kids, taunting and punching and mocking.  

I've come to realize, in my latest job, that there is no such thing as a place without bullies.  

Adult bullies are more subtle, sometimes.  Sure, you can read about domestic abuse, where the strongarm man with a temper beats up his wife.  Those kinds of bullies exist in adult life, but they're cut from the same cloth that those angry kids are.  In absence of physical abuse in my adult life, I'd assumed that if I could just keep away from those, I'd be fine.  

Boy, was I wrong.  Just like adults are more complex than children, the ways to bully became more complex in adulthood.  With that in mind, I'm compiling a non-exhaustive list of the kinds of bullies I've seen as an adult.   Please note, these categories will absolutely mix and match depending on the person and the situation.

1. "The wife-beater": obviously, rage-prone people, often (but not exclusively) men.  The physical abusers.  The classic case is the battered wife, with the alcoholic husband who comes home in a towering rage over God-knows-what and takes out his aggression on his wife.  The victim here is usually too shocked, beaten, or afraid to fight back.  

2.  "Tantrum throwers" (or "shrieking verbosity", if you prefer):  Like a frustrated two year old, these people throw verbose screaming fits when they don't get what they want.  The difference between the two year old and the adult is that the adult can mix in actual verbal abuse.  Depending on how eloquent the person is while enraged, this can be emotionally damaging or even crippling.   The idea, as far as I can tell, is to stun or verbally beat the other person into submitting to whatever it is you want.  You can often find examples of these people abusing customer service reps, which also means you can find scads of such stories on websites like notalwaysright.com.  I've had the misfortune to witness two such outbursts on Facebook of all places, and one of them was the father of an acquaintance.  I dearly hope his parenting skills were more adult than his arguing skills.  This is a particularly damaging style of bullying to some people on the spectrum, because our brains will only hold so many words before we get mentally exhausted.  Add in the emotional abuse factor, and you very quickly get a broken autistic person.

There are more socially acceptable versions of this that may not involve actual yelling or emotional abuse, but merely talking the person's ear off.  The aim is basically the same, though: they're trying to get what they want by wearing you out.  The purported aim is to get you to understand, but to such people, you only understand if you give them what they want.  If you can talk circles around them right back, you can counter this style of bullying.  I've found I can only manage that online, and then only with breaks for keeping my sanity intact.  It has something to do with the way my brain prioritizes words over other sounds, I think.  Online it's all text and can be prioritized evenly.  In person, words steamroll everything else.  

3.  "The human typhoon": a person with a deserved reputation of being an unholy terror to deal with.  This, unlike the first two, is a passive effect, but it often pairs with one or both of the other two styles of bullying.  I had the misfortune to work under someone with this style of bullying in the past.  They weren't necessarily a bad person on most days, but if they were in a bad mood, you watched your step and made triply sure you dotted your Is and crossed your Ts, and God help you if you were human and made a mistake.  Their anger was spoken of in whispers and their staff feared to give them bad news if it was already a bad day.  When angered, the person usually used a form of shrieking verbosity, but less reminiscent of a kid and more of an endless stream of upset words that spun in circles like a smashed and maddened hornet's nest.  I'm looking back on this only now, and I don't think I'll put up with it in the future.  At its best, this kind of terrorizing reputation is good for scaring the crap out of people who're purposely being roadblocks, or personally obstructing something very important.  Unfortunately, those situations are rare.  In many cases you can get a better result by being polite, keeping in mind that the person you're talking to isn't the one who made the rules, and working with them to find a solution.  I imagine learning to deal with this style of bullying will probably take practice, which I'm not looking forward to in the slightest.  

I may revisit this list as I notice more examples of bullying in adult life.  I mostly steer clear of these sorts of people, but there's only so much walking away you can do before you become a hermit, and I can't help people if I'm a hermit.