Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

The Podcast:

Dr. Greg Moody (12:01):
We need to be really clear about what those are, and it’s not always easy. It’s not always easy. Something might look like one category or another and we have to be really careful about. I appreciate the challenge that both educators, parents, people that work with kids, especially have in trying to tease out the differences when some of these things might not always be as clear as possible. Let’s talk a little bit, if we can go on from there, unless you have other questions about that.
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn (12:35):
But that was…
Dr. Greg Moody (12:36):
That’s a really, really good point. We could probably do a whole, maybe have a whole chapter on violence, the difference between violence and conflict in bullying should be part of what we talk about. Let’s talk a little bit about girls, specifically girls’ fears about bullying, because this is really noticeable. And boys’ fears about bullying are very similar, but one piece of data that was done that was really relevant. Girls’ fears about bullying. There was a Harris poll done of about well over 2,000 girls in the eight to 17 year old age range. So a pretty broad poll, pretty high numbers. So a very, very good set of data. The number one fear that girls had, and this poll was about all fears that girls have about anything. The number one fear, 41% of girls were more afraid than anything else about being teased. They had two times more fear about being teased than a natural disaster. They were 15 times more afraid of being teased than the death of a loved one.
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn (14:17):
Wow.
Dr. Greg Moody (14:20):
So parents that are listening, they’re not too worried about you guys, but they’re really worried about being teased and they’re 30 times more afraid about being teased than school grades. So let’s think about this data here and it applies to boys as well as girls. But let’s think about this data. They’re 30 times more worried about being teased when they go to the school every day than their grades. We live an environment where girls are more worried. And again, this is going to extrapolate to boys to some level, although this study wasn’t about them. 30 times more worried about school grades than… Sorry, 30 times more worried about being teased, this characteristic of bullying, than their grades at school.
Dr. Greg Moody (15:15):
If you don’t think you need to worry about bullying, that statistic should worry you. 30 times more worried about being teased than about their grades, about their performance at school. This is an overriding concern that girls have that swamps out any of the other things you think they should be concerned about when they go to school. A sobering thought when we want school to be about getting academic success and maybe having friends, but they’re worried about being teased, maybe having other interactions. It’s a lot about worry about being teased about these issues.
Dr. Greg Moody (16:03):
Okay. What is bullying like? So when we talk about bullying, a lot of times it gets passed over. Well, kids will be kids. It’s not a big deal. Or if they get bullied, they should talk back or fight back or speak up and stand up for themselves and they’re going to learn how to get through those obstacles. Well, they could. That’s something they could do. The kids that are very confident have a lot of self-esteem, maybe have done martial arts with a school, like what we have, that’s what we actually have studied. They would build some confidence and they would be able to stand up for themselves. But for the bulk of kids, when they experience bullying, what is it like?
Dr. Greg Moody (16:51):
Well, mostly bullying is like abuse by peers. And what’s abuse like? And what’s abuse like? When we look at the results of bullying, abuse is more like compared to anything else for those of you who think, well, they should punch that guy back or yell back at him or talk back to him. What it’s most like is domestic violence, child abuse, all the characteristics are more like this, sexual harassment. In other words, what the kid that’s being bullied feels and how they are treated because of the imbalance of power is more like these things than them just having an argument with somebody. So when we give a kid advice, well, go talk back to them, go stand up for yourself. Would you do that when a child is being abused by a parent? Is that what you do? Would that be good advice? Probably not. Would you do that when somebody’s being sexually harassed by somebody who’s in a position of power over them?
Dr. Greg Moody (18:30):
If they don’t comply, they lose their whole career and their livelihood. Would you tell them, go talk back to that person? Would you tell that to somebody who was a spouse and their spouse was in charge of all the money and the car keys and all the family members and they didn’t have any family members themselves? And if they didn’t comply with what the spouse did, they wouldn’t have a house, they wouldn’t have their kids and they’d be out on their rear. Would you tell them they should just talk back to their spouse? Is that the advice you’d give them? So think about that for a moment. When you decide, when you want to tell a kid, “You know what you should do, go talk back to those guys.” See, if you put it in that context, they have similarities. These situations have an imbalance of power. They have repeated abuse over time.
Dr. Greg Moody (19:50):
The other thing that happens is, and we notice in this case and we notice in bullying, is the perpetrator blames the victim. So we see in bullying very frequently that the one who’s doing the bullying says, “Oh, they like this. They like it when I tell them what to do, they like it when I push them.” The victim also often blames themselves. In a bullying situation, they might say something like, “Well, if I didn’t wear those clothes, they wouldn’t tease me.” In fact, we can show you many examples where even the principal of a school will say, “Well, if they didn’t wear those clothes or they didn’t walk that way, or they didn’t do that thing that they were getting teased about, then they wouldn’t get teased.” So, very frequently the victim blames themselves or the environment around them, the adults around them are blaming the victim for creating the situation where they’re getting blamed.
Dr. Greg Moody (21:16):
Bullying is very much like peer abuse. So if you think about that, if you think about this type of situation, is any of the advice where you’re giving the kid who’s getting bullied, or the adult for that matter, who’s getting bullied, the person who’s working in a work environment and their boss is abusing them or is intending to hurt them or degrading them every day. What are they going to do? Maybe they don’t think they can get another job. They need the money. So how can they possibly get out of that? They feel like they’re in a catch 22. If they quit, now they don’t have a job. So they have to put up with what their boss is doing and the boss may not care.
Dr. Greg Moody (22:12):
So if you tell that person, “Well, go stand up for yourself, go tell them what to do. Go to HR.” Maybe HR will go to the boss and say, “Hey, this guy complained about you.” What’s going to happen then? Now they get abused more because the boss is mad that they got yelled at. So there’s all these scenarios. Environments are not always healthy. Schools are not always healthy. Doesn’t mean that teachers and principals do a bad job. A lot of times they don’t have a lot of support or structure for managing these types of situations. So we’ve got to be providing different types of support for the kids, for adults that are being bullied, to make sure that we give them the right support that’s going to give him solutions that’ll work.
Dr. Greg Moody (23:07):
All right, what are the effects of this? Once this kind of thing happens, what effects do we have of bullying when you’re in this situation? What are the short and long-term effects of bullying? The short-term effects, as you might expect when you’re in that abuse situation, it lowers self esteem. Self-esteem is based on people feeling like they have internal high value. That what they personally are capable of is a lot of things. They’re capable of doing a lot of things. They’re capable of being a high value person in the world. And in this environment, when they’re in an abuse environment, they’re going to not feel like they’re very capable and that exacerbates the problem.
Dr. Greg Moody (24:15):
If you’re working for a boss who’s bullying you, you’re going to have a lot of trouble feeling like you’re capable of getting another job or capable of doing more things, and it’s going to have effects on the rest of your life. It’s going to increase, we see a lot of depression, increase anxiety. We also, for kids, we see absenteeism and lower school achievement. We see a big increase in thoughts of suicide. We also see kids get sick and we see adults get sick. When we see this in an adult environment, we see adults that are having trouble with this kind of abuse get sick at a much higher rate. Now, these are the short-term effects.
Dr. Greg Moody (25:28):
Long-term effects. Imagine if you went through this stuff in the short-term, what the long-term effects might be? The long-term effects. This is some stats from research done over quite a long period of time. Give a comparison of bullied people versus non-bullied people. So people that did a survey of what their life was about versus people that were not bullied, bullied and not bullied. Let’s take a look at this. So headaches, people that were bullied versus not bullied. So not bullied, the frequency of headaches. People that were not bullied have headaches about 16% of the time. That’s actually pretty high. I’m surprised people have headaches that much. But once in a while, having a headache about 16% of the time. People that are bullied… Oh, I’m sorry. That’s bullied. That’s the bullied one. Let me reverse my numbers here on our chart.
Dr. Greg Moody (27:04):
So people that are bullied have headaches about 16% of the time. People that are not bullied, about 6% of the time. That’s close to three to one. So if you’re not bullied, 6% of the time. I’m not sure on this. I’d have to look up what the scale was. But about 6% of the time, you might have a headache once in a while. If you’re bullied, 16% of the time. Sleep problems. The average person, about 23% reports once in a while they have a sleep problem. If you’re bullied, 42%, about double. Abdominal pain. The average person, only about 9%. Once in a while, one in 10 people have a little bit of abdominal pain. Bullied, 17%, a little over twice. Feeling tense. The average person, also about 9%, once in a while feeling a little tense. 20% for people that are bullied. Feeling anxiety. Average person, about 10%, about one in 10.

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