I’m still haunted by the school bully

DEAR BEL

FORTY-SEVEN years after leaving my West Country grammar school, I was invited to a reunion.

Among the organising committee names was the girl who made my school life a misery with her verbal and physical bullying. This girl made it her mission in life to mock my Cockney accent, humiliate me and hit me when I tried to resist her taunting.

I planned to attend the reunion, but as it neared, I just couldn’t go through with it. The thought of meeting that girl after all those years made my heart sink.

Since first hearing of the reunion, suppressed feelings have flooded to the surface, and I just can’t get out of my head the unhappiness of my early years at secondary school. I have so much to be grateful for — a wonderful husband, children and grandchildren — but am still haunted by that bullying. I know it has affected my personality.

Photographs of the school reunion were shared online, and the bullying girl still wore the supercilious smirk I remember. I wish I’d never been contacted, so all that unhappiness could have stayed in the past.

But now I just can’t get it out of my mind and feel tortured. Part of me also wishes I had gone to the reunion and confronted her, but the thought of that terrifies me, and then I just feel pathetic. Can you offer advice?

BARBARA

BEINg a victim of bullying in childhood can have serious long-term effects, which is why this mental health issue matters so much. People should realise that it’s no good telling the bullied to ‘just stand up for yourself’. Literature from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Lord Of The Flies reminds us that bullying is a part of the human condition: the strong preying on the weak.

I, too, was bullied in my first year at grammar school in Liverpool and told nobody, but still remember things that were said, and the cruelty of being sent to Coventry by girls I thought friends.

A few years ago, a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry revealed the long-term effects of bullying. Victims were shown to be at higher risk of every depressive and anxiety disorder.

They were four times as likely to develop anxiety in adulthood, and had a five-times greater risk of depression as well as ten times the likelihood of suicidal thoughts or actions and 15 times the likelihood of developing a panic disorder.

Such figures reinforce your feeling that the reunion triggered memories of a very real trauma.

Researchers concluded that adult

mental health struggles such as the one you are experiencing are an effect of the bullying and not of pre-existing conditions that made you vulnerable to that horrible girl in the first place.

What to do now? Take a look at the website StandAgainstViolence.co.uk and perhaps you might get involved in their work.

Even if you only make a donation, you will feel you have helped today’s young people.

You may also find the following online article about the lifetime impact of bullying useful: mentalhelpnet/articles/ the-long-term-effects -of-bullying

I’m not sure you need to go down the therapy route. Reading around the subject will help you make up your mind. Consider the good fortune and life that you have. Then reflect that the girl who made your life such a misery might, in fact, be deeply unhappy now.

I would tell myself every day that she is less blessed than you are — and that you feel sorry for her.

This mantra may help to shift your mindset.

Look in the mirror and tell yourself you’re glad that whatever she did is over, but partly led to you being the kind of woman who is so loved.