My English teacher at high school quoted this to me after I broke down following a rather ‘challenging’ lesson.
She then went to say it was complete cobblers or rubbish in normal English. I’ll never forget the catharsis I felt when she said this. It was both a confirmation that the bullying I was receiving which was non-physical (save the odd paper clip being thrown at me) was bullying and a relief because I had wrongly assumed that bullying can only be physical and not verbal.
I reckon I speak for many victims of bullying when I say that in the experience of bullying, you just end up wishing the bullying stopped being verbal, and you had a good punch-up, and have done with those making your life a misery. I witnessed – at the boys only school I went to – punch ups in the playground between fellow students. It was nasty but afterwards they got over it, made up and moved on, and probably had a good laugh after it in years to come.
Verbal abuse or non-physical bullying isn’t so easy to move on from.
Words stick in the mind, they taunt, they manipulate, they hit the nervous system, the ears, the brain and the body as a whole. And they stay, they are silently recorded in the brain. Like a sponge, the body soaks up, involuntarily or unwillingly, these words and the effect can last years, affecting self confidence, self-perception, mental health, trust, relationships, marriage, jobs and careers and health generally.
Deceptively, of course, you can become desensitized or used to verbal abuse OR you start to shut down, numb your senses and pretend it doesn’t hurt – a defense mechanism in response to what is trauma.
Except shutting down, pretending it’s not there, emotional self-control and shutting up doesn’t solve the problem for the person on the receiving end. Verbal abuse has as much impact as physical violence and the emotions triggered by the verbal abuse don’t just evaporate into thin air. They go somewhere and at some point they need to be expressed or else they accumulate and burst out of jail.
And it can take therapy, coaching, wilderness retreats, writing about it, talking about it, psychotherapy, counseling, hypnotherapy, meditation and even something called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and many other courses of action – all of which take time.
So that’s why words do hurt – as much as sticks and stones.
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