Time and time again, I come across stories of children being teased by other children in schools, people being ragged on in college, and bullying taking place in the workplace, and even in families.
What do you achieve from bullying and teasing someone? Answer: absolutely nothing.
Yet we continue to do this. Why? It’s because we can’t stand anyone else being better or different from our self. Teasing is a tool or tactic we use to try to show someone more vulnerable than our self how powerful we really are.
Let me clarify further: You tease because it puts you in the power position against someone more vulnerable than you. You tease because it shows how great you are. You tease because you can’t stand someone being different from you. You tease because someone is better than you.
If you are in school, go back and read the last paragraph again.
We as a society make way too many assumptions about people who drive us to make random statements that are intended to emotionally hurt – we call people names, assume they belong to a particular sexual class, make fun about the way they look, question their clothes, poke fun about the people they hang out with, how they talk, where they come from, why they are acting a certain way, etc. It just doesn’t stop.
What are the outcomes from teasing? Answer: extremely deep hurt for the individual being teased.
You may not realize when you tease that you are increasing so much negativity into the environment. Keep this in mind: emotions run deep at any age. Crying and running to a parent or friend when you are hurt doesn’t just happen at the age of 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8. It can happen when you are 40, 50, 60, 70, or 80.
We never realize the struggle people are dealing with regarding the very subject we are teasing them about. They could be struggling with a diet, fitting in to a new school, trying to making friends, struggling with finding a date, or just dealing with the regular humdrum of life.
Words hurt! Teasing hurts!
The shameless and unnecessary teasing that occurs continuously is bombardment and torture for those who are a victim to this. I know of cases where people have killed themselves over teasing. I have heard about people jumping off a bridge or hanging themselves in the closet over some false statement that someone told them that they believed to be true.
What is a small child to do if other children constantly picked on them? What is a community to do if other communities poked fun of them? What to do on the job if you are teased about the way you look or act?
For the answers, just look at the news in the past several years and you will see how people react and sadly it’s with violence. Shootings in schools have escalated for this very reason. We now have new mediums for teasing that go beyond simple phone calls or face-to-face conversations. It can sadly occur through text messages, emails, social networks, and web-conferencing to name a few.
Our times have changed. We can tease through any medium any time of the day. The truth is that there is no purpose to teasing and there never ever will be any goal to be achieved through teasing. Teasing is easy as it finds faults in others. It’s so easy to see how we are different. How long does it take to find a difference? A split second.
What’s difficult is finding what is similar between us. This generally takes more than just a split second. Teasing is an excuse not to spend quality time to find what is common or to understand someone. This is one of the keys to making friends. Kids in kindergarten need to learn this. College students need to learn this. We all need to learn this.
The only way teasing will start to diminish is if we each can just look at the faults of others and realize that those same faults reside within ourselves. Do you now have a good reason to tease someone? Go and experiment with this idea.