Is There a Bully in Your Relationship?
Chapter 19. The Turned-On Couple. Narrated by Corinne Farago
I woke up feeling emotionally battered from news footage I’d watched the night before that personified bullying behavior by a politician.
I thought about people who currently live (or have lived) with an adult bully. I wondered how many of them were left emotionally triggered by the embarrassing display played out on national television.
Bullying can happen in every form of relationship from the boardroom to the bedroom. I see all the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of bullying with some of my coaching couples. Bullies aren’t born, they’re raised, usually by bullies themselves.
Many adult bullies come from childhood homes where they too were dominated by bullying.
Children who have control taken from them will commonly seek to control others, often with the same tactics they witnessed and experienced in the adults around them.
It’s easy to spot bullying in others. What’s harder to acknowledge though, is our own inner bully - the part of us that jumps into action when we’re backed into a corner feeling trapped.
If you were to ask someone during a bullying incident to be transparently honest about what’s driving their bullying, they’d probably identify fear as their underlying emotion, insecurity as their underlying feeling, and control as their underlying strategy. They’re using bullying to fend off their own feelings of inferiority and disrespect.
We’re all capable of resorting to bullying tactics in our relationship, should our partner challenge our beliefs and perspectives, but we’d never admit to bullying.
We’d much rather see ourselves as passionate, intense, direct, strong-willed, or generally superior in our perspective of what’s right or wrong. We may even admit that we’re ‘too much’ for some people, but “that’s just who I am.” Yet the fact is, we’re all capable of reverting back to the playground when we’re triggered into fight or flight.
When anger floods your brain, even the most self-aware person can turn to bullying tactics. In those moments, you’re literally not in your right mind; you’re in your amygdala brain, which is pumping adrenaline into your bloodstream. It’s focused on survival or (in the case of an argument) on being proven right.
Let’s look at the behavior of an emotional bully in an intimate relationship. I think you’ll see that we all have an inner bully that can hijack a conversation and turn it into emotional manipulation to get something we want, Consider how you’ve used these strategies in your relationship.
Here are 9 ways your inner bully might show up in your relationship. Perhaps this is you?
Getting angry and raising your voice overpowers your partner’s voice during conflict. Your partner will either join you in the escalation that ultimately leads to painful words and hurt feelings, or they’ll appease you and stifle themselves to keep the peace. Either way the bully wins.
Blaming and pointing the finger back at your partner may have worked as a child but it’s a sadly transparent attempt to avoid taking responsibility or hearing a difficult truth.
Our inner bully has very little capacity for honest self-reflection and vulnerability. Criticism is taken as a personal attack and the defense of a bully is to quickly divert the same criticism back to their partner. “I didn’t lie, you’re the liar!”
Punishing by emotionally pulling away, implementing the silent treatment, withholding affection, sulking, and moping, are all common strategies to punish and bully our partner.
These are the kind of bullying tactics a passive-aggressive person will resort to get their way. If your partner knows there’s a price to pay for disagreeing with you, they’ll likely choose to let you have your way and once again suppress their truth in exchange for a temporarily peaceful home.
Threatening to leave the relationship is a common bullying strategy that gets tossed like a grenade into an argument, escalating the conflict from a difference of opinion, to a potentially relationship-destroying incident.
Gaslighting is a term the psychiatric community uses to describe a partner who slowly tries to confuse and manipulate perceptions. We can say one thing and do another. We can turn our partner’s questions back on them, causing them to doubt themselves. We deny something in the face of proof. We’re all susceptible to gaslighting and we’re all fully capable of resorting to gaslighting. Remember, your inner bully is well-versed in getting what they want.
Name-calling takes an disagreement to a deeply personal level. This is where lines are crossed, and painful words cut deep.
Once you revert to name-calling, the damage is sometimes impossible to undo. The bond is broken, and trust is lost.
Your partner may find their way back to being civil and even loving, but in their heart, the names you called them will resonate and resurface, sometimes for years.
Out-arguing your partner is the bully’s way of pushing their opponent into the ropes and pummeling them with jabs to the ribs.
You wear them out with the words coming out of your mouth. Even when they’ve conceded you make sure to drive it home until they either go silent, beg you to stop, or leave the room.
Interrupting your partner when they’re trying to make their point is another way a bully can wear someone down. When we don’t have the capacity to listen to an opposing view without talking over our partner, we’re shutting them down. This is a common form of bullying in relationships, and often both partners will adopt this strategy as a way to be heard when conflicts start to escalate.
Physical intimidation is more than waving your fist at your partner. It’s how you physically position yourself next to them. It’s leaning in too close. It’s looming over them. It’s throwing a plate or slamming a door. It’s driving erratically or blocking an exit. These are all acts of violence, and bullies use them as coercion and intimidation tactics.
Allowing your inner bully to represent you in an argument with your partner is short-sighted. It’s looking for the short-term gain of being proven right, over the long-term desire to maintain connection.
Your inner bully views your partner as the enemy to be conquered and controlled in a moment of conflict, rather than your teammate who shares a life with you.
Sit down together and review these signs of bullying. I strongly believe we’re all guilty of these tactics in our worst moments, so go easy on yourself.
Get hip to what bullying looks like in your relationship, and agree to being called out, the next time you allow your inner bully take to the stage of a debate.
Share the fears that drive your inner bully. Reflect on the family dynamic that made bullying part of your strategy to get what you want.
And if you have children, tell them that what they see in our politicians these days sadly, does not represent healthy adult behavior!