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Why Catherine Porter Took Her Childhood Bully To Lunch

By December 7, 2011 4 Comments

Last week, I came across this remarkable essay by Catherine Porter. (Thanks to coach Tanya Geisler for sharing it).
 
Porter tells the story of running into her childhood bully on the street – 30 years after elementary school, both women now adults. Courageously, Porter decides to take her bully to lunch. The essay is beautifully written and really worth a read.
 
One of the things I love about the story, is Porter’s description of how her self-image is still impacted by her childhood experiences of being bullied. Even though she’s now a successful, adult woman, on “darker days” she can still hear the bully’s voice, telling her “No one likes you. You are a loser.”
 
I know I can relate to this, and so many women I know can too. There are a few early experiences – things someone said to us – that really got stuck in our heads. Maybe it was the boy that said the mean thing about how you looked. Or the teacher that said you were bad at a particular subject in school. Or maybe it was a mean girl at school who teased you. Most of us have had some very painful moment that still lives in us, that still shapes how we see ourselves.
 
Research shows our brains have a “negativity bias” – we are more alert to negative experiences than positive ones. We pay more attention to potential threats than to cues that demonstrate our saftey – emotional or physical. Research also shows that if a person has a good experience and a bad experience close together, they will feel worse than neutral. This is true even when they judge the two experiences to be of similar importance. It seems we are hard-wired to focus more on the negative than on the positive.
 
But here’s another interesting thing – negativity bias fades as we age. When we are younger, when our brains are still developing, we are particularly susceptible to it. As we get older, our attention becomes more evenly divided between the positive and negative experiences. In other words, our attention gets less biased, more balanced.
 
That’s something important for parents to remember: that their children will naturally be strongly attentive to, and imprinted by negative experiences. That’s something that needs to be noticed, talked about, and dealt with as a reality. And it’s something important for all us to think about in ourselves. What early negative ideas about yourself got imprinted somewhere in you – and how are they still impacting you? What if those are just false stories – more a reflection of mean girl’s pain or a teacher’s incompetence than anything enduring or important about you?
 
Catherine Porter took her childhood bully to lunch in order to update her old story about the bully and about herself. What can you do to let go of an old self-concept that isn’t serving you?
 
Love,
 
Tara
 
***
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Join the discussion 4 Comments

  • Tanya says:

    Tara…you have done a brilliant job in parlaying this into the realm of false stories. Grateful to you and your work.

  • Victor says:

    Awesome story! Thanks for finding this and sharing!

  • Michael Ann says:

    Thank you so much for sharing this. I went and read it and was very moved. It touched on so many issues, but I loved how the last one–the compliments and “I’m sorry” from the bullet, released all the negative for the author. Most victims of any kind of abuse do not ever get the apology. So we have to find ways to not give into the negative voices that the bully helped to create. It’s hard to do this on your own! But possible.

  • Tara,

    I’ve been stunned lately by how these strong early imprints have impacted my life and by observing how they have impacted some of the young adults I know. This is such an important post and alert for all of us!

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