Supernormal. Мэг Джей

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      This was a question Paul heard often, not only from himself but also from others. Many who questioned him wrongly envisioned the military as a gathering place for those with no other options, yet there was Paul, an excellent student who had lived a middle-class life. To many, his decision to be an engineer in the navy seemed curious, or at least one with a story behind it. When I posed his own question back to him—“Why are you doing this?”—Paul was ready with a response. It was succinct and clear, in that way that perhaps the military trains one to be, yet his answer was also notable for its candid self-awareness: “I really struggled in school growing up, and for years I was hunkered down in a sort of bunker in a lot of ways. But the navy is an environment where I have been able to stick my head above the parapet and thrive.”

      ***

      For Paul, the fifth grade had come too soon. He was skipping a year so, on that first day, his teacher said, “Class, this is Paul. He is joining us from the third grade. Please make him feel welcome.” She might as well have placed a target on his back.

      Paul was certainly an easy mark. Of all the kids in his class, he was the smartest but also the newest, the youngest, the skinniest, and the weakest. On his first day on the playground, when the class played Red Rover, Paul gave it his all as he ran toward the line of cheering and jeering classmates, only to be bounced back from their joined hands like a rock out of a slingshot. In a way, all of his school years would come to feel like that. Paul spent his days trying to break in somewhere only to have the other kids grasp each other tightly, like they would rather have their arms broken than be seen as the weak link, the ones who let Paul through. Outside of recess, kids turned their backs to him at the lunch table. They stepped on the backs of his shoes. They leaned in together and snickered behind their hands when he spoke. They spit in his seat and left mean notes on his desk.

      When another new boy joined the class, for a short while Paul had a friend. Together they articulated the sort of social class system at work: The “upper” boys were the biggest and the most athletic ones, the boys whom everyone watched carefully and wanted to be; the “middle” boys had some assets but not quite the right ones so they worked anxiously to align themselves with the boys above them; the “lower” boys, of course, were Paul and a couple of others who mostly stayed away from each other for fear of compounding their bad situation. With his new friend, life as a “lower” was tolerable for a while but only until one of the mean notes on his desk said this: “Sorry. Can’t be friends anymore. I want to move up.”

      ***

      Some kids live with emotional or physical abuse at home, while others live with it at school, where it goes by the name of bullying. About one in three children are bullied, usually at school, by the age of eighteen, although what that bullying looks like varies widely. An estimated 25 percent of bullied children are the targets of verbal aggression; they are made fun of, insulted, or called names, or they have rumors spread about them. About 10 percent are bullied physically, by being pushed, shoved, tripped, spit upon, or the like. About 5 percent are ignored or excluded from activities, and another 5 percent have their physical safety threatened. And according to a 2011 study from the Pew Research Center, about 10 to 15 percent of teens reported being harassed via the Internet. Like Paul, most children who are bullied are targets of more than one kind of aggression.

      To understand bullying and its impact is to understand the role of power: Bullies have more of it, while their targets have less. Contrary to the widespread notion that bullies are insecure outsiders, most have assets that are respected by their peers. Maybe they are physically large or are fast runners or skilled athletes, or perhaps they are popular or socially savvy. Bullies abuse whatever power they have to maintain their dominant position in the crowd. The targets of bullies, on the other hand, tend to be socially vulnerable, usually because they are different somehow. Maybe they are chosen, as Paul was, because they are younger or smaller or new to a class. Sometimes they are perceived as unattractive or unathletic. They may be disabled or economically disadvantaged, or they may be a member of an ethnic minority or identify as LGBTQ.

      Although elementary school students do experiment with bullying behaviors, the lion’s share of bullying takes place in middle school. Bullying behavior spikes during transitions between grades or schools or during other times when social groups are disrupted. Boys and girls jockey anew for friends and invitations, and it is during this social free-for-all that various forms of aggression may be used to establish, or reestablish, the status quo.

      When Paul moved on to middle school, most of his classmates moved along with him, as did his low status. More than ever, the boys scrambled for a place at the top of the social heap, or at least for a place as far from the bottom as possible. During school, kids pelted Paul with the bad words they were just learning—gay, stupid, weirdo, pussy, fag, loser, asshole, shithead, pencil dick—and after school they pelted him with rocks while he waited for his bus. Contrary to the old sticks-and-stones adage, the words did hurt—and in fact, recent research has found that social pain travels along the same pathways in the brain as does physical pain.

      The imbalance of power is not only what makes bullying possible and intractable but also what makes it so harmful. Of course, some fighting and competition is common and even normal among kids, but those who experience repeated aggression at the hands of more powerful others feel more threatened, less in control, and more anxious and depressed than those who experience aggression at the hands of peers on their same level. Feeling helpless to change what is happening to them, the targets of bullying may live with chronic fear and dread, and the harm that this may cause is as varied as bullying itself. Many victims of bullying feel bad about themselves and feel isolated from others. Because bullying often—but not always—takes place at school, targets may perform poorly in their classes and have a negative view of education and teachers. They may suffer from physical ailments such as headaches, stomachaches, or sleeping problems, and report mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. These problems tend to be more severe if the youth is targeted once a week or more, and they may continue well into adulthood as the experience of powerlessness and victimization becomes woven into who they are, with depression or anxiety lasting for years or even decades after bullying subsides.

      This might have been how it went for Paul were it not for one of the rocks hurled his way. When Paul came home with a bloodied eye that required stitches, his mother considered that perhaps he ought to beat a retreat; that maybe the family should move so he could go to another school: “I feel bullied by those kids!” Paul heard his mother cry to his father that night behind their closed bedroom door. Hearing those words and his mother’s sobs, what struck Paul the most was the unfairness, the wrongness, of it all. Parents are not supposed to cry. Families are not supposed to move. People who do bad things are not supposed to get away with them. So in that moment, Paul decided to stay right where he was. He was going to find a way to fight back.

      ***

      When faced with danger, our deepest instincts are to fight back or run away. This “fight-or-flight” response was so-named in 1915 by psychologist Walter Cannon, who observed in animals that, when threatened, the body mobilizes to defend itself or to flee. In Cannon’s model, every living being’s goal is to maintain homeostasis—another well-known word he coined—and, to do so, the brain coordinates bodily systems in order to ensure the stability of what, before him, French experimentalist Claude Bernard called the milieu interieur, or the internal environment.

      Cannon’s ideas have been refined over the years, but a century later we know that he was largely correct. Following disturbances in our environment, the brain and the body respond in an effort to make things right. The amygdala triggers the release of stress hormones, and as a result heart rate increases, focus narrows, digestion slows, and blood flows to our muscles for extra energy. These changes prepare us to react to stress—to do something about it—by either advancing or retreating, through fight or through flight.

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