Surviving the Bully Through Self-Belief

When the one in power is the one you know well

The first and greatest bully of my life was my father.

He yelled that my mother and I were pigs because we didn’t keep the house spotless, and for years after that when she used that word to put herself down after eating “too much,” (which had just been a normal amount), I had to beg her, Please don’t use that word. She listened, because she understood what it was like to embody an insult, to repeat it inside your head until it is as familiar as your own name.

My father called my brother a f****t for wearing a beaded Mardi Gras necklace he got from a celebration at school. My little brother, in Kindergarten.

He slammed doors, hurled beloved belongings, screamed until blood vessels popped in his eyes and I cowered beneath his shadow, drank and got high until he forgot about all the ways we were bringing him down.

As a teenager, I overheard him tell my family that I was disgusting because I accidentally got period blood on the couch. It was a small, dark spot that never came out of the beige faux suede, and each time I saw it, I felt humiliated. I was glad when we lost our house and left the couch behind for the foreclosure bank to deal with, hoping I could also dislodge that nasty part of myself.

The most damaging insult he hurled was that I was a b****, which was his way of saying that I was unlovable. I heard this so much that I internalized it as a true fact about myself. I’m a mean person, I thought. People don’t want to be my friend.

I tried hard to be lovable, to be kind, to leave my b*****ness behind. By sophomore year of college, when I’d made a solid group of friends and still kept in touch with my friends from high school, I began to believe that all my trying to be better was finally paying off.

It took me about seven more years to realize that I had friends because I’d always been a good person, not because I’d somehow tricked people into believing I was one.

It wasn’t just that my father was cruel. He was also an expert manipulator, adept at shaping us to see the world the way he did, with no space for objection, discussion, or feeling. If you disagreed with him, or if your emotions were in any way inconvenient, you were punished. Having dropped out of high school, my father had no desire for a passport and had never ventured beyond the I-95 corridor between New York and Florida, because he was afraid of anyone unlike him. I didn’t know what existed beyond those boundaries he set for us; I just knew it wasn’t right for any person to make me feel so bad about myself, so often.

Is this why I relate so much to survivors of cults? When I hear people discuss their process of discovering life beyond the gates of their former beliefs, it’s the closest thing I’ve heard to what I experienced when I left my father’s house.

Cutting ties with him allowed me to see the world without his influence.

I found safety in vegetarianism, feminism, environmental activism, New York City, California, Europe, queer culture, Korean and Indian food, the cotton candy comfort of nights spent in with good girlfriends, memoirs written by women, the power of writing, the potential of knowledge. When I went to college and discovered this new place—which I now know as reality—you might think I was like the cliché, “a kid in a candy shop,” eagerly consuming every new experience my father had denied me.

But it was more like unraveling a mystery.

How could all of this have existed, and I was just learning about it now? How was my father allowed to deny us so much? What else was there to know?

I tell you about my father now to say that I am no stranger to men like Donald Trump. I suspect that many of the women who did not vote for him have some personal experience with his specific breed: the grossly inflated sense of self-importance, the rejection of basic decency for personal gain, and the very idea that others are less worthy of a well-lived life if they are anyone but a wealthy, straight, able-bodied, cis white man.

Seeing someone just like your abuser elected to the highest office on earth is nothing less than a nightmare. Such platforming of cruelty can make you feel gaslit—if everything you believed was morally wrong is taking center stage, is it actually wrong? Are you the one who’s wrong? I know this feeling well, and I’m here to tell you that if you feel this way, you are not wrong. Know that this is an intended effect, part of the manipulation. Abusers and predators of all kinds feed on your self-doubt; this is how they wedge their way into the driver’s seat of your life.

Living in a country run by Trump again will be a lot like living in a house run by my father. Which is to say, it will be both awful and familiar. Except this time, I am no longer a child, easily intimidated by men asserting their authority through anger and intimidation. I can spot this kind of person from miles away; can see the scared little boy hiding behind the strongman façade.

I understand that such an abuse of power is intended to cause division and isolation, leaving us alone with our broken hearts and ashamed by our distant dreams of equality. The antidote, then, is to love ourselves and our community. I survived my father only because I had a community who showed me I deserved love; a group of friends and teachers and stable adults who insisted that I had potential to be something more than my father’s daughter.

We will only survive the next four years by being this kind of friend to people who will need one, especially those who face persecution for their identity, those who now fear violence for simply being who they are. I see this as clearly as I first saw the world through my own eyes: The weaponization of masculinity is intended to minimize our existence and our contributions, but it can be fought with radical self-belief. Because when we love and believe in ourselves, we have the capacity to love and believe in others. I can say from personal experience that community and kindness and showing up are not small things, as they may have you believe. They are everything.