Dealing with verbal bullies requires strategy and understanding their motivation. Walking away, confronting them, or seeking help from HR are effective ways to handle the situation. Maintaining self-respect and a sense of humor can also be helpful.
Dealing with a verbal bully requires strategy and tact. Like other forms of bullying, those who use words to humiliate another person can be motivated by a number of factors, and understanding the motivation behind bullying can often stop it. On the other hand, there are several ways to silence a bully and these can be quite reliable in most cases. It is important when dealing with a verbal bully not to risk losing face by losing your temper and to remain calm and collected at all times.
One of the best ways to deal with a verbal bully is to simply walk away. Simply leaving the situation can make the bully look ridiculous and keep the conflict from escalating. This is a great strategy for kids and adults alike. It’s important to walk away with your head held high, not in frustration. This tells the bully that he hasn’t “won” the conversation and tells everyone around that the bully is irrelevant.
Refusing to commit is not always possible, especially in professional situations. A bully who interrupts or is sarcastic at work may be trying to impress a superior or may just be mean. At work, it may be best to take the case to the appropriate department, such as HR.
Another strategy for adults is to actually confront the bully. While children who bully others may be too young to be swayed by reason, an adult may not even know that what they are doing could be considered bullying. The situation may be completely innocent, as cultural differences even within the same country can lead to gross misunderstandings of the intended meaning. The bully may come from an area where, for example, people argue vigorously and laugh about it afterwards with no hurt feelings involved.
As adults, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of acknowledging publicly that bullying is occurring. For example, if the verbal bully is an employer, it might not be worth losing your job to resolve the conflict. Many people say that no one should put up with verbal bullying, presumably out of self-respect, but this isn’t always true. If enduring the bullying doesn’t cause severe distress and you’re confident enough that you won’t have your self-esteem negatively affected by the verbal bully, then it might be a good idea to simply hang on until it becomes possible to move to a better position. Having self-respect sometimes means having enough confidence to strategically approach life’s choices without fearing bullying from others.
If there really is no way to beneficially end verbal bullying behavior, it is often helpful to remember that coworkers, classmates, and friends often recognize bullying behavior as ridiculous and pathetic. Sharing an eye to the sky with a peer who sees what’s going on might be enough to get you through the engagement. That is, knowing that everyone but the bully acknowledges the verbal bullying can often be enough to invalidate the loss of self-esteem caused by the bullying. In many cases, a verbal bully is an inconvenience but not a serious problem, and maintaining a sense of humor can be a solid strategy for dealing with this form of harassment.
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