As a parent, there’s little that’s harder than helping your child deal with a bully. For one, your natural instincts might be to go into Mama Bear mode, but releasing your ire onto a small child is ill-advised and frowned upon. For another, a lot of us still don’t quite know how to handle bullies (spoilers: they don’t always go away after high school). And so many a well-meaning parent will fall back to what we heard growing up that sometimes made us feel better: “they’re just jealous of you.” But TikTok creator Emily Ballesteros (@emilybruth) was raised with, we think, a more effective approach.
“I didn’t grow up with a ‘They’re just jealous of you’ mom. I grew up with a ‘It’s never about you’ mom,” she begins and, already, we’re leaning in and fascinated.
“They’re probably unhappy. They’re probably insecure,” she continues, paraphrasing her mom. “They’re probably going through something at home. They probably were raised different. They probably have a certain internal dialogue that’s really negative and judgmental that they probably learned from somewhere and they’re just exercising it on you. They probably have thoughts and beliefs that you’re not living in line with so they’re upset with you.
“As a result, I don’t take anything personally,” she says brightly. “Because very few things are personal. Somebody could come up to me and tell me very personal things they don’t like about me and I would still be like ‘OK, happy normal people don’t act like that. I have never done that to somebody else. So that’s a them problem; I’m going to go on with my life. If everything feels like a personal jab, that’s exhausting! That’s how you end up developing a victim complex. Because it’s like ‘poor me; everything is about me.’ Practically nothing’s about you! I hate to break it to you. But find freedom in that!”
It’s also excellent parenting advice, we think, for a few reasons. Not only does it get our children to realize that other people’s words aren’t anything they have to worry about (because it’s not about them even if they’re the person being talked about), but it plants the seeds of compassion and empathy. Maybe not right away (it’s hard to feel empathy for someone being mean to you), but upon reflection, it offers the opportunity to think “If it’s not about me and it’s a them problem: wow, that’s a sad way to go through life. That must be hard for them.”
It’s also good advice for us to reflect on as well. Because it’s hard not to take things personally: we can only ever really see the world through our own eyes. But if we can really internalize that everyone else is doing the same, we can let go of other people’s baggage and move through the world unencumbered by their unresolved nonsense.
