Acceptance means sticking with your story even in moments when it seems like the bully will never back off.
The way to accept that things will eventually fall into place and you’ll get through this bullying better for it, is to stop checking.
Checking is…reassurance seeking.
We do it to assess the outcome of our goals before they’ve happened.
It’s too soon to know, but we NEED to know now, so we check too early and too often.
This kind of data collection AKA checking will give you a false reading whether the news is good or bad in any given moment.
Why you might ask can we not trust such data? The answer is because you haven’t allowed enough time to pass for the bullying pattern to completely dissipate.
Bullying, no matter how long it’s gone on, will eventually end after a period of your calm and low effort (anti bully food) approach.
However, it will take time to see the bully completely disappear from your life.
My point is you have been dealing with the problem of bullying for a bit of time, and it will take a bit of time to move past it. This is something you must accept as part of your behavioral shifts and healing.
Your emotions and confidence have taken a hit from the bullying, and they will recover from all your persistence over time.
Checking your progress early and often in the hopes of reassuring yourself things are working in your favor will only lead to tension.
This is true for two reasons: the first is doubting creates more doubt. Ironically people check and reassure for a sense of certainty but engaging doubt only reinforces the uncertainty. Doubt goes against your story because it’s focused on what you don’t want. When we focus on keeping the unwanted thing from happening, we resist and keep our story from flowing.
The second reason reassurance leads to tension is if we look outside ourselves for certainty, we give credit to external factors we can’t control instead of crediting ourselves. The only certainty we can control is the sense we can handle uncertainty.
We can handle the unknown as it comes, and the more we accept that, the better we’ll be able to do it.
The bully will back off eventually. Once you’ve accepted that and the fact that it will take some time, you will be ready to stick with your story.
You will give credit to your own calmness and courage rather than looking for external signs or fleeting moments of success.
You will expect the process to take some more time, and because you believe things will work out regardless, you will check less and less frequently.
You will persist, which means to go forward toward your goal of a bully free social life with little effort, pressure for certainty, or tension within.
You will do this because you believe in what you’re learning and your ability to act on it.
You will free yourself of being bullied. As long as you calmly persist in your story and not doubt it or resist the story you don’t want, you will get past this tough time.
You will likely meet more bullies, and you might have setbacks, but you will never be bullied again like this.
Once you let the process you’ve begun unfold completely without checking to see if it’s happened yet, you can only win.
It’s inevitable. Just keep going.
