Day 4 – Solving Workplace Bullying: Am I A Bully?

Tuesday, December 10, 2025

The hardest question I’ve asked myself this week: Am I a bully?

It’s a question that carries shame, defensiveness, and the kind of self-examination most people avoid. But if I’m going to build something credible around solving workplace bullying, I have to be willing to look at my own behaviour without flinching.

The question comes from understanding a uncomfortable truth: people who are bullied can become bullies.

My History

I was bullied by my stepfather. When he turned to alcohol to solve his problems, he became an aggressive, predatory alpha. The house felt dangerous. I left home at 18 to go to university and never came back. For years, I’ve carried a quiet guilt about that—feeling like a coward for running away instead of standing up to him or protecting my family.

In my first job, I was bullied by a colleague through months of micro-aggressive behavior. One day, I called him a bully to his face. He was mortified. We were never friends, but he mostly left me alone after that. I thought I’d won.

Later on, when I was a manager of people I was accused of bullying. Now I was mortified—devastated, actually. The accusation was unjust and callous, calculated by that individual to derail a performance review that might have led to their exit. But even knowing that, I still questioned myself. Had my behaviour at any point crossed a line? Had I been blind to how my words or actions affected someone else? The label stuck to me like tar, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe, somewhere, I had become what I hated.

So I have to ask: Did running from my stepfather make me conflict-avoidant or aggressive? Did calling out my first workplace bully teach me that confrontation works, and did I later wield that lesson carelessly? Am I perpetuating a cycle I don’t even see?

The Cycle: From Victim to Perpetrator

The research is sobering. Studies show that 30% to 35% of victims of bullying later become bullies themselves. Chronic bullying can alter brain development, turning compassion into aggression as a survival mechanism. When people are repeatedly victimized, they may internalize the behavior and later replicate it—either to regain control, to protect themselves preemptively, or because they’ve learned that power through intimidation works.psychologytoday+1​

One longitudinal study found that perpetrators of workplace bullying are significantly more likely to become targets themselves over time. The mechanism? Bullying creates relationship conflicts, which erode perceived control, which increases vulnerability to being bullied. It’s a vicious cycle: bully someone, damage relationships, lose your footing, get bullied in return. journals.sagepub​

Victims can also develop characteristics that make them more vulnerable to chronic victimization—anxiety, social withdrawal, low self-esteem—which then increase the likelihood of being targeted again. The data suggests a feedback loop where victimization and maladjustment fuel one another, trapping people in patterns that span years.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih​

This terrifies me because it means the line between victim and perpetrator isn’t clear. We’re all capable of becoming what hurt us.

What Does Bullying Actually Look Like?

If I’m going to examine my own behavior honestly, I need to know what signs to look for. The behavioral indicators of workplace bullying according to highspeedtraining+1 include:​

• Constant criticism of someone’s work or behavior for unwarranted reasons
• Removal of duties or blocking training and promotion opportunities without justification
• Overbearing supervision or micromanagement designed to undermine confidence
• Exclusion and isolation—deliberately leaving someone out or ignoring them
• Public humiliation—being put down or made the butt of jokes in front of others
• Withholding information or giving someone the wrong information intentionally
• Threats and aggression—overt or subtle intimidation about job security
• Mood swings and inconsistency—constantly changing expectations to keep someone off-balance
• Misusing power to belittle, demean, or intimidate

Bullying isn’t a single event. It’s intentional, persistent, and involves an imbalance of power. It’s emotional, verbal, or physical abuse designed to coerce and intimidate over time.​

Reading this list, I can see my stepfather clearly. I can see my first workplace bully. But can I see myself?

The Retaliation Trap

There’s another dimension I’m grappling with: the cycle of retaliation. When someone is bullied, they often respond with comments, gestures, or behaviors that escalate the situation. Over time, this reaction perpetuates the cycle, with the victim adopting a stance that “it’s their fault, and I can’t change anything”. This limited sense of responsibility can turn victims into perpetrators without them realizing it.​

Did I do this when I confronted my first bully? Was my response justified self-defense, or did I become aggressive in return? When the person later in my career accused me of bullying during a performance review, was there truth buried in their manipulation?

I don’t have clear answers. And that uncertainty is exactly why this question matters.

Why This Examination Matters

If I’m going to help organizations address bullying, I can’t approach it from a position of moral superiority. I have to acknowledge that most bullying isn’t predatory malice—it’s lack of awareness, bias, primitive fight-or-flight responses, and learned behavior from being victimized themselves.​

Most people who bully can be helped if they become self-aware. But that requires creating environments where people can examine their behaviour without being vilified (see here). It requires understanding sensitivity spectrums—hypersensitivity that makes some people more vulnerable to feeling hurt, and hyposensitivity or lack of awareness that makes others more likely to hurt without realizing it.

I believe the majority of workplace bullying happens because people don’t recognize their own impact. They’re stressed, under pressure, replicating behaviour they’ve seen modeled, or unconsciously recreating dynamics from their own victimization.​

But believing that doesn’t exempt me from scrutiny. It means I have to ask the hard question first: Am I part of the problem?

Where Do We Go From Here?

I don’t know if I’m a bully. I know I’ve been bullied. I know I’ve confronted bullies. I know I’ve been accused of it. I know I have accused others. And I know that without constant self-examination, any of us can slip into behaviours we’d condemn in others.

So here’s my commitment: I’ll keep questioning. I’ll keep listening. I’ll keep examining my own filters, judgments, and behaviours. And I’ll create space for others to do the same without shame—because that’s the only way we break the cycle.

If you’ve ever wondered the same about yourself—if you’ve been bullied and worried you became one, or been accused and questioned your own behaviour—I want to hear from you. This work only succeeds if we’re willing to be vulnerable together.

Comment, message, share your story. Let’s figure this out.

Resources that popped up today

1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-human-equation/202507/from-bullied-to-bully-to-butcher
2. https://educate.bankstreet.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1087&context=independent-studies
3. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10596011221143263
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3881278/
5. https://www.highspeedtraining.co.uk/hub/am-i-being-bullied-at-work/
6. https://www.iafc.org/docs/default-source/deptadmin/tableofusefulsignsofworkplacebullying.pdf?sfvrsn=68b9870d_2
7. https://www.fabic.com.au/blog/cycle-of-bullying/
8. https://truesport.org/bullying-prevention/stages-of-bullying/
9. https://www.mentalhealth.com/library/long-term-effects-of-bullying
10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178923000101