17 Things Former Bullied Kids Do A Little Bit Differently As Adults

1. You will probably have an extremely tough exterior that others find difficult to break through.

2. But your interior is very soft and it’s actually the easiest thing in the world to make you emotional. You’re just careful with who you reveal those emotions to.

3. Being vulnerable with people will always be a slightly terrifying experience for you. Probably because you realized early on just how awful people can be.

4. You’ll always be slightly guarded about revealing things in your childhood to people because you don’t want to be looked at differently.

5. You cannot stand to watch especially children being made fun of, in any shape or form.

6. You believe that being bullied made you stronger but you know it also made you very weary and cautious of people as a primary instinct.

7. You just can’t help but get involved when you see someone taking advantage of someone weaker than them in any kind of situation.

8. It’s actually really easy for you to feel like crying even if you seldom ever do it, and especially not in front of people.

9. You’re sensitive to the emotions of other people. And the idea of intentionally hurting people’s feelings is something you take seriously.

10. It’s easy for you to get very defensive about personal issues that you struggle with.

11. Humor is almost always your defense mechanism to deal with the issues that have the potential to personally hurt you.

12. You probably have an above average emotional IQ because you’ve become really good at reading people and their intentions.

13. You can spot adult bullies from a mile away and you either avoid them like the plague or are not afraid to confront them at every turn.

14. You’ve learned that forgetting certain people and things is the only way you’ll ever truly be able to forgive.

15. Having to “take crap” from anyone or anything is like re-living bad memories from your childhood. And you will almost always refuse to do it, no matter the consequences.

16. You find it difficult to admit to anyone including yourself, that there are certain words or actions that will always remind you of the scars you obtained from childhood.

17. Some days you feel like the little child who can still get hurt easily when you remember the past; other days because of that past, you feel like there’s not a single thing in the world that can ever really hurt you again. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

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