The Hidden Long-Term Effects of Bullying. How healing from bullying can unfold deeply. Sometimes through unexpected soul connections that touch your innermost pain.
Maybe you’ve experienced it yourself. Or you see it in your child, a friend, or a colleague. Bullying. Not the playful teasing, but the real thing. Repeated exclusion, humiliation, being ignored. The kind of experiences that settle in places no one sees. Where sometimes you only uncover them years later. The question I keep seeing (and that I myself struggled with for a long time):
What does bullying really do to you? In the long run?
I can only speak from my own experience. But that says enough.
I was bullied from first grade all the way through the second year of high school.
Not always loudly or visibly, but often quietly. Out of sight of the teachers. It wasn’t just the kids; the mothers on the schoolyard also unknowingly played along.
That feeling of never quite belonging. You become alert, on guard. You make yourself small to avoid becoming a target.
The Hidden Long-Term Effects of Bullying
What I didn’t know then, but see now, is that this still affects you years later.
Not necessarily in big dramas, but in subtle ways.
You carry it with you in how you form relationships. How you show yourself. How you dare to trust yourself or not. And sometimes you see it in the way you can abandon yourself, even before someone else has the chance.
Because that is one of the hidden consequences of bullying:
You learn to believe that there is something wrong with you.
And if no one tells you otherwise, you carry that with you. Sometimes for a lifetime. Two years ago, I met someone who opened something inside me.
A soul connection, it could be my twin flame, but I prefer not to label it.
What I do know is that he touched something I had deeply buried.
He saw me, truly for who I was. Right down to my soul. And I felt so alive. So connected. But also so vulnerable.
The Hidden Long-Term Effects of Bullying
Because it was precisely through that deep connection that things surfaced I thought were already healed.
His silence, after he left, his distance, activated something old.
The little girl who felt abandoned on the schoolyard. Who thought, “I’m not good enough.”
And it felt as if I was back there. Not literally, but inside.
As if my body still remembered what my mind had long tried to forget.
Those are the hidden effects of bullying. They can suddenly resurface years later—in your love life. Or at work, in how you set boundaries, or don’t.
In how you deal with rejection. Or how you’d rather disappear before anyone truly sees you.
You develop survival strategies. And there are many. Some become pleasers.
Others isolate themselves.
Some build thick walls, anything is better than feeling that old pain again.
And that is all understandable. Human, even. But it’s not always helpful in the long run. What I’ve learned is that healing doesn’t stop at understanding what happened.
Sometimes it requires feeling what’s still there. Even when you thought you were ‘done’ with it.
And sometimes, just sometimes, someone comes into your life who touches you exactly there.
Not to break you, but to show you what still needs to be seen.
An old pain that needs to be faced
For me, that was this meeting with that meeting on soul level. I felt it in my body, in my energy, maybe even in my aura.
An old pain that hadn’t fully loosened its grip. And instead of running away again, I stayed present. I stayed with everything that was there.
And that brought me something no therapy, book, or course ever could:
True tenderness. For that little girl inside me. That I don’t have to fight to be seen.
That I’m not too much. No, I don’t have to fight for my right to exist or prove myself.
That I may exist just as I am. And I wish that for you too, from the bottom of my heart. Because everyone deserves the freedom to be fully themselves.
🕊️
The consequences of bullying don’t always disappear with time.
Sometimes they need space. Silence. Attention. Love.
Not because there’s something wrong with you, but because you’ve experienced something that deserves to be seen.
If you recognize my story. That old pain that suddenly resurfaces, those feelings that don’t seem to fit the moment.
Know this: you are not alone. And no, you don’t have to solve it all on your own. Healing isn’t linear. Sometimes you go one layer deeper.
Not because you ‘relapse’, but because you’re ready to heal further.
Softer. Kinder. Deeper. In your own way and at your own pace.
