In this episode I book-end my two episode investigation on the impacts of bullying with someone who has interviewed victims of bullying to attempt to characterize the impacts.  I recently did a podcast that reviewed my experiences with bullying as a child and how it seemed to have impacted my personality and my life. From a high level, Dr. deLara’s results resonated with me. It felt good to identify an external reason for why I found it hard to interact with others.  But let’s be careful and question our assumptions. Life is difficult and challenging for everyone. Can victims blame their entire life experience on bullying? No. We need to be careful about confirmation bias. It is difficult to guess how life altering these events really were.  Perhaps I would have turned out shy and socially awkward anyways.  Any good science includes a control group to contrast. Let’s find out what the evidence says.

Dr. Ellen Walser deLara is an associate professor emerita in the School of Social Work at Syracuse University. She is also a practicing family therapist. Dr. deLara received her doctorate from Cornell University in educational psychology and was a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell focused on child maltreatment.

Her areas of research address adolescent development, child maltreatment, school and community violence, and bullying from systemic and developmental perspectives. Currently, Dr. deLara is investigating the long-term consequences of childhood bullying on adult relationships and mental health. She has presented widely at national and international conferences and speaks frequently to the media on bullying and school violence.

Dr. deLara’s books include: Bullying Scars: The impact on adult life and relationships (Oxford University Press), And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to protect adolescents from bullying, harassment, and emotional violence (Simon & Schuster) and School-based Intervention Programs (Houghton-Mifflin) co-authored with Dr. James Garbarino.

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