⚔️ What it means to have grown up with bullying at home
Growing up with family bullying meant your childhood home never felt safe—the place that should have been your sanctuary became a battlefield where love and cruelty were intertwined.
You may have developed hypervigilance to subtle shifts in tone, expression, or body language, learning to watch for danger signs before the next attack. Early on, you internalized the cruel messages, believing you deserved the bullying or that it revealed something fundamentally wrong with you. To this day, you expect cruelty from those closest to you—love and harm became intertwined in your nervous system so that affection without pain feels incomplete.
You may have learned to either tolerate unacceptable behavior or preemptively attack—the middle ground of healthy assertiveness feels impossible to access. In relationships, you often attract bullies or sometimes turn into one yourself just to survive, recreating the family dynamics modeled for you as a kid. Your default is defensive—even neutral comments feel like personal attacks, making you quick to counterattack in self-defense before you've even processed what was actually said.