Blog #3

Reading the Family Bullies post from Adams, and Berry really go me thinking. It is not often that we think about bullying inside of the family dynamic. In American culture we often think of the family as a safe space, a place to escape anything negative that may be happening outside of the home. So this reading really challenged what I knew as a typical family in our society. The sentence I chose to focus on was the one that says "Bullying is an omnipresent is an everyday culture and relational lives"(Berry & Adams, 2016). The part I am really focusing on is the relational lives part of the sentence. This small part completely changed the way I will look at bullying. Especially bullying in the family dynamics. We often times think of bullying in the family as "OK" because they are your family and it's not bullying because they love you... But would a person who quote on quote loves you really treat you in that specific manner. I started to think about my own family dynamic growing up to see if I have had first hand experience of this bullying in the home space. Thankfully for myself I had not, but I started to think about the experiences of one of my childhood friends and his older sister. Significantly older by the way. I can remember her physically abusing him, but it was deemed OK because it was sisterly love and he couldn't be hurt because she was a girl and he was a boy. But looking at this now I can see that this behavior was far from OK and is most likely one of the things that has played into their strained relationship as they have grown older. After reading this piece I will now look deeper into the dynamics of bullying as a whole and hopefully as a result help fight back against this stigma of bullying.