When most people hear the word “bullying,” they immediately picture schoolyards, adolescent drama, or perhaps children being targeted for being different. But what if I told you that some of the most devastating bullying experiences happen to adults? And that these experiences can create trauma responses every bit as severe as those from combat, accidents, or assault?
I’ve seen it in my practice more times than I can count. A successful professional still haunted by fraternity hazing rituals from college. A woman who experiences panic attacks before social gatherings because of the targeted exclusion she experienced in her community group. A man who can’t maintain healthy romantic relationships because of the public humiliation he endured in what was supposed to be a brotherhood.
Adult bullying doesn’t just hurt in the moment – it can create lasting psychological wounds that meet all the criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). And because our society often dismisses these experiences (“Shouldn’t you be over that by now?”), many suffer in silence, not realizing that their symptoms are a normal response to abnormal treatment.
Let’s explore this hidden epidemic and discover how approaches like hypnotherapy can offer healing where other methods may fall short.
The Many Faces of Adult Bullying
Organizational Hazing: Brotherhood or Betrayal?
College fraternities and sororities, sports teams, military units, and even some professional organizations have long histories of “initiation rituals” that cross the line into abuse. What makes these experiences particularly traumatic is the profound contradiction at their core: you’re promised belonging, acceptance, and lifelong bonds – but to earn them, you must first endure humiliation, degradation, or even physical harm.
“It was supposed to make us brothers,” one client told me. “But how can you feel brotherhood with people who took pleasure in breaking you down? I spent years trying to make sense of it.”
This cognitive dissonance – the clash between what was promised and what was delivered – creates a unique kind of psychological wound. The very people who were supposed to become your trusted community became your abusers, yet you’re expected to celebrate this as a bonding experience.
Social Bullying: Exclusion and Reputation Damage
Adult social circles can be just as cruel as any high school clique – sometimes more so because the tactics become more sophisticated. Social bullying often involves deliberate exclusion, gossip, reputation damage, and the skillful manipulation of group dynamics to isolate the target.
What makes this form particularly devastating is that adults have more to lose. Your professional reputation, community standing, and support networks can all be damaged by coordinated social bullying. And unlike children who might have parents to intervene, adults are expected to handle these situations on their own.
Workplace Bullying: Power and Control
The workplace provides fertile ground for bullying, with power differentials, financial dependencies, and limited escape options. While some workplace bullying is finally being recognized as harassment, many forms remain normalized as “tough management” or “paying your dues.”
When Bullying Becomes PTSD
The Trauma Response Explained
Not every difficult experience creates trauma, but certain factors make PTSD more likely. Adult bullying often checks all these boxes:
- Powerlessness: Being unable to escape or effectively fight back
- Betrayal: Harm coming from those you trusted or needed to trust
- Humiliation: Public degradation that attacks your core identity
- Isolation: Being cut off from support during or after the experience
- Invalidation: Having your pain dismissed or minimized
When these elements combine, the brain processes the experience differently than ordinary stress. Rather than being filed away as a normal memory, the experience gets stored in fragmented pieces – sensory impressions, emotional states, and bodily sensations that can be triggered unexpectedly.
Recognizing the Symptoms
Many adult bullying survivors don’t recognize their symptoms as PTSD because they don’t consider their experience “traumatic enough.” But trauma isn’t measured by some objective standard of horribleness – it’s defined by how your nervous system processed the experience.
Common symptoms include:
- Intrusive memories: Flashbacks or nightmares about the bullying
- Avoidance behaviors: Steering clear of similar environments or situations
- Hypervigilance: Being constantly on alert for signs of social threat
- Negative self-beliefs: Internalizing the bullies’ messages about your worth
- Triggered responses: Disproportionate reactions to reminders of the experience
- Relationship difficulties: Trouble with trust or vulnerability
- Shame spirals: Intense, overwhelming feelings of worthlessness
“I thought I was just being oversensitive,” another client shared. “It was ‘just’ hazing, after all. Everyone else seemed fine. It took me years to realize that what I was experiencing was actual trauma, and that I wasn’t weak for being affected by it.”
The Unique Challenge of Organizational Bullying
The Voluntary Paradox
One aspect that makes organizational bullying particularly complex to heal is what I call the “voluntary paradox.” Unlike childhood bullying or workplace harassment, many adults initially chose to join the organization that ultimately bullied them. This creates additional layers of self-blame (“I signed up for this”) and confusion (“Was this really abuse if I could have walked away?”).
What this perspective misses is the bait-and-switch at the heart of these experiences. You signed up for community, advancement, or belonging – not for abuse. And once the process begins, psychological pressures, sunk costs, and manipulation tactics make “just walking away” far more complicated than it appears from the outside.
The Institutional Cover-Up
Many organizations have powerful incentives to minimize or deny bullying within their ranks. “It builds character.” “It’s tradition.” “It wasn’t that bad.” These dismissive responses compound the trauma by gaslighing survivors about their own experiences.
When an entire institution – be it a fraternity, sports team, or workplace – collectively denies the reality of abuse, it creates a profound form of reality distortion that can make survivors question their own perceptions and responses.
Why Traditional Approaches Often Fall Short
The Limits of Talk Therapy
Don’t get me wrong – cognitive behavioral therapy and other talk-based approaches have their place in healing from adult bullying. But there’s a fundamental challenge: trauma isn’t primarily stored in the rational, verbal parts of the brain.
Trauma lives in the body, in the emotional brain, and in the nervous system. You can intellectually understand that the bullying wasn’t your fault, that you didn’t deserve it, that those people were wrong – and still experience triggered responses when faced with similar social dynamics.
The Social Pressure to “Get Over It”
Our culture has little patience for the long tail of trauma, especially from experiences that many dismiss as “character building” or “not that serious.” This social pressure often forces survivors to pretend they’re fine when they’re not, adding a layer of performance to their already heavy burden.
“I learned to never mention it,” one client told me. “If I showed how much it still affected me ten years later, people would look at me like I was pathetic. So I just buried it deeper.”
The Hypnotherapy Difference
Accessing the Subconscious Mind
This is where hypnotherapy offers a unique advantage. By creating a state of focused relaxation, hypnotherapy allows us to communicate directly with the subconscious mind – where trauma responses are stored and triggered.
Under hypnosis, we can access and transform these deeper patterns without being blocked by the conscious mind’s defenses or limited by its verbal nature. We can work with metaphor, sensation, and emotion – the languages that trauma speaks.
Creating Safety for the Nervous System
Perhaps the most important element of hypnotherapy for bullying-related PTSD is the establishment of profound safety. In the hypnotic state, your nervous system can experience what it desperately needs: a sense of security, control, and agency.
From this place of safety, we can then revisit the traumatic experiences not to relive them, but to reprocess them. To give them new meaning. To separate the factual events from the toxic messages they carried about your worth, belongingness, or security.
Specific Techniques for Bullying Trauma
Several hypnotherapeutic approaches are particularly effective for healing from adult bullying:
- Parts Work: Addressing the fragmented aspects of self that emerged from the trauma
- Resource Building: Creating internal sources of strength, wisdom, and protection
- Memory Reconsolidation: Updating traumatic memories with new information and perspectives
- Somatic Release: Allowing the body to complete fight/flight responses that were frozen during the experience
- Future Pacing: Creating new neural pathways for handling similar social situations
The Path to Healing
What Recovery Looks Like
Healing from adult bullying trauma doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or never feeling triggered again. It means:
- The experience becomes an integrated part of your life story, not a defining feature
- You can think about what happened without being emotionally overwhelmed
- Your nervous system no longer goes into fight/flight/freeze when reminded of the experience
- You’ve reclaimed your sense of agency and control
- You’ve separated what happened from what it means about you
- You can trust again, with appropriate boundaries
From Victim to Empowered Survivor
One of the most powerful transformations I witness in my practice is the shift from feeling like a victim of bullying to an empowered survivor. This isn’t about toxic positivity or “finding the silver lining” – it’s about reclaiming your narrative.
Your story doesn’t end with what was done to you. It continues with how you healed, how you grew, and how you used that experience to become more compassionate, more authentic, or more committed to creating safe spaces for others.
A Call to Compassionate Action
If you’re reading this and recognizing your own experience in these words, I want you to know something important: What happened to you was real. The impact it had was real. Your trauma response is real – and valid.
Adult bullying creates legitimate psychological wounds that deserve compassionate care. You wouldn’t expect someone with a broken leg to “just walk it off,” and you shouldn’t expect yourself to simply get over significant emotional trauma without support.
At Acadian Rock Hypnosis, I specialize in creating a safe, non-judgmental space where these hidden wounds can finally receive the attention and healing they deserve. Whether the bullying happened in college, in a workplace, or in your community, hypnotherapy offers a pathway to processing these experiences at their deepest level.
The first step in healing is often simply acknowledging that what happened to you matters – that your experience deserves to be seen, heard, and addressed with the seriousness it warrants. The second step is reaching out for the kind of help that can make a difference.
You’ve carried these hidden wounds long enough. Isn’t it time to finally heal them?
Kevin Moran is a certified consulting hypnotist and Sexual Freedom practitioner based in Portland, Maine. He specializes in helping individuals heal from sexual trauma, anxiety, and emotional challenges using hypnosis. Learn more about his services or book a discovery call at Acadian Rock Hypnosis.
