What an apath is and why they are dangerous - Business Insider

I find this article particularly important and it actually gives a name for the kind of people that ALWAYS made me question "why would they if". I don't like to go along with people that want me to target someone who really did not do anything wrong. Actually, it's one of the reasons I don't join groups because I don't like to be a part of ganging up on someone and hurting someone. I know this has a lot to do with all the years I witnessed my older brother being targeted and bullied on the school bus every day and it traumatized me that a bully would pick on him and others would join in even though it was clearly hurting my older brother. Even my older sister wanted me to be mean to him and hate him and she would even threaten me that she would be mean to me if I did not go along with her and reject him.

I did have a group of friends in High School, however, I made it very clear that I would NOT be part of any making fun of or bullying or being told who to like and who not to like and be friendly with. I do not like to participate in the group mentality of "if you are not X then you are stupid or bad". I do think human beings can be very vulnerable/susceptible to joining in with the group mentality and even being blindly loyal to a point where they will literally fight to the death for it or even loyally "hate" without even actually knowing someone for themselves.

Yes, I do remember noticing how other children would go along with and engage in bullying with the "as long as it's not me" mentality.

I was the youngest of three growing up and I had always felt like the odd man out tbh. My older sister hated my older brother and picked on him and attacked his self esteem, my father would do that to my mother where he would criticize her and attack her self esteem too. I could not participate in any of that behavior AT ALL. Instead I wanted the freedom to know each family member separately and I did love each one separately. However, that also challenged me emotionally and without realizing it, this kind of dysfunction caused me to feel unsafe and stressed. The biggest question I kept struggling with was "how can anyone gain any kind of positive feeling by making someone feel bad?".

I remember the dinner table and having to sit there and literally watch my older sister pick on my older brother insisting he had kooties and not wanting him to touch the food and then he got so he would reach out and touch the food just to get back at her. Then my mother would bring in the dinner she put so much time into making. My mother had to make sure the table was set the way my father liked it and that he always had the salt and most importantly his big dam pepper grinder on the table, GOD forbid she forgot that or forget to make sure there were peppercorns in it. Then I would watch my father taste the food and he ALWAYS found something to criticize about it. So many times I wanted to stand up and yell WILL YOU ALL JUST STOP THIS BAD BEHAVIOR? One time my mother had had it and she challenged my father and he stood up and grabbed this heavy glass vinegar bottle and threw it down at their nice hitchcock table that was supposed to be kept nice and he put a huge dent in that table. Then he sat down and picked up his end of the table and all the food and dishes slid down the table and into my mother's lap. I was so frightened I got up and ran out the front door to the neighbor's house because I thought they were going to kill each other.

Everyday I had to go to school on that school bus and witness how the other children were so mean to my older brother and I would see him sitting alone and stare out the window with those swollen lips with blisters (his self soothing so he could sleep at night was sucking his thumb, and did it pretty much all night long subconsciously needing some kind of comfort) and sometimes were even bleeding and he would hug close to that window and staring out with tears running down his face trying so hard to hold how bad he felt in. Not one person was nice to him. The teachers were mean to him too and I was always worried about him. He would try to run away too, and he would just get punished for it. All these years later in reading about trauma and the "flight" response makes it hard to look back on those years because it is putting a label to what I was witnessing every day.
Complex post traumatic stress disorder (complex ptsd, pdsd, shell shock, nervous shock, combat fatigue), symptoms and the difference between mental illness and psychiatric injury explained

The entire time I was witnessing meanness and hurt, I stored each thing I saw and each time I would think "I never want to do this because it's mean and hurtful".

This is what I did.

This is what I was constantly witnessing happening to my older brother. He would get to a point where he would experience outbursts of anger and he frightened me when he would need to vent that anger. I used to have to run and hide however the one thing I always knew is that it was not "his fault".

This was something I struggled with a lot. However, I had not thought of this as being traumatized in that I had always felt it was my older brother that was constantly being victimized. I did not think about the fact that witnessing someone else being traumatized also traumatizes the witness too.

The reason I bring this up was because I struggled to understand how others would join in with or go along with bullying or hurting someone. How could others not "care"? I used to really wonder why my witnessing it would deeply disturb me and I wanted to help the victim and yet others did not react that way. It can be lonely, it made me feel lonely. Yet, when I came across this information that someone actually invested a lot of time to put together, I finally felt I was not alone and that someone else had made it a point to study it along with how individuals are affected and that there are individuals who have and had the same questions I had myself.