Dealing With Massage School Bullies
You dealt with them in grade school. Maybe they stole your homework. Made fun of your braces or your frizzy hair. Or maybe you were a bully. Desperate to hang onto your big-time status, you got into fistfights or gossip wars. (Either way, it’s okay. We all grow up.)
Except sometimes we don’t.
Don’t be a bully.
When someone is asking a question and truly trying to understand the answer, there is never a good reason to be rude. You might already understand the answer. Or you might not be interested in the answer. Maybe you just want to move on with the material. Get over it. In the three minutes it takes to get someone’s confusion squared away, you could:
- read ahead in your text
- take a bathroom break
- fantasize about your future practice
- pull out a few notecards for review
- ask your neighbor about her new nose ring
- play several epic games of tic-tac-toe
Things not to do include:
- make melodramatic sighing noises to show off your exasperation
- laugh at the questioner
- say, “The rest of us get it. Why don’t you get it?”
- throw your hands up and ask “WHY DON’T YOU JUST GOOGLE IT?” from across the room
If someone is bullying you …
- Don’t react. Even if you’re pretty sure you can do it politely, and ESPECIALLY if you know you can do it scathingly.
- Do a quick motivation check. Are you asking a question that you should have known the answer to if you had studied? Are you asking an advanced question just to make yourself look smarter? Be honest.
- If you fail the motivation check, go ahead and back off. If you pass, don’t stop asking questions just because a bully is feeling annoyed.
- Check in with your instructor. Were your questions disruptive? Save them for later. Justified? Carry on.
- Don’t backbite. Even if your study posse decides to make you feel better by talking crap about your bully. They’ll admire you for not participating.
- Kick butt on your next exam. Is it petty to want to score better than your bully? Absolutely. Does it feel good anyway? HELL YEAH.
I wish I could promise that massage therapy school will never feel like middle school. I can honestly say that nothing I’ve ever experienced in massage school (or in life) has ever been as horrible as seventh grade. But I was a dork then, and I’m a dork now.
I’ve cried at night after people have begged the instructor to switch partners around so that they wouldn’t have to work on me.
I get talked about for being the class brainiac who somehow still can’t manage to operate a hairbrush.
Cliques form everywhere, and some of them would rather catch ringworm from a client than include you in their gossipmongering. That’s okay.
Find your people. Treasure them. Bring them cupcakes.
And together, study your bottoms off, get licensed, and be the best army of non-meanypants massage therapists ever to walk the earth. Take over the world with the power of your awesome friendship. I’m totally down with the idea of a bunch of helpful MTs running the government in perpetuity.
So, to recap:
- Don’t be mean.
- Be kind.
- REVOLUTION!
How you deal with people who beat you up and take your lunch money put others down? (Seriously, I want to know. I wouldn’t have written this entry if I weren’t processing all this crap for myself right now.) Share the brilliance and/or plots for global takeover.
P.S.- You get double love points from me if you can address this as an ethics question. I’d do it myself, but it’s late, and I already sat through a staff meeting today. Cognition = fried.
6 Responses on Dealing With Massage School Bullies
What. The Fuck. People have actually asked to switch partners to not work with you? And teachers have honored this request? Ridiculous! One of the things we sign on for at my school, and the specifically address this, is that we’re comfortable working with everyone, all different types of people, and that if we’re not, then we better well suck it up and learn to deal with it because we’re supposed to be professionals.
I admit there are people at school I don’t like working with. I find them ignorant and frustrating. I also don’t particularly enjoy doing certain kinds of massage on a friend of mine who is quite overweight. But we’re body workers – we’re not there to judge, we’re there to work, and provide the best treatment we can despite out own notions.
Unless there is some sort of extreme situation, such as one we had in my first semester (one student became rather romantically obsessed with another student, to the point that she was calling many of his friends to try to get them involved, and he wound up having to go to the dean to get it resolved when he couldn’t get her off himself), my teachers have never allowed us to not work with someone we didn’t want to work with, and in fact, encourage us to work with new partners every class. Some teachers randomly assign us using playing card matches!
Sometimes people suck. Revolution, for realz.
Great post.
I’ve never been bullied and I definitely try to do no harm. I am, however, defensive which I’m not bragging about and it’s something that I’m working on.
All that to say, if someone plays unfair, I *defend* myself.
@ Wendy: No, the teacher didn’t allow it. But the student did ask. I ended up transferring out of that class into my current class, where I am SO much happier. Instead of cliques and drama, I get support, hugs, and karaoke after major exams!
I don’t love deep work. I remember a partner working on me in school, hurting me, and when I asked her to lighten up (more than once), she made fun of me for being a ‘lightweight.’ Then went back to pounding on me. I wish I had more confidence then to defend myself.
You are spot on, Kat. Thank you for this post.
PS- I’m saving the ethics discussion for you. It’ll be better than what I could write.
Unconditional positive regard. That’s what we agree to give to everyone we encounter at school and in our professional life. There are some people who don’t really understand what that means and hopefully they will learn with the help of the school and their classmates. I’m glad you found a good group of people to experience school with. I love my study group/classmates and that makes all the difference.
I have to admit that I got upset when I read this post, Kat. I was upset at the hurt you felt in the situations you described.
I am quite tall – always have been! And so I was rarely bullied. But the thing that got me when I was at school was how I always seemed to be the last one chosen when teams were being selected.. at the time I felt that I was just being chosen because there was no-one else left!
I’ve changed over the years and now my policy is to always do the best I can without ever hurting anyone (I don’t think I had a life policy when I was younger!).
I take more interest in others and get pleasure from being with friends. And I guess they sense that and give me back what I give out. But you’ve certainly got me thinking about how you were treated. I’m really glad that you are now in a class that supports you.
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