Bullied Because of My Brother: “It Still Follows Me Today”

Dear friends, bullying is a topic that matters a great deal to us, because we know how far-reaching the consequences can be for the people it targets. According to OECD data collected as part of the 2022 PISA study, just under seven percent of all 15-year-old students in Germany are bullied very frequently. Twelve percent are bullied by classmates at least a few times a month.

Nadine told us how bullying shaped her well into adulthood. Her brother has a disability, and that made her the target of years of bullying. Today she's 41 and has two kids, one of whom has a congenital speech disorder. That's why it's so important to her to talk openly about bullying:

Dear Nadine, you have a brother with a disability. What is his disability?

My brother has hydrocephalus (an abnormal buildup of fluid in the brain's ventricles, which causes increased pressure in the head) and low muscle tone, so he uses a wheelchair. He also has some traits of ASD (autism spectrum disorder). Because of the hydrocephalus, he has a cognitive impairment, and he can't read or write. He's 48 now, and mentally he's at the level of a preschooler.

How would you describe your relationship as kids?

I'm seven years younger than my brother. It's just the two of us, no other siblings. My brother and I had a “normal” sibling relationship. We played together, we fought, we teased each other. I have a lot of happy memories of our childhood. 

I have my parents to thank for that. They always tried to make sure my needs didn't get lost alongside taking care of my brother. The “have-to” appointments, like visits to the psychologist or sitting around waiting during his therapy sessions, were often paired with something fun: a trip to the playground, a stroll through town, or some “just us” time with the other parent.

My parents were very open about my brother's disability. They always answered my questions, and my friends' questions, honestly and in a way a kid could understand. My brother was fully included in our family and in our neighborhood, and really took part in everything.

When did you realize your brother was different?

I honestly can't name an exact moment. I think it happened little by little… When I learned to ride a bike and noticed that my brother had a therapy tricycle. Or when I saw the way strangers stared at us in town.

And then I started elementary school and learned to read, do math, and write, and my brother couldn't. That's when it really hit me. I started reading books about disability very early on, to try to understand it all better.

You told us you were also bullied at school because of your brother. What exactly happened?

The bullying started in elementary school. We lived in a small village of about 3,000 people at the time. Everybody knew everybody. Some kids would say things like, “Your brother is so stupid, he'd have been better off never being born.”

In second grade, I got into my first fight on the playground, with a boy in my class. For weeks he kept calling me “gimp,” “cripple,” and a lot of other awful things, at school and anywhere else he saw me. At some point I fought back… My bike was wrecked more than once, and my jackets and backpacks got stolen, always with insults aimed at my brother.

When I started middle school in the next town over, it unfortunately kept going. The kids from my village kept picking on me and scared off my friends, so hardly anyone wanted to play with me. On the school bus I got kicked, and the kid would say, “Then you can just use your brother's wheelchair.” Nobody wanted to sit next to me, and they'd ask “if I was contagious.”

It all went on until tenth grade. A lot of days around lunchtime I'd have the school office call home because I had a stomachache. It was my excuse to avoid taking the bus. It ended when tenth grade did, because we all moved on to different schools, and shortly after that I moved away.

What did the bullying do to you as a kid and a teenager?

As a kid I learned early to be quiet, go along, and stay out of the way. Never stand out, and put my own wishes last. It was always important to me to make everybody happy. That made things easier to bear. I also learned to swallow a lot of things and deal with them on my own. I apologized quickly and felt guilty, even for things that weren't my fault. To this day my self-esteem is pretty low.

Did you get any help from your teachers?

Sometimes more, sometimes less. Since I put up with so much in silence, a lot of teachers never knew the full extent of it. In elementary school there were talks every now and then, but nothing changed. In fifth and sixth grade I had a wonderful homeroom teacher who kept bringing up the subject of bullying. But after that there was no help at all.

Did the bullying also affect your relationship with your brother?

Not in elementary school, but in my teen years it did. For a while I was really angry. I blamed him for my situation and for my exhausting life. Sadly, I let him feel it by pushing him away and ignoring him. As I got older, and with the help of talking to a psychologist, things got good between us again.

Does that hard time still affect you today?

Definitely! Some of the habits, like constantly apologizing, are still with me. So is wanting to make everybody happy and putting my own wishes last. But I'm working on it, and I get a lot out of connecting with others through a sibling network for adult brothers and sisters of people with mental illness.

If you ran into one of your childhood bullies today, what would you say to him or her?

Wow, tough question… I'd probably ask how he looks back on that time and on the way he behaved. And how he'd feel if someone did that to his kids today…