Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back
How Jordan Peterson Reframed My Bully-Filled Childhood
I first heard about Jordan Peterson in my first year after lay missionary work. I had just returned to community college after five years as a missionary and had been interested in the online conversation about masculinity for some time. I stumbled upon Jordan Peterson’s appearance on the Art of Manliness podcast, where Peterson was making his rounds in promoting his now-world-famous book 12 Rules for Life. The way that Peterson distilled all-encompassing transcendent principles into succinct statements, such as “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for”, captured my attention and admiration. Later, when Peterson appeared on the Jocko Willink podcast, he won me over when he spoke on the necessity of being dangerous, but disciplined. This idea made me a devotee of Peterson for some time, and, as I’ll explain shortly, will be the focal point of this post.
Since the time I first discovered Peterson, he has written another book, been on multiple podcasts, and has gone on many speaking tours, where I was able to hear him speak once. In that same period, however, he has also struggled against a benzodiazepine addiction, faced scrutiny for the major involvement of his daughter in his businesses, and has had Twitter spats against anti-Zionist personalities on X that could be described as uncharacteristically vitriolic Observing all this, as well as other intellectual disagreements I’ve had with his statements over the years, my opinion on him has calmed down rather drastically. Having passed the hurdle of hero worship, I can now say that I still appreciate Jordan Peterson, warts and all.
With that being said, the sage wisdom I’ve received from The Internet’s Stepdad Who Cares About You has helped me tremendously in reframing a formative saga in my life - my first five years in school.
For context, I lived in a U.S. territory called Saipan for six years, five of those years in which I went to a Catholic private school. All the memories I possessed in that school were of myself being bullied and teased by the majority of my classmates. Though I never faced a physical fight at school, the teasing was torturous, and the worst of the harassment was an incident where my school uniform was stolen by some of the boys in my class and then had been thrown into a urinal and pissed on. No matter how many times I had spoken to my teachers about it, the teachers had eventually gotten so tired of my frequent reporting that they chose not to care.
I’ve told this story personally many times. The facts remain the same. However, it is often the moral of the story that has changed. I want to take this time to reflect on how this Canadian psychologist has given me the tools to frame my childhood experience properly, to give it a proper conclusion - one that has given me complete and conclusive peace.
On Bullies
First, Peterson had given me an understanding of the nature of bullies that I felt was truly congruent with reality. For years, I would tell people that perhaps the reason I was bullied was because my classmates were inherently cruel. Perhaps there was some truth to that. After all, most children are not yet capable of self-reflection and asking, “How would that feel if it were me?”. Later, I met someone whose family grew up in a similar culture - Guam - and spoke about the racial tension between the local Chamorros and the Filipinos. I thought that this may have been a plausible theory for years. After all, why else would many of my classmates spend much of their time making me miserable, if not for their sheer evil and racist tendencies?
But according to Peterson, the reasoning might be more damning to me than I’d like to admit. In Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life, he writes:
But just as often, people are bullied because they won’t fight back. This happens not infrequently to people who are by temperament compassionate and self-sacrificing - particularly if they are also high in negative emotion, and made a lot of gratifying noses of suffering when someone sadistic confronts them. Children who cry more easily are more frequently bullied.
The truth was, I was a crybaby. Not only did I react to every small insult with tears and whining, but my heavy breathing and flared nostrils mid-cry made me an even more satisfying target. It is true that both good and evil exist inside the human heart. But damn, I gave every kid who bullied me a field day with a hell of a show.
You might be wondering: why didn’t you fight back? I don’t know if I can speak of all of Filipino culture, but I can speak of my family. In our family, aggression was never meant to be accepted. The biggest drawback to being an only boy with two sisters was that I could not fight them when they upset me, for obvious reasons. But that also extended to life outside of my home. I was discouraged from standing up to my bullies with physical force, instead being encouraged to ignore them or to tell my teachers about the harassment. Getting good grades while causing no problems - especially not fighting someone - was my mother’s conception of being a “good boy”, a label I came to hate in my adult life. It most likely explains why my mother did not enroll me in any self-defense or martial arts classes, no matter how much I insisted or had proven the need for it. I’ve come to learn that, to my mother, being capable of violence was equivalent to being prone to violence.
The result was that I had seen myself as a perpetual victim, and when I didn’t want to be one, I pursued violence and considered joining a street gang when I moved up to middle school in the U.S. Although I had come to know God and received redemption at the end of middle school, I spoke of my grade school experience as if I had no choice but to be bullied. But the truth was, I chose weakness because I believed that I needed permission to stand up for myself. When I came to know God, I rejected my aggressive nature, only bringing it up for a testimony, or to use it as a mask among my youth leaders in my youth minister days, to showcase false badassery.
(Side note: Riku of Kingdom Hearts is actually a good textbook example of “integrating your shadow”, a Jungian concept)
What Peterson allowed me to do, instead, was retroactively take accountability for taking the easy way out with my past conflicts. No one had saved me, and no one was supposed to. By the time I was in fifth grade, I resented God. My mother often told me to ignore my bullies and explained that “Papa Jesus would be sad if you fought back”, which led me to believe that I was not supposed to stand up to my bullies because God desired my humiliation. But God did not whine for every stupid insult thrown at me. I did. Once this realization occurred, I decided to no longer speak of these years as if I were blameless. The truth was, I abdicated the responsibility of affirming my dignity by standing up for myself, and expected kinder, stronger people to fight for me. Contrary to what one may expect from this realization, now that I knew and accepted this reframing, true peace started to wash over me.
On Violence
The next realization I derived from Peterson’s writings involved accepting one of the quotes he became famous for: “A good man is a dangerous man who has that under voluntary control.” I spent the next few years after elementary school posturing as a dangerous individual. Although I found myself in one or two fights in middle school, deep inside, I knew I was the young equivalent of the Guy Who Sees Red - mostly talk, maybe a lucky punch, but no danger. When I joined a youth group in high school and found God, my mother was relieved to see my transformation. For the next portion of my life, my mother would tell anyone with ears to hear that I had become a “good boy”. Although it was nice to know that my mother was proud of me again, the label of a “good boy” had always bothered me.
As a matter of fact, I spent so much of my time portraying myself as a “nice guy”, far removed from the troubled violent child I once was, but the truth was, that violence was still inside me. It was in the fascination and competence in krump dancing - an aggressive, powerful street dance from the hoods of Los Angeles. It was in the hardcore punk concerts and the mosh pits where every night had the potential for a black eye and a bloody nose (in my case, I broke my hand at a hardcore show once). I never stopped being violent and aggressive, but I never integrated it into myself. I thought it was a source of shame. However, according to Peterson,
“There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character.”
Myself at a BJJ competition, as a white belt.
Thinking back on my elementary school years, I did not want my bullies to fear and respect my teachers or parents. I wanted them to fear and respect me. When I first tapped into the energy that would have allowed me to do that, I feared it, believing that the capacity for violence would never be used for good. It was not Christian to access that part of me, I believed. Once I realized that this hideous strength could be redeemed for righteous use, rather than abandoned to come off as kind, I felt another sense of relief. No longer confusing impotence for virtue, I was able to be comfortable in standing up for myself. I found the strength to speak up in conflicts when I needed to. And the final culmination of this transformation was learning how to fight at the age of thirty, as a practitioner of Brazilian jiujitsu. These hands can now be weapons of peace.
On My Own Evil
In the last part of this journey, Peterson helped me understand that I also had as much capacity to be the bully myself. This helped me discard the illusion that I could never inflict injustice on anyone. Father Mike Schmitz once said that saying “I would never”, regarding immoral behavior, actually means “I haven’t had the opportunity to do so yet”. I remember being asked once, during my missionary training in the Philippines, if I considered myself a bully. I replied, “No, because I’ve been bullied, and I would never put someone through that.” However, it wasn't until I read Peterson’s work and watched his interviews that the last scales of victimhood fell out of my eyes.
Peterson understood that the average person’s capacity to do evil is often inverse to their awareness of that evil, and also stressed observing a person’s intention towards self-responsibility. Be it Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, the most disturbing atrocities and the rule of an evil regime always began with the populace abdicating responsibility for maintaining their security, never owning up to their shortcomings. Eventually, when they get arrested by the same regime they were complicit in creating by their silence, they look up to the sky, with handcuffs adorning their wrists, and ask, “Me? What for?”
I would recall times I’ve mocked and teased people for the sake of a laugh, and how that had seriously hurt a few of those people. I remember physically hitting my sisters, as a young boy, when I felt that they were disrespecting me. I suddenly became aware of my capacity for malevolence and mocking when I became too comfortable. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Truth be told, were it not for me discovering Peterson’s lectures and books at the time that I did, I may still possess a naivete about my capacity for evil.
Perhaps it’s giving too much credit to one man, for the growth and peace I had experienced after coming to terms with my past and my shadow, to borrow from Carl Jung. There were my friends who helped me understand myself through conversations, as well as my many hours of prayer with God. But I still can’t help but be grateful to Jordan Peterson for allowing me to permit myself, rather than wait for my parents, to become the man I need to be. To be dangerous, but disciplined. To be powerful, but kind. To be at peace with these hands that can write, hug, and punch. Thanks be to God for this eccentric Canadian who helped me claim the manhood that was rightfully mine. Thank you, Dr. Jordan Peterson.