Bullying—going against our innate nature—may use kindness to manipulate. Kindness is called “nature’s medicine” by researchers because it produces the hormone oxytocin which is now recognized to have significant healing and health properties. In contrast, bullying takes the medicine of kindness and makes it toxic. As documented in The Bullied Brain, bullying generates the stress hormone cortisol in the perpetrator and victim. If cortisol is being frequently released into the brain and body, it’s damaging and puts health at risk.

Those who bully target victims, while at the same time, they offer kindness to higher-ups and to beneficiaries. Those on the receiving end of kindness frequently defend those who bully. When reports of abusive behaviour come in, the carefully groomed higher-ups and beneficiaries insist the reports of maltreatment are wrong. They only know the kindness side of the one bullying. They have not learned that kindness is one of the bully’s deceptive weapons.

The split-personality presentation of bullying and kindness confuses the brain, which cannot understand how someone can be kind and compassionate while simultaneously destructive and cruel. The brain cannot understand and therefore it produces what Dr. Shawn Achor terms “counter-facts” in order to try and make sense of the glaring contradiction. When someone reports that upstanding, kindly Mrs. So and So is abusive, the leader receiving the report might try to process this contradictory information by creating counter-facts to explain it.

The reporting victims end up being faulted for being “too sensitive,” “misunderstanding the situation,” “hysterical,” “not telling the truth,” or “falsely reporting.” The report receiver decides........

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