Identify what's happening. What kind of bullying? Homophobia, racism, ableism, intimidation? Name it โ because unnamed things have more power over you.
Every bully uses manipulation tactics. We identify them โ gaslighting, DARVO, triangulation, dehumanization. Once you see the machinery, it loses power.
Get specific phrases, questions, and strategies tailored to your situation. Not platitudes โ real words that cut through to the point and shift the power.
Anyone experiencing bullying โ at school, at work, online, in a family, in a community, in an institution. Anyone who has been told they're "too sensitive" when they're being targeted. Anyone whose identity โ race, gender, sexuality, disability, immigration status, religion, appearance, age โ is being used as a weapon against them.
And anyone who cares about someone being bullied and wants to understand what's happening and how to help.
A note about keeping this free. This site is built and maintained by Shiny Penny Productions L3C, a one-person social enterprise in Burlington, Vermont. It will always be free and anonymous โ no one should have to pay for help when they're being bullied. But hosting, maintaining, and improving costs real money. The tools below are made to help in several ways. Each one is built with the same comprehensive research and framework. If any of them would help you or someone you know, subscribe. That's what keeps this site running.
Full-spectrum manipulation detection. Paste any text โ emails, contracts, political claims, medical explanations, sales pitches โ and get a detailed analysis of deception tactics, logical fallacies, and phishing indicators. Research shows that 91% of cyberattacks begin with a phishing email, and financial scams cost Americans over $10 billion annually. This tool helps you see what's being hidden before you click, sign, or agree.
Three instruments for understanding your relationships honestly. The Concentric Circles of Love maps where people actually sit in your life using a guided questionnaire grounded in attachment theory and relational psychology. The Romantic Consideration evaluator helps you assess potential partners through trust, reciprocity, and red flag awareness. Research consistently shows that relationship quality is the single strongest predictor of health and longevity โ stronger than diet, exercise, or genetics.
The most comprehensive home-community matching tool available. Currently covering New England and upstate New York โ with more regions coming. A 55+ factor questionnaire matches you with communities based on how you actually live โ not just square footage and price. Studies show that neighborhood fit significantly affects mental health, social connection, and long-term satisfaction with a home purchase. Most people buy the house. This tool helps you find the home.
A complete family management and financial literacy platform. Budget tracking, task coordination, document vault, family meetings, shared calendars, and built-in learning modules โ all in one place. Research shows that financial stress is the leading cause of family conflict and that financial literacy education reduces household debt by up to 20%. This tool treats your family like the most important enterprise you'll ever run โ because it is.
All tools built on the TransformativeArts Framework ยท Read the research on Substack
Select all that apply. Bullying often involves multiple forms of bigotry and intimidation at once. Naming each one strips the bully of the shadows they hide in.
Bullying doesn't happen in a vacuum. It runs on specific psychological machinery โ and understanding that machinery is the first step to disabling it. Every section below connects to research. Every pattern has a name. And every name strips the bully of one more shadow to hide in.
Bullying often relies on false narratives โ distorted versions of events, rewritten histories, and manufactured contexts designed to make you doubt what you know. "That's not what happened." "You're remembering it wrong." "Everyone saw it differently." These inaccurate histories are a form of gaslighting, and they are devastatingly effective because our brains are wired to defer to social consensus โ even when that consensus is manufactured.
For trauma survivors, this is especially dangerous because temporal overlay already blurs the line between past and present. When a bully rewrites the present, it compounds the confusion of a nervous system already working overtime to distinguish then from now.
The antidote is documentation. Write it down. Record dates, times, witnesses. Your own contemporaneous record is more reliable than anyone's after-the-fact narrative. The truth is free. But you have to protect it.
Stephen Karpman's Drama Triangle describes three roles that cycle endlessly in dysfunctional relationships: Persecutor ("You're the problem"), Victim ("Poor me"), and Rescuer ("Let me save you"). Bullies use all three โ sometimes in a single conversation. They persecute you, then play victim when confronted, then "rescue" you with false concern.
How to step out: Refuse all three roles. You are not a persecutor for having boundaries. You are not a victim who can't act. You are not a rescuer responsible for other people's emotions. The exit from the triangle is to step into reality โ clear observation, honest communication, and personal responsibility. Each role in the triangle is a lie. Reality is the only position that cannot be triangulated.
Bullying at scale is inseparable from the seduction of power, influence, and money. Whether it's a schoolyard leader who commands a clique, a CEO who rules by fear, or a world leader who bullies entire populations โ the mechanism is the same. Power attracts people who want to exercise it over others rather than with them.
The attraction works both ways. Bystanders are drawn to power because proximity to it feels like safety. This is why bullies attract enablers โ not because the enablers are cruel, but because their nervous systems interpret closeness to power as protection. Understanding this dynamic doesn't excuse complicity, but it does explain why bullying is so often a group phenomenon, not a solo act.
The alternative is authentic enterprise โ an economy and a social structure built on WITH rather than OVER. In authentic enterprise, success is measured not by dominance but by mutual flourishing. This is not idealism. It is the only model that sustains itself without consuming the people who build it.
When you are bullied, your body responds with a cascade of neurochemical events. The acute stress response floods you with cortisol and adrenaline. If the threat is inescapable โ as it often is for children, employees, and marginalized people โ the body's next move is dissociation: a protective shutdown mediated by your own endogenous opioid system. Your body literally drugs itself to survive.
This is not weakness. This is biology. Your body manufactures its own opiates โ endorphins โ to manage pain that cannot be escaped. The problem is that we learn that dissociation works. And when the bullying is chronic, the body seeks that numbing more and more. This is one pathway to addiction: the brain, having learned that its own opiates provide relief, becomes receptive to external opiates that do the same thing more powerfully.
Understanding this connection โ between bullying, dissociation, and substance use โ is not about blame. It's about recognition. If you're using substances, food, sex, gambling, screens, or any other numbing agent to cope with the aftermath of bullying, that is your nervous system doing what it was taught to do. The exit is not willpower. It is processing the underlying trauma and gradually replacing dissociation with presence.
Dysfunctional coping strategies โ substance use, self-harm, disordered eating, compulsive behaviors, isolation โ are all downstream of unprocessed bullying and trauma. They are not the problem. They are symptoms of the problem. Dealing with the bully and the bullshit is how the coping strategies become unnecessary.
The same patterns that operate on the playground operate on the world stage. Authoritarian leaders use identical tactics at scale: gaslighting entire populations, manufacturing false histories, triangulating allies against each other, weaponizing identity, dehumanizing opponents, and using the attraction of power to recruit enablers.
This tool works at every scale. A diplomat trying to understand the bullying tactics of an adversarial leader can use the same framework as a teenager dealing with a school bully. The tactics are identical โ only the consequences are different. Naming the pattern is the same first step whether you're in a hallway or a parliament.
Anyone can use this tool anonymously โ from a student to a senator. No accounts, no tracking, no data stored. If you need to strategize about how to deal with a bully โ any bully, at any level โ this is a safe space to do it.
Sometimes the most devastating response to a bully is laughter โ not at yourself, but at the absurdity of their attack. Humor disrupts the bully's script because it refuses to play the expected role. When someone calls you a name and you respond with wit instead of tears, the entire power dynamic shifts.
Important: Humor works when you're in a safe enough position to use it. It's a tool, not an obligation. If you're in danger, safety comes first. But when the moment is right, wit is a sword the bully doesn't know how to parry.
Bullying isn't just personal โ it's economic. Systems built on dominance, extraction, and zero-sum competition are bullying structures dressed in business casual. Authentic enterprise is the TAF's answer: an economic framework where success is built WITH others, not extracted FROM them.
The word "authentic" comes from the Greek authentikos: "one acting on one's own authority." In authentic enterprise, every participant acts on their own authority within a framework of mutual benefit. No one's success requires someone else's failure. This is not charity โ it's good business, because systems built on WITH are the only systems that don't eventually eat themselves.
Naming the bully and feeling your anger is essential. But it's only the beginning. If anger stays unnamed and unprocessed, it destroys from the inside. If it's expressed but never channeled, it burns relationships and health. Research shows that suppressing anger leads to anxiety, physical illness, and sometimes violence โ but acting on raw anger without processing it can be equally destructive. The question isn't whether to feel angry. The question is: what do you do with it now?
Maya Angelou said: "I believe in anger. Anger's like fire โ it can burn out all the dross and leave some positive things." Malcolm X said: "Usually when people are sad, they do not do anything. But when they get angry, they bring about a change." The research confirms what they knew intuitively: anger is a biological program designed for survival, and when channeled wisely, it becomes the engine of justice.
This is not anger management. This is anger utilization. Each stage builds on the last. You can't skip stages, but you can revisit them as often as you need.
Let the anger exist. Don't suppress it, don't perform it, don't explain it away. Scan your body โ where is it? Fists? Chest? Jaw? Gut? That physical sensation is real. It's your nervous system saying: something wrong happened. Research from NPR (2024) shows that naming the emotion and locating it in your body helps regulate the nervous system. You don't have to do anything with it yet. Just let it be real.
This is what the tool above does. Name the bullying. Name the tactic. Name the bias. Name the pattern. Unnamed anger is a wildfire. Named anger is a controlled burn. When you can say "This is gaslighting" or "This is institutional racism" or "My therapist pathologized my survival," you have taken the first step from victim to advocate. The research is clear: giving language to internal experience regulates the nervous system.
Anger is physical energy. It lives in the body and needs to move through the body. This does NOT mean hitting things or screaming into pillows (research shows this can actually reinforce aggression). It means: walk, hike, swim, dance, play music, paint, write, garden, cook, build something. The body processes what the mind cannot articulate. Creative expression โ music, art, writing, movement โ is how the brain metabolizes anger through neuro-connected aesthetic cognition. The anger is hungry. Feed it something creative and it transforms into something useful.
Turn your anger into evidence. Write down dates, times, names, what was said, who witnessed it. Keep your medical records. Save emails. Screenshot messages. Request written explanations for decisions that affect you. Documentation is the conversion of anger into power. A documented pattern of bullying is legally actionable. An undocumented one is your word against theirs. This is especially critical for medical, therapeutic, legal, and institutional bullying where the other side controls the records. Request your complete records. It is your legal right.
This is where anger becomes advocacy. File the complaint. Request the second opinion. Contact the ombudsman, the licensing board, the inspector general, legal aid. Write the letter. Tell your story publicly if you choose. Build the tool that helps others see what you see. The third alternative to aggression and suppression is expression through advocacy. Research confirms that channeling anger into constructive social action โ what psychologists call "agentic anger" โ is not only healthy, it is essential for justice. Your anger is not a problem to be managed. It is fuel for change.
Medical gaslighting is now recognized in peer-reviewed literature as a serious systemic problem. The American Journal of Medicine (2024) defines it as invalidating a patient's genuine clinical concern without proper evaluation, driven by "physician ignorance, implicit bias, or medical paternalism." Research shows it disproportionately affects women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, elderly patients, and people with psychiatric histories.
The pattern is devastatingly simple: a patient reports symptoms. The provider attributes them to stress, anxiety, weight, or a pre-existing psychiatric label โ without conducting appropriate tests. The patient's record is contaminated with this dismissal. The next provider reads the record, sees the dismissal, and dismisses again. Symptoms worsen. The patient returns. They are labeled a "frequent flyer," "difficult patient," or "non-compliant." The very persistence that should trigger deeper investigation instead triggers further dismissal.
For trauma survivors, this is catastrophic. When your body already carries the weight of past invalidation, being medically dismissed recreates the original wound. Your nervous system registers it correctly: the person who is supposed to help me is hurting me instead. That is not paranoia. That is accurate perception.
Therapy requires extraordinary vulnerability. You open yourself โ your trauma, your shame, your secrets โ to someone you trust to hold them carefully. When that trust is violated, the damage is compounded: you are harmed in the very place you went to heal. Research in Frontiers in Psychology found that therapy harm comes from therapist rigidity, over-control, boundary violations, lack of knowledge, and the misuse of power โ leaving clients "disempowered, silenced, or devalued."
Common patterns include: Misdiagnosis as control โ labeling your survival mechanisms as pathology rather than recognizing them as adaptive responses to genuine danger. Framework imposition โ forcing your experience into their theoretical model rather than meeting you where you are. Pathologizing self-advocacy โ calling your boundaries "resistance" and your questions "splitting." Therapeutic abandonment โ ending the relationship when you disagree rather than working through rupture.
A service user in a PMC meta-synthesis testified: "It really did replicate the experience of having an emotionally abusive parent." When the therapist who is supposed to help you process trauma instead creates new trauma, that is not a therapeutic misunderstanding. That is harm.
Legal bullying uses complexity and cost as weapons. The system was designed by and for people with resources. When you can't afford representation, when paperwork is used to exhaust you, when deadlines are set that you can't meet because you're working three jobs โ the system itself becomes the bully. Justice should not have a price tag, but it does, and the people who need it most can afford it least.
Educational bullying damages developing minds at their most vulnerable. When teachers humiliate students publicly, when standardized tests become gatekeeping tools, when a child who learns differently is labeled "deficient" instead of the teaching being adapted โ the institution created to nurture potential instead destroys it. Research confirms that educational trauma is widespread, and that the FOR/AT/TO model of teaching (lecturing AT students, doing things FOR them, teaching TO them rather than WITH them) creates systemic harm.
Both systems share the same core problem: authority without accountability. When power is exercised without genuine oversight, and when the people affected by decisions have no meaningful voice in those decisions, the system operates AT them โ never WITH them.
Anger becomes advocacy when you know where to direct it. Here are the concrete channels for each type of professional bullying:
Bullying is bullshit with a target painted on someone. Every bully uses the same manipulation tactics that scammers, trolls, and con artists use โ but they aim those tactics at your identity, your body, your history, your existence. This tool connects those dots.
The TransformativeArts Framework (TAF) was developed over fifty years of work in education, psychology, and creative expression. It holds that the deepest part of every person is good, and that bullying โ like all manipulation โ operates FOR, AT, or TO the target rather than WITH them. The distinction changes everything.
When someone operates WITH you, there is collaboration, respect, and mutual dignity. When someone operates AT you, you are a target. TO you, an object. FOR you, a project. Bullying is always AT or TO. Always.
No subscription. No paywall. No use limits. No account. Nothing stored. If you're being bullied, the last thing you need is another barrier. Use it as often as you need โ daily if that's what it takes.
Bully ยท Bullshit ยท Best Bet is a public service tool from Shiny Penny Productions L3C.
This tool is part of a family of instruments built on the TransformativeArts Framework:
Built by Scott Thomas Carter, M.M. (Eastman School of Music)
Shiny Penny Productions L3C ยท Burlington, Vermont
shinypennypro@gmail.com ยท 802-540-1231
We want your honest feedback. But here's the thing: this website detects bullshit. Including in the feedback box. If your feedback contains bullying tactics, manipulation, or bad-faith attacks, it will be identified and rejected. If your feedback is honest and constructive, it's welcomed, compiled, and used to improve this tool. This is also a lesson in how to give good feedback.
Tell us what worked, what didn't, what's missing, what could be better. Be honest โ that's the whole point of this site. Your feedback is anonymous and no personal data is collected.
Every submission runs through the same bullshit detection engine that powers the main tool. If it detects hostility, slurs, manipulation tactics, or bad-faith attacks, the feedback is rejected and you'll see exactly which patterns were detected โ with an explanation of what constitutes good feedback. If your feedback is clean, it's accepted and stored locally on your device. The site owner can download compiled feedback to review and improve the site.
This isn't censorship โ it's quality control. You can criticize the site all day long. You can say it's terrible. You can say it doesn't work. What you can't do is use bullying tactics in the feedback box of an anti-bullying tool. That would be... well... bullshit.