Cappy's Boxing Gym, Seattle WA, is a community hub devoted to health through boxing, self awareness and expression. Not only do people come to this gym for stress release, to get in shape and learn how to box, but also to learn more about how the punch path heals past trauma. Simplistically, if you deliver a punch at a target, you will punch according to who shows up to throw it. A bully throws a different punch than does the bullied or the bystander, who throws nothing.
It takes three to play the bully game. Hopefully, there is a fourth role, support, as played by family, friends or community members. This role is often essential in interrupting the bully game pattern, but sometimes one of the primary roles has to take responsibility for the interruption.
Cappy's Community Outreach program director chose to take on the bully game for 2016 by launching the Bully Story Dance Project. This project has three phases. The first phase brought a group of local youths together to introduce boxing moves, develop a story beginning with creating a character and explore telling the bully story through movement. watch video
The second phase of the project brought together another group of local youth to take the story development deeper. They gave their characters a role in the bully game, and designed different plots to provide different outcomes. Sometimes the support role was filled, other times not. Sometimes the outcome was one of violence, including using guns. There were also stories of coming together to share how they came to be taking on the roles of bully, bullied and bystander in the first p[lace.
The third phase of the Bully Story Dance Project is all about bringing together dancers to tell the story through movement. The dancers will work together for six weeks to develop movements that express going in and out of the three roles, bully, bullied and bystander. In the process, not only do they tell the story differently than the same old outcome of dominance, shame and absence, but they train their bodies to recognize the signs of these behaviors.
The bully and the bullied come from the same source, as explained in the video How To Make A Bully (From Scratch) Watch video on the Conscious Discipline website. They suffer from extreme abandonment, physically, emotionally and mentally. These habitual patterns of reaction can be interrupted and replaced with resilient response behaviors that handle a situation confidently. We can make a difference one story at a time.;
Comments (1)