When you watch “very special” episodes of TV shows and they try to address bullying I think the picture they paint misses nuance. In these stories the bullies are always children whose parents have catastrophically failed them and they lash out at others. I’m sure that does happen but it’s not the only kind of bully.

Middle school age (10-13) is a time when children seem to be going through a developmental stage of experimenting with social behavior. They are testing out and learning how power and control work. Even well meaning kids make missteps there.

This isn’t meant to excuse bullying behavior at all. But I am concerned that we aren’t going to see the real problems if we’re expecting bullies to always look the same, to label them as the “bad kids.” The advice for how to deal with bullies is going to be different depending on what form the bullying is taking and what motivates the person doing the hurting.

I’m going to tell you some stories about myself. Maybe it’s going a bit far to call what I’ve done bullying, but I was hurtful to other kids my age occasionally and I deeply regret that.

To start out, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that I’ve always been a sensitive type. My spirit is easily crushed. For as long as I can remember my defense mechanism has always been to be vulnerable. When I feel in danger, I turn puppy-like. I’ve also been religious ever since I was a small child. Doing right was a huge priority for me even when I was very young.

Most of the time, I was the one being bullied. It was never really terrible. There was a girl who ridiculed how I dressed and it made me cry (yet I never considered for a moment changing anything to avoid getting teased, which seems weird to me in retrospect). There were some boys in the hall that I didn’t know who laughed among themselves because I had facial hair. All I ever did about it was cry.

But while I was usually a victim (or at least playing the part of victim in my own mind), there were a few moments that I am still deeply ashamed of years and years later.

1) I don’t even remember why I didn’t like one girl in my fourth grade math class. I think it was probably something to do with coming from very different backgrounds and so not understanding her experience. She was black and she was part of a program that brought “disadvantaged” kids from the city to our fancy suburban school. The program was meant to give these kids a better education and me and my peers more diversity. Somehow I took a dislike to her and I made a very stupid pun out of her last name. Why did I do that? I have no idea. Kid logic is so hard to understand even when it’s yourself.

2) Much worse than that was when I turned on a friend. We had become close very suddenly at the start of Middle School (age 11) and I was hanging out with her more and more. One day I used a curse word and I was so horrified with myself but I knew where I had learned it from: my friend. I ended our friendship and told her she was a bad influence on me. What a rotten thing to say! How incredibly stuck up I was to think I was so much better than she and that she was going to drag me down. I cringe to remember it.

The point of sharing these stories that I’m so embarrassed by is that I was a well meaning mostly very sweet child. But I still had my moments of being cruel. I suspect we all did.

Let’s keep that in mind when we’re dealing with a bully situation with our own children. It doesn’t make bad behavior okay, but it reminds us that it isn’t necessarily a bad kid but a kid who is still learning what is appropriate and what isn’t. They’ll need punishment and consequences to learn that but I suspect that painting them as a bad person isn’t going to help with that.