Guest Post: Siobhan Curham on Bullying and Finding Your Inner Cherokee.

Finding Your Inner Cherokee by Siobhan Curham || Release date: TODAY!

Finding Your Inner Cherokee is a non-fiction e-book, full of case studies, exercises and advice, designed to help reassure and empower victims of bullying.

Finding Your Inner Cherokee will be available from Amazon Kindle and all other e-book stores from 18^th November and can be downloaded for FREE at Siobhan Curham's website: www.siobhancurham.co.uk

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Guest Post: Siobhan Curham on Bullying and Finding Your Inner Cherokee 

In March of this year, my novel Finding Cherokee Brownwas published. Finding Cherokee Browntells the story of a 15-year-old girl who finds the confidence to stand up to her bullies in her own unique way. After the book was published I received many emails from readers telling me that the book had helped them deal with bullying in their own lives. This made me want to do more to help and so the idea for Finding Your Inner Cherokee was born. Finding Your Inner Cherokee is a non-fiction e-book, full of case studies, exercises and advice, designed to help victims of bullying find their inner strength and become happy again.

At the start of the book I talk about four basic truths about being bullied. These are four truths that I wish I’d known and believed back when I was being bullied:

1.      You are not alone

2.      What is happening is not your fault

3.      You have nothing to feel embarrassed about

4.      It will stop and your life will get better

In this guest post, I want to focus on TRUTH NUMBER TWO: What is happening is not your fault.

When you’re being bullied it can be really hard to believe this one. Bullies can seem so confident and strong. When they call you names or make fun of you it can be hard not to believe that it is somehow your fault; that you have asked for it in some way. But here’s the truth of the matter:

Bullies. Are. Freaks.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a freak as: abnormal, unusual, odd, strange.

Bullies are freaks because bullying is not normal behaviour.

Think about it for a moment. If you were totally happy with your life – if you had a great family, an awesome group of friends, enough money to live comfortably and you were healthy and fit – why would you need to make anyone else’s life a misery? You wouldn’t. You’d be too busy having a good time. It therefore follows that bullies must be very unhappy people. I know this might seem hard to believe – and I’m certainly not suggesting we throw a pity party for the people who make our lives so tough. But this fact is important because it proves that none of it is your fault.

In Finding Your Inner Cherokee, I condense this down into a bullying equation:

Unhappy person + chance to make someone else feel bad & experience short-term happiness = bully

By putting someone else down and causing them pain, the bully experiences a feeling of power, and this gives them a short-term burst of happiness. They get a kick out of seeing another person upset or afraid because it makes them feel better about their own unhappy life. But it’s only ever a temporary high and that’s why they keep on doing it. The key word in the equation above is someone – as in, anyone – as in, not you, personally. If the bully wasn’t picking on you, they’d be picking on someone else to make themselves feel better. Therefore it’s not you who has something wrong with them – it’s the bully.

I really believe that words have the power to transform our lives for the better and in the book I regularly give the reader what I refer to as power tweets. A power tweet is a statement which, like a tweet, is 140 characters of less but packs a powerful punch. If you are being bullied and feel that it might somehow be your fault, write this power tweet down and read it regularly:

“I’m not the one with the problem – they are.”

In a lot of cases it’s impossible to know the exact reasons behind your bully’s behaviour, but think of this: You are kind. You are not a bully. And one day, hopefully very soon, you will be free of them and happy again. You will move on. They won’t. They won’t be free of themselves and whatever is making them act in that way – and they still won’t be happy.

Finding Your Inner Cherokee will be available from Amazon Kindle and all other e-book stores from 18^th November and can be downloaded for FREE at my website: www.siobhancurham.co.uk

 Follow Siobhan on Twitter: @SiobhanCurham

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Siobhan Curham and Netmums Join Forces Against Bullying

Siobhan Curham, author of Finding Cherokee Brown, Dear Dylan and Shipwrecked, is fast becoming the authority on anti-bullying.

She has been chosen by Netmums, the UK’s biggest parenting website, to write regular articles on all aspects of bullying to help parents handle this sensitive issue which affects 46% of young people.

Siobhan’s input will include a series of articles during National Anti-bullying Week (18th – 22nd November 2013). Topics that Siobhan will write about will include: Tips for Staying Strong for your Child, Creating an Anti-bullying Action Plan, Home-Schooling, How to Build Your Bullied Child’s Confidence and Cyber-Bullying.

Siobhan will also take part in two anti-bullying clinics on the Netmums website on 26th & 27th November, answering questions alongside Alex Holmes, who runs the Diana Awards Anti-Bullying Ambassadors scheme.

 Source: Press Release.

Check back later today when Arianne will be reviewing Finding Your Inner Cherokee.