Madison Therapist Speaks Out on Bullying

The teen-age soul is a confounding place, part kid, part adult, playful, unsure, a place of both darkness and light.

Private therapist Kelly Sutliff has been spending considerable time inside those minds and souls in her new practice at 37 Kings Road.

Much of that time lately has been dealing with the issue of bullying. New Jersey schools are in the early stages of implementing the new state rules to curb bullying, intimidation and harassment, she said.

"I'm familiar with schools," Sutliff said. "Bullying issues are such a big thing right now. A lot of effort is being made at schools resulting in referrals to outside counselors for both victims and bullies. The new law is very stringent, but it is in place for a reason."

Sutliff moved her practice to Madison at the end of the summer. The town is central to her practice, and offers public transportation at the nearby NJ Transit station, and ample street parking.

She is licensed by the State of New  Jersey, and is a nationally certified counselor. She has a master's  degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and is an adjunct professor in the counselor education graduate program at Kean University.

Her practice is a psychotheraputic counseling service for individuals, couples and families, with a specialization for adolescents. She has a background of working with trauma victims of sexual assault, but is trained to address all aspects of mental illness.

She said the concern about the rise of bullying incidents in school is warranted. While a well-publicized case like the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clemente draws attention to the issue, bullying occurs daily in schools, but is often unnoticed by adults and authority figures.

Sutliff feels there are many contributing factors to the rise of bullying that go beyond the new requirement that says every allegation must be examined. Changes in home life due to the loss of a parent's job can add uncertainty to a youth's already jumbled life, filled with education-defining mandated tests, high expectations, teen culture issues, young love, and a sense of isolation, she said.

The economic need for a teen to find a job, for example, could be accompanied by a fear of failure, a sense of heavy responsibility to assist the family through hard times, and, in a rich county like Morris, even a loss of self-esteem because  of perceived loss of status.

Add to all the immediate possible factors, the Internet and all its means of instant communication, Sutliff said, and things can go from bad to worse.

"If I'm stressed out I'm going to harass and bully you. I feel a little better about myself and in turn  make you feel horrific about yourself," she said. "The anonymous nature of the Internet allows you to say whatever you want. On Facebook someone can post a phony status, and 25 people can say they like that status. They become part of the bullying problem.

"A student sees how many people agree with that status and thinks 'Oh,  I'm hated by so many people.'  The impact on their self-esteem is enormous."

Sutliff said she's "not sure we are teaching our children how to deal with conflict. We appropriately need to teach children to  deal with conflict and distinguish the difference between conflict and  bullying. We need to teach them coping skills to work out issues that they might be having with friends and peers as opposed to harassing and bullying."

A concern is that teens don't necessarily understand the impact of what they are doing, don't realize the effect that bullying had on the victim.

"I think sometimes that if you said to a child that if you logged on in a month from now and saw that the person they bullied was thinking about killing themselves that it might sink in," Sutliff said. "Maybe that person would think that the kid that I've been calling names about his weight is making him want to kill himself. Maybe that would have an impact and get that child to make a different choice."

She believes schools are doing a better job addressing bullying. The observaiton is based on her own experience as a middle school student who didn't quite fit in and was overweight.

"I was an awkward middle schooler," Sutliff said. "I was not in with the cool kids. I wanted to be, but I wasn't. So  I stuck out. They knew I would not fight back. A lot of time a bully picks on the student who is not going to fight back.  I went home and cried about it. After a while, it stopped. I had good coping skills and good parental support, but it was very difficult and I never forgot it."

Sutliff can be reached a 973-224-2574. She is also on Facebook and her business website can be found here.