Throwing shade is a slang term that means making subtle, indirect, or clever insults or criticisms about someone. It often involves being sly or sarcastic rather than outright rude, with the intent to demean or belittle someone in a subtle way.
“There are different reasons why people bully, including wanting to dominate others and improve their social status, having low self-esteem and wanting to feel better about themselves, and lacking remorse or failing to recognize their behavior as a problem.”
“In a recent Ditch the Label study, we spoke to 7,347 people about bullying. We asked respondents to define bullying and then later asked if, based on their own definition, they had ever bullied anybody. 14% of our overall sample, so that’s 1,239 people, said yes. What we then did was something that had never been done on this scale before; we asked them intimate questions about their lives, exploring things like stress and trauma, home lives, relationships and how they feel about themselves.”
“Those who engage in public corrections of this sort often are looking to feel good about themselves, and, according to Benoît Monin, a psychology professor at Stanford University, displays of language all-knowing-ness provide a ready-made, two-pronged opportunity to do so. ‘The way we evaluate our competence is relative to other people,’ he says. ‘If I need to feel good about my language skills, one way that I could do that would be to give myself evidence that my language skills are awesome. Another is to give myself evidence that other people’s language skills suck. So by putting down other people, I can feel better about myself.’”
“Why a narcissist plays the victim depends on the situation and the type of narcissism they live with. Playing the victim or feeling like a victim may stem from lower self-esteem, low empathy, or a need for control. In every case, because NPD is a mental health condition, this behavior is linked to the symptoms that define the disorder and not to a personal choice.”
“In order to understand what happens in your body when you dislike someone, you can start by trying to understand fear. As Robert Sapolsky writes in “Why Your Brain Hates Other People,” when we see someone who even looks different from us, “there is preferential activation of the amygdala,” which means the brain region associated with fear and aggression flares up. This visceral, emotional reaction can spark a long-term pattern of dislike when it’s validated by action: if you perceive that someone has hurt you, your fear of them becomes rational. Our negative feelings toward someone get stronger as bad experiences with them pile up, and these negative thoughts trigger the fight-or-flight response in our bodies.”
“You probably didn’t start hating yourself out of nowhere. One possibility is that your self-hatred may be a natural reaction to a traumatic event… Begin to slowly, carefully, put down the weight of your imperfect explanation… The fact that it was not enough does not mean anything about you—it just means you are human, with all the strengths and weaknesses involved.”
“Depression is a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. Also called major depressive disorder or clinical depression, it affects how you feel, think and behave and can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems. You may have trouble doing normal day-to-day activities, and sometimes you may feel as if life isn’t worth living. More than just a bout of the blues, depression isn’t a weakness and you can’t simply ‘snap out’ of it. Depression may require long-term treatment. But don’t get discouraged. Most people with depression feel better with medication, psychotherapy or both.”
“There are different reasons why people bully, including wanting to dominate others and improve their social status, having low self-esteem and wanting to feel better about themselves, and lacking remorse or failing to recognize their behavior as a problem.”
“The male ego can in some cases be tied to how and where a man sees his place in the world and whether he’s living up to expectations — his and those of society.
Cultural stereotypes for men can be intricately tied to both the inflation and deflation of the male ego. Some men measure themselves by the answers to the following questions:
Am I strong enough? Am I wealthy enough? Do I meet the traditional definition of masculinity? Do I attract women? Do I control things or people? Do people recognize me for these things and am I respected and revered for them?”