School for School Counselors Podcast

Relational Aggression and Bullying

• School for School Counselors • Episode 139

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"It's just middle school drama." 
"Ignore them, and it'll stop." 
"You're gonna have to toughen up."

Sound familiar? These are the kinds of dismissive responses students often hear when they report bullying or relational aggression—and they’re not helping. In fact, with 1 in 5 students reporting being bullied and 41% of those fearing it will happen again, we’ve got serious work to do.

In this episode, we’re diving deep into relational aggression and cyberbullying, breaking down what makes these behaviors so damaging, why they often go unnoticed, and—most importantly—how school counselors can step in effectively.

You’ll learn:
✅ The subtle ways relational aggression shows up in schools (and how to spot it)
✅ How cyberbullying is evolving and why it’s getting harder to combat
✅ Practical, real-world strategies for supporting students and stopping these behaviors before they escalate

Plus, I’m giving you a sneak peek at my upcoming Behavior Breakthrough Kit—a game-changing resource packed with evidence-based strategies, a behavior intervention flowchart, and more tools to help you handle tough behavior challenges with confidence. [Go here to join the waitlist]

If handling concerns around relational aggression, cyberbullying, and behavior intervention are keeping you up at night, this episode is for you. 


00:00 Introduction

00:26 The Reality of Bullying Statistics

01:37 Understanding Relational Aggression

04:14 The Rise of Cyberbullying

05:43 Emotional and Academic Impact

06:58 Intervention Strategies

07:58 Creating Safe Reporting Spaces

09:32 Collaborating with Teachers

10:33 Supporting Targeted Students

15:33 Behavior Breakthrough Kit

19:51 Conclusion


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Speaker 1:

It's just middle school drama. Ignore them and they'll stop. Just go make some new friends. You don't need friends like that. Maybe we should just toughen up. You're overreacting. This happens to everyone. Ooh, those are things we should never, ever say when students are experiencing interpersonal conflicts, because the truth is that one out of every five students has reported being bullied, and 41% of those students who reported that they were being bullied indicated they thought the bullying would happen again. They thought the bullying would happen again and even worse. When the US Department of Education conducted a national survey in 2022, they found that 100% of students reported experiencing, witnessing or being aware of bullying during that single school year. And in all of this, only 44% of students reported notifying a trusted adult.

Speaker 1:

Y'all, we have got some work to do in the world of relational aggression and bullying. In the world of relational aggression and bullying and I will bet this time of year especially you are experiencing these very concerns on your campus. In today's educational world, relational aggression in schools is a huge concern and, unlike physical bullying, relational aggression is subtle. It has behaviors aimed at damaging a student's social relationships or their reputation, and when we add that to the rise of cyberbullying among students. We realize we have some very unique challenges in our work, because we have to address these behaviors while still supporting students' emotional well-being. That's what we're talking about in this week's episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. Hey there, I'm Steph Johnson. I'm a full-time school counselor, just like you, on a mission to make school counseling more sustainable and more enjoyable. I've been working in public school buildings for almost 30 years now and I can tell you there has not been one single year when I haven't heard about multiple instances of bullying. It's been going on for a long time, but it feels like it is becoming more and more of an urgent concern with students' access to devices, not only the ones they're bringing from home, but the devices that schools are now providing for them.

Speaker 1:

Relational aggression is tricky. When students try to harm one another's social standing or damage relationships. It can be devastating. It might look like social exclusion, where an aggressor deliberately engineers a student out of group activities. It might look like spreading rumors to tarnish a student's reputation, and that's even more insidious, again with these devices that students now have access to. It could even look like the silent treatment where one or more students ignores another to make them feel like they are completely on their own. This stuff can add up to some huge emotional distress and, if it's not caught and dealt with, can also impact a student's academic performance and their mental health right. A student's academic performance and their mental health right, because who wants to go into a building where you feel like you're being made the enemy each and every day?

Speaker 1:

As I said, cyberbullying is rising. My goodness, I think if I had it my way, we would have a moratorium on these cell phones in the schools, but then again y'all. I don't know about you, but a lot of the online cyberbullying situations that I'm seeing and hearing about are carryovers from things that are happening at home, out in the community, things that are not happening at school, but the fallout carries over into the school building and so we're trying to put out fires that we had nothing to do with in the first place, and that is really frustrating. Typically in cyberbullying you're going to see things like harassing messages, right, threatening or mean text messages or emails or communication that's just ugly. Or emails or communication that's just ugly. Public shaming, where students post embarrassing content about somebody else online. Sometimes they create fake profiles to post this information. It's so concerning, and because the internet provides anonymity, that just emboldens the bullies right, they feel like they can get away with anything because they're never going to get caught and let's be real, often they're not. And even if they are, it takes quite a bit of work to dig down to where it's coming from when students experience relational aggression and cyberbullying.

Speaker 1:

I mentioned emotional distress, right. Feeling anxious about going to school, I certainly would Feeling some having feelings of depression or compromised self-esteem, academic decline, not only poor academic performance, but just decreased participation in anything. Who wants to raise their hand or put themselves out there when they know that the enemy is lurking just around the corner. And that leads to social withdrawal, avoiding social interactions altogether, not participating in extracurricular activities, and so it is crucial that we are able to recognize these things so that we can appropriately intervene. We can provide the bridge between the students and the staff and the families to make sure that our relational aggression interventions are strategic, that they're developmentally appropriate for students and that they're based on everyone's social emotional needs. One thing that we can do is help teach students about conflict resolution. This could be small groups or it could be classroom lessons about recognizing manipulative behaviors. We can teach students the difference between setting boundaries and excluding someone. That's a big one. Or we can help students engage in role-playing exercises where they can practice communicating assertively and resolving conflicts effectively.

Speaker 1:

I love the book series Weird Tough Dare. I think it is a really cool glimpse into all of the different viewpoints of relational aggression, and I believe those books are still available on Amazon. I find myself using those quite a bit, and that's saying something, because I don't do a lot of bibliotherapy, so you need to pick those up if you don't have them already. We can also provide a safe space for reporting these kinds of relational aggression space for reporting these kinds of relational aggression. Lots of kids are afraid to report this stuff because they do not want to become the next target or they do not want to make their own situation worse. We can help by creating some confidential reporting systems. Maybe we have an anonymous form, maybe we have check-ins for students that we're worried about. Maybe we have a locked Dropbox somewhere on campus. It doesn't matter what the system is, as long as it's confidential and it's easily accessible. Students don't have to go out of their way or be seen utilizing it. I've tried these in my school counseling programs with great success, and the cool thing about them was they often alerted me to issues that were brewing before I could see them, and so it allowed us to get a jump on it before things got out of control. Out of control, we can also provide some judgment-free spaces to let kids process these experiences, to help them in developing their own coping strategies so that they're able to handle things as we're working this situation out, and so these safe spaces that we are uniquely equipped to provide are going to be like gold.

Speaker 1:

We can also collaborate with teachers to see if we can identify some of these patterns. We are typically not with the students all day, we don't see all the things going on, but these teachers a lot of them are really good on picking up on some of these patterns. They can be subtle. So we need to make sure that we train staff on the warning signs of relational aggression. If we see a student suddenly withdraw socially or their friend groups start changing erratically, that might be a warning sign. If teachers alert us, we can start tracking behaviors. We can start establishing relationships so that we can identify when an intervention might need to be deployed before everything reaches a boiling point, deployed before everything reaches a boiling point and that proactive piece I think is so important in situations of relational aggression and then just supporting students who have been targeted.

Speaker 1:

We can help the victims rebuild their confidence, rebuild their social connections. Rebuild their confidence, rebuild their social connections. We might need to help them rediscover what makes them amazing Working on self-concept, what makes you you, what makes you awesome, and re-establishing some of the social connections they might have lost along the way. Sponsored lunch opportunities, small counseling groups I use that term loosely where we're just coming together for camaraderie. Those approaches are really discounted by a lot of people on our campuses. That's where we get a lot of the comments like oh, you just play games with students in your office all day. That's probably what it looks like to a lot of people. But we know the mechanisms of what we're doing, we know why we're choosing these things and so it's going to be okay. It made me laugh.

Speaker 1:

The other day. I saw a post in a principal's Facebook group and one principal was acting like they had just discovered gold. Facebook group and one principal was acting like they had just discovered gold. They said you know what I did? I pulled one of my troublemakers into my office and I invited them to challenge me in a game of Uno and y'all. That was one of the best experiences. It allowed me to talk with this kid when they weren't in trouble. It allowed me to establish a relationship with them. It was just the best thing ever. Everyone needs to invest $10 to put a deck of Uno cards in their principal's office and y'all.

Speaker 1:

I laughed out loud and it took everything in me to not comment on that post and say please tell me, how do you see your school counselor on your campus? Would you give them a hard time if you saw them playing a game of Uno with students? Because a lot of administrators don't understand what we're doing. Now it's up to us to educate them. We have to build the confidence and the clout on our campus to be able to have those conversations. But it can be done. It just made me laugh. They just acted like they had discovered some sort of secret trick that no one knew about.

Speaker 1:

We can also encourage students to join some structured activities, some extracurriculars, clubs or teams where they can find some newer and more supportive friendships. And, of course, we can offer that one-on-one counseling right for students who are recovering from relational aggression. But I think it's important that we keep our eyes open. Eyes open when 16% of high school students report being bullied electronically in the past year, we know we have a problem. Yet, on the bright side, school-based bullying prevention programs have been shown to decrease relational aggression by almost 25%. This is huge. This is where we need to be among all the many, many other places we need to be on our campus.

Speaker 1:

We definitely need to have an eye toward relational aggression on our campuses. We can't ignore it and pretend like it's not happening, because if we do that, it's going to explode right in front of our faces. We need to understand how relational aggression happens, both in person and online. We need to understand the effects of that behavior and we need to know how we can help Through teaching, conflict resolution, creating safe reporting processes, collaborating with teachers and supporting students who have been targeted. If we can deploy these multi-layered approaches, we are going to be able to change our school cultures, and that y'all is super exciting when you think about it. It just gets me jazzed to think about how we are positioned to make such a huge difference on our campus.

Speaker 1:

This is a short episode this week, but I just kind of wanted to get you thinking toward relational aggression and cyberbullying. I think so often it's just kind of dismissed by people on our campuses oh it's just kids being kids. Oh she's just a mean girl. Oh you just. You need to get over it. Go go play with someone else. Those things don't work and we have to be ready to speak to that effect and to effectively advocate for our students.

Speaker 1:

I mentioned last week I'm considering offering something called the Behavior Breakthrough Kit. Let me tell you a little bit more about what I'm considering putting in this behavior breakthrough kit, because I want you to be prepared and to feel confident and competent with behavior intervention like relational aggression, cyber bullying in the moment, de-escalation, whatever your behavior situations may be. Here's what I'm thinking of including in this behavior breakthrough kit. I would include my master class that I provided to my School for School Counselors, mastermind members, y'all. These master classes are deep dives. They're not your typical run-of-the-mill workshops where I just kind of show up and tell you things that you could have googled for yourself. That's not how our master classes work. These are deep dive, perspective changing sessions that I guarantee are going to leave you looking at behavior intervention differently. So that's one.

Speaker 1:

Secondly, I'm thinking about offering my behavior intervention playbook. So this playbook is specially designed to eliminate the need for print and pray materials that might work but probably won't. Instead, I want to give you the evidence-based approaches that you need to be able to work through behavior concerns in real time. You need to be able to work through behavior concerns in real time, and the cool thing about this is it can be repeated. You don't need a resource every time something else pops up, and the more you work with it and practice with it, the more fluency you build, so that when your administrator says, hey, we have this issue with this kid, what do you think You're going to be able to pop off ideas at the drop of a hat, and that makes you look like a badass.

Speaker 1:

So we have the behavior masterclass, we have the behavior intervention playbook, and then I'm going to include a collection of my most popular behavior-oriented podcasts. But not only that. Not only are you going to get to listen to those podcasts, you're going to get a written summary of each episode In case you don't have time to sit down and listen to them right away. You can read through the most pertinent points quickly and easily. But you know what? Let's not stop there, because I still think you need even more support, and sometimes sitting down and learning a bunch of stuff takes a back burner to the day-to-day, moment-to-moment activities that you're constantly engaged in. Right, our time is precious.

Speaker 1:

So what if I show you my brand new behavior intervention flow chart, so that, when you're presented with a concern, you don't have to guess what comes next. You can consult this flow chart and know exactly which direction to look in next? And then, to make it even better, what if I provided a decision-making tree for determining whether or not a student is truly a student that falls victim to dysregulation, or whether it's defiance? Now, be honest, you've probably had a couple of situations, if not more, where you wondered is this student truly dysregulated or are they playing me because they don't want to have to do what they're supposed to do? I bet you've had some like that, and so have I, and so I developed a decision tree for determining what the best approach is going to be.

Speaker 1:

Y'all that is a lot of stuff, isn't it? A masterclass, a step-by-step playbook, a podcast collection with summaries, a next steps flow chart and a decision-making tree, if you think this might be something that could help you in your work as a school counselor. I'm still feeling it out a little bit. I want to make sure that this is something that school counselors can actually use. So if it sounds like something you need, I want you to join the waitlist. You can either click on the link that I'm going to provide in the show notes of this episode, or you can go to our website, schoolforschoolcounselorscom, and if the waitlist is still up, it's going to be right at the top of the homepage. Just click the link, enter your email and then you're going to be the first to know when this behavior breakthrough kit becomes available.

Speaker 1:

I am all about you. I am all about your success. I'm holding nothing back, because I truly believe that school counselors do some of the most important work on the planet, and I want you to feel like you have what you need. Beyond the silly printables, beyond the perfect world advice that everybody seems to be so ready to give you, I want to talk about what's really happening in the trenches. So again, if you think this behavior breakthrough kit could be useful to you, head on over to schoolforschoolcounselorscom and hit the link at the top of the page. I love school counseling, but the one thing that I love more than that is supporting good school counselors, and I'm in your corner. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, my friend, I hope you have the best week. Take care.

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Steph Johnson

Host