Anti-bullying speaker in The Dalles September 20

Now she’s a New York Times bestselling author who has taken the principles of her top seller, “Please Stop Laughing at Me,” to over 500,000 students at speaking engagements around the world and across the U.S.

Her next stop will be in The Dalles, on Tuesday, Sept. 20 at St. Mary’s Academy. During the day, she will give age-appropriate talks to students and present a seminar for teachers from area schools.

At 6:30 p.m., parents, students and the general public are invited to attend her free talk at the St. Mary’s Academy gym. The school is at West 10th and Cherry Heights.

Blanco especially encouraged adult survivors of bullying to attend.

“If you felt invisible or excluded or bullied when you were a student and it still haunts you, come to my event on Tuesday evening, it will be very healing, I believe.”

She said survivors tend to fall into two extremes: people like her who overachieve to drown out the voices from school convincing them they’re worthless; or others who never lived up to their potential because the voices from school demotivated them completely.

She said she’s worked through a lot of her own issues because “I’ve turned my pain into purpose.”

What hurt her most about being bullied, she said, wasn’t being beaten and teased and denied friendship and acceptance, “it was all the love I had to give that nobody wanted. After awhile it backed up into my system and poisoned my spirit.”

It took until the night of her high school reunion to take back her dignity and forgive her classmates. “I talk a lot about forgiveness and second chances.”

She said, “I’m a survivor turned expert and activist, so when most adults address bullying they’re addressing it from the outside in. They’re adults speaking to kids. When I address student audiences, I become a kid. I take them back with me. I’m able to reach them on a deeply emotional and spiritual level.”

She will also speak to “How I wish my parents and other adults in my life would have handled it differently.”

Her talks are not an easy ride, and tears often flow.

She said she actually acts out her childhood bullying, taking roles of both victim and bully. It’s difficult reliving her past, sometimes up to 16 times a week, “but the rewards are worth it.”

“What I do is very emotional, very real, very deep. It’s the humanizing of bullying through the lens of an adult who goes back to her childhood in the trenches with America’s students,” she said.

“I’m not afraid to get real, I’m not afraid to be vulnerable. And most speakers have a veil, sort of a protective device when they get up and speak which is a very smart thing to do, but I don’t have that.”

She said she will stay as long as she needs to after her talk in order to answer every single question people have, she said.

“When I’m done with one of my middle or high school presentations I’ll have kids come up to me needing intervention,” she said.

Other students email her, some telling her they were about to commit suicide until they heard her talk, others apologizing because they recognized they were bullying others.

While half the people who contact her are victims, the others are “often elite tormentors, my term for mean members of the cool crowd who had no idea they were mean until they hear me speak.”

When her book came out in 2003, she quickly started getting emails “from hundreds of kids, asking if I would help them, so I gave up my career in the entertainment business and I started traveling to schools to answer these cries for help.”

For 20 years, she ran a PR firm that catered to high visibility clients like celebrities and Fortune 100 firms. She’s used the communication tools she learned there to apply to her work combating bullying.

Her messages for adults —parents and teachers — are threefold. First, clichés like “ignore the bullies” don’t work. “You’re imposing adult logic into adolescent circumstances. And it doesn’t work.”

Second, she advocates compassion for bullies, who she says are acting not from hate, but from hurt. “It’s a cry for help,” she said of bullying. Until both victim and bully are treated with compassion, no progress can be achieved.

Third, she encourages adults to be curious about bullies’ background. “The more you know, the better you’ll be able to help.”

The title of her presentation is “It’s Not Just Joking Around.”

For kids, her top message is “I tell kids it’s not just joking around — bullying can damage you for life.”

She also tells them that bullying isn’t just the mean things they do to others, it’s the nice things they don’t do, like excluding them. She said during high school, she sat in the bathroom and ate a protein bar every day for lunch because nobody would sit with her at lunch.

Her third message to kids is they should be true to themselves, pursue their dreams, and never change for anyone.

For teachers, she provides tactical and strategic advice, such as never chastise a bully in front of others, since it will only humiliate the victim and often just increases the popularity of the bully.

Another option sometimes employed by teachers is requiring a student to confront their bully directly before the teacher will intervene.

Blanco said that method “is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.”

The key to helping bullies isn’t to punish them, but to sensitize them to the feelings of others and help them access and develop their natural empathy.

The biggest thing she tries to teach adults is “the bully is not the enemy. It’s a good kid acting out of bad circumstances.”

One method she suggests is having a bully carry around a notebook for five days, do one unexpected act kindness for another student each of those days, and have the recipient of the kindness sign the notebook and provide a phone number, so the kindness can be verified.

Punishment, she said, only exposes kids to the consequences of wrongdoing, not to the “joy and fulfillment of doing the right thing.”

Find Blanco’s website at jodeeblanco.com.