Jennifer Fraser's Blog: How I Became an Unlikely Whistleblower

The post Scientists Document How Bullying and Abuse Harm the Brain appeared first on The Bullied Brain.

When you are abused, you often lose yourself, your authentic self. You become disconnected from your essential self. You are painfully the self lost to abuse. My mission is to recover her and honour her. This is why you see her on my website. That confident, glowing, young, vibrant woman. I am dedicated to returning her to this world despite the dedicated attempts of three teachers to destroy her.

When I was in grade 12, after I had finally stumbled away from intense emotional, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of three teachers who worked together, I was voted “worst dressed girl” for the yearbook. I wore sweat pants and baggy shirts everyday. I didn’t want anyone to see me as I toiled over the books and wrote scholarship exams. I was terrified of anyone thinking I was attractive. This continued on for many years. I still am shocked if any attention comes my way and I mostly wear leggings, runners, sweatshirts, put on no makeup, and keep a low profile.

Attention stirs in me a sense of extreme anxiety, bordering on pure fear.

Hardly surprising when in my formative years I was a target for relentless psychological and sexual harassment, followed by relentless humiliation when I refused to succumb to the teachers’ sexual pressure. I am 56 and do not look like the ideal, youthful, regal self who appears on my website. It’s quite deliberate. I know all too well the self lost to abuse. My mission is to recover her and honour her.

I want to reconnect with that girl and young woman and give her a chance to shine. She was ripped out of this world at a very young age by pedophiles, by psychopaths, by those who enabled them, and I want to bring her back in all her glory. These are photographs of me taken recently, but I am middle aged. I no longer have the unscathed face of a twenty-something girl. I never was that teen or twenty-something girl. She died at 13 when the grooming and sex-trafficking began in science class.

The self lost to abuse.

At 13, my science teacher started telling me and a few other girls about this outdoor education program called “Quest” that he thought we should really try out for. It was competitive. Kids wanted to get into it from all over the city. It was built around trips into the wilderness. My biggest trip I had done before grade 8 was a family trek to Disney Land. I wasn’t in a good position to understand my science teacher’s desire for me to do this program. I thought we were friends.

Over time, my science teacher’s control over me wasn’t just friendly interest in my life, giving me an A when I was a C science student, putting his arm around my shoulder, asking me about friends, driving me home, driving me to his house, asking me in, wondering what boys I was interested in, steering me away from friends, and especially from boys I was attracted to, no it became more.

I tried out for the outdoor education program at his insistence, not knowing it was run by two pedophiles.

How could I know? I was 15 years old. I went into the program and was hit with an onslaught of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse on a daily basis. School admin, other teachers, parents, no one seemed to be raising alarms. It was hard to know that we had been inducted into a cult-like, psychopathic environment that slowly, but surely eroded any sense of essential self. My science teacher joined the program the year after.

He could only have been chosen for the program as a pedophile because it was run by pedophiles.

There was no way they would have brought him into their highly abusive program if he was a healthy teacher committed to child safety and child rights. He slid right into the routine of humiliation, public shaming, put downs, insults, threats, massages, hugs, favouritism, and sex with students. He belonged there. He fit right in. Of course he chose me for the coveted position of “counsellor” on a canoeing trip. This was a leadership position and made a teenager feel chosen and special.

A few days in, I had the sense that I was in danger. I had no words or experience to properly rebuff or report his abuse. I was 16. We shared a tent. He suggested we zip our sleeping bags together and my response was silence. I had nothing else. And from there it went downhill. I could not seem to extricate myself from the hold these teachers had over me. Ultimately, they coerced me and others on a trip to strip naked and swim with them. They commented in sexualized ways about my body. I was 17 and I can still feel the paralyzing trauma in my cells to this day.

At least I was not having sex with them as were other girls my age.

Ah, the self lost to abuse.

We six students were brought along to make the trip seem normal. We weren’t the teachers’ sex targets, just their witnesses. We couldn’t save the two girls in the teachers’ tents. Like us, they were lost, but truly lost. Some of those teenaged girls married the teachers and had children with them.

I find myself thinking about what it would be like to have a husband, now in his late 70s or 80s, when you’re 50 something. Would you hope your own children also had sex with middle-aged teachers? Back when we were kids, the science teacher was divorced, but one of the outdoor ed teachers had a wife and three kids. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. What would it be like to wake up and gaze into the eyes of the teacher who abused you, who was your husband, who was the father of your children. Did he hope your kids would also have sex with teachers? Did you? Was it considered normal in your family?

The shame you carry after these traumas in childhood is intense.

In my case: you wanted to disappear. You felt like a ghost. You wanted to scar any beauty or glamor that might make you a target again. You hid. You harmed your own body whether it was with an eating disorder or a knife. This went on for many years. Many hours were spent with psychologists and psychiatrists, but I never told them about these teachers. I lived in repressed terror.

It’s taken me until now to fully and completely fight back. I have mentally, psychologically, spiritually, neurologically severed all ties with those teachers who abused me, those teachers who abused so many of us. It took a great deal of work to get away from their brainwashing in my formative years. But I succeeded and so can others. It’s what my work is focused on. I bring back abuse victims from the dead.

I have resurrected the girl I was once. She is the avatar of The Bullied Brain.

Look at my website. I have resurrected the young women I should have been. She lives again. She is the avatar of The Bullied Brain. I am the founder of this company and the author of the books. I’m the one that toils over the research, but she is the embodied divine teacher. She is confident and queenly and glamorous and not terrified to show it. She’s not ashamed at her place in the world. She looks you straight in the eye. She does not cower or look down. See her. She lives.

The post The Self Lost to Abuse appeared first on The Bullied Brain.

By its very nature, sport enables coaches who are abusive to have far too much power. A teacher can’t block a student from learning skills or participating in contests, but a coach can block an athlete from practising, from participating in gameplay, from having the required exposure to earn awards and be seen for recruitment, as well as block him or her from receiving an accurate letter of recommendation.

Sport enables abusive coaching.

Frequently, there are a number of individuals teaching an academic subject. Those who are identified as incompetent, let alone abusive, can be avoided. Students can drop their class and move to a better one. But in most high-schools, there is only one coach or one pair of coaches for a sport. Sport by its nature enables abusive coaching.

One of the greatest power imbalances is that of coach to competitive athlete. A coach can penalize an athlete for reporting abuse in ways that an academic teacher cannot. While most coaches are supportive and committed to athlete wellbeing and success, the few who are abusive have far too much power. They have far too little oversight that is transparent and holds those who abuse to account.

Sport by its nature enables abusive coaching.

A teenager on our son’s basketball team told his mother that at a tournament, the coaches’ hotel room was full of beer. The mother reported her concerns to school administrators. Next thing you know, that boy was benched. He had been singled out by a local group that watches athletes with talent, along with our son, but he barely saw playing time after his mother spoke up.

Our son also spent long stretches on the bench, especially if he shone too bright. One time he scored two three pointers in a row and got hauled off the court. At halftime, the coach told the team it was “his fault” that they were losing. Many other talented players reported similar treatment on both the boys and girls senior teams. The injustice and cognitive dissonance was soul-destroying to many.

Abusive coaches don’t want to win necessarily. Some just want to abuse.

Even worse where we live in British Columbia, Canada there is a rule established by BC School Sports that if an athlete leaves their school to get away from an abusive coach, they have to sit out a year of play. If they’re a competitive athlete and seeking to play college level, this can ruin their chances.

When I contacted the then-director of BC School Sports about this obvious injustice in 2012, she told me not to speak to anyone about it. It was an effective threat and a clear message she wasn’t going to do anything about the abuse, nor was she going to do anything to protect athletes.

Abusive coaches are known to retaliate if athletes speak up. They weaponize the sport against the athlete.

As our son and other athletes at his school discovered, not only would the abusive coaches require silence, so would the BC School Sports system. There was no solution except to endure more abuse if they wanted to play in their final year and try out for college teams. This is yet another example, a glaring example, of the way in which coaches are given far too much power to make or break an athlete.

Amazing that if an athlete in a BC high-school wants to play their sport, but not be abused, they have to submit to the abuse and also keep quiet about it.

Ten years later, athletes across Canada, including BC, are now speaking up by the hundreds demanding the abuse stops. They’re sick of being told to keep quiet and endure coach abuse. And they have been vocal about the way in which coaches are empowered by the broken system to retaliate against athletes who speak up.

Ten years ago, our son was one of the first to sacrifice his sport to avoid being abused.

He gave up his dream of playing in grade 12 and of going on to play college level. He is one of the first vocal athletes speaking up against abuse in sport, striving to protect other athletes, exposing the broken system. Ten years later, athletes are still trying to get the Canadian government to step in and halt rampant, enabled, empowered abuse in sports.

If there’s only one coach or coaching pair of a sport, then this power imbalance must be under a microscope.

Athletes need to do anonymous surveys monthly to identify abusive behaviors. It must be anonymous to avoid retaliation from abusive coaches. The surveys need to be shared with administrators and parents. There’s been far too long a history of covering up abuse done by “armies of enablers.”

If coaches have created an environment of fear, favouritism, and humiliation, they need to step down. No athlete should be exposed to these abusive conditions. Research is clear, such a toxic environment does not produce athletic performance. It creates conditions for worsening abuse. It damages brains.

The post Sport enables abusive coaching appeared first on The Bullied Brain.

If you have not read blogs in the series, How I Became an Unlikely Whistleblower, you can read them here.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. It’s time to admit the official social systems under which we operate are insane. When will we admit that our system is broken? The statistic for me that finally and wholly made me admit the painful truth was that youth suicide – imagine 10 to 24 year olds – is becoming more and more frequent. Youth suicide has increased 57% from 2000 to 2018. If our system was healthy and up-to-date on science, we would not have that heart-breaking statistic.

When will we admit our system is broken?

Our system is constructed on out-dated myths. For instance, we endlessly focus on child bullying, but refuse to admit adults teach bullying to children. Bullying is learned behavior. We don’t like to talk about adult bullying and we work double time to cover it up when it is exposed.

In August 2019, I gave a TEDx Talk about the “Neuroscience of Bullying” (sorry the audio is awful, not my fault). I told the story of how my son was one of many victims of teachers who were abusive. The students reported the abuse and then got re-victimized by those who uphold the broken system. When will we admit our system is broken and backward?

I know from extensive research that all forms of abuse are incredibly damaging to the brain.

In the TEDx Talk, I shared that in November of 2019 one of my students killed herself. I had been in close touch with her, emails back and forth. Like my son and the other students, she had reported being abused by a teacher. She was desperate for someone to clarify to her what was happening. While my son and the others were abused psychologically and physically, this girl was being groomed by a teacher she had trusted. Once again, those who uphold the broken system lurched into action and instead of effectively protecting her, it exposed her further to the abusive teacher. Over and over again.

She literally lost her mind.

I asked highly-awarded neuroscientist Dr. Michael Merzenich if a young suicidal brain could be compared to an aged brain that had succumbed to dementia. His response was “absolutely.” Sit with that for a moment. It matters because Dr. Merzenich is known to scientists as “The Father of Neuroplasticity.” For forty plus years, he has documented in his lab that the brain has the capacity to change. All of us across the lifespan can change our brains. We can recover a suicidal brain back to organic health. How many children and youth know this life-saving fact?

If someone has a suicidal brain, it can change, repair, recover.

I made this eye-opening discovery the central core of my new book The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health. I want every young person from 10 to 24 to know that if they have suicidal ideation, its origin is in the brain and the brain like other organs of the body can repair. They need to get the help of a professional who is knowledgeable about brain health and how to restore it. If they had a broken leg, heart murmur, torn ACL, digestive issues, surely they’d get expert medical help. The same needs to happen if their brain is acting in a disordered way.

A society that has an increase of youth suicide by 57% must admit that it is broken.

It must do something different. Here is what I recommend.

Hold adults who bully and abuse children accountable. From an early age, teach children how to protect themselves against adults who are abusive.Teach children starting early how to have an effective working vocabulary to recognize and report abusive adults.Beginning in elementary school, teach children that suicide means that the brain has become unwell and they need to get expert support to address why it’s unwell, and develop a recovery plan.As early as possible, educate children about their brains. How to understand their functioning. How to keep them healthy. What to do when brains become unhealthy.At present, in our broken system, children learn next to nothing about their brains.

How can they possibly recognize a brain that has become ill like a suicidal brain, let alone one suffering from other mental health issues? How can they get the help they need when they have no vocabulary or experience or understanding to articulate what is wrong? The fact that there is still stigma about mental illness means our society is broken and backwards. Time to teach children brain science to empower them. Time to teach them that they can strengthen their brains.

Let’s use science to level the playing field between an adult who abuses and the children he/ she targets.

Let’s teach children brain science so they can sculpt healthy, high-functioning, resilient brains. Let’s teach them how to guard their vulnerable brains from toxic abuse of all forms. This just might fix our broken system.

The post When will we admit our system is broken? appeared first on The Bullied Brain.

If you’re interested in blogs in the series, How I Became an Unlikely Whistleblower, you can read them here.

Parents, teachers, and coaches are not usually the bullies we feel comfortable talking about. We prefer to talk about child-to-child bullies. What’s going on when adults bully children? In most cases, adults come by bullying behaviors honestly because they were bullied in childhood. They think it’s normal conduct. They think it gets results. They think it made them “tough” or gave them “grit.” In all these justifications for bullying behavior, what you really are hearing is that these adults are identifying with the aggressor.

If a child is raised by an abusive parent who bullies them, then they may opt to save themselves by mimicking the parent’s lack of empathy or outright cruelty.

Adults who bully kids may have been humiliated and terrorized by a parent, teacher, or coach. Adults who bully kids were likely beaten down by an aggressor and now fear gentleness, softness, sensitivity, kindness, caring. They associate such terms and associated empathy and compassion with weakness. After the harm they survived, the one thing they never want to be again is vulnerable or weak like a child.

Let’s ask the question again and focus on the answer.

What’s going on when adults bullying children? They are protecting themselves by identifying with the bully. They are terrified of once again becoming a victim.

In the comments on my TEDx Talk (I know the audio is horrible, out of my control) viewers do not comment that the bullying they endured at the hands of adults or even children made them strong or successful. Not a single one says that it gave them grit or toughness. Take a moment to hear what victims say about bullying.

“bullying made me sick”

“I definitely think bullying effects my behavior. My self esteem. I’m very defensive and over protective with myself. I pray that I’m able to get over this. I’m 37 now.”

Bullying “does have long term effects I’m 35 now and I can honestly say bullying has absolutely broken me.”

“As a 31 year old male, who experienced bullying / social ostracization, I know that my lifespan has been significantly shortened.”

“I cannot bring myself to say ‘former victim’ even 37 years later because I’m still struggling with the trauma.”

“So ya, I hate my life. I am 20, and still can’t get over the fact that I was taken advantage of.”

“I will say now at 20-21 years old, neither my self-worth or self-esteem are the best, and I struggle with social connections (and missed lots of opportunities). Loneliness or isolation, and/or simply not fitting in is almost certainly my norm now.”

“I feel alone.”

“The effects are reaaaaaally long term. Like years and years pass and I still haven’t found my self-esteem and I avoid social situations and my biggest dream is to just die.”

Don’t know about you, but these comments break my heart. These victims are expressing personally how long-term, how damaging, how serious the effects of bullying are. Everything they say is backed by extensive research. Adults might rationalize their bullying conduct, say it’s due to their passion, or that the children need motivation and discipline, and only way to achieve that is through humiliation and harm, but the fact is bullying does nothing but damage children.

There is zero research that provides evidence that any form of bullying and abuse improves performance, increases health and wellbeing, makes an individual resilient or tough. It’s all a tragic myth.

Many adults who bully children don’t know or don’t care how much damage they are doing. They do not recognize that the abuse they suffered as a child, if left untreated, is like an infectious disease which they pass on to the next generation.

What’s going on when adults bully children? They are trapped in a cycle of abuse.

Parents who bully their own kids perpetuate a cycle of intergenerational trauma. Teachers and coaches who bully infect year after year of students and athletes. It is little wonder that we have an epidemic of child bullying (as they imitate adults) and an epidemic of youth mental illness in our society.

Abuse done by adults to children, all forms of abuse are connected to mid-life chronic disease and shortened lifespans.

Emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical abuse, physical neglect, and sexual abuse all damage brains and bodies. The extensive research took place from 1995 to 1997. How much has changed since then? We know there’s correlation between adults abusing / bullying children and chronic disease, but we haven’t even found the courage to include this critically important, lifesaving information into school curriculums. Why is that?

Do adults worry that children will realize the way they are being treated is damaging? Might they speak up and ask it to stop? Might they recognize adult hypocrisy when they say “don’t bully” and then subject children to bullying themselves?

Adults abuse of children is connected to: substance abuse, mental illness, physical illness, eating disorders, disordered relationships, failure to perform, aggression, and school shootings.

What would our world be like if we adults found the courage to read research on the impact of all forms of adult bullying and then teach it to children? What would our world be like if we adults stopped normalizing the abuse of children and instead invested heavily in getting educated across the board and rehabilitated if defaulting to abuse?

It’s time for change. It’s urgently needed.

The post What’s going on when adults bully children? appeared first on The Bullied Brain.

If you’re interested in blogs in the series, How I Became an Unlikely Whistleblower, you can read them here.

When I did my TEDx Talk in 2019 (sorry the sound is terrible, out of my control), I was not expecting viewers to comment on parents bullying their own kids. Due to lived experience, I was speaking about the serious harm to developing brains when teachers abuse students, not parents. I hadn’t really thought about how some parents bully their own kids.

The fact that bullying has infected the most sacred bond in life – namely mother and father to child – suggests that bullying and abusive behaviors are so rampant in our society that they even infect parent-child relationships. These are some of the comments that struck me.

“My parents bullied me.”

“I’m 35 now and I can honestly say bullying has absolutely broken me.”

I was bullied “by my family members.”

“My bully was my father. It happened everyday as soon as my feet hit the floor in the morning.”

From a brain science perspective, this is surprising, and yet not surprising. When a child is born, the brains of both parents and baby are flooded with oxytocin which is referred to as the “love hormone” or the “cuddle hormone.” It has the job of making parents fall head over heels for their baby to give them the strength to have broken sleep, care passionately about their infant through thick and thin, manage the full time job of parenting when they likely have another full time job, and to shoulder a constant state of serious responsibility.

These are huge demands on an individual, and yet when “love” happens in the brain, these stressful demands fade in the intense glow of connection with and adoration for one’s child. It’s natural for the brain of a parent to discover incredible reserves of energy to cope with the intense challenges an infant and baby bring into their lives. This is all built into the brain by evolution. It’s how we survive as a species.

From a brain perspective, it’s surprising that all this natural, established in evolution, connection and bonding turns into one of the most harmful behaviors, namely bullying.

How could that happen? From a brain science perspective, it’s also not that surprising. If the parents were bullied by their parents, or family members, or maybe coaches, teachers, or even peers, then they may well transfer this harmful way of behaving onto their own kids. The brain gets shaped and moulded by experience, especially repeat experience, and especially during one’s formative childhood or teen years.

Once a brain has been sculpted by bullying, the individual is likely to believe the falsehood that bullying was the making of them.

They believe bullying gave them success or toughness or survival skills. While this is not backed by research, it makes sense that a compensatory strategy for being harmed by one’s own parents is to try and make it seem like it made the victims strong or it was done “for their own good.”

You can see though, from the comments on my TEDx Talk, that the children on the receiving end of bullying from their own parents do not see it in a positive or loving light. They speak about how much it damaged them and how hard it is to recover from this kind of harmful treatment. Rather than enhancing their grit or their success in life, it has lead them to a lot of pain and suffering.

When parents bully kids, their own kids, all they do is set them up to either bully the next generation, or to turn the harmful behavior inward and suffer many well-documented issues throughout their lives.

Research is extensive and clear that bullying from adult to child does not give them an advantage, doesn’t help them, doesn’t make them tough or have grit, doesn’t lead to greatness, doesn’t support them in healthy social relationships. All it does, according to extensive research, is hurt brains.

The post Parents Bullying Their Own Kids appeared first on The Bullied Brain.

Today I am presenting at the inaugural conference of Whistleblowing Canada Research Society and my topic is “What is the impact of speaking up on the brain?” I am looking forward to it because instead of being an outlier, I am going to be with my people. The keynote address will be given by Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire and I am honoured to be in his presence and with all the other brave 9% in society who spoke up about wrongdoing, even though it put their brain at risk.

The tag lines on the Whistleblowing Canada Research Society site capture the organizational and social betrayal you suffer when you dare to speak up.

“Learn about why whistleblowers who tell the truth in the public interest suffer reprisals.”

It is not telling the truth that is hard on the brain; it’s the reprisals one suffers for committing the crime of telling the truth in a society that prefers silence when abuse and corruption occur. Rarely, if ever does anyone talk about the impact of speaking up on the brain. Another key tagline from the Whistleblowing Canada Research Society offers hope.

“Understand how the contradiction of reprisals for truth tellers and impunity for wrong doers can be corrected.”

It’s hopeful, but the key word from a brain perspective is “contradiction.” The brain does not cope well with contradiction. It struggles to stay healthy and clear when it’s told to call out wrongdoing, but then witnesses those in power coverup. In other words, the brain is being told to do the right thing and to look the other way when those in power do the wrong thing. This inconsistency causes what Dr. Michael Merzenich would call “noise” or “chatter” in the brain’s complex system.

A distracting, confusing, misfiring of signals is unhealthy for the brain and puts it at risk for mental health issues.

While growing up, as your brain is being shaped and sculpted by your experience in society, you are taught the difference between right and wrong. You are told that lying is unacceptable. You are trained in a culture that forbids harming others or stealing goods.

Cut to adulthood, you witness wrongdoing but it seems no one else is calling it out. No one is speaking up.

No one is telling the truth to stop the abuse or corruption. You make the courageous decision to speak up. You should be praised for your ethics and bravery, but instead find yourself questioned and attacked. Next time you read a media story about abuse that has gone on for decades like it did in the case of Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar, or Jerry Sandusky, remember the contradiction into which a whistleblower must enter and somehow strive to endure. Abuse goes on for decades because those empowered to stop it enable it and cover it up.

When those in power operate according to a system of “do as I say” and “not as I do” brains become confused. Contradiction, manipulation, lies are not healthy for the brain.

In order to maintain brain health when surrounded by corruption, the key is to consciously and purposefully create a dialogue between the Mind-Brain-Body as I discuss at length in my new book. The Mind can instruct the brain to calm the noise and chatter by stilling the inner self through mindfulness or listening to meditations.

The Mind can assure the brain that there is indeed corruption, but it’s confusing, contradictory, hypocritical conduct is outside. Within the skull and self, clearheadedness prevails.

The Body can get the Brain out doing aerobic exercise which is excellent to lower the toxic stress levels that rise when faced with abuse and corruption. It also makes the Brain resilient when further reprisals are sent along.

Finally, one of the healthiest evidence-based ways to maintain Brain strength when being a whistleblower is to commit to daily workouts in the “brain gym.” Doing online, gamified brain-training, designed by a neuroscientific team, led by brilliant Dr. Michael Merzenich can keep your brain healthy even in the midst of an ill organization or society.

The post The Impact of Speaking Up on the Brain – Whistleblower Series #22 appeared first on The Bullied Brain.

In 2019, I was asked by students at Langara College in Vancouver BC to do a TEDx Talk on the work I was doing and this is what led to my presentation on the “Neuroscience of Bullying.” I was reading neuroscientific, neurobiological, medical, and psychological research about bullying and abuse in order to write my next book. I had been presenting in the US and Canada about my discoveries, insights, and concerns.

The TEDx organizers at Langara College contacted me and asked if I would present. Because I really do care about the neuroscience of bullying and abuse, I said yes.

However, I am not a performer. When I directed youth theatre, I loved being behind the scenes, writing plays, directing talented student actors. I found it hard to come out on stage even when it was time to be applauded at the end of run of plays. I’m an introvert. I like to keep a low profile. It took everything for me to walk out on the TEDx stage and present. The only thing that gave me the courage to do the talk was because I had learned life-saving information about mental health.

I learned that we could actually protect and save children and youth from mental health disorders if we knew more about what was going on in their brains.

There is great concern about the youth mental health crisis in the US and beyond. While there is serious worry about rising rates of an epidemic of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, aggression, eating disorders, and suicidal ideation, few discuss bullying and abuse as correlated causes, and few speak about the harm done to the brain by bullying and abuse.

How can we even discuss mental health without including brain health?

At the end of my talk, my call to action is that we must start including brain health and brain imaging when we are dealing with mental health. It could save lives.

My TEDx Talk was titled “The Neuroscience of Bullying” which you can see on the screen in the actual talk, but when it arrived on Youtube I found they had changed the title. The title they chose was “Does childhood bullying have long term impacts?”

I do not refer to childhood bullying in my TEDx so the title is misleading. I do refer to personal experiences with adults who bully and abuse children, and then I put that traumatizing crisis into the arena with research. I respect research. Highly awarded Dr. Michael Merzenich has said that my new book, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health is “scientifically the most thorough treatment of the subject on planet earth.”

I am academically trained to respect research and to draw from it in order to bring evidence to a discussion of ideas. I do not talk about childhood bullying. I focus on the research into adults why bully and abuse. Notably, many of the people who have commented on the talk also speak about adult bullying and abuse.

I discuss what happens in the brains of children and youth when they are bullied and abused by adults in powerful positions like teachers and coaches.

It’s an uncomfortable topic because as I examine in my new book, we train children from an early age in the school system to respect and obey teachers, coaches, doctors, and other adults. We do not warn them that some adults in positions of power might not be safe, might not have their best interests at heart, might harm their bodies and brains.

By speaking up about adults who abuse children, we are forced to look at our whole system that sets kids up as victims. That’s uncomfortable.

What’s exciting is that when we include neuroscience into our understanding of mental health, we are empowered, just like we are with knowing how much we can improve our own physical health by working out, eating well, and doing mindfulness. We can strengthen our own brains keeping them more resilient and healthier. We can repair our brains after the damage done by adults during our formative years.

The post The Neuroscience of Bullying and Abuse appeared first on The Bullied Brain.

After I reported teachers’ abuse at one private school, then watched administrators and the board cover up, I resigned in protest. I was hired to work at another private school. In my third year at the new school, a student reported directly to me that she was being “sexually harassed by a teacher.” I didn’t know what to do because you can’t be a whistleblower twice.

This was the beginning of my impossible situation because being a whistleblower once is dangerous, being a whistleblower twice is an act of true self-destruction.

Like at the other school, I did everything by the book. At the old school, the Headmaster asked me to take student testimonies and send them to him if the student agreed, and I did. I took 8 testimonies. The Acting Head at the new school also asked me to take the student’s testimony, while she was also present, and I did.

The teacher was instantly suspended and a police investigation began.

This time, it seemed that proper protocols would be followed, unlike at the other school. But I had a sinking feeling when students, parents, and faculty were informed that the teacher was on “sick leave.” Is that the moment I should have spoken up and insisted that the truth be told? What would you have done?

Would you speak up if you had already been a whistleblower recently at another school?

Whistleblowers are a minority because they fear reprisal; they worry nothing will be done; they lack confidence; they are not aware that wrong-doing is occurring. The first two were true for me, the other two not at all. I know what child abuse is whether it’s emotional and physical like at the first private school, or emotional and sexual at the new one. I am a confident person, even after the first private school administrators lied and tried to hurt my reputation, and the reputation of the many students who reported the abuse being done to them.

My deep concerns revolved around reprisal, not just against me, but more importantly against the student who reported the abuse. The research has been clear since the 1980s that for children to report sex abuse by adults often results in feelings of extreme self-loathing and guilt for having “accommodated” the adult in power’s manipulation.

These feelings intensify after having reported and exposed the adult with whom they have a “trauma-bond”. The student who reported the abuse was suffering these exact feelings and I am not a mental health professional. Based on what I went through at the other school, and the fact that at the new school lies were already being told, I felt rightly concerned that “nothing” would be done.

The school administrators at the new school were already covering up, replacing the truth with lies.

I did not know what to do. I felt trapped. You can’t be a whistleblower twice. If you work in a system where child abuse is normalized and enabled, then your impulse to stop it and protect children makes you an outlier. It’s not just these private schools. It’s USA Gymnastics, Catholic Church, Boy Scouts to name a few as the list of organizations that cover up and normalize child abuse is far too long to record here.

Why were there no administrators, school counsellors, or other teachers who would take the hard road of the whistleblower at the new school? Certainly no one did at the old school I resigned from. Why was I the only one ready to commit the crime of telling the truth?

But I could not do it. You can’t be a whistleblower twice even when you’re in a traumatizing situation where no one else will speak up.

I dream that one day we will be a society where the whistleblower on child abuse is not an outlier.

I dream that child abuse will be understood as abnormal and all who know about it, stop it, speak up about it, and protect children.

The post You Can’t Be a Whistleblower Twice – Whistleblower Series #21 appeared first on The Bullied Brain.

After I reported teachers’ abuse at one private school, then watched administrators and the board cover up, I resigned in protest. I was hired to work at another private school. In my third year at the new school, a student reported directly to me that she was being “sexually harassed by a teacher.” I didn’t know what to do because you can’t be a whistleblower twice.

This was the beginning of my impossible situation because being a whistleblower once is dangerous, being a whistleblower twice is an act of true self-destruction.

Like at the other school, I did everything by the book. At the old school, the Headmaster asked me to take student testimonies and send them to him if the student agreed, and I did. I took 8 testimonies. The Acting Head at the new school also asked me to take the student’s testimony, while she was also present, and I did.

The teacher was instantly suspended and a police investigation began.

This time, it seemed that proper protocols would be followed, unlike at the other school. But I had a sinking feeling when students, parents, and faculty were informed that the teacher was on “sick leave.” Is that the moment I should have spoken up and insisted that the truth be told? What would you have done?

Would you speak up if you had already been a whistleblower recently at another school?

Whistleblowers are a minority because they fear reprisal; they worry nothing will be done; they lack confidence; they are not aware that wrong-doing is occurring. The first two were true for me, the other two not at all. I know what child abuse is whether it’s emotional and physical like at the first private school, or emotional and sexual at the new one. I am a confident person, even after the first private school administrators lied and tried to hurt my reputation, and the reputation of the many students who reported the abuse being done to them.

My deep concerns revolved around reprisal, not just against me, but more importantly against the student who reported the abuse. The research has been clear since the 1980s that for children to report sex abuse by adults often results in feelings of extreme self-loathing and guilt for having “accommodated” the adult in power’s manipulation.

These feelings intensify after having reported and exposed the adult with whom they have a “trauma-bond”. The student who reported the abuse was suffering these exact feelings and I am not a mental health professional. Based on what I went through at the other school, and the fact that at the new school lies were already being told, I felt rightly concerned that “nothing” would be done.

The school administrators at the new school were already covering up, replacing the truth with lies.

I did not know what to do. I felt trapped. You can’t be a whistleblower twice. If you work in a system where child abuse is normalized and enabled, then your impulse to stop it and protect children makes you an outlier. It’s not just these private schools. It’s USA Gymnastics, Catholic Church, Boy Scouts to name a few as the list of organizations that cover up and normalize child abuse is far too long to record here.

Why were there no administrators, school counsellors, or other teachers who would take the hard road of the whistleblower at the new school? Certainly no one did at the old school I resigned from. Why was I the only one ready to commit the crime of telling the truth?

But I could not do it. You can’t be a whistleblower twice even when you’re in a traumatizing situation where no one else will speak up.

I dream that one day we will be a society where the whistleblower on child abuse is not an outlier.

I dream that child abuse will be understood as abnormal and all who know about it, stop it, speak up about it, and protect children.

The post You Can’t Be a Whistleblower Twice appeared first on The Bullied Brain.