The Bullied Brain - Losing the mind bully

Dr Jennifer Fraser wrote her book The Bullied Brain primarily for people who have been bullied or abused. The focus is on the maltreatment of children by adults and how a lot of adults use this type of behaviour without knowing how harmful it is. Jennifer thinks we are at a tipping point as a society because have outdated beliefs where we think we need to toughen kids up but this is backfiring. She has looked at science surrounding this and it is clear that children don't learn, perform well or have healthy brains if they are treated in this way.

Jennifer looked at bullying thorough the lenses of law, education and psychology but found the most interesting information though neuroscience. Most of us grow up without any mention of our brain unless we have a trauma of some kind. We don’t teach children about their brain or learn about it as adults. We go to our doctor for many different things but they never assess our brain for health. Jennifer was personally invested as he son had been abused by two teachers and been threatened and humiliated as well as suffering physical abuse and homophobic slurs. She started to read about neuroscience to find out what this kind of abuse does to the brain of a teenage boy. She now feels that all kids need to know about this as well as their teachers, coaches and parents.

In bullying situations the neurochemistry works against the brain by allowing it to deselect things that are healthy. If a brain is constantly under threat or feels fear and anxiety of being bullied or abused, it constantly ramps up its stress response system. It should be able to shut down naturally - it's a fight, flight or freeze response - but if you are consequently activating it you are doing considerable damage to your brain architecture. This damage can’t be seen without a brain scan and Jennifer feels we should be listening to the people that are looking at the damage and also measuring people’s cortisol, the hormone that causes the problem. When cortisol, pumps though your brain because you are being abused you can start to identify with the aggressor and lose selfhood to survive. The brain uses this as a coping mechanism but what also happens is that cortisol is eroding your blood and damaging all kinds of other cells.

As well as the fight, flight, freeze mechanisms, increasing with trauma patients there is an additional category that is referred to as flop. People who are abused use this final approach of flopping and accept abuse. This can then create a brain/body link so dealing/coping with these things has to be more holistic rather than just resetting a chemical balance. We have to learn how to realign our mind, brain and body. All three need to be in alignment or they work at cross-purposes and you start to get behaviours such as eating disorders or suicidal idealities.

Bullycide happens when you are trying to kill the bully but the bully has become morphed into who you are and is held in your mind, body and brain. You end up eliminating yourself through your passion, desire and suffering to get rid of the thing you have internalised. The abuser becomes a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde character. They are really good at being a pillar of the community, are charismatic and intelligent but change behind closed doors. Many have a borderline personality disorder and many get like this by being abused. You have to find a way to halt the cycle. It’s not easy to fix your brain but it can be done. You can get better and return a damaged brain into a high functioning again with organic health.

Jennifer developed a mind bully herself. When she was writing the book she tried to why unpack why she behaved the way she did. She had dissociated with the person she was as a teenager who was physically, emotionally and sexually abused by three teachers. She had put this away in a box and not integrated it so it started to operate as a mind bully. She was a high achiever in the academic world but when she came home behind closed doors she bullied herself through cutting and eating disorders. She was hurting her own body because she had no idea she had to take teenage girl and her trauma and work through it. She was as seeing psychiatrists and psychologists and never told them anything about it.

Jennifer could have gone out as a teacher and done what had happened to her to her students. Her personality type, introverted, academic and full of self-expectation meant instead she turned it against herself. That is the mind bully. Many people are holding themselves back from happiness, health and fulfilling their potential because of their mind bully. It takes work on separate it out. You need to become aware its not you, that its something you created that helps you avoid looking at the trauma. If it’s your own problem and the mind bully is your own issue you don't have to take a hard look at what happened to you. You don't have to be the victim, to be vulnerable, to feel what it was like to be a teenager and be treated that way. It’s easier to keep the mind bully beating you up because you don't have to be a victim again. If you find the courage, a good mental health practioner, and a safe network and space to do it, you can go back into the arena again and choose to replace the mind bully.

There seems to be more mental health issues nowadays but this may be because we are more aware rather than there being more. If you've been bullied you are likely to bully yourself, to bully someone else or fix yourself. This explains the growth in bullying and trauma – it is replicating through society. Bullies are victims as well though.  Most help is for the victim but the emphasis should be split. Children have strong brain plasticity. A child showing bullying behaviours should be a red flag that they need help. Society needs to intervene they get the help they need. The conversation needs to shift from a moral issue to a medical one.

It can be a parent that abuses you or a teacher, coach, family member or friend. When Jenifer was bullied the therapists were looking at her family but never asked about teachers or coaches. Children spend more time with these people than they do with their family. One of the key powers bullies use is favoritism. This type of power dynamics can be found in sport. A coach will treat one child properly and at the same time someone else they destroy. This often happens to the most talented athlete in the group – if the coach can ‘destroy’ the best then the rest will fall in.

Jennifer doesn’t talk about being fixed, cured or learning to be better. Rather she talks about people who unlearn and rewire. Unlearning is incredibly hard because you are unconscious of what you have learned. Each person has a default neuro-network – if you burn your hand on the stove the brain never forgets this. It learns this and keeps you safe in the future but as you don’t want to feel anxiety every time you pass the stove, you have to talk to your brain. Jennifer uses her variation of mindfulness to do this - you close your eyes do your deep breathing and start talking to your brain. There are nuances and emotional concepts that are more complex and a richness and diversity of life. It’s not just kick-starting the same old neuro-networks – we have to rethink it.

You can find out more about Jennifer at https://www.bulliedbrain.com/ Her first book, Teaching Bullies: Zero Tolerance on the Court or in the Classroom explores what happens when the bully is a teacher or coach whilst her new book, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health delves into how bullying affects the brain and how the brain can heal.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

The Bullied Brain. A new perspective

Dr Jennifer Fraser has been working for a number of years on the idea that if we are raised in a certain culture, in a very intensely trained belief system it becomes very hard to separate your mind from this. Your brain on an anatomical level gets sculpted by your experience. If we are all raised in a certain culture we all come to believe its reality when in actual fact its not.

In her first book Jennifer looked literature to consider how a person goes from being a reader of culture, growing up seeped in a belief system, for example racism, religion or financial, and how this belief system scripts your brain as a child and makes it difficult to see any alternatives. How does someone switch from being a reader and consumer of culture to someone who writes culture, thinks or does things differently and then expresses this to others.

In neuro science emotions aren’t just something innate or inherent within your being. Neuro scientists now talk about how our emotions are actually constructs that are built based on our past experience. One person might look at a loss that's pending and feel overwhelmed by grief because of past scripting whilst another suffer so many loses that they build a resilience to it. They know its not going to destroy them and use another emotional concept in reaction – the idea of really thinking very consciously and purposely about how they are going to act and behave and also how they are feeling. They aren’t just going to feel how they were told they needed to feel growing up as a child. They are an adult so are going to make some choices based on the emotional concept they’ve drawn on depending on they are faced with.

This is the nature of being an adult. In today’s world a lot of mental health practioners treat their clients as children. At work we see leaders and managers treating their teams as children then go home and treat their children as little adults. Have we lost the idea of adulthood?

Jennifer feels this idea is particularly interesting in relation to bullying and abuse. She was recently asked to comment about a case in Canada where a large group of teenagers physically beat and shamed a girl then filmed it and put it out through social media. It was an horrendous act and the police wanted to press charges but It is incredibly difficult to obtain a conviction for adult abusive behaviour.. The legal systems treats adults with kid gloves, people cover up for them and protect them but the police were keen to charge the teenagers when its well documented that the brain is programmed in adolesence to the age of 25 to be risk takers and reward seekers. The pre frontal cortex is not mature and so the decision-making mechanism isn’t good nor is the ability to think about consequences. The brain is not mature or thinking nor does it have rational adult like qualities.

This may relate to the language we use. The term stress is now devalued and meaningless, there is no distinction in mental health between dysfunction, illness or mental health. Low mood or depression means you have a mental health problem. In the same way bullying has lost significance so now anybody using an unpleasant tone of voice is bullying and this detracts from the real situation. Part of the problem is that we have lost the ability to define what we mean by these terms. Being rude to someone else isn’t bullying nor is saying something on Facebook. True bullying is something that takes place over time.

Jennifer doesn't talk about bullying amongst children. She feels it’s impossible to try to solve the epidemic in the youth populations. She talks about adults who bully and abuse children which she feels is the biggest power imbalance on the planet and the most taboo subject. People don't want to talk about parents, teachers doctors or coaches bullying children.

Brain works, paradigms or belief systems train us to behave in certain ways, stop us disobeying or thinking outside the box and tell us to stick to the plan. The plan is that we tell children at a very early age.and train and sculpt their brains to believe that adults, regardless of their behaviour are to be respected. That is a fatal law right at the beginning. When we use the word bullying it is part of the whitewashing because we don’t want to deal with the situation as it makes us uncomfortable. It brings a lot of anxiety and vulnerabiities. To be an adult a lot of people believe that it means you align yourself with power.

Some of the most powerful people in the world today behave like children. That has to be changed. The public encourages this behaviour and it shows that in a cultural way we have lost some of our training around critical thinking and empathy. We need to understand that if we want to get something done about things like bullying we’ve got to start working together in a thoughtful, purposeful, mindful insightful, educated, researched and evidenced based way. You should not be in a leadership position if you cant do that.

Jennifer has come to realise that what she thinks happens is when we become childlike in our behaviour its because we don't know what to do with our brains. We ignore our brains because we cant see it so we act as if its not there. It used to be thought that concussion was a moral testing ground. If you suffered a concussion and then straight back on the rugby or football pitch it was showing you had resilience, that your teammates came first and that you’d do anything for the coach and the win. It was seen as sign of great character but in fact a person with concussion has a brain trauma which can be really serious but because we are a visual, species we can’t see it so it hasn’t happened.

We can’t see our brains so we don’t think or talk about them. We don't teach children about them or encourage teachers to find out more. We don't tell organisations that when young people come to work for them they are not mature. They have incredible creative and vast learning brains but they don't have mature brains until they are 25 so you have to work differently with them if you want to be successful.

We have two choices if we don't pay attention to our brains. We can remain a victim and turn negative, bullying and abusive type behaviour that happen to us against ourselves and develop a mind bully mentality. We don't believe in ourselves, fullfiil our potential or suffer from substance abuse. We put on a facade when we go to work, become a perpetual victim and don't know how to get better. The other group that suffer bullying or abusive behaviour in childhood and their formative years go out and align themselves with the bully and become the next bully. They are as traumitised as the victim but  they align with power and identify with  the aggressor.

If someone has been abused and then goes out in the world when they meet people they are looking for the emotion concept that helps them navigate their world and creates a sense of reality for them. When they go though their file holder and find abuser they think they know how that works, they are comfortable navigating that world, they know the feelings so they can act it out again. They are not going to choose an emotion concept that they don't have in their file holder such as respect - they don’t have that emotion concept so can’t predict it in their next relationships.To get better they have to change their brain by using neuroplascity to purposefully create an emotional concept for respectful relationship with someone.

The human brain is remarkably skilled at learning everything we want it to learn. If you put in the time you can take someone who is highly abusive and rewire and reprogramme their brain. It takes a lot of hard work but after 6 weeks you can see changes that show the brain is not defaulting to bullying behaviour because its been retrained and rewired to actually pause, take a deep breathe and choose a different path - to choose respect, empathy, compassion, diplomacy or assertiveness because we can train all of those skills in the brain. The exciting thing is that as soon as we start working with our brains we can start changing things because our brains are highly adept at healing.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Jennifer’s first book, Teaching Bullies: Zero Tolerance on the Court or in the Classroom (Motion Press, Aug. 8, 2015), explores what happens when the bully is a teacher or coach.

Her new book, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health (Prometheus Books, April 1, 2022), delves into how bullying affects the brain and how the brain can heal.

You can find out more about Jennifer at bulliedbrain.com