102 - (Part 1) Dr. Jennifer Fraser-The Devastating Effects of Child Abuse and Finding Hope for Healing Through Neuroscience.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe

Ruthless Compassion is a podcast about people who've turned their emotional shit into fertilizer for success. It's about seeing our darkest moments and opportunities for growth and transformation.

Dr. Jen Fraser has a Ph.D. In comparative Literature, which trained her to take diverse discourses and put them into dialogue. Her books draw on literature, psychology, law and anthropology as she analyzes culture and society. Her 6th book, The Bully Brain - Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health, turns to neuroscience in order to rethink how abuse shapes our world and learn new ways to recover from it grounded in science. This book is forthcoming with Prometheus Books, due for a release in March 2022.

Welcome Jennifer Fraser to the Ruthless Compassion podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, it's a pleasure having you because you're kind of this interesting unicorn with your background and the things that you're doing. So I thought that the first thing we should do is have you talk about who you are and what you do and how you came to do it.

Well, that's a lovely way to think of oneself as being a unicorn, as opposed to somebody who got thrown onto the whistleblower path inadvertently and feels out of place there and yet will not get off it until I have concluded what I've set out to achieve. So, basically my background is I'm your classic nerdy professor type. My happiest place is a library. I love to research and write. I'm incredibly introverted and I'm happy sitting with a book from eight in the morning until 06:00 at night and then gathering up my family or friends and connecting. It's not that I don't like people, but I really do love a world of thought and reflection and articulated language. I did my PhD at University of Toronto in comparative literature, and it's different than other literary doctorates because what we do in comparative literature is we take different discourses. So, for example, in my first book I drew a lot on anthropology and sociology and psychology and literature always came back to the literature as a way to try and unpack ideas and figure things out. And my first book was about how is it that a person changes from being a reader of culture.

So, someone who absorbs information and listens and learns and fits in and so on to someone who becomes a writer of culture. So, someone who breaks the rules, in fact, and someone who thinks differently and walks out of the old paradigm and says there must be something new and different and we must be missing something. And am I that person to express that? And that can show up in many different forms. And I was really fascinated with that idea. I taught at University of Toronto in the literary studies program for years, and then my husband got a job in Victoria, British Columbia. So, we decided to move and I was unable to get a job at the University of Victoria. It so specialized our work, and they chose someone else for the role of modernism and theory and the kinds of things that I did. So, I ended up teaching in an international boarding school,university prep school. And so I was teaching first-year university classes. In a sense, I was teaching advanced placement. And I ultimately ended up running their theater program and being involved with these incredible young people from all over the world who were acting.

And it's just a fabulous school. And so I was very, very happy. And I was working on my second book, and it came out while I was teaching there, and I explored pedagogy and the way in which we raise children and the way we think they should behave. So I was looking at a very specific period in time, which is a modernist era sort of leading up to World War I. And after World War I, what I discovered was the pedagogy or the teaching, the education system. And even parents, they were convinced or encouraged to believe that children were unruly and willful, and they really needed to be contained. And they were not to cry, and they were not to express themselves. Especially grief was seen as a terrible weakness and an indulgence. So they hammered into these kids this generation of children to be good soldiers, not to cry, to suppress their grief. And then what the writers were exploring, which was so fascinating, like James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe and Joseph Conrad, they were exploring what this did to children as they grew up. Well, it laid all the conditions for war. You had people seeking either numbness, so they became the Cannon fodder.

They were the people that wouldn't dare speak up. You would just tell them, Take your gun and run over the Hill. And even though you're getting gunned down and it's an obviously poor strategy, they would never speak up or say anything. They would just do as they were told. So there was this real numbness seen in young generations. And then on the flip side, there was incredible aggression, all the kind of aggression you needed for people to be very warlike and not compassionate or empathic or connected even to one another. So that was my second book. I'm still happily teaching at this independent school, private school, and there were warning signs, but I really was pretty unconscious of what was happening. It's one of those things where you look back and you're like, oh, it was so obvious, but when you're in the throes of it, you can't see it. So I'm happily teaching. I love the school. I love the kids. I totally love my colleagues. And my mother phones me and she says, my son is texting me, and he says he can't stand it anymore, that they're calling them. And the language was unbelievable.

So I'm not sure how rough.

You can speak freely here.

Okay, so he wrote said they're calling us fucking pussies. They're calling us fucking pathetic. Grow some balls and so on and so forth. And he said, I can't take it anymore. So this very distraught mother was on the line with me, and she had contacted me several months before to tell me that her son and the group of boys had been called fucking retards. Yeah, it was kind of the final straw for me at the school. And I'm embarrassed to say, actually, this has been part of my whistleblower journey. But I'm embarrassed to say that when she told me that I counseled her not to do anything about it, I said, you know what? At this school, they've got a track record of allowing this type of conduct to go on without intervening. And they might flip it on you and make you the problem because they had done that to me before. So I look back and I'm like, how could I be that person? Oh, my goodness. Because it wasn't kids that were saying these things. It wasn't peers, teenagers bullying other teenagers.

These were my colleagues who were speaking like this. These were certified teachers in Canada who were addressing students like this. So for me, that was the final straw. I had seen another teacher behave this way, and I'd seen the school cover it up and actually make it a problem for me that I was being very vocal about it. So when students and parents would come to me and say, he has done this, he has done that, I would say, you know what? Nothing I can do about it. Go talk to the administration. I've tried everything in my power. They will not listen to me. I don't know why. I don't know what their decision is about this, but I have no power. Whereas when you go on the whistleblower journey, you take that power back. And that's why I find it really interesting in the arena of abuse, which is I'm starting to come to realize that the most powerful thing about abuse is it takes away your agency and your sense of selfhood and your capacity to speak up and say, you know what? This is who I am, and I have a line.

And you crossed my line when you spoke to students that way. And I will not stand for it. I will do whatever I have within my power. Sure, might be limited, but it doesn't matter. I will do whatever I have in my power to make change. So, here I am. I'm at the school. I speak up. I write letters to the board. They send that letter onto the headmaster. I say, I'm going to resign if this is not instantly sorted out. And then I also tell them that we will remove our son from the school because our son was one of the victims. And these teachers were speaking to these students under the auspices of coaching basketball. We were pulled into the classic scenario. So any one of your audience who has been in this place before will recognize that this is when the machine starts lurching and clanking into action. And what happened was the administrators, the board went into complete circling the wagons. They started hiring lawyers. I didn't really understand at the beginning why there was this kind of reaction, like, really, teachers that are speaking to students like that just they either need to be fired.

30 parents, wanted them off campus, off campus, gives them two years, let them get the psychological help that they need so that they don't treat children that way and really help them paid leave, give them the support they need. We don't have to be punitive here, but this is you can't allow child abuse to flourish in a school like this, and they wouldn't do that. So they hired lawyers. It's a long story from that point. It ended up on the front page of the Toronto Star. It was covered by CTV, W Five. It was a big story, and it became such a huge story because actually the government supported the teachers and said that the students were too sensitive and that they shouldn't have listened to the teachers obseneties. So, by the time I got caught in that whirlwind of really, that is mind-bending. That is incredible. I have a stack of reports from the Commissioner for Teacher Regulation in British Columbia sitting in my house, and I can walk you through all of the legal manipulations. It's just unbelievable to me. Took that to the Ombudsperson's office. They also, just, after three years, wrote a ten-page letter saying, oh, don't worry about it, that nothing happened.

I was like, oh, my goodness. So at that point, that's when I started to recognize the whistleblower journey is actually much bigger than I thought. It's not the important moment where you put your hand up and you say, I will not remain silent when wrong is being done. It's not that. We kind of have shown that, but it's not really that it becomes a long journey towards standing up for what you believe, no matter what they throw at you. And so it brings me to the place where I'm at now. The interesting thing about all this is when you say, I'm a unicorn, I'm a unicorn because I couldn't figure out a way to solve the problem. I couldn't figure out a way to change people's minds. I realized that this is a textbook scenario. You can open up the newspaper every single day and read the identical story. You just need to change the names. But we live in a society that condones child abuse, normalizes child abuse, and then victimizes children when they dare to speak up about it. That is a very common societal situation. So I set my mind to. Okay, well, surely we can change this.

This is the 21st century. We don't have to live like this. There's got to be a better alternative. And for me, the way I go at these things is by reading and researching. So, I read about what does a psychiatrist say? What do the psychologists say? When I got to the science of the neuroscience? And I was like, what do the neuroscientists say? And that's when I decided that perhaps using neuroscience would be the way to open people's ways of thinking. They're sort of entrenched mindset and get them to understand that we don't even know the half of how brilliant and healing and powerful our brains are. And so, yeah, lousy things happen to us. We get abused, we get traumatized. But let's take a look at what our brains can do to change that. And that's where it started to become really exciting for me. And that's what I've been working on. I've kind of come full circle to literature shifted into neuroscience.

When you're talking I was thinking about the story with the American gymnastic women and the years of abuse by that predatory doctor. And no one wants to deal with that. And then the story that Kyle Beach just brought forward very recently, talking about the sexual abuse again and how all the people in his organization where he played hockey were absolutely unwilling to deal with it, even though they knew all about it. And like you say, there's no will on the part of the people who are supposed to protect the innocent. And what they tend to do is they protect the perpetrators, right?

Yes, that's exactly what happens. It's textbook.

And you know what it actually reminds me of when I was writing an article about. It was before Trump got into power quite a while ago. And it was when there were some stories coming out about his sexual misbehaviors. And I was writing about how women who go and report sexual abuse or rape, maybe 10% or 15%, are taken seriously. Most of them are retraumatised by the police or by the courts. And then up until very recently and in some places still, their reputation can be smeared. They can be accused of all sorts of promiscuity to discredit them. And the actual act of trying to stand up for themselves, it becomes so counterproductive that most of them don't even bother because they are aware of how little they can get out of it. And even if they achieve a conviction, the average sentence for someone for rape or for sexual assault is less than someone who has some grams of marijuana.

The way you express that absolutely sums up a profound problem in our society. And the sad thing is by letting it continue this way, we lay the groundwork the absolute foundation for all the social ills that cost extremely large amount, billions of dollars. I mean, if you look at the criminal justice system, the substance abuse problems, the opioid addiction, failure to achieve in the workplace, dysfunctional families, the cycle, the intergenerational cycle, of abuse. I mean, all of these things could be addressed so much better and with much more health and stop so much anguish if we changed our legal system. I just have finished reading Armies of Enablers by Amos Guiora. It's an absolutely fantastic book. He's a Utah law professor, and he's written a book about how we can and how we must criminalize the enabler. Now, the goal is, again, it's not a punitive. I mean, that's not my model, really. The only reason why it is very important is because it's a deterrent and it would encourage everyone in a leadership position or in a fiduciary duty position to get educated. And right now, they don't need to. Just as you said, you can do extreme harm to people.

You can cover up abuse. Look at Boy Scouts. Look at Catholic Church. It's normalized in our society that you will cover up abuse and just walk away. You look at Dr. Larry Nassar as you were talking about with USA Gymnastics. So he's gone to jail for life, but that doesn't stop the many people, the army of enablers, that allowed him for 30 years to do extreme damage to children. Same thing with the football coach who's now infamous for having abused at Penn State. He's gone to jail for life now. But that's like scapegoating. It's such a primitive way of responding to these issues because it takes a village to raise a child. And as they famously say in a spotlight movie, it takes a village to abuse a child. And if you don't hold the villagers accountable, then it never changes. It's just press, repeat. It's funny.

When I first started being a psychotherapist many years ago, my patients would come to me and they would say, for example, my mother would beat me and berate me and withhold food for me and make my life a living hell. And I say, how did your father deal with that? Oh, my father just let her do it because he was afraid she'd be angry at him. And I said, well, how do you feel about your father? And they'd be like, what do you mean?

And I said, well.

Your father contributed by refusing to protect you, by failing to protect you. He's equally culpable by sitting back because his role as your father was to protect you, even from the other parents. And they were like, oh, right. They didn't even understand that the father was an enabler because of his own fears or selfishness. And I always have maintained that the person who stands by and allows the abuse to happen is just as culpable. And that's been a cornerstone of my practice for years.

And a lot of patients still are surprised when I say that.

I agree with you that that person actually is the most important person in the whole dynamic. So this makes me completely furious because, for example, Kirsty Duncan, I'm sure she meant well. She was the former Minister of Sport and Science. But they made this big deal about saying, oh, it's about rule of two. We're going to protect athletes from sexual assault or emotional abuse or whatever it is by having a rule of two. There has to be two adults, two coaches, two empowered individuals. Then it won't happen. Well, as you've just described, abuse almost always happens with an enabler. So, when my son was being abused with the other athletes, of course, there's two coaches and one coach standing and watching the other coach abuse is normalizing the situation. It's making the children or the young adults feel as if what's happening to them is normal. They must be a real outlier because they feel terrible being humiliated and yelled in their face and berated it must be, then that's the problem. And as you write about, this is one of the most deadly things that happens with abuse victims is they think they deserve it.

They think it's their fault. They somehow absorb it into their own psyche as an issue. And that's pure psychological poison.

I'm also reminded, as you're talking, of George Floyd and how it wasn't just Chauvin who was arrested. It was all the other cops. I think there were three of them or four of them who stood by and did nothing and watched. They stood by and watched as he killed George Floyd. And they all got charged, maybe not with murder, but with something. So, I think that was correct. That was absolutely correct. And one guy was saying, well, I was new on the job. I didn't want to rock the boat.

And the answer is yes.

But someone was getting killed in front of your eyes. When you do the right thing?

That's been the biggest question for me, because I think there's a really worrisome place that you come to when you're fighting for protection, when you're fighting for a woman to be protected or a child to be protected, and you come up against these institutions, or a person of color to be protected. Anybody who has anything that makes them vulnerable or a minority or they're an immigrant, let's say, so they don't know how it works and they don't have the network and they don't have the money perhaps. It can be any of those different things. And so what was really startling to me, and again, I'm going to use this word again, mind bending, because it's a bigger concept I want to come back to, but I just could not get over in Canada. I mean, here we are in Canada. And I don't know if you believe, but I used to believe that we were a country of rule of law. We were a place where we invested enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars into things like the Ombudsman's Office and the Commissioner for Teacher Regulation and the Representative for Children and Youth and the Ministry of Education because those bureaucrats represent the people and they serve the people and they care, and they know that one of their most important roles is to halt abuse.

And yet I'm telling you, I went through every single hoop that I could to try and save in particular one student. And what had happened, was so I told you the story that I resigned from protest because I realized this private school is not going to do the right thing. And I told them I was going to resign, and I did. It was something that should have shook them a bit because I'm an award-winning teacher. I had two books published by University Press at that stage. I was a pretty fabulous person running their theater program, and they were willing to let me go to cover up for what had been happening. That was fine. I got a job at another private school, and I started working there, and I was exhausted by this point. And demoralized. I just was done with all of it. And I knew the Toronto Star story was coming out. I knew the W Five TV show was coming out, the investigative journalism. So, I learned at the school that this was going to happen. They still hired me. So fine. So, I'm teaching. I'm working again. Fabulous students from all over the place.

Amazing achievement and lovely people and great colleagues, so on and so forth. I'm working away. And in my third year at the school, a student that I taught the year before. So, she was now in grade twelve and the year before, I taught her in grade eleven. And this was International Baccalaureate literature. Wonderful kid. She's from China. She was living with her dad, who came from Macau to live with her for her final year. But previously she had been an international student living in the family state program with the principal and his wife. And they had grown up children. They had other international students there too, but I don't know if the kids were there. Anyhow, she came up to me in October, and this is her grade 12 year. It's my third year at the school. And she said, I'm being sexually harassed by a teacher. I was like, oh, my goodness, please don't tell me. I didn't want to know. I didn't want to deal with it or think about it. I just was exhausted. So, of course, I said all the right things, just like I had at the other school. I said, I'll help you.

I'll be with you. Ultimately, the school asked me to take her testimony. A police investigation began, so on and so forth. And I just fought tooth and nail with all of these government agencies to ensure that she was protected. I didn't want her to go into teacher regulation. I wasn't going to report it to them because I was having them examine under the Ombuds Person's Office for corruption. So, it would be like sending somebody into a jail system where, you know, they're going to get beat up. There was no way I was sending this vulnerable girl into that system, which I knew from personal experience was not safe. And I also knew that the school had to report. They had duty to report, and I was assured that they had reported. So I was dealing with the police. The school asked me to take her testimony like I did at the other school. I took eight kids testimony. So I'm having direct knowledge from these kids of what's being done to them. The teacher, of course, was instantly suspended and never came back to the school. But then the machine started lurching and clanking back into action.

And all the faculty were told that. And the parents and the kids, they were told that this teacher was on sick leave. Then they were told this teacher was on stress leave. Then they were told that he was retiring early. Well, he never set foot back in school again. But of course, it was lie after lie after lie. So this girl was constantly being messaged that somehow he hadn't done anything wrong. But the school was protecting him. The school needed to have her up on his behalf. And you, as a psychiatrist, would understand what that was doing to her brain. So, she's getting more and more destabilized by all this. And I'm writing her emails going, no, you did the right thing. You're protecting other students, blah, blah. She gets to graduation. And without telling her they're going to do this, they do a big celebration of his service to the school in front of her. So, that again, it's like yet another layer of rational understanding of what she had done was being eroded. So again, I'm writing her. I'm having tea with her. I'm trying to just say, look, you just need to go off to university.

You just need to forget this place. You need to put your future ahead of you. Just whatever it is you want to do, just so what does she do? She attempts suicide.

I was waiting to hear that. I was just waiting because it was like it was just all being set up, right?

Well, in your world, not in mine. I am not a mental health professional. I was ill prepared. I just was devastated. So I get a phone call from the school saying, a former student is asking to see you. And that's when the penny dropped from me. I was like, former student what? She's not. She's still a part of the school, but they were just trying to distance themselves. So she asked for me to come visit her. So I went into the psych ward. I'd never been in a place like that before. It's all in lockdown. And I brought her a book, and I sat by her bedside, and I said to her, if you had no responsibilities and no pressure and you didn't have to please your parents. And you didn't have to do anything at University. You didn't want. What is your dream? What do you want to do? And she looked at me, and her face lit up. It was like seing an angel. She said to me, I want to die. I was like, oh, my God. So, she went off to university, and she was doing fabulously. She was writing me funny emails.

All of a sudden, she sounded like a kid again. She joined the synchronized swim team. She was a brilliant kid. Absolutely brilliant. And still sending me emails about being confused and not understanding. And did she do the right thing? And lots of medication from doctors anyway, just, like, worry some stuff. And then she wrote me in the spring and said that the teacher had asked to meet with her. She goes, you're not going to like this. But I did. I was like, oh, no, I phoned the police. I was like, how come he's allowed to access her? Why is there no protection for her? She has suicidal ideation. Why is he able to reach out to her? This is wrong. And they said we hadn't been able to charge him, which is typical in the Canadian system, as you just outlined. We couldn't charge him. So there's nothing we can do. So, I didn't phone because, of course, you're not allowed to talk to the on this person's office. You can only email them, and they won't email you back. There's no paper trail. So I emailed them a long and passionate. This is terrible.

You've got to step in. You've got to deal with Commissioner for Teacher regulation. Why aren't they protecting her? Trying. Anyways, on November 21 of the following year, she took her life. Success.

Everybody failed her except you, right? Like, everybody kept failing her. And that teacher, the predator, and these predators, they just can't let go. Part of being a sociopath is that you just have to keep going after and going after. It's the compulsion, right. So as a psychiatrist, there was nobody that could really protect her enough. And as much as you tried, there were too many forces opposing you. It was a feta complete that she was going to die. It killed her soul, and it killed her soul. Not because she was preyed upon, but it killed her soul because she was preyed upon. And so many people made it about something wrong with her.

Exactly. You have just said all of the things that I want to see change. And I believe, like, your podcast is a perfect example of it. The blogs you write, the books you write. This has to be handed out no longer to the leaders in society or the coaches or the teachers. It needs to go directly into the hands of children, because they need to know that this will happen and that they must have resilience. They must have mental strength to oppose this broken system. This is a very broken system.

It's horrible. And when you ask, did I feel like Canada was a country that observed the rule of law? And I can say no. And the reason I can say no is because I've been doing psychotherapy for decades and the things I've heard are so shocking and horrifying that it has made me very aware of all the things that are wrong with our society because I've heard it all. And your story is tragic, but it's not new to me. And I can't tell you how many stories of trauma and abuse and the perpetrator getting away with it. Right, over and over and over and over again. Stories of people who are married and who leave their abusive partner and the abusive partner has full access to the children and continues to horrendously abuse them, just horrendous, horrendous things that are allowed to happen to children under the law. And I think your question of what's going on with our society that they abandon the victims of abuse and they protect the perpetrators of abuse. And I think when you talk about the history, the precedent of shut down your feelings, kill your empathy. The problem with shutting down your feelings and killing your empathy is if there's a victim, it's threatening.

It's threatening because it makes you feel something. And if you have pushed away your feelings all your life and you're in a position of power and it's much too vulnerable feeling to connect to any empathy, then you have to punish the victim for threatening your defense mechanisms and you have to protect the perpetrator because that keeps you safe, right? So all these people in positions of power in the government and the Ombudsman and the teacher regulation, all these people are people who have shut down their own feelings. And if they are challenged with anything bad that happens to a victim, they can't tolerate it because they need to stay numb. They need to stay dead. They need to stay hard and so the victims get punished and abandoned. That's my feeling about the way things work.

I think that's exactly what is happening and that's been exactly my experience and what I've found most useful in my quest to figure this out.

That was part one of my conversation with the incredible doctor Jennifer Fraser. If you like this podcast, please review it wherever you listen and you can't sign up for my free Biweekly Wellness newsletter@marcisrodamd.com where you'll learn about my online courses and my YouTube video series.