102 - (Part 2) 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. Jenn Fraser has a PhD 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 coming in March 2022 with Prometheus Books.

So, what you just described, I don't know if you've read Alex Renton's book. He was a victim in private schools in England where they have, as you probably know, just like everywhere else in the most amazing schools with the most incredible leaders that come out of them in England, it's now being exposed as they were just rife with the most horrific abuse. And victims are by the hundreds coming forward and pure sadism, absolute sadism. And the normalization of sadism. And the way that Alex Renton explains it, which is really fascinating, he says. And you would know this, of course, this would be in your wheelhouse of work. But for someone like myself who's not mental health professional, I was like, oh, bingo, that makes so much sense. He said that when these kids are sent off to boarding school and they're very young in England, like six, seven years old, they undergo what's called and this happens even later in life. Like this happens certainly to these international boarding kids and even local kids at these private schools in Canada because they're in their formative adolescent years. They're trying to develop independence from their family, their parents in particular.

They're trying to figure out who they are. And so what happens is they get attachment fragmentation if they're in an abusive cycle at these schools. And so their attachment goes to the institution and gets torn away from the attachment you might feel to family or friends or even peers. So you end up wanting more than life itself to defend the school and the school history and the school brand or the government or the Catholic Church. You really want to preserve that because as you say, that's how your ego constructed itself and feels powerful. And it belongs it belongs to this new thing called whatever it is. And so it's really interesting to me because and it's something I'm really hoping changes with my book when it comes out in the spring. They don't understand how much they are doing damage to their own brain when they conduct themselves like this. So they don't just become faceless bureaucrats when they work for these government institutions. They become soulless bureaucrats. They become callous unempathic. And that's arguably one of the saddest things that can happen to a human being because what is the essence of humanity.

We are wired for empathy. So undoing all of that empathy within your brain is a truly limiting kind of tragic outcome for you.

Yeah,it leads to an empty, meaningless existence where nothing matters. And it's all about just trying to protect themselves, trying to shore up their psychological defense mechanisms at any cost to themselves or anyone around them.

Exactly. And there's a lot of loss that comes with that. Losing your marriage, losing your relationship to your kids, believing that if you buy a new car or have a better address or get a cabin, you're somehow going to be fulfilled. But you're never fulfilled. As in the kind of work you do, you're looking constantly at addictive behaviors because people are so empty.

Yeah, they're doomed. They're doomed, and so are their victims. So it's the lose lose.

Really.

This lack of empathy is a lose lose.

It is. And I mean, I found it so fascinating in the neuroscientific research to read that there's been a bunch of studies that show the more power you have, the less empathy you have. So going back to Donald Trump, it's been so interesting to me. So ,while I'm writing a book called The Bullied Brain, I get to watch Donald Trump every day and the normalization of his very blatant, like, schoolyard level bullying behaviors. It's so interesting to me that just to give you an example, as a teacher, if I ever went into a classroom and said, you know what? The Holocaust never happened, it's an exaggeration. There's no way there weren't that many victims. I would be instantly fired. But you can be the leader of the free world. You can stand up publicly and on multiple platforms documented by multiple media, lie through your teeth, and it can be shown that you are lying through your teeth and no one can touch you. So this is the kind of reverse that's happened in society. And this is what we see with enablers. So the Archbishop and the Cardinal of the Catholic Church, they go scott free. Maybe they go to a course about pedophilia or whatever, but basically, they enable the abuse of thousands of children and the law does not hold them to account.

But the priest, who is on the lowest end of the totem pole of the hierarchy, well, he's going to get punished. Maybe it takes a long time to punish a priest, but maybe he will go to jail. This is the inverse situation. It's just the more powerful you are, the more you can demonstrate lack of empathy or care or even just basic humanity and even truth telling. And the law doesn't hold you to account.

Well, it's like you say, we're wired for empathy, but when we turn off the empathy, then what do we replace it with? Well, the seeking of power, like you say, the aggression and the seeking of power because you feel so numb or so enraged that you have to do something else. So either, like you said, you become cannon fodde, or you become another victim, or you become a bully. So, the abused person who has shut off all their empathy becomes the bully, and then the enablers, who are all numbing themselves, support the bully because they don't want to feel anything. They don't want to feel their pain. They don't want to feel any empathy because also if they empathize with the victim, then they have to think about their own victimization and they can't go there because that victim reminds them of who they used to be. And they're not going to feel vulnerable. They're not going to feel their pain. So they're going to punish that victim who's reminding them of what they went through, what they suffered, and they're going to support the bully because the bully is powerful and they didn't feel powerful, and they want to feel powerful, even though it's not true power, it's emptiness, it's an empty soulless, parasitical existence.

That is exactly it. In my book. I talk about it using the identify with the aggressor phrase from the literature. And one of the things that I think is going on, because I really struggle to understand it. When you articulate it, that makes perfect psychological sense to me. One of the things that I wonder about and if you could put it this way, is when you're looking at research on empathy, you learn that empathy is easier to give to people that resemble you. So, there's an outlier group. So, for example, my background is Swedish, Scottish. I come from families that have lived in Canada for hundreds of years. I might not feel as much empathy for an immigrant. So, someone who comes from a different culture and they look different from me and they speak a different language and they've had a different background, I might very unconsciously, this happens to us, as you would know. I would not necessarily have them in my empathy group. I might even put them into what's called an out group. So I think that what happens just to resay what you said from a different angle. It just reinforces what you're saying.

I think that adults in positions of power see children as belonging to the outbreak. They are weak, they are small, they are vulnerable. And to include them in the group, to bring them into the community or the village means a loss of power, a loss of control, and a loss of invulnerability on the part of the adults in charge. It's their biggest Achilles heel, and they are afraid of it. But, you know, why can't we teach this? Why can't people learn this rather than just this old fashioned cycle of blame, shame, ostracize, which gets us nowhere? We just go in circles with it.

Well, I think we need people like you to write books like The Bully Brain, and we need people to talk about it more so that it becomes normalized to acknowledge the damage caused by abuse and by enabling, as opposed to it's normal to abuse and enable. We need more people to speak out and to write and to make a fuss, because that's the only way that things change, especially something this entrenched and this pervasive in our society because it really is everywhere. It's at school, it's in sports, it's in dance, it's in businesses. Right. It's in the entertainment industry. Right. It's every single aspect of our life. It's in families. Abuse of the vulnerable is old people, right. Elder care, it's using elders. Anyone who is vulnerable is abused and it's enabled. So, it's across every aspect of our society. So, it's going to take a lot of work and probably a lot of time until people wake up. Look how long it took for Me Too, and Time's Up. Look how much had to happen for that, right? So we're still at just the tip of the iceberg of the problem. And I think we just need to keep talking about it and talking about it and drumming the message home, because there's a lot of resistance to facing, first of all, the fact of trauma, just to acknowledging the fact of trauma.

And there's a tremendous amount of resistance on the part of the bystanders because they don't want to face their feelings. So we are living in a society where people are consumers as opposed to feeling empathic, compassionate people. And the more we shut down, the harder it is for us to want to do anything about anything.

As you know, the second part of my book so what happened was it was an interesting publishing journey for me because I'm used to writing academic books for an academic audience. And I was trying to answer that question that I just posed to you. How do we make change? How can we change this? What is the way to capture the general reader's imagination? How do we activate and ignite their heart? Again, it's funny. A book is such an old fashioned thing, and yet it does have the power sometimes because it's a deeply empathic experience to read, it does sometimes have the power to make change. And that's why I chose the book as my vehicle. And so the second part of the book is called Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health. And what I learned from the publisher and what I learned from my literary agent was that the general reader doesn't just want the academia, unlike me, and unlike you. They don't just want the research per se. They want your own story. So I had to go into this uncomfortable place for myself. I had to walk out of the library and I had to walk away from the literary giants and instead take my own humble story, just as I've been sharing with you today, and share it with a general reader and say, look, this is what I discovered over the course of this disaster in my life, this tragedy.

And here's what I discovered about how I can change it for myself. And if I can change it for myself by using neuroscience, by saying, yes, abuse happens. Yes, I have a traumatized brain. And you would be probably not actually surprised to know that I had to unpack the abuse that was done to me as a child in order to be able to write this book. And I had never faced it. I had seen psychotherapists for years, never once told them not one word. I'd had a brutal eating disorder for years and years. I was cutting. I was doing everything that you do to not feel, to not have a beating heart, to not go to that vulnerable place. I was just walking through my life like a zombie, trying to be a good teacher and a good mom and a good wife and write my books and keep a low profile. And the universe would not let that happen.

Now way.

The universe decided that instead, I was forced to look at my own abuse. And by doing that, though, what I find really exciting about it and really inspiring. And what I learned on the Whistleblower Journey is that the more you speak up and you go to that horrible, vulnerable.

You're having panic attacks now. You're crying all the time. Your husband doesn't recognize you because you can't stop crying. When you go to that place. You get your power back. You start to integrate back into who you once were, even though it hurts to do it, it's worth every single minute.

And it's like the reason you could do all this work is because you were somehow willing to go there. Right? Unlike some people. And like some of those bureaucrats, you are willing to be vulnerable. You are willing to go there. And instead of just being retraumatized by those experiences with those students and that horrible, horrible, tragic story about that young girl who took her life, instead of just being traumatized by it, you were able to use that as part of your healing journey.

Yeah. And in an odd way, it made me have empathy for the enablers, because I realized that I had so carefully taken that hurt teenage girl. A bunch of us, many of us, over the course of ten years, were abused by three teachers who were pedophiles in an outdoor education program in Vancouver, British Columbia, called Quest. And it's gone to the courts and so on and so forth. One of the teachers was convicted, and the other two just walked away regardless. But I never looked at it. I never looked at the court case. I never looked at what the media said. I didn't even remember until this process began. And then I started getting flashbacks. People started reaching out to me, et cetera. But what was fascinating to me was I had taken that girl who had been so damaged and I put her in a box. She was gone. I have empathy for the enabler. I have empathy even for the perpetrator. Not that I don't think they should all be held criminally accountable, let me be clear. But I have empathy in that I understand the mechanisms because I live through it of how you can disassociate that way, bury something to keep yourself from losing your mind, basically.

And this is why I want to talk about it so much. It's such an opportunity to speak publicly with an expert like yourself, as opposed to the behind the scenes. I'm going to share my personal trauma with me, and you're going to help me heal. You and I are having a public discourse about this on a platform saying, you know what? We can talk about this openly, and I'm not ashamed to talk about it.

You can't be ashamed of things that happen to you when you had no choice about them.

Exactly. The thing that was interesting for me was as a teenager, I was resistant to the sexual advances. Actually, even in all honesty, this is pre Internet. I could not understand why middle aged men were acting and behaving and even speaking of the way they were, when I was 13,14, 15,16. I was very innocent. And I thought when they turned on me, they were actually ultimately having sex with girls my age at 15,16. And those were the ones, if you think of bullying on the playground, those were the privileged ones. They got the benefits. They were treated as if they were queens. And we the resistors that were targeted and who did not want to have anything to do with them sexually. We were humiliated around the clock. So, I was brutally humiliated. So, when I heard my son being humiliated that way by teachers again, I was like, yeah, no, that's not happening again. So, even though it wasn't clear in my own mind about what had been done to me and how it had affected me, there was no way I was letting my kids being talked to like that by teachers. I would have gone to the wall.

And I did just stop it.

Yeah, for sure. Thank goodness he had you. So I just wanted to say something for the listener, because there are two kinds of girls you're talking about that outdoor activity group. There's the girls who said no, and then the girls who went along. And I wanted to be really clear that no one was to blame. None of the girls were to blame because they were children. The teachers and the leaders were adults. They were in powerful positions, and the girls were too young to be making informed consent. So whether they resisted or whether they went along, none of the girls are culpable. None of the girls are at fault for whatever reasons they went along or for whatever reasons they resisted. The bad guys were the teachers the perpetrators and the enablers, not the children. I just wanted to put that out for all the listeners who are going like, well, those girls went along. No, everyone makes the choices that they can make based on their capacity in the moment, and the children are never to blame.

So when my student took her own life, I felt very responsible to report to the police because I never had reported the abuse, the sexual abuse or the physical abuse or the emotional abuse that they did to me. So I went to the police in Vancouver and I reported what they had done. And there was only two times in 2 hours of reporting that I cried. And the first time was when I had to tell the police officer that as I found myself saying, they broke me. And I was describing how there was eight of us students on a month long canoeing trip in the Yukon, and they pressured us to take off our clothes and swim naked. The deepest core of myself, if you want to call it my soul, my integrity, did not want to do that. But pressure was so great and the other kids were doing it that I did do it. And so at that moment, I cried. The only other time I cried in this two hour long listing of what they had done to me was when I said, if the girls, my peers, if they are going to watch this video, I want them to know how sorry I am, because I feel like I was a facilitator in their abuse, because they used us.

We were the victims of their hatred and the meanness and the cruelty so that they could access these girls because nobody wanted to be on the receiving end, especially as a teenager of that type of it's the most powerful figure in your life as your coach or your teacher or parent, you will do anything not to be on the receiving end of their bullying. So, of course, we were just used by them. And I felt it just hurt me so much that I had any part to play in those girls being hurt. And I call it splitting. It's called splitting.

You give one bad choice or another bad choice and there's no good choice.

Exactly. There's two girls that we were all together and I've never spoken to them since about it, but it just breaks my heart. And so I certainly hope it didn't come across that I was suggesting that they somehow were involved in that. No, of course they weren't.

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But I just started thinking that the listener might start having some thoughts. And I just wanted to make sure that things were very clearly spoken for all the listeners out there and whichever side they might have fallen on. I've had many patients who were molested as children, and they, quote unquote, went along, maybe because none of their family members loved them. And this was the only person paying attention, or maybe because they didn't know how to say no, or maybe because they didn't know what was really going on for whatever reason. And I always said, it's not your fault. It's the fault of the perpetrator. You are not in a position to give informed consent. You don't understand and you are not in a power position. You could not stand up for yourself. It's not your fault. Whatever you did, whatever you did, none of it was your fault. It's always the fault of the perpetrator. It's always the shame of the perpetrator, not your shame. I just wanted to make that clear to the listener because they can start reading into things right, especially if they've been victimized and they have self blame, because very often, as you know, we blame ourselves for what happened.

But it's not the child's fault. It's not the victim's fault. It's not the person. Even if they've gone along, it's not their fault. Because like I said, it's one bad choice or another, and there is no good choice.

I just want to add to that because it's a very clarifying and powerful point. You talked about Kyle Beach before, and Kyle Beach is the NHL player, professional hockey player now who reported that he was being sexually harassed and threatened by one of the coaches, a video coach. And when he reported that one of the other coaches implied to him that it was his own fault as a 20 year old, to have gotten himself into a situation where he could have been harassed again, back to that mind bending word. I mean, they can spin it every time so that it's the young person's fault. It's the person without power's fault. It's the person who, for whatever reason, has vulnerability. It's always their fault. It's never the perpetrator's fault. So this is concerning. This is the absolute core of why this is such a problem in our society. And what I think is so great about him is that however many years later and it was the same impulse I had. And I think this is what pushes a lot of people onto the whistleblower journey, is he's no longer John Doe. He's gone massively public saying, you know what, I was the victim.

And in the moment that he does that and he reclaims his name and says, I'm Kyle Beach. And at 20 years old, a big, huge, top hockey player. I was a victim. And then my Blackhawks organization revictimised me. They didn't believe me. They didn't protect me. They didn't support me. It was soul destroying, as he put it. It destroyed me from the inside out. And it went on for years. What was the spark that made him decide to speak up, go public, become a whistleblower and call out the organization? He found out that another kid had been victimized by this guy because the organizers had covered up and that's when he said, no, I won't be part of the cycle. And that's how I felt. And when my son was interviewed by the Toronto Star, they asked him a question about why are you doing this? And he said, well, I want other athletes to know they don't have to suffer abuse in silence. And he also said a really important psychological thing, which is what you've said articulated with expert language. But my son said to the reporter, he said, you know, at times I thought, maybe I am a pussy.

And it's in that moment that you understand. And Kyle Beach, too. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I did deserve this. And it doesn't matter what age. Even my son was 16, Kyle Beach was 20. These girls I was in high school with were 15,16. It's not that age so much as it is you don't have the power, and the powerful people in your world don't believe you. You have no other choice. Talk about your no choice but to start to wonder if it's somehow you.

And children tend to be. It's called natural narcissism of children. They tend to be very self reflective. So if something bad happens, they tend to think it must be something that I did right. And that's the way children's brains work, talking about neuroscience. And when we get older, we can have a little more perspective. But it's natural for children to think that if something bad has happened to them, it must be because of something that they did. So the predators take advantage of that natural way of thinking that children have. But listen, it's been an incredible conversation. We can go on and on, but I think we have to start to sum it up because otherwise we could just never end. It's such an important conversation. But I wanted to ask you, you have a new blog series which maybe you could just say a couple of quick words about.

Yeah. My blog series has been really interesting for me to write, and I hope it's useful. It's called How I Became an Unlikely Whistleblower, and it's talking about, as I lead up to my book coming out in the springtime, The Bully Brain. I'm talking about how is it that I became this person, as you said, this sort of odd unicorn? How did you get to be the person who is making the argument that the more we learn about our brains, the more we can heal, the more we can restore our health. But we do have to start learning what the neuroscientists know about our brains to do that. And what's so exciting and inspiring to me is, we can do it. Yes, things happen to us, but we have incredible power within our brains to change them. We have neuroplasticity. We can remodel and recreate the brain that we once had. And it takes practice and it takes hard work, just like going to the gym takes hard work. We can go to the brain gym and we can change that brain. And I find that really inspiring. So, the blog is talking about how did I become the person that ultimately wrote that book and how if I can be a whistleblower, anybody can be a whistleblower because I don't fit the profile.

I'm not this big heroic person who gets all the files at Facebook and stores them away and then goes in front of Congress. That is not me. You're a nerdy introvert from a nerdy introvert in the library. But it just goes to show all of us have the possibility to speak up when we need to. And the more we speak up, the more we take our power back and the more our hearts get beating again.

That's beautiful. So where can people find you? And where can they preorder your book?

My website is www.bulliedbrain.com, and that's where my blog is. And the book is already up on Amazon. It's the bullied brain, and it's Amazon.com. I don't think our Canadian readers will find it on the Amazon.ca yet. It's on Amazon.com. The bullied brain -Heal your scars and restore your health. And it comes out March 8, which is super exciting. And, yeah, that's how you can find me.

Just before we go, how about a call to action for the listener?

My call to action for the listener is that we are an army of vulnerable people, and the more we find the courage to just open ourselves up in our vulnerability and share what we're afraid of and what's happened to us and what we want to become. I really believe that that's where social change and health and healing and wellness lie, and I think we're at a tipping point in society now. I think a lot of people are tired of our broken system and we're ready for change. So I call this new paradigm the neuro paradigm, no longer the bullying and abuse paradigm, which, as you and I have discussed, no longer works, it's broken down. But there's a potential impossibility for a new brain focused paradigm Where it's about the work you do. It's about psychology and psychotherapy and psychiatry and brain science. And once we all shift into that new framework and you have to do it yourself, no one's going to do it for you. That's really where hope lies.

Hope is a wonderful word to end this very fascinating and provocative podcast on I want to thank you so much, Jennifer Fraser, for coming on the podcast. I think our conversation has been very important, very meaningful.

Thank you so much for having me.

That was the incredible Dr. Jennifer Fraser. And I'm Dr. Marcia Sirota. If you like this podcast, please review it wherever you listen. And you can sign up for my free biweekly wellness newsletter at Marcia, md.com, where you'll learn about my online courses and my YouTube video series. Bye.