Jennifer Fraser - The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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Copyright 2022 by Jennifer Fraser

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fraser, Jennifer, 1966 author.

Title: The bullied brain : heal your scars and restore your health / Jennifer Fraser, Ph.D.

Description: Lanham, MD : Prometheus, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: In The Bullied Brain readers learn about the evidence doctors, psychiatrists, neuropsychologists, and neuroscientists have gathered that shows the harm done by bullying and abuse to your brain and how you can be empowered to protect yourself and others. It is not only critically important to discover how much your mental health is contingent on what has sculpted and shaped the world inside your head, but also the first step in learning ways to recoverProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021029929 | ISBN 9781633887787 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781633887794 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Bullying. | BullyingPhysiological aspects. | BullyingHealth aspects. | Victims of bullyingMental health. | Brain.

Classification: LCC BF637.B85 F74 2022 | DDC 302.34/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029929

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For my teachers, Montgomery and Angus Fraser-Brown

My brain isnt broken.

Its beautiful. Im in a city Ive never been to and I see bright lights and new ideas and fear and opportunity and a thousand million roads all lit up and flashing.

I say

There are so many places to explore but youve forgotten that they exist because every day you walk the same way with your hands in your pockets and your eyes on the floor.

Brainstorm, a play by Company Three

Jennifer Fraser has written this book for you. Youve been bullied or maybe you are or have been a bully; perhaps you care about someone who has been a bully or bullied. Alas, we humans abase one another on a routine basis. What most of us have not appreciated until recently is that these behaviors have serious, negative neurological consequences for both the bullied and the bully.

Dr. Fraser helps us understand the myriad of ways that we humans can deploy to humiliate one another. While child-on-child bullying is commonplace, so, too, is adult-to-child and (of course) adult-to-adult abuse. In all three cases, the bully or abuser proclaims their dominance over their victims, feeding their egocentric appetite while they degrade their empathetic core. Most bullies are blind to the fact that their bullying and abusing behaviors are a strong form of progressive, self-inflicted neurological wounding. The plastic negative changes in that bullys brain grow apace and will be embedded in their personhood for lifeunless something is done about it. Our modern culture is plagued by the endemic egocentric detachment that stems from all of this substantially avoidable social mayhem.

Dr. Fraser also helps the reader understand the even more direct neurological trauma that arises and progressively grows in the brains of the bullied or abused. In the past decades, the disabling impacts of fear and ongoing stress associated with bullying and other forms of child abuse have been extensively scientifically documented. Bullying induces soft brain damage. It impairs the progression of neurological advance. It carries the brain off-line in ways that negatively impact learning rates and personal achievement. It has a long series of negative consequences on organic brain health and on general physical health. It increases the risks of a progression to an anxiety or depressive disorder and of suicide. It increases the risks of a progression to addictions. These impacts are amplified, again, by that additional self-inflicted wounding that arises because the bullied and abused individual reevaluates and then enduringly stigmatizes himself or herself as a victim, weakling, outcast... a loser.

Bullying has had consequences in Jennifer Frasers life. She awakened to its happening in the lives of individuals that she cared deeply about. She witnessed its insidious neurological and physical impacts in people she loved. She explains how she has tried to tilt this enormous windmill. As a warrior, she did a wonderful job of preparing herself for battle by educating herself about the neurology and psychology and the cultural paradoxes related to this darker side of our human natures. As you read, youll likely search your own mind and reexamine your own behaviors to reconsider how you personally govern your interactions with children and calibrate healthy child-to-child and adult-to-adult interactions. Im a brain expert who is widely informed about the destructive neurological impacts of epochs of fear and ongoing stress in children and adultsand that is exactly what I did.

Most accounts of neurological and behavioral distortion arising from adverse childhood experiences end with an explanation of the environmental events that engender them, but Dr. Fraser takes a wonderfully insightful further step forward. In her own life and kinship, she was driven to answer a crucial further question: Given the fact of bullying, what the h___ could we do to help the victim move back on a path to neurological and physical normalcy? Because she is herself an empathetic individual, it did not take her long to ask a second question: What could and should be done to help that bully? Again, our warrior entered this second arena after extensively educating herself about the science of brain plasticity-based neurorehabilitation. The brain of that current or historic bully or victim is (of course) plastic. Inflicted damage can be overcomebut healing requires that we acknowledge the wounding and take specific forms of action to drive the brain back in a corrective direction. Jennifers and my dream is that our understanding of the neurology of bullying should and shall be succeeded by an epoch of personal and national healing.

Have you been a bully? Have you been bullied? Do you care about someone who has inflicted this form of neurological damage on someone and who, by such egregious behaviors, slowly but surely damaged him- or herself? Read this book to help yourself and to help them find a path to that better place where human empathy and positive inspiration and positive self-appraisal once again rule the day.

Michael Merzenich, PhD
Professor Emeritus, UCSF
Chief Scientific Officer, Posit Science
Founder and President, Brain Plasticity Institute

I am privileged to work with literary agent John Willig, whose cordial expertise and unwavering faith in this project have been instrumental in bringing The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health