509- Lifelong Effects of Bullying and the Brain's Ability to Recover

Carol Fleck
Welcome to the Attention Deficit Disorder Expert podcast series by Attitude magazine.

Hi everyone, I'm Carol Fleck and on behalf of the attitude team, I'm so pleased to welcome you to today's ADHD experts presentation titled the lifelong effects of bullying and the brain's ability to recover. Leading today's presentation is Doctor Jennifer Fraser. Doctor Fraser is an award winning teacher of 20 years and the author of four books, including her latest titled the Bullied Brain, heal your scars and restore your health. It explains all forms of bullying and abuse and how that affects the brain. She also writes a regular series for psychology Today called the bullied brain.

Children and teens with ADHD are more likely to be bullied due to impulsivity, trouble detecting social cues, low self esteem and other traits. Whether your child is being bullied or is the aggressor, bullying leaves its mark on the brain. And we know this because we see the evidence of bullying on brain scans. In today's webinar, Doctor Fraser will talk about the harm that bullying can do, but also how to cope with and recover from bullying. And she'll tell us how we can protect students and work with the bullies to change their behavior and prevent these harmful acts.

Finally, attitude offers a variety of ebooks about parenting children with ADHD. If your pain points are discipline and behavior, emotional regulation, time management, homework in school, or other related issues, these ebooks will be a helpful resource for you. View our full list@attitudemag.com ebooks so without further ado, I'm so pleased to welcome doctor Jennifer Fraser. Thank you so much for joining us today and for leading this discussion. Hi everybody.

Jennifer Fraser
I'm very glad to be here. Okay, so I'm just gonna, without further ado, just launch right in the we already heard Carol talk about the fact that children with ADHD can be at higher risk of bullying. They can be easy targets. And then I've sort of bolded perhaps here as I want to kind of hone back on this. Perhaps they're easy targets because of their impulsivity or that they are suffering low self esteem, struggling with school.

Maybe they have trouble detecting social cues and they might have executive function deficits. That makes it hard for them to know how to navigate something socially with other kids or in terms of, again, the demands of the classroom. So the reason why I bolded, perhaps, is because I want to have us think in a really big way about bullying today. And I'm going to be really looking forward to hearing your questions and ideas and comments. Because in my work, I really am moving beyond our society's usual way of talking about bullying.

I look at it in a very different way, that I wanna run past you all today. So, basically, and this is sort of an uncomfortable truth, we tend to think that children who are targeted by bullying behaviors, and even adults who are targeted by bullying behaviors, it's because it's due to something about them. So oftentimes in my work, a target will say to me, I was bullied because. And I instantly stop them and I don't let them finish the sentence. And the reason being is I say to them, you weren't targeted because of anything to do with yourself.

I'm really interested and very interested in the research on what's going on in the brain of the individual who feels that compulsion to bully other people, whether it's a child or an adulthood, and they will find anything to target. They will target anything. And, I mean, maybe it's because somebody has adhd, but it could be because a child is new at school. They just simply are a new kid. They don't yet have social relationships, they don't have friends to create some kind of buffer around them.

Maybe because the child threatens the bully in some way, makes them feel even more insecure, more traumatized, more at loss or jealous in some kind of way. Envious. They want to remove the target's power because the power threatens them so much. And this is an all conscious, especially with children, this has a lot to do with their own impulsivity. Bullying is a very impulsive act on one level.

It can also be a very calculated act in another. But the point being, we tend to try and understand bullying by saying that the target, you know, it's the target's hair, it's the target's background, it's their ethnicity, it's their gender. We come up, we're always looking for, what is it about the target that can explain this horrible behavior, this harmful, destructive behavior? But really, I think we can do better by really turning the focus onto the individual, the child or the adult who has this bullying behavior. We're going to do better to solve the problem, have less victimization, get more help for the individual that's doing this kind of destructive behavior.

When we factor in this larger point of view, types of bullying, as we all know, have sort of grown exponentially since the Internet. The Internet. Because I think one of the most serious flaws in it, and it should never be allowed, is that people are anonymous, and anonymity just allows people to do highly destructive things and not really have any kind of sense of responsibility or personal understanding that it harms their reputation to behave in this way, that they're exposing something really destructive about themselves. So the fact that the Internet allows us to have these kind of avatars and characters and made up accounts should be illegal, in my humble opinion. It's very unfortunate.

And the research shows that if you are interacting with a person face to face, their cues, the fact that you are hurting them, will cause a healthy brain to pause. So when a person manifests, they cry, or their facial expression shows, or they. They cast their eyes down, or they cower in some way physically. All of these different behaviors indicate to the brain that's doing the harmful behavior that they're causing harm. And, I mean, animals will do the same thing.

I don't know if anybody here has a dog, but if you do, a dog trainer might teach you that if your dog is too excited and they nip or they put their teeth on your hand, and if you create a sound that shows that they're hurting you, they will instantly stop. This is just natural mammal behavior. And of course, children even, but adults as well, especially, who use bullying behaviors, they sometimes are completely disconnected to the fact that they're causing pain. In fact, that might increase their own power base and social standing in their mind, their empathy, neural networks are oftentimes eroded, which means they aren't high functioning anymore. Serious deficit, same thing with their emotional regions in the brain.

These are things that are visible on brain scans. And so you might be dealing with someone who, who isn't responding in a healthy, natural way to your. To the harm being done. Now, it gets 10,000 times worse when there's distance, when you're able to do the harm and you can't see at all the response because you're on the Internet, then it's really, it's not a healthy brain function interaction between two people. And this is why the Internet is so, it's been so deadly.

So from 2000 to 2018, in the United States, for example, youth suicide, and we know that youth suicide, much of it, many times, it's correlated with abusive or bullying behaviors, and the target cannot cope. Youth suicide. So ten year olds to 24 year olds, from 2000 to 2018, so Internet has increased 57%. And that's a very horrible statistic. I'm sorry to share that with you, but I think it means we all need to advocate a lot more for a great deal more Internet regulation, especially when it comes to children.

So bullying and abuse, it can be cyberbullying. That doesn't touch the body, and it still does extremely serious harm to the brain. People off the Internet could use psychological bullying, verbal bullying, social relational. Social relational. Bullying is when you use the person's relationships to harm them, so you don't invite them to a party, and they should be there.

You don't invite them to a meeting in the workplace, and they should be there. You use a smear campaign to ruin their reputation. You gossip behind their back and act like you're a friend in person. These are all social relational types of bullying, and they're very, very harmful. They can do physical damage to the brain.

The physical damage can be seen on brain scans. And so I've said here at the top, something that might be a little bit confusing. I said we punish physical abuse and bullying much more than we do social relational and emotional or psychological. But from a brain perspective, they're equivalent. And in fact, things like emotional neglect might be more harmful to the brain than physically harming someone.

And part of our societal problem with this is it's criminal to strike somebody. I mean, if you went to the workplace and punched someone in the face, that's instant criminal charges. If a teacher did it to a student, same thing. If the student even did it to another student, that's considered legally criminal. Very serious.

If it's emotional, if it's neglect, emotional neglect. If it's social relational, we don't get the same kind of legal response, so we don't take it as seriously, and yet the science tells us we should be taking it as seriously. So one of the mistakes in our society is we have a tendency to talk about bullying as if it's a power imbalance. The child who's bullying has the power, and they use the power to harm the target. This actually, from, again, from a brain point of view, is not true.

Kids who bully others, they don't have healthy brains, and they're not neurotypical. In fact, what's typical is to have a really innately wired into your brain. Healthy empathy, neural network. Empathy is the key. And just to quickly remind you, sometimes we mix up empathy and sympathy.

So just to remind you, empathy is when you walk in someone else's shoes. It's when you look at the world from someone else's perspective or you look at the world from their emotional standpoint or their history, and you start to see things differently, because you're actually imagining what it would be like to be someone else. Well, babies at 40 minutes after birth are already starting to take a really good look at the powerful people in the world. In their world, like doctors and parents and caregivers, they are looking, and they start to imitate very quickly adult powerful behaviors, because babies and children, all the way up until they launch, are dependent on the powerful people in their world. So if we didn't have really, really high level, high functioning empathy as human beings, we might not survive.

So when you have a child at school who's bullying, like, their empathy neural network has already started to be damaged or eroded by whatever it is that's going on in their lives, then it's not neurotypical, it's not powerful. It's incredibly unhealthy, and it should be setting off alarm bells, and we should be teaching children this. We should say, when you see a child bullying, they are suffering. They are not powerful. You need to go get a teacher because that child needs help really badly.

And I can't help but believe, and I do not have research to back this up, but I can't help believe that if we taught kids, those that feel the impulse to bully and those who are going to be targeted, if we taught them that this is really what's going on, I don't think it would make children feel comfortable to display to their peers that they really are suffering, that they have extreme insecurity, that there's something wrong with their brain. We might say they're mentally ill, they have a deficit. These are all very significant negatives. And not that we would ever want to speak that way to a child that's manifesting this behavior, but if we had before school began and every single year, and we repeated and we taught and we made kids really understand that bullying is not powerful. It's a sad and desperate act.

I think that it would change how kids handled it, how they took care of each other, how they went and sought help themselves. If they felt the impulse to bully, I think it would change it. So there is not only an empathy issue that's shown that you can see in the brain of a child that's bullying, you also are going to see dysregulated emotional regions in the brain. So, for example, if a healthy child, a healthy adult with a healthy brain was put into an fMRI machine. So fMRI just means it's video.

You can see movement. It's not a still picture like an MRI. If you put them into that kind of a brain image machine and you looked at what the activities in their brain while you show them a series of pictures. So let's say you show a series of very upsetting pictures, you show a dog being hit by a car, an elderly person being pushed, a child being ignored when they're crying. These kinds of upsetting, think, emotional, think that somebody getting their hand pricked is a classic research technique that they use to see what happens in the brain of the observer.

These are the major studies that have been done. So if you had two people and you were pricking the hand of one person, the observer's brain would completely light up in the same neural networks that experience pain in the brain. And you're not getting your hand pricked at all. You're watching someone else get hurt. That's empathy.

And our empathy. Neural networks are designed to make us pro social, make us care about each other, create communities, collaborate, work together. This is how human beings survive, and our brains are very passionate about survival. So what happens to the brain of somebody who's very dysregulated? So we're concerned about behavior that they're manifesting.

They might be like when they study adults, you're talking narcissists and machiavellians and psychopaths. You put them into the brain scanner that fMRI, and you show them the same images, the dog being hit by the car, the old person being pushed, the child being ignored when they're crying, and you see that their empathy neural networks do not ignite. They don't light up. They don't get active. The emotional regions in the brain, they don't light up.

They don't get activated. It's just extinguished. And that tells you, right, that there's something very harmed, very hurt in their brains. They have major deficits, and this is why they don't have emotions. They don't feel guilty when they hurt people.

They don't feel remorseful. They don't lie up at night, tossing and turning about what they've done. They just repeat the behavior the next day. Because when you put them in the brain scanner and show them those kinds of horrible images, what lights up in their brain is language and cognition. These are the types of neural networks that help you tell lies and cover up what you've done and lie even more because it's self serving.

So these are very concerning things. When we see children bullying, we should be profoundly worried and doing absolutely everything in our power to get their brains back to health and find out what is going on in their lives that are hurting their brains so significantly. So this is very, very general, and I know that there's a million different versions, and every single brain is unique, which is a fascinating thing. All of us have brains as unique as our fingerprints. So no one brain is the same.

And every single brain has different histories and experiences and genetic. Genetic backgrounds. I mean, I am saying the most general things right now, but I do think it's relevant, and I do think it's interesting because this is not how we talk in society. So we talk a lot about ADHD, and these children need support, and they need accommodations, and they need to be. Perhaps they need medication.

We need understanding around them in order to help them fulfill their incredible potential. And that's just normal. We do not talk the same way about children who are manifesting incredibly aggressive, destructive behaviors like bullying. But perhaps we should, is what I want to just let us invite us to have this kind of discussion and conversation. So I just tried to kind of map it out.

I think we can say very much. In general, ADHD is a genetic condition. It's not like it happened to you or you caught it or something like that. It's not environmental, and it usually runs through families. In my family, we have dysgraphia, and it runs through, my brother had dysgraphia, and both of my sons have dysgraphia.

So it runs through families in the same way that ADHD can run through a family. In contrast, what's really interesting is bullying, for the most part. And there is research that shows that sometimes you could look at it as a genetic, inherited condition, but in general, it is environmental. It's something that happens to you by the environment, that usually toxic environment that you are being raised in. And we could also say it's inherited, too.

It's inherited in the sense that if you have caregivers who were traumatized, who were brutalized, who were hurt, who were on the receiving end of a lot of cruelty from the adults in their life, or just absentia, like all the suffering that can happen to people, mental illness and substance abuse and poverty. And I don't want to minimize any of that, but that, too, is inherited. It's part of the intergenerational trauma cycle. And we talk about ADHD as a developmental condition. We could argue that bullying, too, is a developmental condition.

It happens to you from your environment, but we talk about it as a moral condition. Bullying is. And of course, rightly so. I mean, it hurts people, right? It is a moral situation.

But couldn't we also say it's a medical condition, too? It is about the brain. The brain is not, and the nervous system are not functioning properly.

So the abuse trauma cycle shows that. And this is, again, research. It shows us that those who bully and abuse are almost always victims of. There's different things that can happen. A victim can end up going on and being the most wise, caring, loving person and never be aggressive.

They can grow up and suffer terribly from what was done to them in childhood and carry the neurological scars and not know what to do about it or. And this happens quite a bit, the victim becomes the aggressor. And I'm sure you all know the expression identify with the aggressor. And that's something that we naturally do as a survival technique. We identify with the aggressor and we become highly aggressive ourselves.

And we believe that maybe we deserved what we got and now we've toughened up and we're going to do the same thing as soon as we have some kind of power. We believe all these things because they were survival strategies. And our brain cares about survival almost beyond everything else. So, as you know, they talk to about people who are in abusive, bullying, dangerous situations. They might start to become or manifest fawning behaviors.

I'm not sure if you've heard that fawning is a natural survival strategy. It's the bystander, it's the kid that will laugh along when another child is being targeted and crying. And it's not that they're bad kids, it's that their brain is going, okay, this is really dangerous. This is something I can't handle. I'm going to identify with the aggressor because he or she is manifesting such dangerous, harmful behavior.

I don't want to be the next target. This is all happening on an unconscious nervous system level. Brain and body communicating to each other, saying, safety is the priority. How are we going to manage this? And adults do it, too.

We tell kids to be upstanders, which I think is the most ridiculous thing in the world, because adults can't be upstanders at all. We see this repeatedly in the workplace. When there's a workplace bullying or harassment or abuse situation, even corruption, we see that people will look the other way. They will put on blinders because they're protecting their survival, they're protecting their livelihood, their reputation, their opportunity for promotion. Well, kids are navigating the same kind of intensely challenging, difficult social world, too.

And so when adults start to role model upstander behavior, great, then we can teach kids more about it. But for now, we shouldn't be asking children to try and do things that adults can't do. I also think it's really important for us to understand that trauma is infectious. You know, there's really interesting research, for example, on teachers that use bullying techniques. It's a very small percentage.

You know, if you look at a thousand teachers, you're going to find a tiny number, ten of them maybe, who use bullying techniques. But what the research shows is when teachers use bullying, it infects the whole population at the school. And children watch that kind of power and role modeling or harm and this aggressive kind of way to put others down and demean them and they will start to use the same kind of techniques. So trauma is infectious.

People will say hurt people, hurt other people. That's kind of a common phrase, but we can make it even more precise with the research and say that hurt brainstor hurt. They hurt inside. Like they don't feel good. They are.

I mean, if you're a child and you go to school and you don't want to go on the playground and you don't want to go to the library, and you're not looking for your favorite teacher, you're not trying to find your friends, you are looking for someone to hurt. That is a really, really hurt brain. That is so unhealthy. It's incredible. And so what many children don't understand as well, and what society doesn't understand is that the child that does the bullying behavior, they're damaging their own brain at the same time, same time as they're doing physical damage to the target's brain.

Probably the bystanders as well, who are witnessing something that is extremely harmful and that's causing them a lot of anxiety and a lot of anguish and confusion. They don't know what to do. All of these things are very harmful. And so, yeah, I think personally we're at a major turning point. I think we're at the tipping point because of the brain science of moving towards a whole new model.

This is what I'm hoping for. I call the outdated model that I feel like we're really trapped in right now. I call it the bullying abuse model or paradigm. And I call the new paradigm or the new model a neuroparadigm. And basically it's just brain informed.

Maybe if we brought the brain into the conversation about all of these kinds of destructive behaviors, we would better handle them. We would teach our children better how to handle them and we would start getting the rehabilitation that the medical response, not just the moral response, when we see kids acting in really destructive ways. So what would it be like? I mean, if we. I mean, instantly, people get usually upset at this moment in the presentation because they think to themselves, oh, she's not gonna.

She doesn't think we should punish children who bully. She doesn't think we should discipline them. They're just going to run amok. They're going to hurt kids, and they're going to do it with impunity. And that's really not what I'm advocating at all.

So just stay with me for a few moments, and I'll come full circle to some of those issues. But just to entertain for a moment what would happen if we saw bullying as a medical condition, as a kind of mental illness where, you know, in the same way that when we see a child with ADHD, we want to do everything to help them. We want. Well, many people do. I'm not.

I know that in the school system and in history and so on and so forth, and there's still people that are ignorant and don't understand, and they make mistakes. I'm not trying to make it seem like, oh, it's no problem to have ADHD, and all you get is understanding, support, and accommodation. But we have changed in the past, same thing with autism. In the past, we had, or dysgraphia and dyslexia. We had no understanding, and we acted as if it was somehow a child not trying or a child being bad or a child acting out or not studying or listening or all, you know, all this moral condemnation.

And we still have all that moral condemnation for bullying. And I think we can change that model, and I think it would reduce bullying and therefore protect targets. So it's not that we don't hold accountable. I think we hold accountable in a much wider way. And we hold adults especially accountable because if children are bullying a great deal, it means that they are living in a society where bullying has been very normalized and bullying is role modeled and taught by adults because.

And all you need to do is turn on the tv and watch how politicians behave or people that are very high level leaders in society. Or you can look at the Internet and you see adults manifesting bullying behavior everywhere you turn. And it's normalized. They do it with impunity. In fact, it might even give them power and prestige and a promotion.

We see that a lot, and then we tell children not to do it. We say, oh, don't do that. It's really hurtful. So this kind of hypocrisy on the part of adults, once we start to understand that children will never stop bullying, it's learned behavior. As we said, children are born wired for empathy.

If we can come full circle to say, just a second, we need to role model compassion and empathy and depression, diplomacy and respect for one another. When adults start doing that, we will see our kids reflecting that back more. But so let us take a look at the kinds of adult behaviors that lead to very traumatized child brains, the kinds of brains that might manifest with aggression. You can either turn your aggression out and bully other children and hurt them, or you can turn your aggression in and have self harm, substance abuse, self medicating, the kinds of things that children do in order to cope with a very traumatized brain. So imagine a world where we had some kids that had adhd, but we also talked about some children have aces.

And I'm sure you've heard about that adverse childhood experiences study in the late 1990s. If you didn't hear about it, it's an absolute medical watershed. They say it's one of the most important research projects ever done. They did. They looked at children who were growing up in homes where their parents were, or caregivers were struggling in terrible ways.

And there were ten different categories that they looked at. They looked at mental illness. Is your caregiver mentally ill? Are they incarcerated? Do they have substance abuse issues?

Is there divorce happening in the family? And is there domestic abuse? Those were the. Those were the five kind of adult world ones. And then there were five that were just about abuse.

Are you on the receiving end of psychological abuse or emotional abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect. Those were the ten things they looked at. And first of all, the shocking information was these two doctors, american doctors, found out that they could not believe how much abuse was happening in children's homes. And then they showed a direct correlation between midlife chronic disease and shortened lifespan and kids that had grown up in adversity. So you would have thought if this was done in the late 1990s, we would have really changed as a society and put a huge amount of energy into ensuring that children were not growing up with so much adversity.

But it hasn't happened yet. So I want to argue that aces, adverse childhood experiences create aces, which is me calling children who bully aggressive, they're callous and cruel and conniving oftentimes. And their experiences are like a syndrome, like an illness, like some kind of a larger sense of lack of wellness in their lives. So I went over the ten aces with you already. That's just a visual for you, for people who are visual learners.

It's not traumas like immigrating. It's not trauma like, I come from a war torn country. It's not trauma. I've been in a natural disaster. They didn't look at any of that.

They looked at the relationships between adults and children. That's it. And they found shocking information about it.

One of the ways we can think about children who are bullying and aggressive and acting out and being very unnatural in their behavior is. I'm just repeating what we've talked about here. Our brains are wired for empathy, and their empathy neural networks are not functioning. This should be deeply concerning. We need to find out instantly what's happening in their life.

What is the adversity that's doing this is a red flag that they are in fight mode. And I'm sure you've all well aware of fight, flight and freeze. These are the different behaviors that we automatically do. We don't make a choice to do them. So in the same way that I don't make a choice to become instantly still when I'm afraid, when I'm threatened and I'm afraid, my default is freeze.

I can't speak, I feel paralyzed. I put my eyes down. I hope nobody notices me. It's automatic. My nervous system, my brain and my body, my sympathetic nervous system, they do it automatically.

So some people run away, they don't go to work, they don't go to school, they self medicate, they watch tv rather than take responsibility. They just are in flight mode, they can't cope and it's automatic. They're not making the choice to do it. They're not bad people. They're just automatically doing this.

Brain body nervous system, sympathetic nervous system activated into these modes. And couldn't we also then extend our understanding that when somebody is aggressive, not that we're excusing it, we're not saying it's okay, we're not saying they're allowed to maltreat other people because they're not, and especially not children. I fully am on that page with everybody, but we are going to get further if we don't just treat it as a moral thing. We understand the person's in fight mode, they are profoundly threatened. And if we taught kids that it's like, you see somebody bullying, why would you be afraid of that?

That child is showing you that they feel threatened. Go get a teacher, go get a parent, get the coach, get someone to help them who can help them, because that is a very threatened child. And maybe we would gain a lot more by talking to the child, treating the child, rehabilitating the child that is suffering so much threat. So again, just to remind you in case I'm upsetting everybody. The goal isn't to remove accountability.

It's actually to almost have more accountability. It's like you wouldn't go to school if you had an infectious disease, if you had a virus. If you were a teacher and you had a virus, you wouldn't go to school because you would be infecting other people. It would be very irresponsible. We can see bullying behaviors in the same way.

It's very irresponsible if you feel that impulse. You should really be trained from the get go and it has to be repeated over and over and over. The brain learns by repetition at timed intervals. It doesn't learn by a one day workshop or here's an assembly. Bullying is bad.

Don't do it. It doesn't learn that way. The brain learns by daily practice. You talking and saying, you know what? If you feel the impulse to bully someone else, go get some help, because you're actually unwell and we want to get you better.

I mean, that is just going to make a difference. This shift to the idea of medical. So again, I was using ADHD as a way to think about wouldn't it be wonderful if we see a child manifesting ADHD? We go and get a psyched assessment. We go and see a doctor, we see a professional, and we get a big picture assessment.

And then we put into place all kinds of things to help that child. Same thing if a child has poor vision or a child is struggling to hear. We do all kinds of things to help them. Broken leg, we get them crutches. Same thing we should be doing with a child that's manifesting highly aggressive, dysfunctional behaviors.

We should get a psyched assessment. What's going on in their brain. Let's do an eeG. Let's find out what's wrong so that we can help them. We can build in accommodations and so on.

It's not only going to help the kid that's doing the bullying behaviors, it's going to save the targets. No kid should have to go to school and be targeted by aggressive, destructive behaviors. But if we don't repair the brains of those who feel an impulse to do it, if we don't have a place where they can go or a person to talk to, to say, I don't feel well, then we're just not going to solve the problem. So we've talked about this. Bullying is not powerful.

We've gone over that whole idea, so we can just keep going. How does bullying affect the brain? I know, I keep talking about the research. Just to let you know, there's extensive studies, 20 years replicated, peer reviewed. They can see all these different parts of the brain.

I don't have the time to go into the details right now, but all of these different parts of brain and body. Amygdala, hippocampus, corpus callosum. You can see visible damage to them on brain scans. When a child is bullying or a child is being bullied, I mean, even something like yelling. Yelling in the face of somebody can do really significant harm to the brain.

Now, the good news is the brain is innately wired to repair and recover. It's unbelievably powerful at getting better. If we do evidence based practices, I mean, we have to know what to do. Most people don't even know they have neurological scars or brain injury from bullying and abuse and trauma. Sorry, but once you know that your brain is being hurt, you can set in motion all for your child.

You can set in motion all kinds of ways to get better. So, a healthy school is a safe school. It's a place where kids can go and know that they can be safe, and they can have brain fitness, and they can have brain understanding and brain conversation and a shared vocabulary. And schools can build in daily practice. And I bolded daily practice in blue because I want people to understand that, just as I said before, the brain learns by repetition at timed intervals.

We teach mathematic every day because that's how the brain learns math. We teach language, reading, how to speak, geography, physics, everything. A second language. We teach it every day because that's how the brain learns. If we don't want children to bully, if we want them to have compassion and empathy and understand what's going on when they move into fight, flight, and freeze, then we need to teach them every day.

That's what daily practice looks like. It can't be a one shot deal where an expert comes in and talks about how bullying is a bad thing. No brain learns that way. It's really important for kids to understand, too, and parents to understand. If a brain doesn't feel safe, then it cannot learn.

It's just they have to have this kind of homeostasis. They have to have this safety around them for brains to learn and repair and grow. So the more we punish children for bullying behaviors, the less we actually are giving them the opportunity to repair the harm done to their brain and to get better. Here's just some fast things on ways that we can repair our brains. One of the best things for the brain to reduce stress.

So reduce that impulse to fight flight. Freeze is aerobic exercise. Sports are amazing. Any kind of exercise that gets the heart rate going is extremely good for the brain. It lowers cortisol, which is a stress hormone that shouldn't be running through brain and body all the time.

But it does when children are stressed and when they feel unsafe. Another thing we can do is brain training. Very targeted, focused brain training designed by neuroscientists. It's called Brain HQ. I don't have time to go into all the research today.

You can just go on the site and look at it if you like. It's really good for kids who have adhd and anyone who doesn't want to get a brain that moves into dementia and Alzheimer's. It's really good for professional athletes and they use it. It gives them a competitive edge. Anyone who wants to have a high performing or stronger brain or worries that their brain is being harmed in some way.

Brain HQ, designed by neuroscientists. It's online, gamified, inexpensive, but it does brilliant things. You can read about the research on that site. Another really good one is mindfulness. Yes, it's an ancient practice, 3000 at least years in eastern philosophy and religion.

The neuroscientists are like, oh, yeah, it's really, really good for your brain. It helps a lot with being able to manage your. Your sympathetic system is starting to ramp up. You feel yourself going into fight mode or flight and freeze and you can start to do deep breathing. When you do the deep breathing and you start to get yourself into just calming yourself down, becoming very aware of your system, your nervous system's response to something.

As long as you're safe and you calm yourself down, you do the slow breathing, you're basically communicating with your body to your brain. You're using your mind to tell your brain that it safe and it can calm down, which is really important. This is a great one for parents. Co regulation is one of our powerhouse things we can do and it doesn't happen on the Internet. You have to be in person.

But it's all, all the natural things that a mammal would do to make another mammal feel safe and loved and cared for, and especially safe because that allows homeostasis. How you learn, how you repair brain harm and how you grow. And all of us can do this for each other with a loving tone of voice, kind facial expressions, melodic ways of speaking, or prosody. Like when we talk to animals, you talk to your dog, you're like, who's a good boy, it's that kind of thing. Not flat monotone, that can be quite threatening.

It has to be more melodic. So here's just a quick reminder to you of the action steps we can all do. We can do aerobic exercise, brain training, mindfulness practice, co regulation. Being out in nature is a game changer as well. And here's just my final image for you before we open up to questions.

The brain is organic. We have to remember at all times. It's growing, developing, changing. It's blossoming. We can prune it.

We are our own brain's arborist or caretaker of the tree. And if we remember that, that our brain changes, we have neuroplasticity. We can change our brain by what we practice. Our children can change their brains by what they practice. Right until our last day on the planet, that is enormously empowering.

It means sky's the limit for what we want to do. We can make our brains stronger, but we can also have our brains weakened. And that's where bullying needs to be talked about and we need to be very aware of its harmful effects. So thank you. Thank you, Doctor Fraser, for helping us understand how the brain reacts to bullying, hurtful situations.

Carol Fleck
Now, let's get right to your questions for people whose neural networks aren't lighting up in brain scans to show empathy, as you had talked about. How can we change this? Yeah, it's very, very important. Now, I'm going to give you good news, bad news. The good news is the brain, as I said, is innately wired to repair and recover.

Jennifer Fraser
So if you have somebody who is not responding with empathy in a brain scanner, you're going to have to do really intensive training to get that empathy back up and functioning. And I mean, chances are very good if someone has damaged empathy like that, they are in an unsafe place. They are using everything in their power to manipulate, to gaslight, to try and create scenarios that advantage them, that give them power, that compensate for the fact that they're full of self loathing. I mean, this is an enormous question, like a big, huge question that requires thought experts like the brain scientists and the neurobiologists and the psychiatrists and psychologists, really, when you've got someone with eroded empathy, neural networks like that, you need to go to the mental health professionals and get them to work with the individual to try and recover that part of the brain. Now, the good news is many brains are able to recover.

Like they cannot get over how much brains can repair, even from serious things like having to remove a whole hemisphere of the brain can be removed, and the brain will start to, like, adapt and recreate its power and figure out ways to cope with this massive intervention. So, I mean, neuroscientists are daily learning more and more, and hopefully we can start to repair that kind of thing, especially the earlier we catch it. When you let somebody like, we let people continue very abusive behaviors, not just for months, not just for years, but for decades. It takes us decades sometimes to stop that kind of behavior. If you think of some of the big abusive individuals we all hear about in the news, that's going to be hard to recover.

That brain, a child's brain, an adolescents brain up until the age of 24, they're, they're full of neuroplasticity. They can be healed and repaired. Bad news is just, again with the heavy duty abusers, chances are you can't repair those brains, and you have to be very cautious with them because they are harmful. Okay, we had some questions around ADHD and impulsivity. A few people wrote, students with ADHD are sometimes perceived as bullies because they act impulsively and have regressed social and emotional skills.

Carol Fleck
Sometimes they have strong emotions and angry outbursts and have difficulty recognizing that their actions hurt others. So does that define, is that a definition for bullying? And what can teachers do in these situations?

Jennifer Fraser
Well, I mean, even the way the question has been phrased indicates, like, larger thinking, bigger picture understanding when any of us behave. I mean, I don't know about everybody else on this call, but I have behaved in ways that I'm mortified about. Even with my own children, I have yelled at my own children because I'm angry, I'm upset. I'm afraid. I feel threatened.

I think they're threatened. That's what human beings do. If you think about now, if you take that even a step further and you think about a dog, that's being, that's come from an abusive home, and they're lashing out all over the place, and they think that they're unsafe all the time. You reach out to pet that dog, that dog bites your hand. So if we start having these kinds of big conversations, then we can get to the point of saying, wait a second, so and so has ADHD.

Does everybody understand what that is? That's sometimes when the brain is, is different in how it's processing safety and how it processes information, in how it's able to manage its impulsivity or emotional world. What does that feel like? Have other people ever been there? Other kids?

You know, it's a matter of how we talk about it so that, you know, for a child to be able to say, hey, when you do that, that hurts me. We're already getting into a place of shared learning where the child with ADHD is like, oh, so I'm sorry. Basically, the mother who yells at her children, I'm sorry, I will go and apologize to my kids and say, I didn't mean to yell. I was under a lot of stress, please forgive me, and they will forgive me, and we move on. That's very different from how a lot of bullying happens today, where the child that's actually doing it is so adept at covering up what they're doing that you oftentimes they fool the adults in their world who will tell the child that's targeted, oh, you know, you must be too sensitive.

I mean, all of these kinds of things. I think the more we can open up these types of conversations and help children understand how their brain drives them to behave, regardless of what kind of brain they have and to have a lot of care for each other and language and vocabulary. To say, when you behave this way, it hurts me. Here's why I don't like it, and move on from that kind of place of shared understanding.

Carol Fleck
Someone writes, our student is being bullied by the school faculty. What can we do?

Jennifer Fraser
That is a big question. That is the catalyst for my book, the Bullied Brain. In the bullied brain, my lived experience was teachers bullying children. That's where I come at this whole issue, and that's why I talk about very taboo subjects. Like, sometimes the adults are the bullies, and that's very unpopular, but it's a reality.

And so it's incredibly difficult. I mean, if it's hard to stop kids bullying kids, imagine how hard it is to tackle adults who bully children and think it's normal and think it's healthy and are getting protected maybe by the administration or whatever. Personally, I mean, this sounds like a cop out, but it is so hard to change that kind of entrenched culture, and it's so unhealthy for children. If there's any possibility of removing your child from that school, that would be. If my kids were in school, that's what I would do.

I'd get them out. Wow. A school psychologist asks what behavioral management strategies work best for students who are being bullied or who are the aggressors. Yeah, well, I mean, basically, I can imagine for teachers, I get it. It's so stressful already.

There's so much demands on their time. But if you don't have kids that are safe in school, they're not going to learn anyway. So if you are able to constantly stop what's happening and actually address the behavior in the moment, and that might mean stepping outside with the child that's manifesting the aggressive behavior and getting them the help that they need, not as opposed to sending them out of the room, as if they don't belong, as if they need to be suspended or expelled. We know that these things don't work. They actually reinforce the trauma that these kinds of kids, kids are going through at the same time as we're trying to keep the targets safe.

Like, it's a very complex school psychologist would know this. It's a massively complicated situation. I personally think that the earlier we start teaching kids to have a shared vocabulary, we could do things like teaching them de escalation techniques, like when you start to feel yourself ramp up, the other kids have a code word to say that they've all decided with the teacher. They practice, they work together, the teacher can use the same word and it's really a signal to the brain to say, just a second, you're ramping up, you feel very threatened. We're here for you and we're going to help you.

And, I mean, even if you switch it like that, chances are it's going to change. Now, one of the things I want to see in schools, too, is a brain safe room. So if you come to school and you feel that impulse to hurt somebody, you actually go to the brain safe room and there's food there and there's a consistent caretaker. There's the school psychologist, and he or she knows how to calm you down. There's certain spaces.

You go to workstations where you do mindfulness or you do exercise or you talk about what's going on, you do journaling. The research on journaling is unbelievable how much difference you can make 15 minutes a day of journaling about trauma. So, I mean, I just think we have to start making these practices a normal part of the school day rather than this. You know, our situation right now is not working, so we need something new. Someone says, is there research to support worsening of ADHD or even emergence of ADHD as the result of bullying?

Well, I mean, bullying. Okay, so my short answer to that is, yes, I do. I have very specific research where I've seen the impact of bullying, specifically on kids with ADHD. No, what I can say, though, is all forms of bullying and abuse cause so much trauma to the brain, cause so much anxiety, completely take the concentrating brain, the learning brain, offline and channel all the energy into survival. As soon as that's happening, I mean, it's gonna be even worse for a kid with ADHD who's working double time to build out and strengthen neural networks for concentration and for learning and for being in the moment and controlling impulsivity.

So, yeah, bullying would. Bullying is terrible for everybody. It's terrible if you're already struggling with a challenge or frustration, for sure. We had a few questions that were similar to this.

Carol Fleck
Can bullying as a child cause an adult to be a target of domestic violence or to be violent themselves later on?

Jennifer Fraser
There's research that correlates. So they studied, for example, eight year olds, really large study of eight year olds. And the eight year olds who were bullying, they were a much higher percentage in terms of adults in the criminal justice system, which makes a lot of sense. Right? I mean, you don't become a bully if you grow up in a happy home.

You. You just don't have that. You're not under that kind of stress. As we talked about, the fight flight freeze, you're not in fight mode. You're happy.

You're learning. You've got friends. You're socially, emotionally regulated. You. You're really interested in learning.

So I think if you come from an unhappy background, you're getting traumatized. The adults in your life are really, really struggling with their own traumas, and you are manifesting this kind of behavior at school. Chances are. I mean, the research shows you end up doing all kinds of destructive behaviors, and domestic abuse is one of them. You either are the aggressor, identified with the aggressor.

I mean, individuals who are violent, they're identified with the aggressor. Right. They use violence as a way to reduce their stress and the threats that they think that they're under. So they are just as unwell as the target that is on the receiving end of this abuse. So, yeah, I mean, the Aces study shows, and this was late 1990s, and it shows absolutely correlation with suicide, and they have all the numbers.

This is kind of a hard thing to do, and I don't recommend you do it unless you're feeling really strong or like you have your team around you or you have a mental health support person in your life, but you can go online and do the aces test yourself, and you can see where you fall on the ten questions. You can see what your aces score is. And if you have four traumas in your childhood, you are, percentage wise, really on a path towards all kinds of difficult things that affect your health and well being, substance abuse, domestic abuse, suicidal, you know, ideation, etcetera. So yeah, there is, there's a direct correlation between trauma of all different kinds, including bullying and then manifestation of very destructive behaviors later in life and shortened lifespan and chronic illness. Wow.

Carol Fleck
So the effects are, can be devastating. Well, that has to be our listen. Can I say one fast thing? Of course it's not what has to happen. You can absolutely learn and all kinds of people do, how to manage what your brain is.

Jennifer Fraser
You can heal your neurological scars. You can repair them. You have neuroplasticity. You do not have to follow that path. That's what neuroplasticity has taught us.

We can change our brains by what we practice. So if we have a bunch of aces, there is nothing stopping us from repairing the harm that they've done and getting our health back on track.

Carol Fleck
So important. Thank you for that. So unfortunately, we're out of time, so that has to be our last question. But thank you for joining us today and for sharing your expertise with our ADHD community. We appreciate that.

Jennifer Fraser
Thank you so much for having me. I love to be with you. And thank you to today's listeners for joining us. If you would like to access the event resources, visit attitudemag.com and search podcast number 509. The slides and recording are posted a few hours after each live webinar.

Carol Fleck
If you're listening in replay mode, simply click on the episode description. Please know that our full library of attitude webinars is available as a podcast. It's called the ADHD Experts podcast and it's available on all streaming platforms. Make sure you don't miss future attitude webinars articles or research updates by signing up to receive our free email newsletters@attitudemag.com. newsletters thanks everyone.

Appreciate you. For more attitude podcasts and information on living well with the deficit, visit attitudemag.com. that's additudemag.com.

509- Lifelong Effects of Bullying and the Brain's Ability to Recover

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1: Introduction to the Topic

2: Understanding Bullying as a Neurological Issue

3: The Role of Empathy and Recovery

4: Strategies for Recovery and Intervention

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