Latest / LAUNCH: Parenting Tips for Raising Adult Children & Building Better Relationships / #34: Was Your Child Bullied? The Shocking Truth About the Effects of Bullying and Gaslighting and What Parents Can Do

Transcript

#34: Was Your Child Bullied? The Shocking Truth About the Effects of Bullying and Gaslighting and What Parents Can Do · LAUNCH: Parenting Tips for Raising Adult Children & Building Better Relationships

0:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm Sherry Jonas, and this is Lunch.
0:03
SPEAKER_01: What would you think if I told you that bullying and gaslighting don't just hurt feelings and leave emotional wounds?
0:10
SPEAKER_01: They actually damage the brain.
0:12
SPEAKER_01: I know.
0:13
SPEAKER_01: How's it even possible?
0:15
SPEAKER_01: Well, my guest today is Dr.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: Jennifer Fraser, a professor, researcher, and author who has written several books, but two of them, the bullied brain and the gaslit brain, focus on how these negative experiences can alter our brain and shape our behavior for the rest of our lives.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: So for parents wondering why their grown child might be struggling with confidence, motivation, deep insecurities, this conversation might explain a lot.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: But don't worry, this is not permanent.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: I promise, healing is possible and it's easier than you think.
0:52
SPEAKER_01: I'm really excited to share this episode with you.
0:55
SPEAKER_01: So let's get started.
0:56
SPEAKER_01: Jennifer, welcome to launch.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: It's really great to be here, Sherry.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: I am so glad you're here too.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: I think that we both really care about this subject.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: And so it really is, you know, when you're passionate about something and you feel that it's really necessary knowledge for other people, it's just a pleasure.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: So I am very happy to be here.
1:24
SPEAKER_01: I absolutely agree.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: I have been really looking forward to this conversation with you.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: I am so intrigued by your work, so intrigued that I actually went out.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: I went out.
1:34
SPEAKER_01: It's so I ordered the book.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: I'm working through it.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: The bullied brain.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: So for our listener, the bullied brain.
1:42
SPEAKER_01: And I'm I'll be honest, it is blowing my mind.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: No pun intended.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: Thankfully, though, your next book, The Gaslit Brain, it's coming out in November.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:54
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:54
SPEAKER_01: November 4th.
1:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay, good.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: So I'll have time to work through this one before I get into the next one.
2:00
SPEAKER_01: But before we go any further, I kind of want to prepare all the parents who are listening because this is a very heavy topic.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: And I feel I feel like it's going to make many parents stop and reflect on their child's life and whether this might have happened to them or maybe to themselves.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: I know because it has had that impact on me.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, people feel very uncomfortable talking about bullying and abuse and the impact.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: It's a heavy conversation for sure, but I liken it to when we talk about giving kids sex education.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: Adults feel very uncomfortable.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: It's it's a it's anxiety-inducing, it's it's there's embarrassment and there's shame, there's there's just so much that gets activated in us that we almost feel like we we just want to ignore it, we don't want to talk about it, we just want to stay positive.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: You know, I hear these things and I relate to it.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: I I really get it, of course.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: But we also know that the more we talk to kids and educate them and give them knowledge and allow them to be deeply informed about sexuality and their bodies and their health and pregnancy, and I mean it is a game changer for our kids.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: So I feel like this is a moment.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: Yes, it's a hard conversation, and we're all we're all adults, we're strong.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: We've we've had a lot of experience and we have acquired wisdom.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: And by us having the courage to have this conversation, we can really help our kids in a serious way.
3:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and here's what's most important rather than becoming worried, because that's what's gonna happen, parents are gonna get like anxious.
3:53
SPEAKER_01: I want them to know that no matter what might have happened, there are ways to heal and reverse the damage.
4:01
SPEAKER_01: That's the biggest takeaway.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: For every parent listening to this, we all need to know, and many of us are not taught, we have, and our kids have, until the very last moment that we're alive on the planet, we have brain plasticity or neuroplasticity.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: And neuroplasticity means our brains can change.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: And so, although we're going to share, Sherry and I, difficult information today about how badly the impact of all forms of bullying and abuse can be on the brain, every single one of us listening just it's like that's important knowledge because our brains are innately wired to repair and recover.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: And so let's learn how to do that.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: Let's learn what hurts them, try and minimize that in all of our interactions.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: None of us is perfect, none of us have been trained that the way our society normalizes interactions actually hurts brains.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: That's going to be a shocking uh discussion today.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: At the same time, as just as Sherry said, the brain is wired to repair and recover.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: Let's learn how to do that.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: So, Jen, can I call you that?
5:07
SPEAKER_01: Because I know it's Dr.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: Jenna Jennifer Fraser.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: But is Jen okay?
5:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I go way more often by Jen than anything else.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: I'd love to know what motivated you to do this research.
5:20
SPEAKER_01: I mean, how did you become so interested in the brain science of bullying and abuse?
5:26
SPEAKER_01: I want the listener to know what is the story behind this.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, I've always been interested in education.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: I've always been interested in the wiring that we have, where it comes from, why we are the way we are.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: These are the types of academic questions I've always asked and I've always written about.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: That's that's what my research and my books have have been on.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: But really, what happened to me was I was teaching at a private school in Canada, and this is a very, you know, it's a it's a fabulous school, huge boarding, international boarding population, wonderful kids, amazing teachers.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: And I loved working there, and I'd been there for eight years, and and it was it was really an important place for me in many ways.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: But I heard from a parent, and then this got confirmed by a whole group of parents, there was at least 30 of them.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: It then got confirmed by 14 teenagers, students, that there was a very small number of teachers at the school who were being psychologically and physically abusive.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: And when I heard that, I mean, I have a legal duty to report, first of all, as an educator, I have to report by law.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: I reported the abuse, of course, immediately to the board, then to the headmaster, the chaplain of the school was involved.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: And over time, in this process, I learned that they had all been informed, headmaster, chaplain, board, they'd been informed a year earlier that this abuse was occurring and they hadn't stopped it and they hadn't informed parents.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: So you can imagine they were in a very uh precarious position.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: They were negligent.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh, it would impact their own careers, it would impact their reputations, it would impact the insurance at the school.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was very, very serious.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: And so what they did was they covered up.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: And I just, I wouldn't, if you had asked me, Sherry, I know all these people, if you had asked me prior to this moment what they would do, I would have told you in no uncertain terms they will do the right thing.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: They will do what they have to do.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: They have fiduciary duty, I would have said all those things.
7:33
SPEAKER_00: So it came to me as an immense shock.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: I was, I could not believe it as it unfolded.
7:40
SPEAKER_00: And then, and this is textbook, this is what happens in these abuse cultures, and I've been studying these abuse cultures for over a decade now because I actually ended up being in one.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: What they do is not only do they cover up what's happening, they essentially flip the script to use the academic terms, they flip the script, and all of a sudden the the victim, the person reporting, the messenger, gets shot because they have to eliminate you, because you're the as a truth teller and whistleblower, you're putting the whole operation and cover-up into jeopardy.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: So they villainize you.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: And so you you can't imagine this is even happening.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: Your your brain essentially is not trained to cope with these kinds of things.
8:28
SPEAKER_00: So it gets very, very confused and it stops functioning properly.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: You start struggling to concentrate, you start ruminating, you start perseverating over things you can't remember.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: It's just amazing what it does.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: I now know the brain science on why this happens, which we can talk about, but that was the actual impetus to why I really started to say, okay, well, just a second here, what's really happening?
8:53
SPEAKER_00: Because what was happening on the surface was an illusion.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: There's something more personal that happened.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: Can you talk about that?
9:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: So this was all unfolding.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: And I was asked by the headmaster to take testimonies from students, which I did.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: I did everything through the process according to what they asked me to do.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: I just, I it didn't occur to me to say no.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: So I'm taking direct testimonies from students, and they would talk for about two hours, these young people, these teenagers, and they were just in detail telling me about the abuse, like what they endured day in, day out from these four teachers.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: And so the boys were describing, there were four girls and four boys that I took testimonies from, and the boys were describing this repeat sort of shaming behavior that would occur.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: So this was during basketball.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: So the teachers who were coaching, there were two teachers in this particular scenario, they would call the same boy up over and over and over again.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: It happened hundreds of times.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: They would stop practice, all the boys would have to witness this.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: One teacher would start assaulting, basically, yelling in the kids' face.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: It was all sort of rhetorical questions, like, do you even deserve to be here?
10:07
SPEAKER_00: You're the best player out there, you're not even trying.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: Do you even like basketball?
10:11
SPEAKER_00: It was just this onslaught.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: The boys described it.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: One boy described it as vicious, another boy described it as uh he said, we wanted to stop it, but we couldn't because it was teachers.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm furiously writing this all down, taking the notes.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: And it occurred to me, and I suddenly said, because you're not really supposed to interrupt, you're supposed to just let the person talk, and you only ask clarifying questions.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: So I just I said, Oh, could you just tell me what boy was this?
10:40
SPEAKER_00: What who was it?
10:41
SPEAKER_00: Who was being treated like this over and over again?
10:43
SPEAKER_00: And there's just one final horrendous detail I forgot.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: The boy would try to get away.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: And the teacher would grab his arm or his jersey and hold him in for more.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: And so I said, Who is it?
11:01
SPEAKER_00: Who are they doing this to?
11:07
SPEAKER_00: And and the boy said, Amonty.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: Amonty is my son.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: So in that moment, you asked me, Sherry, why did I start researching this?
11:18
SPEAKER_00: In that moment, my my researching author, educator self, came into full connection with my mother self.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: And I have not stopped working on this ever since.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: Because as soon as this happens to your kid, you don't want it to happen to anybody else's kid.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: And when it happens from people that you trusted and you personally know, and they see you day in, day out as a colleague, and behind closed doors, they're doing this to your child.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we got to start learning about how this dynamic unfolds in abuse cultures and put a halt to it.
11:58
unknown: Wow.
11:59
SPEAKER_01: In your book, you compare the bullied brain to a concussion.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: That's like heavy.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: Can you explain like what actually happens to the brain that you can actually say it's as bad as a concussion?
12:16
SPEAKER_00: So if you think back in in not long ago, we used to think that a concussion was kind of a badge of honor.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, get back out there, you just got your bell rung, you know, get back into play and show your parents and your coach and your teammates what you can do.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, you're tough, that type of thing.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: Well, we now know from non-invasive technology that a concussion is actually a traumatic brain injury.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: What happens is the brain slams against the hard bone of the skull and it causes blood to seep through the blood-brain barrier.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: And as soon as that happens, as Dr.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: Michael Mernik says, the brain degrades all systems.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: So when you see a kid who's had a concussion or an adult, they won't remember their name.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: They don't know what month it is, they can't walk properly, and they don't remember that their memory gets scrambled, they can't concentrate, and they have a lot of pain.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: Well, Dr.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: Michael Mirzenik also says that when a brain is being abused, and you see, when you get abused, it has nothing to do with you.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: It's not like interpersonal relationships where you have an argument with someone.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: If you're being targeted for bullying and abuse, you actually aren't a participant at all.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: You're just a random target.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: And it has to do with the other person's trauma, psychopathology, uh, mental illness, whatever you want to call it.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: And they're projecting all of their stuff onto you.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: You're just this random individual.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: When that happens, as Dr.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: Michael Mirzenik says, the brain can't understand.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: He puts it, the brain can't answer the question.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: You can't answer the question, why is this person maltreating me?
13:52
SPEAKER_00: Why are they hurting me?
13:54
SPEAKER_00: What have I done?
13:55
SPEAKER_00: You can't answer any of those questions because sorry, there's no answer to those questions.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: It all lies in the with the perpetrator, because you're not a participant.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: You're just a you're a blank screen for them.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: So when the brain can't answer the question, it does the same thing as in a concussion.
14:11
SPEAKER_00: It degrades all systems.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: Because it can't, it starts, it's like when lungs breathe in toxic air, the lungs start to frantically try and get clean air, but they can't because they're breathing in toxic.
14:23
SPEAKER_00: Same thing with the heart.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: With the heart, its job is to pump blood.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: If there's a blockage, it all of a sudden starts, you know, malfunctioning, becomes irregulated, it becomes, it's not beating properly, et cetera.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: It can be very, very serious.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: Same thing with the brain.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: The brain is just another organ in the body.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: And the brain's job is to make sense of ridiculous amounts of data coming from the environment, from other people, and from the internal systems of the body.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: When the brain can't answer the question, it means it can't tell a meaningful story, starts to degrade all systems.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: This is why when kids are being bullied in school by other kids or kids are being maltreated by adults, they can't concentrate, they can't remember, their grades drop, they're not good at their sport anymore, they they withdraw, they start to self-medicate.
15:11
SPEAKER_00: They're trying to do everything in their power to be able to get better, to answer the question, but no one tells them that it's actually a brain malfunction that's happening.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: So is there a difference between being bullied by an authority figure like a teacher, a coach, even the parent, as opposed to, you know, when a child is bullied by another child?
15:32
SPEAKER_00: Well, what's interesting is the research is actually pretty parallel in terms of the damage it does to the brain.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: So you can see a group of totally healthy teenagers, they look completely fine from the outside.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: If they are repeatedly verbally abused by adults, their brains will look similar to the brains of children that are sexually and physically abused.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: So in our culture, we we tend to dismiss the verbal.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: We dismiss things like ignoring, not giving feedback, emotional neglect, not providing love and care and nurture and encouragement.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: We we dismiss those things.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: There's not even criminal laws attached to them, but they do the same kind of brain damage that physical and sexual abuse do.
16:12
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it manifests in the brain in slightly different ways, but you still see the same kind of serious harm.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: Amazingly enough, kids being bullied by peers will show similar damage.
16:23
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes bully kids develop what you call a bullied brain mindset.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: So explain what that looks like in terms of behavior.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: What are the signs of a bullied brain mindset?
16:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so a bullied brain, there's two different ways it can it can really go.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: It depends on the person, right?
16:42
SPEAKER_00: So one group will become defiant, they'll become aggressive, they will lean towards violence, they will become bullies themselves and target other people that they can they can harm in that way.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: Not that I mean, or they can work out their own trauma with.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: On the flip side, and this is the direction my son went in, my son is a very introverted person on one level.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he's social when he wants to be, but he's also like a deep thinker and he's a good listener, he's quiet.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: So his became very internalized in terms of withdrawal.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: He his response was so if you think fight flight or fight-flight freeze, the fighting personality, the fighting person, or depending on the environment, they will they'll start to lash out.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: They'll be they'll be, you know, a very difficult child to work with.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: These kids end up in prison, right?
17:31
SPEAKER_00: The other group, they become very withdrawn, they become very quiet, they lose their voice, and they get missed by the system.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: We miss them.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: I missed my son's trauma because they're so easy to work with, they're so quiet, they're so non-confrontational, but they're suffering.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: They're really, really suffering.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: What are some of the signs that parents might notice or look for if their adult child is still affected from being bullied?
17:59
SPEAKER_01: Because you mentioned a few things, and I'm for the parent who has the young adult that's home and is more like your son, quiet, maybe suffering from some low self-confidence, has difficult trusting people.
18:12
SPEAKER_01: You're saying that you missed it.
18:15
SPEAKER_01: Is it possible that parents can miss these signs?
18:20
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: I'll give you two really concrete examples that are my personal ones.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: My son would come home from practice and he'd go straight into his room and close the door.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: And we were like, we're sort of parents who are very sensitized, and it was like, oh, you know, moody teenager, the last thing he wants is to spend time with us or interact or anything.
18:41
SPEAKER_00: He's closed the door for a reason.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: We don't want to invade his privacy.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: You know, we did all of those kinds of things.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: Looking back, it was just an absolute trauma response.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: When he was being driven to practice, you could see the signs that he was under extreme stress.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: So this is the real mistake we made, though.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: And my son is the one that taught me because I said to him, when I got the information from the other kids, and we had he had some insights into what was going on, but not nearly at all what was really going on.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: So I said to him, I said, Montgomery, why didn't you tell me?
19:16
SPEAKER_00: Why didn't you tell me what was happening?
19:18
SPEAKER_00: And he he looked down, my son is like six, four, so he looked down at me and he said, he put his hands on my shoulders and he said, I did tell you.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: And I just, I felt ill.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: He said, and he repeated the phrases, those guys are freaks.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: I hate those guys.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: That's what he said about his coaches on two separate occasions.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: I missed it.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: Now, if I had trained my son what abuse was, what it looked like, why people did it, how it impacted him, how it would impact him, how it would impact the target as well as all the witnesses that were forced to watch this kind of thing, he would have had the vocabulary to say to me, I am being relentlessly, emotionally, and physically assaulted by the two teachers.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: One watches while the other does it.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: They relentlessly are swearing, using homophobic slurs, calling us retards.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: They, they, it's all about favoritism.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: All kinds of kids that don't deserve the position, get it, because this is how abuse cultures work.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: They lean on fear, humiliation, and favoritism.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: Fear, humiliation, and favoritism, and then take it all the way down to abuse cultures in a school, on a sport team, in an arts program, in church, Boy Scouts, whatever, you will see the exact same pattern: fear, humiliation, and favoritism.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: So that's, I mean, I didn't teach my son that vocabulary.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: And what I've now learned from the brain science, which is so important to know, brains cannot understand what's happening or articulate them, or even really, we could argue, feel what's happening without the vocabulary to express it.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: So a whole chapter in the gaslit brain is dedicated to this simple fact that we the more we learn and share and have with one another a really well-designed and accurate set of emotion concepts for abuse culture, the more we can keep each other safe.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm curious, can you tell when you meet a young adult whether or not they've suffered any type of brain damage from abuse of bullying?
21:30
SPEAKER_01: Is it clear to you now?
21:33
SPEAKER_00: That's a really interesting question.
21:35
SPEAKER_00: There's certain things that I've learned that indicate to me, in an interesting way, when you come face to face with someone who has been maltreated and harmed and suffered a lot and traumatized, they will look much more likely at the lower part of your face than they will meet your eyes.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: And the reason being is because they live in a state of constant fear, says.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: So constant fight, flight, and freeze and fawn is the other one.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: And those big markers, if people aren't clear on those, that is just simply your automatic or your autonomic, they say, automatic nervous system.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: So your nervous system is designed, it's your brain and your body working together.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system is designed for you to escape from a predator, basically, or a natural disaster.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: So that's why your whole system ramps up immediately when you recognize something's very, very stressful.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: So in the 21st century, this system isn't working well for us anymore because we're very rarely do we encounter an actual predator.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: What we do encounter is intra-species predators, other human beings who are dangerous.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: And our system is highly sensitized to that.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: But we can also get this kind of a stress response for public speaking or doing an interview or having a financial stress or big, huge work presentation.
23:00
SPEAKER_00: We can still have that kind of big stress response.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: And if we're not aware of it, we don't get really good at lowering our stress and calming it down, which we can do, and we can talk about that ultimately if you want to.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's chapters dedicated into exactly how to do that in the bullied brain, because the book is very action-oriented in terms of, okay, yeah, this is bad news.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: Here's the good news.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: We have a million things we can do to moderate these kinds of things, but we need the awareness in order to do it.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: So when you meet someone who kind of struggles to look you in the eyes, that might be a little bit of a red flag that they've been hurt and that they are struggling and they don't even know it sometimes themselves.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: Then look at the lower part of the face because that's where you can get an indication if someone is a threat or not.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: When you look someone deeply in the eyes, you're trying to find out about them.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: You you're curious, you want to engage, you're meeting them, you know, on a on a level like that that's quite different.
23:57
SPEAKER_01: Here's the big question.
23:59
SPEAKER_01: Is this permanent?
24:02
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely not.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: And I use the word absolutely because Dr.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: Michael Merzenick, who's one of the world's most highly awarded, most brilliant neuroscientists ever, he is the master of what's called neuroplasticity.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: We talked about it at the beginning.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: He's the one, 40 years of research in his lab, that showed that our brains are always changing and adapting.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: Your brain is never fixed.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: But here's the kicker it's changing your brain to be more what you want and healthier and happier and more high-performing.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: It's as hard work as getting in shape.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: So if you've been sitting on the couch watching Netflix and you suddenly go, that's it, I'm gonna get in shape.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: We all know how hard that is.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: It requires day in, day out, hard work in the jogging or in the gym or biking or walking, whatever it is that you're gonna do to get in shape, it's not easy.
24:53
SPEAKER_00: And your brain is gonna be really resistant.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be like, oh, come on, let's just watch Netflix.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: This makes me so uncomfortable.
24:59
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to do all this work.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: But if you can get your brain to do the practice, the hard practice long enough, as you know, at cut to four months, six months, next thing you know, your brain is completely gone the other way.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, well, why aren't we going running today?
25:15
SPEAKER_00: Today's a good day for a run.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: I'd love to get out there.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: We love, we feel so good when we do this.
25:19
SPEAKER_00: You can absolutely change your brain.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so in your book, I'm at that point now where you give some really powerful tools to help the you know, repairing and and healing.
25:30
SPEAKER_01: For our listener, can you share one or two of those ways that can help heal the brain?
25:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, the great thing about neuroscience is it makes a lot of sense.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: It's not going to surprise you.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: It actually is just scientific confirmation of a lot of things that we already know.
25:50
SPEAKER_00: But when you read the science on why mindfulness is so good for you, it's pretty convincing to try and put in that 20 minutes a day.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: It's unbelievably good for your brain and your body.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: Same thing with aerobic fitness.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: Unbelievably good for your brain and body.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: And let me just give you an example from the neuroscience side of things that, again, is highly motivating.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: So when you remember we talked about fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: And just to clarify fawn, because most people don't hear that, a fawn person is someone who identifies with the aggressor.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: They're, they're the favorite person, the person that will then, because they they are not getting what, they're not getting their privileges and benefits from meritocracy, they're getting it because there's an abuse culture at work.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: All the people that have the meritocracy, they get fired and they get replaced with people that don't have the same, they haven't earned the same right to be in these positions, but they will be absolutely dedicated to the leader that gave them that position.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: They will sell their soul to keep that position, keep getting the benefits, keep being the favorite.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: And the abuse culture person who, the perpetrator, needs these people because when reports come in about the abuse that they do, these people will defend them.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: They will say, absolutely, he would never do that.
27:04
SPEAKER_00: That's not true.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: You don't understand.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: And then you get into this crazy illusion world again.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: So aerobic exercise, what happens is when you are going into this stress, we talked about it's automatic, your nervous system makes it happen.
27:19
SPEAKER_00: What happens is adrenaline and cortisol get released in the brain and body.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: When cortisol is repeatedly, it's a stress hormone, and when it comes, when it keeps shooting up into the brain and body, it does serious damage.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: It does serious damage to the brain, it does serious damage to the heart and the gut, like really serious, like chronic disease serious.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: When you look at the brain on a brain scan, it leaves visible neurological scars.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: You can see the damage, physical damage to the brain.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: And this is from all kinds of normalized behaviors in our culture that you're not protected from.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: Yelling, put downs, humiliation, ignoring, ghosting.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: I could go on and on.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: We all know the kinds of behaviors that happen.
28:02
SPEAKER_00: Well, they're really, really not great.
28:04
SPEAKER_00: When they activate cortisol, they hurt your brain and body.
28:07
SPEAKER_00: What does aerobic fitness do?
28:09
SPEAKER_00: It replaces the cortisol with what's called BDNF.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: All you need to know is it's like a fertilizer for neuroplasticity, how our brains change.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: So if you want to take care of your brain and get it really fit and in shape and fabulous, these are the kinds of things you'll do.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: You'll do mindfulness, you'll find up time for aerobic exercise every day if you can, because it's so good for your brain and body.
28:33
SPEAKER_00: And here's one third thing that you could do, which is uh brain HQ.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: That's so brain headquarters.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: Brain HQ is a program online designed by a team of international neuroscientists.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: The lead scientist is Dr.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: Michael Merzenik, who's my great supporter, and I'm absolutely blessed to have him care about my work and support it.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: But this, it's like doing, it's gamified, it's online.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: You put in half an hour a day, it's really, really good for your brain.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: So you can check that out.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: There's tons of research on it.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: You can just look at it online, brainhq.com.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: But I would recommend if you're worried or if you're worried about your child, this is an excellent thing to do.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: You could do it together as a fun, you know, project and and and make it kind of a family thing.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: You could do it with your all your kids starting like 12 all the way up.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: It's it's an excellent thing to do.
29:25
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
29:26
SPEAKER_01: You I just want to kind of go back for one second.
29:28
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people don't, the the term mindfulness is thrown around a lot and a lot of people don't understand it.
29:33
SPEAKER_01: So if you can just kind of go back to mindfulness and and explain a technique of mindfulness or what it means, because again, I don't think I think it's a term people use, but they don't really fully understand how to achieve that level of mindfulness.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the really interesting thing about mindfulness, going back to what we were saying about the nervous system, is our brain interprets every stress we feel.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: It can't see anything, right?
29:58
SPEAKER_00: It's in our head, so it can't see.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: So it depends on us to give it the information and it gets the information through how stressed we are.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: We're starting to breathe shallowly, um, we're starting to panic, we're starting to feel stressed, uncomfortable, etc.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: And it will marshal resources to help us.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: It will put us into fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so what mindfulness does is you it really matters to do the deep breathing.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: Because when you do deep belly breathing from the very core of yourself, and you breathe in very, very slowly, and then you slowly release and you pay a lot of attention to this, even though it seems simple, it's actually hard to do.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: And you you clear your mind and you you just infuse yourself with kindness for yourself and the world and all people in it.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: That kind of kindness, that non-judgmental, the deep breathing, basically what you're telling your brain through your, you're using your body and your intentions to tell your brain that you're safe.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: When you're safe through the mindfulness, so you keep doing this, keep doing it, when you tell your brain you're safe, it's like, oh great.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: It drops the cortisol, drops the adrenaline, it starts to just go into what the neuroscientists call rest and digest.
31:14
SPEAKER_00: You know how a kid will tell you, I've got a stomachache, I don't want to go to school, I feel sick to my stomach, I can't go to that interview, you know, the way you're talking to me, I just don't feel well, I've got a migraine.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: These are all symptoms of, or not always, I mean, there can be other factors, of course, but they may be symptoms of feeling extreme stress because body and brain, they're they work together, they are the same thing.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: And so it's called, just to give you the official term, so when you activate your sympathetic stress response, that's fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: When you want to take it down, and you can do it through mindfulness, the deep breathing, the kindness, the calmness, all of that, what you're doing is activating your parasympathetic response, which is rest and digest.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: And it's so healthy, it's incredibly good for brain and body.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to, I I feel like the listener is wondering what happened with your son.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: Did he?
32:10
SPEAKER_01: I just want to I want to go there because it's been many years.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: So before we move on to the next topic, I want you to tell us how Montgomery Matt like handled this and how is he today?
32:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, you're just such a mum, Sherry.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: That's just hilarious that you asked.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: That of course, all the parents, I forgot all the parents are like, oh my God, how is he?
32:29
SPEAKER_00: Um so this happened when he was, it all blew up.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it had been going on for a while.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: It all blew up when he was 16.
32:38
SPEAKER_00: He, my son has what my brother has described him as having steely comportment.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: So our son is just, he's, he's just unbelievable.
32:49
SPEAKER_00: So he it's so complicated.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: So what the school did was they dragged out all these fake processes, fake investigations, all this garbage that they were doing.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: They were, they were presenting the facade of, oh, we care about the kids and we're gonna do the right thing.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: But really, what they were doing is navigating how to save themselves because they were negligent.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: But we didn't know that.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: So they dragged it all out.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: It was too late for us to move our son to another school because it was it was August when they when they pulled out the fake investigation.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: And so I went to my doctor and I just said, you know what, I'm I'm gonna have to go on stress leave.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, there's no way I'm going back to that workplace after all that's happened.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: And she looked at me and she said, Are you telling me that all the students that came forward, including your son, are gonna have to go back to school next year into that, into that atmosphere?
33:38
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Yeah, yeah.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: And she said, pull yourself together.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: She said, you will go into that school every single day, hell, head held high, because you're the only thing standing between those kids and what this, you know, toxic workplace is gonna do to them.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, yes, ma'am.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh my God, you know, so no stress leave for me.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: So Montgomery and I went into that school every single day for grade 12.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: He missed 172 days of school.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: He started to have anxiety, extreme anxiety, extreme depression, panic attacks.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: He went from being an honors student to not being able to write his advanced placement exams.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he refused to go to his graduation because he didn't want some kid to say something when he walked across the stage.
34:23
SPEAKER_00: They made him the poster child for this whole thing.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: And they were trying to get me, they were trying to silence me, which, as you can all well imagine listening here today, they didn't succeed at one thing I'm not, it's silent.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, so Montgomery now, he turns 30 today, and he is a brilliant camera.
34:45
SPEAKER_00: Today?
34:45
SPEAKER_00: His 30th birthday.
34:47
SPEAKER_00: He's in Italy.
34:48
SPEAKER_00: He's in Italy with his girlfriend.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he turns 30 today.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: Um, and he he's just fabulous.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: He's he's taken his steely comportment into the film industry.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: He's a camera operator.
34:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, he lives this kind of amazing lifestyle.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: The lessons he learned in everything that we went through was basically he won't take anything from anybody now.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: So you can imagine some of the egos in the film industry.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: They he'll tell them right away, don't speak to me that way, don't look at me that way, don't do that, uh-uh.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: Like he will not tolerate anything.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: He's incredibly empathic, which you have to be in film because there's so many different people working at once.
35:27
SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a huge workplace, and you have to navigate all kinds of things simultaneously.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: So he has amazing friends, he loves the work, he's he's an incredible athlete.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: So he's able to move with like grace and agility through very complex film sets holding extremely expensive equipment that's also very heavy.
35:46
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, he learned a lot in this horrible situation.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we can hope for ourselves and our kids always is that, you know, we we can't avoid horrible things.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: We can't avoid making brutal mistakes like I did, but we can always keep learning and trying and being, you know, our better self because it's gonna impact our kids, how we how we handle things.
36:09
SPEAKER_01: I'm so proud and pleased that Montgomery has come through this on the other side.
36:14
SPEAKER_01: But what about someone who doesn't go through the healing process?
36:17
SPEAKER_01: Like, would they repeat the cycle?
36:20
SPEAKER_01: Do they do this to others?
36:22
SPEAKER_01: Is that like what what happens?
36:24
SPEAKER_01: How does that bullied brain grow up unhealed and then live without doing any damage to someone else?
36:33
SPEAKER_01: By any chance, does that lead to narcissism?
36:38
SPEAKER_00: Well, so the the really sad answer to that is that it's called by the psychologists call it the dark triad.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure if you've heard that term, but the dark triad is narcissists, Machiavellians, and psychopaths.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: And it's very complex.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to make, I don't want to simplify too much, but in the research, one of the most deciding factors of individuals who become narcissists and psychopaths and Machiavellians is abuse and neglect.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: So those people come by their trauma, honestly, and they unleash it all over the place on other people.
37:16
SPEAKER_00: And it becomes a cycle and it becomes a contagion.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: It's like an epidemic.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: You know, we talk about the epidemic of bullying.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, because but we don't treat it as a medical crisis.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: We don't quarantine these individuals and try to get them some kind of health and well-being and recovery.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: We just let them roam around and they're masters at manipulation.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: So they're very good at covering up the harmful things that they do.
37:43
SPEAKER_00: That's one of the things that they excel at.
37:45
SPEAKER_00: And so they actually rise up into positions of power and they they day in, day out, decade after decade, do terrible things to people.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: And so those people get sick too.
37:54
SPEAKER_00: It's not good.
37:56
SPEAKER_01: I'm curious, does a narcissist have brain damage because of the bullying and abuse that happened to them?
38:04
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
38:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:05
SPEAKER_00: You can in the bullied brain, I talk about the brain differences that you see on a brain scan between a narcissist, a Machiavellian, and a psychopath.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: In the gaslit brain, the whole central part, the part two of the book, is exactly about how these brains are, and they're very different than a healthy brain.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: Let me give you a quick example.
38:26
SPEAKER_00: If a healthy brain is put into an FMRI machine, we all know MRI, we might have had an MRI.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: FMRI just makes it into a video.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: So you can actually watch the brain in action.
38:38
SPEAKER_00: So if you put a healthy brain into that kind of a machine and you show really awful images, you show, you know, somebody being humiliated, someone being yelled at, someone being physically hurt, someone being abused in some way, or an animal, an animal being abused in some awful way.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: The brain can't help itself, it reacts.
39:01
SPEAKER_00: So you can watch it react.
39:02
SPEAKER_00: And what gets activated in the healthy brain is the emotional centers of the brain and the affective empathy neural circuit.
39:09
SPEAKER_00: So the affective empathy neural circuit is like, you know, if I said to you, Sherry, you know, I really feel your pain.
39:16
SPEAKER_00: Told me something about yourself or what you suffered or your child or something, I would, I would literally feel it.
39:22
SPEAKER_00: And what's amazingly fascinating is you can put two brains into a machine.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: Let's pretend it's you and me, we're in these separate machines, and and they start to put pinpricks into my hand, your brain will react the same way as mine.
39:36
SPEAKER_00: You will literally, on a brain level, feel my pain.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: And the reason being is our brains were constructed to care for each other.
39:43
SPEAKER_00: Mine will be, you know, yours will be muted because your brain doesn't can't feel the full pain of actual, you know, pin stabbing into my hand because then you wouldn't be able to help me.
39:54
SPEAKER_00: Your brain reflects what's happening in a muted way because you're meant to go to my aid, which is just, you know, human brains are designed for connection, for community, for compassion.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: We can even co-regulate one another.
40:08
SPEAKER_00: Like if I came into the room today and said to you that I was unbelievably stressed out, I couldn't do the interview.
40:13
SPEAKER_00: By your talking to me, the use of your voice, you're looking into my eyes, you know, if we weren't virtual, you'd reach out and you know, put your hand on my shoulder.
40:22
SPEAKER_00: You would calm down my nervous system.
40:24
SPEAKER_00: This is one of the greatest techniques parents can use with their kids, is if their kid is really ramped up and really stressed out or really withdrawn, they can use their physical presence, their the kindness in their face, the their eyes, their physical voice, that the caring, loving intonation of their voice to bring that child back from a stressed out place.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: It's called co-regulation in the research.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: So, okay, now here's the bad news.
40:50
SPEAKER_00: If you put a psychopath into, or narcissist Machiavellian, if you put them into the brain scanner and you show them the same images that they showed the healthy brain, the exact same images, unfortunately and kind of tragically, their emotional centers don't light up and their affective empathy does not light up.
41:09
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't ignite like it does in a healthy brain.
41:12
SPEAKER_00: What does light up is language and cognition.
41:16
SPEAKER_00: And those are the skills you need in order to manipulate people and lie and cover up.
41:24
SPEAKER_00: And so it's really terrible.
41:25
SPEAKER_00: Like what we need to tell our kids is if you are acting out and bullying another child, you're hurting your brain as much as you're hurting their brain.
41:34
SPEAKER_00: It's a negative brain experience for both perpetrator and victim.
41:39
SPEAKER_00: Because what what the perpetrator is doing is eroding their affective empathy circuit.
41:45
SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
41:46
SPEAKER_00: The most needed quality in the workplace today is empathy.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
41:53
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
41:54
SPEAKER_01: Here we go.
41:55
SPEAKER_01: At some point, you shift from bullying to gaslighting.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: And that's the second book that you wrote.
42:01
SPEAKER_01: I want to talk about why that is.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: Why did you do why did you go from bullying to gaslighting?
42:07
SPEAKER_00: So let's go back to this big crisis at the school.
42:10
SPEAKER_00: So I go into the headmaster who I've known for eight years, charming guy, I big administrative, a very wealthy, you know, 100-year-old private school.
42:20
SPEAKER_00: I go in and I tell him what the students have reported about the abuse, the physical abuse, the psychological abuse, relentless.
42:29
SPEAKER_00: And he looks at me and he smiles and he goes, Oh, that's just old school coaching.
42:36
SPEAKER_00: And in that moment, honestly, it was like being for me.
42:40
SPEAKER_00: Of course, I would have just kept a blank face, but inside myself, I felt like I'd been electrocuted.
42:46
SPEAKER_00: I was like, wait a second.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm I'm a language person, I'm a literary person.
42:52
SPEAKER_00: I'm trained to decode language and spin and the way wording is, I hone in on it.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: That's what I do.
43:01
SPEAKER_00: And when he said that to me, I realized I didn't have the language for it at the time, but I now know he was trying to gaslight me.
43:08
SPEAKER_00: So he was gaslighting me, and this is what gaslighting is, essentially.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: I present him with abuse, and he tells me it's just an old school coaching method, right?
43:21
SPEAKER_00: And so he's trying to make my reality shift.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't want me to see the abuse.
43:27
SPEAKER_00: He wants me to change my perception of reality, not trust myself, not trust my own ability to decode what's happening, what I've heard directly from students.
43:35
SPEAKER_00: He's trying to tell me it's something else.
43:38
SPEAKER_00: So it's so when that happened, I started to really think a lot about gaslighting, how it works, how it happens, why people do it.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: And that's what the gaslit brain is all about.
43:51
SPEAKER_00: Because when someone starts to try and manipulate your reality, they tell you that what you're seeing or hearing or witnessing isn't actually.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: Right, they're going to replace it with their own version of events, their alternative facts that they want you to think is reality, you're in big trouble.
44:09
SPEAKER_00: That is incredibly dangerous.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: It's funny because when years ago, and I we're about the same age, gaslighting wasn't a term that we used.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: And I only learned what it meant, you know, recently, I'd say in the last few years.
44:24
SPEAKER_01: And now I know for sure that I've experienced it.
44:27
SPEAKER_01: But why is gaslighting so damaging?
44:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:30
SPEAKER_00: So gaslighting, what makes it so dangerous, is that it's very hard for the brain to identify it.
44:37
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make sense to you.
44:38
SPEAKER_00: And the more you're a good, thoughtful, reflective, caring person who has integrity, you are gonna fall prey to this kind of gaslighting.
44:50
SPEAKER_00: So we have we have a bad habit of thinking that people who get gaslit and manipulated are gullible.
44:56
SPEAKER_00: They're ignorant, they're gullible, it's kind of their own fault, is what we think to ourselves.
45:00
SPEAKER_00: But in actual fact, the more intelligent you are, the more compassionate you are, the more integrity you have, the more you're gonna get targeted and the more you're gonna be susceptible to gaslighting.
45:11
SPEAKER_00: So in the gaslit brain, I did four case studies at the beginning to make this point.
45:15
SPEAKER_00: I chose four people who you would think, on the surface, are untouchable.
45:20
SPEAKER_00: I'll give you an example of one.
45:22
SPEAKER_00: One was a uh superintendent detective for the Met police in London.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he's a counter-terrorism expert, he's a lawyer, he's been in his career for 28 years, he gets along with all his colleagues fabulously.
45:35
SPEAKER_00: He's basically slated to be the next commissioner, and um, but he's full of integrity.
45:40
SPEAKER_00: So when he sees police like police uh, you know, uh exploitative or negative or kind of uh behaviors of different kinds, he reported it and he shut it down in his leadership position.
45:54
SPEAKER_00: Well, that put a target on his back.
45:56
SPEAKER_00: And they bullied him, and the it's the gaslighting though that really impacted his brain because bullying is very obvious.
46:06
SPEAKER_00: You know, you can pretty much you can recognize it more easily.
46:09
SPEAKER_00: Gaslighting operates on reversals.
46:12
SPEAKER_00: So here's the fascinating thing.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: He goes, he's gonna meet with his superior, he's gonna, he's gonna report to her, he's told her there's bullying going on.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: She sends in an email back saying, we have zero tolerance for bullying in the Met police.
46:26
SPEAKER_00: Come and meet with me.
46:27
SPEAKER_00: He comes in to meet with her, and she's really, really um sort of uh condescending and disdainful, which is weird.
46:37
SPEAKER_00: He's like, wait, what?
46:38
SPEAKER_00: Why is she acting like this?
46:40
SPEAKER_00: And she says that she's met with the two people that he had identified as perpetrators of bullying that he was reporting.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: She's met with them, and her conclusion is that he's the problem.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: The second that gets said to you, you're in the gaslighting world.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: And gaslighting is a hall of mirrors.
46:56
SPEAKER_00: So being the good person, the self-reflective person of integrity who has care and compassion, he immediately starts, his brain starts to go, oh, I'm the problem.
47:06
SPEAKER_00: What did I do wrong?
47:08
SPEAKER_00: How could I be better?
47:09
SPEAKER_00: I need to go and find out how to make amends.
47:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, it's just a scrambling of the brain.
47:16
SPEAKER_00: And let's go back to Dr.
47:17
SPEAKER_00: Michael Murznick.
47:18
SPEAKER_00: When the brain can't answer the question, it degrades all systems.
47:21
SPEAKER_00: The second you degrade all systems in the brain, it's like you have a concussion.
47:25
SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
47:26
SPEAKER_00: You're way easier to manipulate.
47:28
SPEAKER_00: The second your brain is humiliated and feels afraid, and you're targeted, you're not one of the favorites, when your brain is afraid like that, you're putting all your resources into threat detection.
47:41
SPEAKER_00: You lose your capacity to problem solve, you're no longer creative, you struggle to collaborate, you can't do any of all the remarkable brain functions that you've been gifted with, because you are putting all your resources into threat detection because you are you are afraid.
47:58
SPEAKER_00: Like, where is the next attack coming from?
48:00
SPEAKER_00: That's what your brain is doing.
48:02
SPEAKER_00: And all the time it puts its energy into survival like that, it's it's not able to do all the other things our brains need to do, including managing the butt the body budget.
48:12
SPEAKER_00: That's why your health takes a terrible turn for the worse when you are being treated this way, maltreated.
48:19
SPEAKER_01: So, is there any way to prevent gaslighting?
48:22
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes.
48:23
SPEAKER_00: So the book, there's the four case studies.
48:26
SPEAKER_00: The central part of the book is what is going on in the brain of the gaslighter.
48:30
SPEAKER_00: The last part of the book is six chapters of different forms of brain understanding in order to teach you how to discern between truth and lies.
48:42
SPEAKER_00: And it teaches you why your brain is susceptible to gaslighting and all these six different methods on what to do about it.
48:50
SPEAKER_00: And the reason we we fall for gaslighting is because nobody teaches us anything about our brains for the most part.
48:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I had to do this deep dive myself, and I'm not a neuroscientist, but I learned, and being an educator, I'm like, everybody needs to know this.
49:05
SPEAKER_00: It's how we keep ourselves and how we keep our kids safe.
49:08
SPEAKER_01: When I do solo episodes, I talk about actionable steps that parents can take.
49:13
SPEAKER_01: So right now we've given them so much information, but for a parent that wants to actually do something about this, what can they do?
49:20
SPEAKER_00: A great thing to do with a young person who is struggling with their stress is to have a, it's called cold cognition.
49:28
SPEAKER_00: So cold cognition is when you're both calm, you're both relaxed, and you both are saying, okay, we got to develop this shared vocabulary so that we can help each other, we can co-regulate each other's stress, we can stop taking our stress out on each other, you know, with older kids and you're so worried about them that you act out and you know, we've all been there.
49:47
SPEAKER_00: So I love this idea because you're using cold cognition moments when everybody feels calm and happy to prepare for hot cognition when somebody's stressed out.
49:57
SPEAKER_00: And you have it, you develop a code word for it.
50:00
SPEAKER_00: So this is how you de-escalate the stress.
50:02
SPEAKER_00: So let's pretend, Sherry, you're in my code word for this is we go rest and digest.
50:08
SPEAKER_00: And so if I was getting all ramped up and I'm starting to take things out on you, and I might be like insinuating this or that, or putting you down, or not hearing you, and just, you know, kind of projecting my own issues onto you, and it's jeopardizing our friendship.
50:21
SPEAKER_00: You you would look at me and just go, rest and digest.
50:25
SPEAKER_00: And in that moment, you trip up my brain, and my brain goes, Oh yeah, all that work we did when we felt calm, you just made me recognize that I'm feeling really stressed out.
50:34
SPEAKER_00: And then I can apologize and say I need 10 minutes to myself, and then come back to the situation.
50:42
SPEAKER_00: And here's one other actionable step that's a really, really good one.
50:45
SPEAKER_00: This one's harder to do, but it's very doable.
50:48
SPEAKER_00: So, especially if you have a crisis, this is called empathic listening.
50:53
SPEAKER_00: Quick reminder to you empathy is when you feel someone else's pain, you try to get into their shoes and walk in their shoes, you try to see the world through the lens that they see the world as.
51:04
SPEAKER_00: So a parent is going to see the world very differently from their child because everything's changed from when we were growing up to what they're going through.
51:13
SPEAKER_00: We might not understand or see their stress, but if we really listen to them, we will learn it.
51:18
SPEAKER_00: So in empathic listening, you've got the two people, so the child and the parent, let's say, and the let's say that child goes first.
51:25
SPEAKER_00: So it's a crisis around curfew.
51:29
SPEAKER_00: Curfew is always a good one.
51:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so it's a crisis around curfew.
51:32
SPEAKER_00: So the child gets to speak first, and they speak for say a minute, and they describe to the parent why they broke curfew.
51:40
SPEAKER_00: And they can only go for about a minute because the parent's job is not to say a word, which is really hard to do, believe it or not.
51:46
SPEAKER_00: It's really hard to do.
51:48
SPEAKER_00: You can't say a word, you can't roll your eyes, you can't make any type of a non-vocacy, you know, a vocal sound or or you know, throw your hands up in the air.
51:58
SPEAKER_00: You cannot react on any level.
52:01
SPEAKER_00: Your only job is to listen, and then when the child finishes speaking after a minute or so, you repeat back as accurately as possible, adding absolutely nothing, no tone of voice, no attitude, no nothing.
52:13
SPEAKER_00: You repeat back to the child exactly what they said.
52:16
SPEAKER_00: They then speak another minute, another minute, another minute, same thing.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: Your only job is to listen and repeat.
52:22
SPEAKER_00: When they are finished, they say to you, I feel heard.
52:27
SPEAKER_00: And then it's your turn.
52:28
SPEAKER_00: And you do the same thing, but you get to tell them how you felt, how worried sick you were, how you you want to trust them more than life itself.
52:36
SPEAKER_00: But if they don't come home on time, you feel like it erodes your trust in them and you don't trust that they're taking care of themselves and blah, blah, blah.
52:43
SPEAKER_00: Imagine all the things that you'd say.
52:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, all of a sudden, two people that are really mad at each other suddenly have compassion for one another's decision that they made.
52:53
SPEAKER_00: And it gives you the the, it gives you a shared moment to say, okay, how can we do this better next time?
52:59
SPEAKER_00: How can we, oh, you need your curfew a bit later because I'm cramping your stop.
53:03
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you can text me at curfew to explain why you're not gonna be home because I'm gonna be up anyway.
53:07
SPEAKER_00: You think not to text because I'm asleep?
53:09
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm not asleep, frankly.
53:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm waiting.
53:12
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, that would be a really good exercise.
53:14
SPEAKER_00: So to go over the three actionable steps, develop code word for de-escalation for situations where you're kind of a loggerheads.
53:22
SPEAKER_00: Get into the habit of doing empathic listening with each other so that you really know how each other thinks and feels and intends.
53:30
SPEAKER_00: And then, and also it's building that skill for them that's so needed in the workplace.
53:35
SPEAKER_00: It is so needed.
53:37
SPEAKER_00: So it's a fabulous exercise to do, it's really good for the brain.
53:40
SPEAKER_00: And then the third one is developing a shared vocabulary of abuse culture.
53:45
SPEAKER_00: And as we said, Sherry, at the very beginning, that's hard to do.
53:48
SPEAKER_00: It makes us uncomfortable.
53:50
SPEAKER_00: But the less our kids know about abuse, the more they are going to be served over to perpetrators on a silver platter.
53:57
SPEAKER_01: It's incredible.
53:59
SPEAKER_01: This information is incredible that bullying and gaslighting is not just about hurting someone's feelings anymore.
54:07
SPEAKER_01: It's so much more deeper than that.
54:09
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the fact that it causes brain damage.
54:12
SPEAKER_01: It's I'm I'm just sitting with this right now and thinking about all the things that you've said.
54:17
SPEAKER_01: But I love, I love your suggestions.
54:20
SPEAKER_01: Those are I I almost want to finish right now because I want parents to walk away and remember how powerful those suggestions are.
54:29
SPEAKER_01: I always love leaving on a positive note.
54:31
SPEAKER_01: That was positive, but what is the most important message that you hope parents can take away from this conversation?
54:42
SPEAKER_00: My statement that I always say is hurt brains hurt.
54:47
SPEAKER_00: So if we can have especially immense compassion for kids that are hurting and they don't know they're hurting, they don't know they have a brain injury, they don't know why they act and do the things that they do, if we can have profound compassion for that, as a community, as a parent community, as a larger community, we can start to rehabilitate brains that are derailed by neglect and abuse.
55:13
SPEAKER_00: And I think, I really think we can do that.
55:15
SPEAKER_00: I believe that.
55:17
SPEAKER_00: But it's it's gonna take a big group commitment.
55:21
SPEAKER_00: It's not an easy thing to do, and it's hard.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
55:24
SPEAKER_01: I want to thank you so much for sharing your time, your wisdom, your research.
55:30
SPEAKER_01: I think parents are gonna get so much out of this.
55:32
SPEAKER_01: It's the least I've talked in a long time, but I really wanted to give you the space because you you are truly an expert in this.
55:41
SPEAKER_01: I find this incredibly reassuring to know that we can heal the brain.
55:47
SPEAKER_01: That to me is like I can breathe, because I I feel like I hold my breath when you talk so much about the negative effects of bullying and gaslighting, but I feel this calmness when I know that we can heal.
55:58
SPEAKER_01: And I truly appreciate everything you shared today.
56:01
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
56:03
SPEAKER_00: Well, it was great.
56:04
SPEAKER_00: It was great to talk to you.
56:05
SPEAKER_00: And I was I'm so happy to speak with parents, and it's a hard job being a parent, and anything that will help that and and give them confidence and insight and knowledge is just a joyful thing.
56:18
SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
56:18
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for creating the opportunity to talk about the research today.
56:22
SPEAKER_01: Honestly, I wish we could hug.
56:26
SPEAKER_00: We've got to stop talking to each other this year.
56:29
SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Jen.
56:30
SPEAKER_01: We'll talk again soon, I'm sure of it.
56:32
SPEAKER_01: I hope today's episode gave you valuable insights and actionable steps that will help you guide your young adult to launch successfully into adulthood.
56:42
SPEAKER_01: If you found this topic helpful, feel free to leave a comment and hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode.
56:48
SPEAKER_01: Leaving a five-star review helps us reach more parents who are dealing with the same issues.
56:53
SPEAKER_01: And if there's something you want to ask me, I invite you to join Launch Advice, my weekly publication where I answer one question from parents just like you.
57:02
SPEAKER_01: It's free advice that will appear in your inbox probably when you need it the most.
57:06
SPEAKER_01: Just click Launch Advice in the show notes, and don't forget to email me your confidential question.
57:12
SPEAKER_01: And remember, no one ever said parenting is easy, especially when you're raising an adult.
57:17
SPEAKER_01: Talk to you soon.