Jennifer Fraser > Quotes

“Speaking up, especially in childhood, is one of the hardest acts a person can do. It requires immense courage and sacrifice.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“The line between being demanding and being demeaning is as wide as an ocean.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Children learn bullying behavior from adults, but no one talks about this transfer of destructive behavior.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“I was suitably impressed with the eighty-six billion neurons that glittered like stars in the skull but was a little overwhelmed by the idea that the constellations could be moved, shaped, and changed negatively and positively.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“The beauty of neuroplasticity is that when you make changes to what you remember and how you remember it, what you do and how you do it, your brain overrides the old neural networks with new ones.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“With your brain veritably defined by its dynamic neuroplasticity, the cage that holds you back is an illusion. Your brain potential is unlimited.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke, and cortisol damages the cells of the hippocampus, crippling your ability to learn and remember.”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“They say that what would be bullying and abuse in other situations—such as yelling, swearing, violating physical and psychological integrity, using homophobic slurs—is actually just a natural part of the passionate, intense world of competitive athletics. It’s revealing to see identical abusive behavior described by Ian Pace in the arts world.”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“The brain learns by making mistakes; maybe we can stop punishing them.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Because abuse is a cycle, those who now occupy positions of power may well have brains so steeped in normalized bullying and abuse, that they can no longer think clearly.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“While the bullying paradigm creates destabilizing, fear-inducing, unpredictable conditions, the cornerstone of learning and healthy brain wiring is safety.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“When you have a fixed-mindset, then you see your brain as if it's a machine. When you have a growth-mindset, then you understand your brain as if it's a growing tree.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Rigid brains and inflexible mindsets --- whereby individuals and whole organizations ignore what is different and even outright reject it if it doesn't fit their established pattern of thinking --- cause much of the world's suffering.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Bullying applies to the tendency of parents, educators, or doctors to categorize and label children rather than see them empathically and treat them as holistic, complex beings with histories, hopes, and untapped potential.”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“brief influx of extreme stress was something you could recover from, but the more I learned about chronic stress, the kind you get when day after day you attend abusive practices,”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Machiavellians “look for situations that allow them to cheat and not get caught,” and as a way to cover up for their mediocrity, they “ingratiate” themselves with those in administrative, managerial, or leadership positions. In”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Mindfulness is paying attention here and now, with kindness and curiosity, so that we can choose our behavior.”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“fear is the dragon” that the hero must fight to achieve his goals.”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“However, from a neuroscientific point of view, it makes perfect sense that the individual, most likely once a victim, has developed a brain disorder—a split personality—that targets certain individuals, offers kindness and privileges to others, ingratiates themselves with those in power, covers up their abuse, and thereby perpetuates the abuse.”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“We use science to find the courage of a child and get to the naked truth.”
― Jennifer Fraser

“You can learn from brain scientists how to strengthen what's weak, make flexible what's rigid, and heal what might be broken.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Again, the goal is not to forgive and forget, dismiss and deny. The goal is to seek insight, diagnosis, rehabilitation if possible, and most importantly protection for victims. While Chazelle focuses”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Because, as noted before and worth repeating, chronic stress attacks the brain and damages brain architecture: “If mild stress becomes chronic, the unrelenting cascade of cortisol triggers genetic actions that begin to sever synaptic connections and cause dendrites to atrophy and cells to die; eventually, the hippocampus can end up physically shriveled, like a raisin.”26 When you learn, think, reason, and problem solve, the goal is to make synaptic connections in your”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Now, for our purposes in The Bullied Brain, we must realize that this brain change tenet applies to healing and recovery. If your brain’s ability to be calm and rational has not been practiced, if that neural network has not been fired up very often, then it’s hard to wire it in. Instead, you find that due to bullying and abuse, the neural network for anxiety, irrational thought patterns, and defensive reactivity is your default. Any little event that throws you off means you instantly find yourself pulled onto the default: the anxiety path of lashing out. In other words, if your brain has been so bullied and abused that it has developed a very defensive, aggressive, panicky neural network”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Brain scans have provided evidence that bullying and abuse don’t make you tough and resilient. They don’t put you on the path to greatness. Bullying and abuse are in fact correlated with failure to perform, mental illness, substance abuse, aggressive behavior, weakness, chronic disease, and shortened life spans.”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“Hurt brains hurt.”
― Jennifer Fraser

“Training children to obey adult authority is so influential that it appears to override the brain’s natural “mirror neurons”; it dismantles the brain’s shared neural circuits that are instantly activated by the pain, emotion, and experience of another person.”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“demeaning or humiliating conduct on victims’ brains, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk discovered that abuse victims’ intense feelings of shame—that stop them from even meeting his gaze—“are reflected in abnormal brain activation.” In a healthy brain, when we meet someone’s eyes, the prefrontal cortex assesses the individual. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the last part of the brain to mature, and it’s often referred to as the CEO of the brain. It’s engaged in thinking about the future, weighing consequences, being rational and reasonable, and assessing a situation from a variety of perspectives. The PFC is involved in decision-making, in planning, in self-control, in social interaction, and in self-awareness.19 Bessel van der Kolk explains that survivors of chronic trauma do not get activation in their prefrontal cortex; instead, they get intense reaction deep within their emotional brains, the “Periaqueductal Gray.”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“right out of the cage of learned helplessness. They’re not helpless. They can resist. They can refuse. They can rebel against the authority figure. And so can you.”
― Jennifer Fraser, Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health

“If you take a neuroscientific approach to rewiring your brain, then it requires you to stop remembering, retelling, reiterating, and maybe even repeating the past. It demands that you remember something new.”
― Jennifer Fraser, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health