When you are abused, you often lose yourself, your authentic self. You become disconnected from your essential self. You are the self lost to abuse. My mission is to recover her and honour her. This is why you see her on my website. That confident, glowing, young, vibrant woman. I am dedicated to returning her…
In 2019, I was asked by students at Langara College in Vancouver BC to do a TEDx Talk on the work I was doing and this is what led to my presentation on the “Neuroscience of Bullying.” I was reading neuroscientific, neurobiological, medical, and psychological research about bullying and abuse in order to write my next book.…
When I did my TEDx Talk in 2019 (sorry the sound is terrible, out of my control), I was not expecting viewers to comment on parents bullying their own kids. Due to lived experience, I was speaking about the serious harm to developing brains when teachers abuse students, not parents. I hadn’t really thought about how some parents…
Parents, teachers, and coaches are not usually the bullies we feel comfortable talking about. We prefer to talk about child-to-child bullies. What’s going on when adults bully children? In most cases, adults come by bullying behaviours honestly because they were bullied in childhood. They think it’s normal conduct. They think it gets results. They think…
What we need to teach kids about the psychology of bullying. Schools are mostly fire-proof, but many aren’t bully-proof. Encourage children to question some of the bullying beliefs that give power to bullies and remove it from victims. Spark children’s empathy and compassion for those who are bullying, since it indicates they may be suffering.…
Whistleblowers are afraid because those you expose attack what you care about. While whistleblowers are often praised after the fact for being courageous, few talk about how frightening it is to take this role. Dorothy Suskind writes that “whistleblowers place themselves in the path of an oncoming train in an effort to force a reckoning.”…
Research shows that whistleblowers don’t leap onto the path guns blazing. No. Whistleblowers try everything they can to solve the problem internally so as not to rock the boat, expose wrongdoers, cause trouble. That said, for whistleblowers, exposing injustice is an obligation, not a choice. I tried to address the crisis at the school in…
Only Child Abuse Could Make Me Speak Up I am an unlikely whistleblower, but where I find courage is when I hear directly from children they’re being abused. Only child abuse could make me speak up. I know what it’s like to be an unwilling bystander and a self-protective sheeple, but the only thing that…
School Culture that Looked the Other Way I was an “unwilling bystander” in a school culture that looked the other way when abuse was occurring. This was before I stepped into the whistleblower role. I knew about an abusive teacher, but my attempts to stop his harmful treatment got me nowhere. Instead, I encountered all…
I transformed from an unwilling bystander to someone who is a vocal advocate, researcher, consultant and writer about child abuse and the system that enables it. In the picture above, you can see that I am calm and surrounded by copies of my wine thriller Crush that was a lot of fun to write. There I am, signing…