Due to generous donations the Atrium Society Youth Peace Literacy Online Resources are Free
Dr. Webster-Doyle’s work on peace promotion and solving conflict nonviolently, especially for young audiences, is groundbreaking and brilliant!
Dr. Michael D. Knox, Chair, US Peace Memorial Foundation
Those of us who have been bullied have been conditioned to get scared, which is a natural human reaction. Fear ties a knot in our brain. As we’ve already learned, this knot causes us to either want to fight whatever threatens us, or run away from it. Is one of these responses better or worse than the other?
The fact is — they’re both unproductive.
When we’re scared and, as a result, we bully ourselves into responding in a certain way, we react totally out of fear. But we don’t have to. When we can see that we can act based on “rational” thinking rather than react on fearful “reactive” thinking -there is freedom in that.. When we’re scared, we react out of fear. When we can understand our fear, we can act intelligently. Knots in our brains can cause us to have thoughts that aren’t true - thoughts that can condition us to think in ways that are not helpful to us in our lives.