What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

My sister got this book delivered to the house, opened the box and goes, 'here, you can read it first.'

Oprah has this new book she wrote with a research neurologist...and it's called 'What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing.'

And this is the guy, Bruce Perry was the guy who started the trauma conversation back when no one knew what that was.

And it's basically his studies talking about when stuff happens to kids, everyone loves to talk about kids being so resilient and blah blah blah, but actually if you're traumatized in specific ways and in certain ways, it actually affects your brain chemistry. It affects your brain makeup.

And it's just a fast...and it's written like a conversation. You'd love, you would love it. I know you'd love it.

And it's the piece called what happened to you by Andrew Sullivan. It's dated July 9th. It's on his sub stack. And it's, it's the subheading is the radicalization of the American elite against liberalism.

We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn't coming from the ground up. It's being imposed ruthlessly from above marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda.

And its victims are often the poor and the black and the Brown. It nearly lost the Democrats, the last election.

It is an ongoing moral panic against the specter of white supremacy, which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

We talk about how they are redefining childhood trauma, why experiences at a young age mold our adult life, and finding rhythm and balance to start healing yourself.

Why is it so important to make this switch from us thinking what is wrong with you to what happened to you?

So I want to ask you both this first question to start with is, why is it so important to make this switch from us thinking what is wrong with you to what happened to you?

And so I will just say this. One of the things that Bruce says in the book, each of us comes into the world with our own worldview.

And that worldview is actually shaped from the crib.

And I'm I really encourage everyone listening to this to get this book, what happened to you? It is a necessary piece of reading and it applies to so many different topics. I've used it for parenting. They talk about regulating your kids. You can get through to them. I was enraptured by the implicit bias versus your beliefs and your cortex and how they can fight. I mean, there are so many topics in here, but it's totally easy to digest. Put it in your earphones as you drive to work or grab the book as you drive to work or grab the book if you like to sit outside and read.

Yeah. So it's Oprah's book called 'What Happened to You?'

And she talked a lot about people pleasing in that book and how she's a massive people pleaser.

And I was like, well, first of all, it's kind of cool to be like Oprah in a way.

Of course, Scott McClellan just written a book called What Happened?

It's a pretty remarkable audiobook.

Being evasive's not the same as lying in bushes!

As I entered the Oval Area, I ran into... Scooter Libby!

What Happened Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception.

Yeah, I found this book, What Happened To You, to be sort of a game changer in terms of how I think about what is wrong with me, which is really not the way one should look at it, as you'll explain.

What I got out of it was so much more because my thesis or at least my approach to my investigation was literally to ask the question, what is wrong with me and what are the origins of that? And I kept coming up against the shame.

So your book very much helped me to recenter and ask the question differently. And the rest I just found to be incredibly revealing in terms of the impact of trauma on the developing brain and on who we are as adults.

And I think it's very difficult as someone who's had some of both at any given time to not be sure how to validate any one of those things.

If I've been through a big trauma around divorce, my parents' divorce or my personal health or some kind of assault, well, it's not as bad as it is for other people.

So does that really count? And if I'm having more trouble with practices in daily life that should not be so difficult, but that trigger me in a way that those big things did, well, then I would judge myself as dysfunctional for that too.

So what your book did, which most other books that I've read on trauma and the brain and psychology and behavior don't do is actually normalize the experience of trauma in life.

I think you both highlight the very important special circumstances around PTSD and circumstances that nobody argues would be trauma, but also that we have experiences that are traumatic based on things that we don't fully understand.

I have a better question that Dr. Bruce Perry talks about in his book with Oprah Winfrey is what happened to you?