Book Review: Oprah Winfrey’s ‘What Happened To You?’ Deals With Our Trauma

Published in April 2021, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing written by Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert, Bruce D. Perry is now New York Times bestseller.

“Through this lens we can build a renewed sense of personal self-worth and ultimately recalibrate our responses to circumstances, situations, and relationships. It is, in other words, the key to reshaping our very lives.” ―Oprah Winfrey

These two writers offer a groundbreaking and intense shift from asking “What’s wrong with you” to “What happened to you” through heartfelt personal conversations. As our earliest experiences determine our lives far down the journey, this book provides powerful scientific and emotional insights into the behavioral patterns that are hard for people to understand.

Pictures: Google

Here, Winfrey shares the stories from her past showing that vulnerability comes from the experience of facing trauma at a young age. Alongside one of the world’s leading specialist on childhood and brain development, both of them shares the power of storytelling with science to make the readers understand better and overcome the effects of the pasts.

The two focus on comprehension of people, behavior, and ourselves through a conversation in the book. It is a needed shift of our approach to trauma that will allow us to understand our pasts, instead of pushing them away, in order to clear the road to our future. This book opens the door to resilience and healing in a proven scientific way.

Sources: Rolling Stones, Flatiron Books

Adib Mohd

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