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

This fascinating book produced many “lightbulb moments” for me. Some reviewers have stated that “What Happened to You” contained very few new ideas. I’ve read quite a few self-help books over the decades. Perry and Winfrey covered a lot of territory I had yet to explore. What’s more, they explained complex issues involving brain science in an understandable and interesting way, vividly demonstrating how stress and trauma change us. Oprah boldly shares her personal struggles. I never realized that the first couple months of our lives have a disproportionate impact on our emotional well-being for the rest of our lives. Infants with high stress or trauma in their first two months typically will experience more problems than show more others who had very little stress in their infancy but endured years of stress later in childhood. I do wish the book had spent a bit more time examining the impacts of stress and trauma on teens and even adults. But I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in PTSD, brain science or psychology. show less

the audiobook version is EVERYTHING! it felt like listening to a podcast. Oprah and Dr. Perry were basically just having a long conversation that was easy to follow and understand. i loved how Dr. Perry presented his real case studies alongside the science of trauma and healing. i would listen to a podcast with Oprah and Dr. Perry.. but i guess that was the Oprah show... not everything needs to be a podcast...... anyways i just really loved the conversational style of this audiobook *chef's kiss* this book was eye-opening. i never would have thought to ask "what happened to you/ me rather than what's wrong with you/me". i learned lots about feelings, PTSD, vibration of love, etc. very well written, well researched, Dr. Perry knows. his. show more stuff.! show less

I don't know why I picked this up. I was having problems with my parent family and thought maybe this could help. It didn't relate to my situation but I thought it was fascinating. How does trauma carry through your life? How does our brain handle early childhood trauma or neglect or indifference. What if you were never hugged or held? How do we humans process trauma? What is biologically occurring in our brain? I highly recommend. It gets rather wordy and repetitive but still worth the read.

This was recommended to me, and with good reason. There’s lots of good stuff here, but man it was a slog. The conversational style felt forced.

One of my top 50 books of all time. I recommend it if you want to gain more insight into child trauma and why parents do what they do to themselves and their children. It’s not all about the bad, either! There is hope for everyone suffering from mental health issues as long as we can learn the whys.

What Happened to You: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing is a book about trauma and how traumatic experiences affect people throughout life. Oprah is no stranger to trauma. Complete with experiences from Oprah’s own life and Dr. Perry’s knowledge in brain science to explain the resulting behavior, this can be a perspective-changing work. It is a way of helping people understand as well as overcome the effect of trauma—how it affects our brain and greatly influences who we become and shapes our behavior. The book is an insightful guide and provides advice on healing from trauma which is helpful and pleasant after reading and trying to understand trauma. It helps one understand that if we did so much as replace show more “What’s wrong with you?” with “What happened to you?”, we would do a much better job at understanding ourselves and one another. show less

A great book for u dears tan ding trauma. The conversation format makes it easy read and even better as an audio book. A great book for understanding the impact of childhood experiences on the developing brain.