Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph. D. Oprah Winfrey. What Happened To You? Conversations On Trauma, Resilience, and Healing. Flatiron Books, 2021. (301 pages)
In true Western-minded form, it would be easy to categorize this book—and the subject—as about “trauma,” and “resilience.” I opine that this is wrong. Books like this are truly about what it means to be human and what kind of humanity we want to be and cultivate. Once again, our frailties and brokenness are our greatest teachers, and we would do well to listen carefully to what those experiences and our body’s response says about us, and what kind of life we wish to enliven.
My favorite takeaways:
Your brain is doing exactly what you would expect it to do considering what you lived through. (p. 28)
I cannot tell you how healing and helpful this is. In a world of shaming and blaming, knowing that there are mechanisms of which we may not have much control which affect us so deeply is a critically enlightening perspective. In a somewhat odd way, while we need “free will” to function, the appeal to “determinism” can be quite healing.
…we feel better with the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty. (p. 180)
If you’ve ever questioned why some people (perhaps yourself) simply cannot give up certain beliefs or situations, this is a really helpful explanation. When there are painful, traumatizing, and threatening events in someone’s life, the double-tragedy is that we cannot take any more uncertainty; we need some anchor of security. And so we must hold on to whatever familiarity we have, for our own sanity.
…children are not born ‘resilient,’ they are born malleable. (p. 190)