What Happened To You is a fascinating and informative book from Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D Perry. The main focus relates to early trauma and how this can have a long lasting effect on your life. There are many anecdotes that illustrate how children and adult’s behaviour and reactions are created through previous experiences. Not only does this create an understanding for the reader, it also provides hope that things can change. No blame is apportioned within the information, only strategies to help and improve the future for survivors of trauma and adversity. Oprah shares her own personal experiences and ‘ah-ha’ moments that allowed her to understand how her experiences have shaped her personality. Highly recommended.

Some people will be drawn to this book because Oprah's name is on the cover, other people will run a mile. Firstly, this book isn't written by Oprah, it is very much written by Dr. Perry with relevant and worthy contributions from Oprah. I loved What I Know For Sure so of course I immediately gravitated towards this. For the anti Oprahs out there, try to put that aside for a minute because it is an absolutely fantastic book which everyone should read. Whether you feel trauma is relative to your life or not, this book is wildly interesting and I think important to help people understand each other's behaviours.

Dr Perry looks at how trauma can affect absolutely everything within a person during their life. He discusses the obvious things like PTSD and fight or flight but also looks at things like ACE (adverse childhood experiences) scores, their meanings and their long term impacts on everything, even your physical health.

Two things really stood out from this book compared to others I've read on the subject. Firstly, he looks at the trauma, discusses the often resulting behaviours and then goes on to explain why one causes the other and possible ways to correct them. The second part that I really enjoyed is that the book is full of real life scenarios and examples of trauma so it isn't this jumble of psychobabble, it's a lot of scientific and well researched facts married with real life stories and emotions.

I read this on my kindle which was great to jump in and out of as it can be heavy reading at times but I think it would be absolutely fantastic on audiobook due to the conversational nature and how the book flows.
Whichever way you read I would really recommend this as an amazing informative starting point for anyone who wants to understand trauma.

Thank you Netgalley and PanMacmillan for this ARC.
This is my second time of reading this book, more slowly this time around. I have gotten so much more out of this book from reading it slowly, really allowing myself to absorb it.
This book is written in conversational style between Oprah and Dr Perry. Dr Perry writes in a way that is so easy to understand and draws you in. The book describes how trauma affects the brain from a biological level and also the psychological effects. The facts are frightening, particularly for babies and infants who suffer trauma, Dr Perry states that although the capacity for speech is not developed at a young age, the trauma is held in the body and registers in sometimes daily occurrences once the trauma victim is an adult.

The premise of the book is to change the way we consider people and the actions in their lives. Taking away the blame and shame, we begin to consider “what has happened” to you, or another person. And with this we begin to understand that person from a more compassionate stance.
I am so glad I read this book again and could appreciate it more fully.
Highly recommended, this book will stay with me for a long time.

The book was easy to read and flowed well.

A really informative and interesting book on the topic of trauma, resilience and healing. I loved the way that it was written like a conversation between the two, and packed with real life examples.

Oof. It's a heavy one, but it's worth it. While there are so many books in this market, discussing and breaking down trauma, this one shifts the narrative from looking at complex behaviours as a problem to solve, and instead looking at the foundations of those behaviours to better understand ourselves and others. It's so interesting -- what is trauma, how do we experience it individually, and what can we do to minimise its effects? And how can we offer wider solutions systemically and politically moving forward. The books is written like an interview, and both Oprah and Dr Perry discuss their own experiences, and how the changes in theories of trauma have helped them to better understand things in their own lives. The guides and figures help with breaking down some especially complex ideas and neurological research. I learned a lot from this, and will be recommending far and wide.

“As you move through the experiences of your past, know that no matter what happened, your being here, vibrant and alive, makes you worthy.
You alone are enough.”

Sometimes a book will come into your life at exactly the right time. Traumas, both from childhood and more recent times, have been making themselves known to me with an urgency I haven’t experienced before, at a time that seems more inconvenient than pretty much any other time in my life. Although I’d love to push it all to the side, with a ‘Not now! Can’t you see I’m busy reading?’, there’s also a knowing that there’s never going to be a good time and that maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason it’s all coming up for me now.

So, here I am, trying to figure out what healing will look like for me and having conversations with people who are seeing my resilience from the outside in vastly different ways than I’m perceiving it from the inside. Then this book, which covers the trifecta of what my brain has decided is my priority right now (trauma, resilience and healing), makes its way into my world.

The shift from asking ‘what’s wrong with you?’ to ‘what happened to you?’ is something I’ve yearned to hear for most of my life. Western society is so fixed on labels, which I know have their place and can be useful, but all too often pasting a diagnosis (or multiple diagnoses) on someone marginalises them more than it helps them. If we don’t get to the core of why a person behaves the way they do then we’re really missing the point, and the opportunity to best support them.

“All of us want to know that what we do, what we say and who we are, matters.”

Dr. Perry’s work in understanding how the brain’s development is impacted by early trauma helps explain why we behave the way we do, for example, why some people lash out in anger and others withdraw into themselves.

There’s science in this book but it was explained in a way that made sense to me, someone who hasn’t formally studied science since high school. Even if you don’t understand a concept the first time it’s mentioned it’s okay as it will be referred to in later conversations. If words like ‘brainstem’, ‘diencephalon’, ‘limbic’ and ‘cortex’ make you want to disengage, I’d encourage you to hold on because how the science relates to someone’s life will be explained. This, in turn, will make it easier to apply what’s being said to your own life. You’ll read about people Dr. Perry has worked with, people Oprah has interviewed and about Oprah’s own experiences.

Knowledge truly is powerful and simply having an understanding of why a smell or sound (‘evocative cues’) can cause people with PTSD to have flashbacks, making them feel as though they’re right back in that moment, feels like half the battle. If you’re not caught up in judging yourself for your brain responding the way that it does, then it frees up so much energy that you can use to regulate yourself.

I learned about how our view of the world becomes a “self-fulfilling prophecy”, why self harm makes so much sense to the people who do it (even though it baffles the people who don’t), the importance of rhythm in regulation, how vital connections with other people are to healing and why I need to learn more about neuroplasticity.

I gained a much better understanding of flock, freeze, flight and fight. Dissociation, which I thought I knew all about from personal experience, make much more sense to me now, as does why I find reading so helpful in my everyday life.

I love facts and there were some that really put what I was reading into context for me.

“During the first nine months, fetal brain development is explosive, at times reaching a rate of 20,000 new neurons ‘born’ per second. In comparison, an adult may, on a good day, create 700.”

This book isn’t about blaming anyone for your trauma and it’s not giving you an excuse for bad behaviour. It does explain why you react the way you do and can help silence the voice inside you that tells you there’s something wrong with you because of it - your reaction is reasonable given your history but there is also hope; you can heal.

I would recommend this book to so many people. Before I’d even begun reading I’d recommended it to my GP and would not hesitate in recommending it to anyone who works in a profession that brings them into contact with young children and their families or trauma survivors.

“To this day, the role that trauma and developmental adversity play in mental and physical health remains under appreciated.”

I would recommend it to trauma survivors, although with a few caveats: that they stay safe while reading (some of the content is bound to be triggering), read at their own pace and make good use of their support system as needed. Loved ones of trauma survivors will find explanations for why their friend or family member behaves the way that they do and ways they can help.

I’m not someone who usually listens to audiobooks but if there’s a book that would be more suited for that format than this one, a series of conversations between Dr. Perry and Oprah, I can’t think of it. Of course, having grown up with Oprah, I heard everything she said in her voice as I read anyway but I’m definitely planning to reread via audiobook.

“It takes courage to confront your actions, peel back the layers of trauma in our lives and expose the raw truth of what happened.
But, this is where healing begins.”

Content warnings include mention of addiction, alcoholism, bullying, death by suicide, domestic violence, foster care, gun violence, mental health, murder, neglect, physical abuse, physical health, poverty, racism, self harm, sexual assault, slavery, suicidal ideation and traumatic loss.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Bluebird, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, for the opportunity to read this book.