Even though moderate stress can be beneficial (such as in exercise), being put through high levels of stress is the main cause of trauma for many people (e.g. having abusive or missing parents). There are 3 categories of people:<ul><li>sensitive: they get into a state of fear even from daily challenges, and even terror from moderate levels of stress</li><li>resilient: they do not feel fear unless experiencing high levels of stress</li><li>neurotypical: their response is proportional to the stress</li></ul>

The Effects of Stress

A few main points from the book are:<ul><li>connectedness and forming meaningful relationships is one of the most important factors for healing from trauma</li><li>regulating ourselves is essential for well-being. This means practicing any sort of sport, art, listening to music, etc.</li><li>every experience a child has will have an effect on them: it is essential for a child to be loved and cared for, while being transmitted as little generational trauma as possible</li></ul>

Main Points

The book is structured as a conversation between Oprah and Dr. Bruce Perry. Oprah mostly asks questions, while Dr. Perry brings the more scientific explanations behind trauma, but they both share their interactions with people affected by trauma.It focuses on the fact that a person’s behavior is shaped by the traumatic events they experienced. If we understand this, then we can be more empathetic toward the people around us, shifting our perspective from “What’s wrong with this person?” to “What happened to this person?”

About the Book

There is a direct relationship between a person’s degree of social isolation and their risk for physical and mental health problems. But when you do have connectedness, you have built-in buffers for whatever stress or distress you experience.

Taking inspirations from our ancestors, our children should grow surrounded by loving adults, each having a different set of qualities for the different needs of the child.In school, children should be allowed to play and not be forbidden to touch each other, as touch encourages connection.Teachers should understand that children rocking, chewing gum, daydreaming, or listening to music might just be trying to regulate themselves.

How Children Should Be Treated

It’s important to understand that the old pathways in the brain are not simply replaced by new ones. They will always be there, but the goal should be to replace them with new ones.Ideally, a child should experience just so much stress so that they become a resilient person. But a sensitive person has an opportunity to build strength and resilience through their healing journey.”The journey can create post-traumatic wisdom.”

Healing

A key part in understanding how trauma affects a person is the way their brain experiences a new event. In a simplified explanation, everything we experience passes through more levels of the brain in a sequential way:<ul><li>the brainstem manages vital functions such breathing, heart rate, and temperature</li><li>the diencephalon handles things like arousal, sleep, and appetite</li><li>the limbic system is involved in our behavioral and emotional responses</li><li>the cortex mediates the most uniquely “human” functions such as speech and language, cognition, and the capacity to reflect on the past and envision the future.</li></ul>

A Model Of The Brain

Take as example the story of a military veteran suffering from severe PTSD, taking minutes to recover from hearing the sound of a louder motorcycle that his brain associated with gunshot sounds.Dr. Perry explains that the reason behind this behavior is the sequential processing of the brain: the sound of the motorcycle is first processed by the brainstem, which developed to associate these kind of events with something potentially deadly. This causes the other parts of the brain to temporarily “shut down”, and only reactivating the cortex after a few minutes, when he recovers.

Impact of Trauma on  Brain

For most of our species’ history, we have been living in small intergenerational groups. It is safe to assume that our ancestors experienced trauma-related problems: anxiety, depression, sleep disruptions. Their methods of healing were:<ul><li>connecting to the clan and the natural world</li><li>regulating rhythm through dance, drumming, and song</li><li>a set of beliefs and values that helped them make sense of trauma</li><li>natural hallucinogens taken under a healer’s supervision</li></ul>

Traditional Healing

The functioning of the brain depends on the state we are in. When you are calm, you are using the “smartest” part of the brain (the cortex), whereas if you feel threatened, the “lower parts” of the brain take over, shutting down the cortex.And the situations we feel stressed in depend on our past experiences, how we were treated as children, essentially our trauma.This means that a traumatized child might have a teacher that resembles her abusive father, so her performance might be impacted just because she feels fearful in this class (without knowing why).

Unseen Impact of Trauma

A counterintuitive idea is that a traumatized person will seek people similar to the ones that hurt them in the past. “It’s the same type of person continually showing up in their life. They might arrive in a different package—it might be a boss or a domineering friend.”People look for predictable responses from the world. Predictable might mean punished, excluded, minimized. Even though their worldview is chaotic, they look for evidence that it is right, such as “I’m going to get kicked out of this class” or “I don’t belong here”.

Same Patterns Everywhere

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

books

Books

health

Health

communication

Communication

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

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Personal Development

Trauma: The Journey to Healing

This is the first book that I’ve read on trauma. I found it pretty good.

ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Our earliest experiences shape our lives far down the road, and What Happened to You? provides powerful scientific and emotional insights into the behavioral patterns so many of us struggle to understand. “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 This book is going to change the way you see your life. Have you ever wondered "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't I just control my behavior?" Others may judge our reactions and think, "What's wrong with that person?" When questioning our emotions, it's easy to place the blame on ourselves; holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It's time we started asking a different question. Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” Here, Winfrey shares stories from her own past, understanding through experience the vulnerability that comes from facing trauma and adversity at a young age. In conversation throughout the book, she and Dr. Perry focus on understanding people, behavior, and ourselves. It’s a subtle but profound shift in our approach to trauma, and it’s one that allows us to understand our pasts in order to clear a path to our future—opening the door to resilience and healing in a proven, powerful way.

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Mental Health

As the visionary and leader behind OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network and formerly the supervising producer and host of the top-rated, award-winning “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Oprah has entertained and inspired millions of viewers to live their best lives. Her accomplishments as a global media leader and philanthropist have established her as one of the most respected and admired public figures today.

Oprah Winfrey

Bruce D. Perry is an American psychiatrist, currently the senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas and an adjunct professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois.