Book Club: “What Happened To You?”
My March book club recommendation is “What Happened To You?” by Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. & Oprah Winfrey.
There are so many amazing nuggets that, although most references to trauma stem from childhood, there certainly is an explanation and better understanding of how trauma affects our brain and body.
In an explanation of the book it’s explained that, “Trauma Is Difficult to Define…and Difficult to Share.
Trauma’s relative nature and unclear definition can make it difficult for survivoTs to share their experiences. This is particularly true in the case of “individual trauma,” or trauma that happens to just one person as opposed to a group of people. Because that person was the only one to experience the event, they can’t compare their reaction to that of anyone else. Therefore, they might think that the event was “not that bad” and feel shame that they still have trauma from it. They also might worry that others won’t understand or believe them when they discuss the trauma.”
This is where the conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing begin. The chapters lay out as:
*Making Sense of the World
*Seeking Balance
*How We Were Loved
*The Spectrum of Trauma
*Connecting the Dots
*From Coping to Healing
*Post-Traumatic Wisdom
*Our Brains, Our Biases, Our Systems
*Relational Hunger in the Modern World
*What We Need Now
One of my favorite chapters was on the Post Traumatic Wisdom. He said, “ In the wake of trauma, the hardest thing to understand is it nothing and no one can take away the pain. And yet that’s exactly what we desperately want to do – because we are social creatures, subject to emotional contagion, and when we are around people who are hurting, we hurt too. We don’t want to hurt. It is hard to sit in the midst of ruined lives, and not feel the misery. It helps regulate to try to undo or negate-to look away from-others’ pain. So we make our arbitrary assumptions about people’s innate resilience. We take our focus off the tragedy, move on with our lives, telling ourselves that “they” will be okay. But as we continue to see in our discussions, the impact of trauma doesn’t simply fade away.”
