Episode 03: What Happened To You by Dr. Bruce D. Perry & Oprah Winfrey
In this episode of the podcast, I discuss the book, "What Happened to You: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing" by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey. I talk about the effects of trauma on the brain, and the role of self-regulation and rhythm in stress management. I also share a personal story highlighting how I’ve overcome stressful situations using self-regulation techniques. I advocate for the importance of finding positive, personalized coping strategies, like my practice of journaling, to maintain mental health and improve overall life quality.
Amaka (00:00:15) - Hey, everyone. Welcome back. Welcome back to the Bibliotherapy for Black Women podcast. I'm your host, Amaka, and I'm very excited to talk about this book that I finished maybe about a month ago. It's called What Happened to You Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing, and it was published as a collaboration between Doctor Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey. So this book does a really good job in talking about what the body, what happens to the body when it's when it sustains trauma and it talks about how we view trauma as an ongoing phenomenon, which it is in, you know, different ways. But I liked how the book framed trauma as an injury, the way someone can, you know, fall off a bike or fall down the stairs or something, you know, something where they sustain physical injury, whether it's breaking a foot or, you know, an arm or something like that. We understand pretty well physical injury. And I think part of that is because we can see it physically.
Amaka (00:01:59) - We can see our arms, we can see our legs, we can see our body. We know what it looks like when it is fully functional and whole. And with that reference point, we know what it is not supposed to look like when it is not complete and whole. And that is a lot of the challenge with mental health, trauma, depression, PTSD. We can't see it and no matter how hard we try to explain it to another, they will likely not ever fully understand because they can't see it. Mental health has fought a bad rap for a very long time. People don't take it seriously. It can't be used as an actual excuse. It's getting better now in terms of taking. When someone says, I'm having a bad mental health day, I feel like our generation has taken it a lot more seriously. If someone tells me I'm having a bad mental health day, I'm like, oh wow, do you want to talk about it? Do you need a listening ear? I'm here for you.
Amaka (00:03:18) - We've gotten better with that. But in years past, we didn't take it as anything. We didn't understand it as well as we do now. We didn't have any as many resources as we do now. So now we have more words to describe what we feel, what we mean when we are not in our best selves mentally and in the context of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and injury. Using that word is appropriate. It's an injury to your brain. It's an injury to your nervous system, your neurological system. It's a shock that your body internally is processing and is looking for ways to reregulate and get back to baseline. The first part of the book, it has a few parts, I think maybe six parts. So the first couple parts of the book, we're talking about the components of the brain, how it's structured. And just a quick side note, I really liked the format of the book. I don't know how long it took Doctor Perry and Oprah to kind of talk through these things, because it flows like a conversation they had over a really long time.
Amaka (00:04:44) - So if you open the book, you actually see throughout the entire book, that's how it's formatted. You see, when Doctor Perry is speaking, you see when Oprah is speaking for the whole time. So that kind of helps with the reading experience or it it made it more enjoyable for me. So the first couple parts of the book talked about the components of the brain, how it's built, how the lower portions of. Of the brain are more primal, mostly primal, and much less intellectual. When we're born, those first few months and years of life, we are operating mostly from the lowest portion of our brain. As a baby, you don't have the words to tell your parents, I'm hungry. I'm sleepy. My diaper is wet. Change me. We use crying to communicate as best we can what we need. And that crying, that communication. When we're young. It's being managed primarily by the lower parts of our brain because we're yet to really tap into the higher parts. You know, we're not at that age yet.
Amaka (00:06:02) - That's why growing up is in stages. So in the book, they talk about how as you're growing up, you're forming your worldview. What that looks like is shaped by 1,000,001 different things. It's shaped by who your parents are, who your guardians are, who your family is, who's around you all the time, who's not around you all the time. The house you live in, the neighborhood you live in, the people you see every day. The people you don't see every day. The images around you, the objects that you play with, the images you see on TV, the interactions of the people around you, how they interact with each other, how they interact with you, the animals you see, the words you see everything. Everything that we see with our eyes. Smell, hear, touch, taste, eat as babies. Because you know they love to explore the world with their mouths. All those things help shape our worldview. Depending on the type of things that are in our immediate environment growing up, our worldview can be stable.
Amaka (00:07:23) - Our worldview can be whole. Our worldview can be balanced. Our worldview can allow us to experience stress, but have the ability to self-regulate and return back to baseline. And then we can also build a worldview where the people around us come in and out. There's no stable figure, there's no stable home, there's no steadiness. And as a result of that, you can become hypersensitive and your nervous system will always be on alert, and it will be harder to self-regulate and get back to baseline. If you're in an environment growing up where you experience adverse experiences, you, your brain, your body, your body is always looking for a way to keep itself safe. Whether it's employing the sympathetic nervous system, looking at, you know, being in the woods and becoming face to face with the bear, your body is processing every possibility that could happen in that moment, and it is looking to find and decide the best way to protect yourself, whether it's to fight and face the bear, or in our modern lives, like a hard deadline or stress from work.
Amaka (00:08:52) - Stress from school. Those are our modern day bears, quote unquote. Your body is always trying to decide the best way to protect you in that moment. Do you get ready and fight? Face that problem head on. Do you flee? Do you put the energy towards running away, or do you succumb? And do you draw inward? And do you disassociate? And do you numb yourself so that whatever is charging towards you, its impacts will not be felt as harshly as it could of if you were fully alert? So the book talks about how we as humans use these different defense mechanisms as children growing up, becoming adults, and what may ultimately become our most prominent means of defense is oftentimes shaped by how we grew up our childhood. The older we get, the more solidified our worldview. Is our brain broken down in the most simple way? It's just a catalog. When you are talking about the more intellectual components of our brain, our brain is pretty much. A catalog. Our brain has been cataloging every single experience we have had since we were little.
Amaka (00:10:21) - Our brain has been taking in external stimuli even before we could remember, even before we had memory to think back. Our brain has been cataloging everything and building it up and building it up. And as you grow and become an adult, the brain is always taking in information and cataloging it. What I believe happens more and more as we get older and hopefully more mature, is that all the experiences that we have. We use the reference points that we have already in our catalog to evaluate what we see. That's new, because anything that the brain has not encountered up to that point is new. It's novel, and it's going to elicit a stress response. Stress is not always bad. Stress is good within a particular context. Stress is good. Stress lets the body know that it has encountered something unfamiliar, whether it's good, whether we perceive it as good, whether we perceive it as bad, it's unfamiliar. That's the most important part. And then the brain starts doing the work based off its catalog of trying to categorize this new, unfamiliar thing.
Amaka (00:11:47) - What is it? This new person? Who is she? This new place, where am I? What do I have already that will help me understand what's going on? So stress plays a role and when it is used correctly within our system, it's to our benefit. But depending on how we grow up, depending on how people grew up, the way they see different things, and because we know that stress can be helpful to the body, it helps us mentally build resilience. When we encounter a new problem, we elicit a stress response. When we figure out the problem, we build a little bit of confidence. We feel good about ourselves. That initial reaction was the body trying to figure out what to do. And when we're finally able to, we build some more mental strength and we have more resilience. But when we are perpetually finding ourselves going through experiences that put our stress response into overdrive, we become hypersensitive and we're not able to deal with life in a productive way. What I appreciated a lot about this book was it gave me a deeper understanding of what it means by not taking things personally when I was younger.
Amaka (00:13:21) - You know, some lessons only come with time and age and maturity. When I was younger, when someone told me, oh, don't take it personally, I did not understand what they meant, I didn't understand. I was like, you're a person, I'm a person. You're doing this to me. What do you mean? I shouldn't take it personally? How else should I take it? When I read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, he has. One of the agreements is don't take things personally. And it mirrors some parts of this book. He essentially was saying that the way people see us has nothing to do with us. The way people see us, the way people categorize, categorize us is based on their worldview. It's based on the catalog that their brain has built. Because a person is new and novel, whether they're good or bad, they're unfamiliar. It elicits a stress response. The brain is trying to do the work and do it quickly to categorize the person. And the way that they're categorizing you is based off of their worldview, which could be completely opposite of who you are.
Amaka (00:14:39) - There was an example of the book where there was a young woman, a white woman, who was going to a country what's considered a quote unquote, third world country. And she was going with all the best intentions, you know, to make a difference, to do good. And when she got there, the kids that she was hoping to work with were frightened of her. They were scared of her. They had never seen. Seen a woman so fair skinned. The book said that they thought she was a ghost. And I was like, this is the perfect example of how a lot of the times I would even, I would venture to say off the top of my head 95% of the time, who we are and how people treat us don't go together because they are perceiving us based off how they have always perceived the world. So these children are meeting this woman for the first time. They are scared out of their minds because whether she's good or bad, whether she's coming with good intentions or malicious intentions, she is new, she is unfamiliar, and she elicited a stress response that caused the children to initially flee.
Amaka (00:16:07) - And it wasn't until the interactions began and the children started learning who she was, and then started to re categorize her and start building a new part of the catalog so that in the future, if they saw a woman who looked like her, their brain wouldn't initially assess them as a threat. It takes time for those changes to happen, but initially, how we're perceived has nothing to do with really what we do. It has everything to do with the person and their upbringing, what they grew up around, what they saw. Because the end goal in any given moment is to stay safe. Whether the brain is doing the right thing to stay safe, or it is hypersensitive and in overdrive and is overreacting in a way that is detrimental to the person. So I only began to really understand what it meant not to take things people say or do, or behave how they behave personally. Because like I said, I didn't get it when I was younger. I was like, how could I not take this personally? I'm a person.
Amaka (00:17:23) - You did it to me. But with time and age you get to understand and it's freeing. You know, there are things now that happen. There are ways that people might react to me, respond to me. And I'm like, what did I do? And I've practiced this long enough to tell myself nothing. You didn't do anything. Whatever elicited the response from that person doesn't have to do with you. You didn't do anything. Maybe their God, they just got really bad news. Maybe they're having a shitty day. It could be a myriad of things, but it's not you. So that has helped me really move past that and not take on problems that aren't my own. When I tell you that saves you a lot of stress, I can't overstate it. I really loved how they emphasized in the book the importance of re-regulation, of self regulation, of being able to come back to baseline. That's easier for some, harder for others, because like I've been saying up to this point, a lot of that has to do with what you grew up around.
Amaka (00:18:36) - A lot of that has to do with the tools that you had or didn't have growing up. So some of us are able to re-regulate in a healthy way when we become stressed. Some of us are unable to re-regulate in a healthy way. When we become stressed, we might disassociate, numb ourselves, become outwardly physical or emotionally responsive, which you know, fits within that fight context. And then the disassociation and the numbing fitting in with the fleeing context when you're talking about fight or flight response. But when that immediate threat, when the threat that the brain perceives has been neutralized, we still need to get back to baseline. Another thing that I loved about this book is that it talks about how the body is always trying to return to baseline, whether we attempted to fight the immediate threat or we attempted to flee. Sometimes if we have an over sensitized stress response, it's not able to. But speaking within the context of quote unquote normal life, where we experience stressors every day, whether good or bad.
Amaka (00:19:58) - And when I say stress, I just mean unfamiliarity. The body is always trying to look for ways to keep calm. And that brings to my mind an example where a couple of weeks ago, I became. Friends with a woman who she and I are in, like a common interest group. I reached out to her and I was like, hey, let's set up a zoom call. You know, let's talk a little bit more. It seems like we might have some things in common because we were just texting at that time. So she was down and we got on the call. It was good. You know, like that initial, oh, hey, how are you type of awkward thing. She was pleasant as can be. It was great to talk to her, but having read this book, I think back to that seemingly innocent example. But I, I can see how my brain was working. So I'm talking to this person who my brain has never seen before. She's not she's not quote unquote good.
Amaka (00:21:04) - She's not quote unquote bad. She's just new. She's novel, she's unfamiliar. So my brain is now doing the feverishly, as quickly as possible, as trying to figure out how to categorize this new person based off its cataloging for 32 years, because I'm 32 years old, so it's doing the work. I think about the movie Inside Out, which is one of my favorite movies. If you've never watched that movie, it does a great job of putting on a screen with animation how the brain works. So my brain is pretty much just doing the work of trying to categorize this new person based off my long term memory, my short term memory, what I did last week, what I did last month, what I did last year, anything that could potentially be similar enough to this person that I'm talking to right now. So that the brain knows how to go about maneuvering this situation and thinking back to that afternoon when I was talking to her, I can kind of pinpoint this is just me thinking, you know, like, I can kind of pinpoint when my brain was doing the hard, hard work.
Amaka (00:22:31) - And when it finally calmed down, when I was talking to her on the zoom, I picked up those like, Apple headphones. Like, not not the airpods, like the ones with the cord. I picked it up and I was wrapping it around my finger and then pulling the pulling the cord so that it would go free, and then I would wrap it around my fingers again and pull it to go free. I did that for a few minutes because this was me trying to keep myself calm while I was interacting with something new, in this case, a new person. And I believe it was the rhythmic quality of wrapping the headphones around my fingers and pulling them and wrapping them around and pulling. She couldn't see that I was doing this. I wasn't doing it in the camera, but I was talking. As I was talking to her, I was wrapping the headphones around my fingers and pulling them, wrapping them around my head, my fingers and pulling them. Just doing the repetition of that, doing that over and over again, I believe, was keeping me calm while my brain was doing the work.
Amaka (00:23:48) - And the book talks about that too. It talks about how repetition and rhythm is a means of the brain being able to reregulate and comment down. It doesn't always work because it depends on the situation you're in. You know, if you are walking down the street and a car is barreling towards you, you're not going to be wrapping headphones around your fingers, you're going to run like hell. But in this seemingly mundane experience of just talking to someone new, my brain picked up the headphones and started doing that. And I feel like when my brain was getting to the point where it kind of did enough work to understand in those moments, in that initial introduction, enough of who she was to where I felt completely safe, and the stress response elicited by the unfamiliarity of this new person went away. I put the headphones down and I didn't pick them up again throughout the whole conversation. Isn't that crazy? Isn't that? Isn't it? Is it just me? Is it just me? I'm really just thinking about this, having read this book.
Amaka (00:25:07) - Like it? It has changed. How I interact with people. Not even in like a seismic. Like not even it hasn't even in in me, it feels like a seismic shift. But like in my day to day interactions, it's just little things. It's really just little things. I, I had just finished that book, and then I went to go see my good friend, who I shouted out in my first episode of the podcast. She had a baby over a year ago, so I went to go see her and. He's one, so he's all over the place. The sweetest little kid. And I picked him up and I put him on my lap, and I started to bob my knee up and down because having just read the book, I'm just like rhythm, repetition. It's soothing to the brain. It's coming to the brain. So I'm like, let me try and employ a little something here. I picked him up, I put him on my lap and I was just I was like rubbing his belly really rhythmically, like whatever physical interaction I was having with him, like skin to skin, whether he was whether his legs were on my lap or, you know, my hand was on his belly or on his hand, like I was trying to be rhythmic and repetitious with the physical interactions.
Amaka (00:26:40) - And he hadn't seen me in a really, like in a while, a couple of months at least. so I was I wasn't sure if he would remember who I was, but he kind of just settled into me and it made me feel good. You know, I don't know if him kind of getting comfortable and feeling freer had to do with what I was doing. but it didn't take away from it, at the very least. So it's really little things that I do now on a day to day basis that have come from reading this book. I think back to the first episode where I talked about my experience taking the NCLEX and how I got to the 75th question, and it the test did not shut off. So like I'm speaking about this instance out of context, if you listen to the first episode, you'll understand why that's important. With the NCLEX, you can get between 75 questions and 265 questions. but you never want to have to keep you never want to go beyond 75. You just want to get to that 75th question, answer it, and then hopefully you've passed and you're done with the test, but I didn't.
Amaka (00:28:01) - I got a 76th question, and going from 75 to 76 elicited a stress response to where my brain perceived it as a threat. I laugh about this now, but in that moment, I was a wreck. My brain perceived it as a threat, as a threatening response. And the book talks about how when you perceive a threat, your primal instincts take over. You can. You're so much less likely to access the more intellectual parts of your brain that are involved in executive functioning and making decisions and problem solving. So in that moment when the test did not end and I got emotional, if I did not regain myself, if I did not calm myself down, if I did not give myself a pep talk, if I did not attempt to reregulate and come back to baseline, I wouldn't have been able to access the more intellectual parts of my brain so that I could answer the questions and complete the test. Thankfully, I only got 11 more questions after that, and not some 280 no, 180 something because it can go as far as to 65 I the question for me ended at 86 and I passed.
Amaka (00:29:49) - So I think about that instance. You know, having read this book, I just think about different instances where you see the brain at work, you understand what's going on. And I think that understanding is really helpful in approaching. Future interactions, things that you haven't encountered yet. Kind of having that deeper understanding and knowledge better equips you. You know when you know better, you do better. That's pretty much what it boils down to. So the last part of this episode, I just want to talk about means of regulation and regulation and the instance with talking to my new friend. I used the headphones, twirling them around my fingers and letting them go, doing that over and over again until I felt okay with the NCLEX. It was crying, letting out the emotion, the physical manifestation of the tears coming out. Kind of like because, you know, it had been a stressful period of time up to that test. So kind of just letting the emotions out physically, it's kind of like a pressure cooker finally turning that knob and letting the steam out.
Amaka (00:31:16) - So it's the crying. It's the pep talk that I was giving myself. It's the breathing. It's the task that I was doing that brought me back down so that I could think and complete the test. That was my mode of re-regulation in that instance, on a day to day, I would say my my primary mode of regulation is journaling. I have been journaling since maybe ten years old, ten years old, 11 years old, and I have found it to be, for me, the best way to just handle my emotions and how I feel. I'm a big believer in the energy of writing, like taking your thoughts and emotions, putting them into words, picking up a pen, putting it on paper, and the flow of energy coming out of your body onto that paper. I believe it's powerful and I believe there's strong energy there. So having that be my belief, when I employ that strategy of journaling, I always feel better, I always feel better. And I have noticed for me, because, you know, life can get away from you.
Amaka (00:32:54) - You feel like you don't have time to do anything. I have noticed for me that when I go weeks or even a month or two without having to journal, I push it off because I'm like, I'm going to need two hours to write this journal entry because so much has happened. So I push it off until I just can't anymore, and then I carve out time in an evening. I'll give myself a good hour and a half and I'll just be writing. But when I journal more regularly, my entries are shorter. They're like half a page, quarter of a page, maybe a page and a half. But if it's one of those times where I haven't journaled in a couple of months, my entry might be 4 or 5 pages long because it's my brain, it's my system just letting everything out. And even though I've been functioning at a stable and dare I say, even high capacity, you know, in terms of expectations and what is what people need from me, I'm, I'm operating at a high capacity regardless, but it's to my detriment because I'm not actively processing what's going on.
Amaka (00:34:12) - I'm kind of pushing it down, or I or I am randomly bursting into tears in my apartment and I'm like, dang, I need it. I need to crack this journal open. You know, it's just it's just. It's it's really mental hygiene. I've been hearing that phrase more and more. And it's true. It's mental hygiene. It's keeping your mental state stable and healthy. The way we wake up, brush our teeth, take a shower, wash our face, meditate, eat breakfast, take our vitamins. It's the same in that way. We do all those things to stay healthy physically, but we really need to find what works for us within the context of our lives to stay healthy mentally. For me, that's journaling. That's probably number one. You know, there are other things that I do depending on when I can do it, whether it's going out with friends and connecting, you know, person to person, whether it's going on a hike and being with nature. But, you know, you can't always do those things.
Amaka (00:35:40) - But for me, I can always find pen and paper and just put words down and let them escape me. So I'm no longer carrying that and regulating myself and getting back to baseline and taking that sigh, that deep sigh. A lot of times when I'm journaling, I get to a point where I breathe in like I take like a 4 or 5 second inhale and then I breathe out and I'm like, okay, okay, I'm better. And then after that deep sigh, I the entry, my writing probably doesn't last more than ten minutes. After that, I'm like, okay. I'm good now. So I say all that to say, what is that for you? Do you even know what that is for you? Are you able to figure out what that is for you? Because everyone needs something. Everyone needs something. Everyone needs a healthy way of regulating. When the stress response is elicited and you're not automatically able to come back to yourself, everyone needs something that can kind of support that process of getting back to yourself and feeling good again.
Amaka (00:37:17) - So I am encouraging anyone listening to find out what that is for you, because it can really be life changing and not life changing in the most grandiose way. It could be life changing in that your day to day life is a little less stressful. You have a tool or tools to better navigate what comes your way between the time when you're awake and when you go back to sleep, and you may find that your quality of life across the board gets a little better and a little improvement is always better than none, you know? So I'm encouraging the listeners of this episode to figure that out. What is that for you? What is that for you? Hopefully you're able to take time out to figure out what that process is for you. And if you already know what it is, I'm really happy for you. I understand the relief that it can give you. Once you find what that is for yourself and you're able to employ on a regular basis, you're just able to better handle the curve balls that life throws at you on a daily basis.
Amaka (00:38:59) - So with that, we've reached the end of this episode. I want to thank you guys for listening again. this is this has been a pleasure so far, and I, I'm excited to continue it. If you are moved to reach out to me with any thoughts reflections. if you just want to say. Hi. You can reach out to me via email. BTB podcast gmail.com. Again, that's BT bw podcast at gmail.com. If you're compelled to follow me on social, my handles are in the, episode description. And that's it guys. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you guys have a good day or night whenever you're listening. All right, bye.
