Oprah Winfrey Opens Up About Childhood Trauma In Her Past

I'm back with my friend and mentor, Oprah Winfrey, who is opening up like never before about trauma in her childhood. It's all part of her new book, What Happened to You, where she explores how trauma in our past informs who we are today. So Oprah, you've been very open about the physical abuse you suffered growing up. In the book, you tell a heartbreaking story of a particular beating on a Sunday morning before church. It seemed so innocent what you were doing. What happened? Well, first of all, I want to say my grandmother is the reason I am able to stand here today, sit here today. She did the best she could. She was a maid, was a domestic worker her entire life, and never would not have imagined in this lifetime the life that I now am able to live. But like so many parents of that era, caregivers of that era, particularly in the Black community, corporal punishment, whipping your kids, beating your kids was just common. It was, you know, I grew up in a household with my grandmother. It was just my grandmother and my grandfather the first six years of my life. And I grew up under the auspices of children are seen and not heard. So me, Oprah Winfrey, not being heard in an environment where if you talk too much or you look the wrong way or you spoke out of turn, my grandmother would just turn and just thump me on the head. And many times she would save up the whippings for Saturday night when you were naked. And so I remember this morning I had been asked to go to the well to bring some water back. And as I was bringing the water back, I was like playing with the water with my fingers like that in the water. And my grandmother was looking out the window. And when I brought the bucket in, and I'm sloshing the bucket because I'm a little girl, and she's like, were you playing in that water? Did you have your fingers in that water? That's our drinking water. And I said, no, ma'am. And she said, I saw you and your fingers in the water. So she grabbed a switch. And I got a really bad whipping for it. And later, when I put on my clothes to go to church, one of the welts from my back opened up and bloodied the dress. So my emotion now is not because I feel such deep pain about it. I just feel pain for that little girl. I feel like now I know what it's like to be, you look at a three-, four-year-old, five-year-old child and how innocent they are. And at the time, I just accepted it. I just thought, OK, I got a whipping. And that was one of many whippings. And my grandmother is the kind of person, and I know a lot of people watching, you had this too in your family. You get whipped, then they'd be annoyed that you were still sulking about it. And she'd come along and say, you better wipe that frown off your face. I'm back with Oprah Winfrey, who's done the hard work of revisiting her own childhood to uncover the trauma that has affected who she is today and ultimately helped heal her own mind. Oprah, how did experiences with abuse in your childhood affect who you've become as an adult? Well, I will say this to everybody. I had all my therapy in front of you all over the years. Those 25 years, every day I was coming to work, I was getting my own therapy. But the clearly most powerful aspect of my evolution into not being a people pleaser, into being someone who could stand in my own truth, was Gary Zukav. I read his book, Seat of the Soul, around 1989. And in that book, he talks about the power of intention. And what I realized, the epiphany for me with intention, is that my intention, Dr. Oz, was always to please. The reason I said yes is because I don't want you to be upset with me. The reason I gave you the money is because I don't want you to say, oh, she's stingy. She's not kind to people. She doesn't share. So she's not nice. So my intention was to make people think I was nice or allow them to feel that I was nice. And what happens is when you do that, when you're a pleaser, all of you all who are listening, because I know there's a lot of people in this, people please inquire. When you're trying to please other people because you want them to think they're nice, that's exactly what they think. They think you're nice, and then they come back and they ask you for more. And then they ask you for more. And then you end up turning on yourself. You're like, I've become so resentful of people. I just gave you money. I just agreed to do that. I said I was going to do it. I already did that. Why are you asking me again? Oh, because the reason I did it, the intention behind it, was not because I wanted to do it. The reason I did it was because I wanted you to think I was nice for doing it. So I now only do what I want to do and make sure that I'm led by what is my real reason for doing it. That changed the people-pleasing for me. It's interesting to look at how people around me react differently in confrontation, because it's a great example of what you're speaking to, because so much of it's colored by childhood experiences. But then a lot of the experiences we have seem so irrational. We fear things. We're triggered by events. I know that's happened a lot over the last year. We were speaking of earlier. And could you take the discussion of what happened to you into that? I mean, for example, in much of your adult life, I understand you were afraid to be alone at night. I never knew that. All the years we were together, it never came up. I remember you called me once saying that you kept waking up early, prematurely, and we talked a little bit about that. Yeah. But I didn't realize it was a nightmare part of it. How bad did anxiety get? And could you give me the root cause of that? What childhood trauma was responsible for that problem? Well, I will tell you that for years, I didn't sleep well. And I still am a light sleeper. And it was 1988 that I suddenly understood what that was. I was reading a newspaper about a school shooting in the suburb of Chicago. And in the story, it said the principal was being asked by the parents to put chains on the doors so that no one could enter the school. And the principal refused to put the chains on the doors because he felt that it would send a message to the children that they were not safe. And I went, that's what happened to me. So when I was a little girl, as I said earlier, it was just my grandmother, my grandfather who now I know had dementia, who was just like a shadow in my life, like just avoid him no matter what. So I slept in the bed with my grandmother in a one room bedroom that was also the living room. So there was a fireplace and a hearth and all of that. So this one big room that had the bed in it, my grandmother and I slept in the bed together. My grandfather was in a room on the other side of the wall. And one night in the middle of the night, my grandfather gets out of bed and comes into the room. And I wake up and he has his hands around my grandmother's neck. And she is screaming, Erlis, Erlis, get off of me. Erlis, Erlis, get away. And she's trying to force him off. And so instantly you awaken in the middle of the night. I feel this fear and I can hear the fear in my grandmother's voice. And she manages to push him off of her and step over him. He falls, she steps over him and runs to the front door. I run out of the bed with her. It's pitch black in the middle of the night in rural Mississippi. And she goes out on the porch and she starts screaming, Henry. There was an old man who lived down the road that we called Cousin Henry. He was blind. And it's the first time we've talked about this. Cousin Henry comes down the road in the middle of the night to help my grandmother get my grandfather up off the floor. And after that, my grandmother put a chair underneath the doorknob and some tin cans around the chair. And that is how we slept every night. So I think that that's when I started sleeping on alert. I'm sleeping, I always slept with listening for the cans, listening for what happens if that doorknob moves, what happens if that chair moves. And so the message that was sent to my childhood brain is that you are not safe in your own home. Yeah, I think some of this is about feeling out of control, especially in the safety of your own home. So, I mean, all of us are from the outside world turning to you each day for advice on the Oprah Winfrey Show because you always seem to have control, right? You're in control. You seem to have answers we are looking for. And even in the middle of that, you're walking through things I think like a lot of people need to right now. Because all of us can look back on our past and start to make these connections as you have. How can that be the first step on the path to healing? For example, that breakthrough moment when you realize what that principle is doing allow you to sleep better at night. Was it the next day you slept well? Or was that still months of coping with the fear, anxiety and everything else going around it? No, it didn't go away immediately, but at least I understood where it was coming from. And I could now be more rational of it because before it was an irrational fear. And then it was when I would have the anxiety which would say, you're not in Mississippi anymore. You're not in the bed with your grandmother. There's no tin can up against the door. You are well. So I would just breathe myself into the reality of my life now versus living from whatever that past memory was, allowing the anxiety of that past memory. It's almost a post-traumatic wisdom where you're able to have deeper insight. Using that as post-traumatic wisdom, yeah. But I firmly believe in this idea of post-traumatic wisdom which we talk about at the end of what happened to you. Because I now know from interviewing over 50,000 people over the years and my own personal experiences that everything that has happened to you can be used to strengthen you if you allow it, if you're open to it. So it's because of my own mistakes and my own observations about life and paying attention that I now can live the, truly I can say, the most peaceful life of anybody I know. But it has taken work to get here.