DoctorOz: Oprah Winfrey on How Our Brains Process Trauma | Oz Wellness

I'm back with my friend and mentor, Oprah Winfrey, talking about the shocking ways the ripples of childhood trauma can turn into tidal waves in adulthood, even affecting our physical health. Now it's something that she and Dr. Bruce Perry have been discussing for over 30 years. Dr. Perry is one of the world's leading experts on childhood trauma, and he co-authored a new book, What Happened to You with Oprah. Welcome, sir. So Oprah has just told us what happened to her, and I think sharing how a forgotten childhood trauma can lead to a fear in case her, in Oprah's case, fear of being alone at night, like decades later, sort of clicks for a lot of folks. I never talked to anybody about this before, but my father would spank me when I was a child. He was from rural Turkey. That's how they grew up. I guess there was some connection between Mississippi and Konya, but he only stopped. I still remember this. He only stopped because he'd beaten me so badly that I would have nightmares and sleepwalk. And as a doctor, he realized the trauma that he was causing. He didn't want that. I mean, I think like your grandmother, Oprah, he thought he was doing well because that's how he was raised. So Dr. Perry, how did what Oprah's brain experienced when she was a little girl affect her adulthood? I want people to be crystal clear on the real science behind this. Well, first of all, I have to say, I've been listening to the conversation, and again, I'm always struck by the power of narrative, the power of stories really, it's amazing. So the thing about what Oprah's talking about and what you're talking about, you're kind of keying in on a phenomenon in neuroscience, which is how the brain creates a memory. And then what memory means. It essentially, memory is the ability of our brain to store some aspect of a previous experience. And one of the challenges with those early life experiences is that the bottom part of the brain, the part of the brain that's involved in reacting and mediating our stress response, that part of the brain doesn't tell time. The top part of your brain in the cortex is what tells time. And I think that this is kind of why people have evocative cues. I mean, everybody's probably heard by now a little bit about a combat veteran, for example, hearing a car backfire and then having this big startle response. And even though it's 20 years after being in combat, and that's because that loud noise had to get filtered through that combat veteran's lower brain, and the lower brain, when it heard that, activated the stress response. And so before the information could get to the top part of his brain that tells time, he's already had this big reaction. And I think that that's kind of what was happening with Oprah. So I want everyone to understand exactly what this bottom-up processing that Dr. Perry's describing really is. This is what happens inside our brains. And it's profoundly important that you get this. So think of your brain like an upside-down triangle, super simple. At the very bottom, there's the brainstem. This is the lizard brain, right? It's very primitive. It reacts to things that make you breathe or get your heart rate up, right? Very simple. It's automatic almost. But it's not very sophisticated. Above that, there's something called the diencephalon. There's no quiz on this. But just remember, this is the part of the brain where you process arousal. So all the cravings, sleep, appetite, movement. You know, you're eating sometimes. It's emotional eating, but you don't get a lot of control over it, right? A lot of us have been there. Above that's the limbic area. This is where things like bonding and emotions are processed. And then this is important. At the very top is the cortex. That's where our advanced thinking is, right? The values, our sense of time, as Dr. Perry mentioned. Now, what's going on, this is critical. When you're in extreme stress, your functional IQ, how smart you are, can drop by 40 points as the top systems of your brain shut down because the brainstem is not so smart. And that's why, again, a veteran with PTSD can be triggered by fireworks. The lower part of the brain doesn't realize it's been decades since they were in combat. But all of us go through this. We react in ways that don't take advantage of how smart we really are. That's why Oprah's childhood nighttime trauma was triggered years later in adulthood. So Dr. Perry, with this kind of understanding, and to me, this was life-changing to get it, expanding, you go beyond this with the individual experiences, how does the brain process generational trauma? For example, like many black Americans feel from decades of systemic racism. How is it possible that your grandparents' reaction to trauma affects you? That's a great question. And it really, it goes to the point that what happened to you is tremendously impacted by what happened to your people. And we also can inherit our parents' fears and our parents' biases and our parents' feelings about certain things, even if they don't overtly express them. And I think that this is something that we have to confront in our society. Everybody's talking about how individuals who grow up in a typical household are hopefully not being taught systematically to be racist. But they may be exposed to implicit bias and racist behaviors in ways that influence how they think and feel about people who are different from them. Oprah, does that resonate for you? It's resonating for me because I think a lot of people say there's not a racist bone in my body. I didn't grow up in a racist family. It goes back to that diagram that you just showed about how the brain is an inverted triangle. So in the brainstem, because you have watched how your parents react to the other, to people of color or whomever, and you're taking that in even though blatantly, the N-word may not be used at your house or disparaging comments about people who are the other, but you see how your parents treat those people. You see how those interactions are not the same as interactions with people who are of the same color. Another point I wanted to make is when you were talking about the brainstem, I think everybody can relate to this, is when you are arguing with somebody and both of you are going at it and that person is yelling at you and you're yelling at them, and many times people say, you're not hearing me, you're not hearing me, the truth is because of the way the brain works, they actually are not hearing you. You can't get through because they're operating from the lower part of their brain and it hasn't reached, what you're trying to say cannot reach the cortex. Literally, their brain cannot process what you're saying. All right, we have to take a break, but up next, an eye-opening 10-question quiz to find out how childhood trauma could be affecting you today. We've been talking to Oprah about her own childhood struggles and how she overcame them to become one of the world's most influential people. Now, Oprah's gonna be back in just a little bit with her own personal advice about how you can help heal your mind and stop down your anxiety in the moment. But first, could childhood trauma or neglect be affecting your physical health in ways you don't even realize? There's now a quiz getting a lot of attention because many feel it's a good first step to find out. It's called the Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, survey. According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly two million cases of heart disease, listen carefully, 21 million cases of depression, could have potentially been avoided by preventing ACEs, these adverse childhood events. Oprah's friend and co-author, Dr. Bruce Perry, is about to go over this ACEs quiz, at least a part of it. But first, the effects of adverse childhood experiences on adulthood, it's something that your guys are all continuing to research to this day. I mean, it's continually evolving. Dr. Perry, what exactly is an ACE and how common are they? Well, an ACE is an adverse childhood experience. And basically, it's any experience that can activate your stress response systems in a pattern that's unpredictable or extreme. My body is not just a saying. I mean, you're actually proving that it's more solidly connected than we could ever have imagined. So let's get to the first questions from this ACEs survey. I want everyone to keep track of how many yeses you have. It's pretty straightforward. So here's the first question. Prior to your 18th birthday, was a household member depressed or mentally ill, or even more severely, did a household member attempt suicide? That's the first question, yes or no? Next question, did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker, an alcoholic, or someone who used street drugs? Next question, were your parents ever separated or divorced? A lot more traumatic than we would maybe have expected. These questions are all tied to trauma that our caregivers went through. It's a lot of the stuff that we did to ourselves. How much of that is passed on, Dr. Perry? You know, because of what we mentioned earlier about the contagious quality of emotions, children are very, very, very sensitive to the emotional tone in the home. All right, so the next question from the ACEs survey is a profoundly important one, because it's changed a lot over the last couple decades. Did you often or very often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special? Just resonate on that for a second, everybody. Dr. Perry, explain the correlation between feeling loved and feeling like you're part of a tribe to our overall health. Yeah, well, going back to what I was saying, that human beings are social creatures. We're intended to be, to grow up, to work, to live in groups, and if you have nobody in your life who you talk with, who's hugging you, who's saying good work, if you're only, you know, you're one of 30 kids in a classroom and you have an overwhelmed teacher, you don't have any afterschool participation in sport, you don't belong to teams or groups, you literally are going to have no counterbalancing health to the adversities that you may be experiencing. Everyone, there's a total of 10 questions in the book. I'll put them all on DrRoz.com. They're critical. Count up all your yeses, and that is your ACE score. Now, according to the CDC, a high ACE score could shorten your life expectancy by 20 years. It's big time stuff. It's an important tool because it points to a mind-body connection that's vital and also shows how our mental, spiritual, and physical selves are completely intertwined. But remember, this is critical. Oprah said this as well. Risk does not define your destiny, right? What happened to you can become your power. Dr. Perry, you say it actually can become your superpower. How so? Exactly. You know, the thing about stress, you know, those systems in the brain that if activated in one pattern lead to dysfunction, but those very same systems, if they're activated in moderate, controllable ways, help build resilience and help you heal if you've experienced trauma. And individuals who've had adversity and come to a place of safety and are able to reflect on their experiences and look back, have this wisdom about what's important in life, about what they should focus on in life, about being intentional in the way they lead their life. And these are also people who tend to be tremendously empathic and supportive of other people who are also experiencing struggles, pain of all sorts. So wisdom really arises from having experienced and survived through, and then ultimately thrived after developmental trauma. Dr. Perry, I want to congratulate you very much on a really well done endeavor, but the decades of research you've done to lead to this book is really where the congratulations should lie. God bless you. Godspeed. And I look forward to rereading the book. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. Next, Oprah's back to reveal what she knows for sure about how to overcome trauma. Welcome back. We've been talking about Oprah's new life-changing book, What Happened to You?, and the brand new approach to healing from trauma based on that vital question. So one of the key tools for freeing your brain is to process stress using self-regulation. And Oprah, you're one of the most successful human beings on the darn planet, right? Probably because you have mastered the art of regulating. So share with everyone some of the ways you regulate yourself to stop down anxiety in the moment when even you are feeling your brain becoming overwhelmed. Oh, I go immediately to my breath. Actually, as you know, I'm a very spiritually grounded person, and I will tell y'all this. When I was on trial in 1998, which now seems like exactly what it is decades ago for saying something bad about a burger, that was the most anxiety-filled time of my life in a consistent measure. And I remember Maya Angelou saying to me before I went into trial, as you're sitting in the courtroom and you are in before the jurors, look directly above their head, she said, and say to yourself, it is in God I move and breathe and have my being. And let that be your comfort. Let that be your mantra. And that got me through that trial. I mean, at all times, no matter what the prosecutor was saying, no matter what the defense was saying in my mind, I was just like, in God, I move and breathe and have my being. Just the saying of those words brings a sense of regulation and peace to me. I also do active engagement in walking through nature. So for me, it's nature, and it's also regulating myself from making myself aware that there is a bigger vision for my life and for the world than myself. In God, I move and breathe and have my being. How ironic. You could buy anything you wanted, but what you're recommending to us is actually free, which makes it so much more valuable. Very free. So we are touching the surface only. This is a life-changing takeaway from the book with so many others. That's why I'm so thankful Oprah, God bless you, has given us a bunch of copies of what happened to you to give away online. So head to DrRoz.com for your chance to win a copy. Oprah, Dr. Perry, thank you both very much for being here. And to all of you at home, remember, we're all in this together. I'll see you next time.