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Oprah Winfrey Bravely Shares Traumatic Past With Dr. Oz

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey has recently opened up with Dr. Oz while promoting her new book and, moved, recounted a specific traumatic episode from her childhood.


Very few people don't know Oprah Winfrey's name. The famous host has influenced billions of lives with The Oprah Winfrey Show and, subsequently, with the platform OWN: Oprah Winfrey's Network. Winfrey has interviewed countless of spiritual leaders, celebrities and people all over the world, reaching the heart and soul of her viewers with powerful stories about resilience and the possibility to become the masters of our own kingdoms.

While promoting her new book about trauma and healing, "What Happened To You? Conversations On Trauma, Resilience and Healing" co-written with Dr. Bruce Perry, Winfrey shared a traumatic episode of her past with Dr. Oz:

"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."

Then continued, bravely sharing:

"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 starts screaming 'Henry!' There is an old man who lived down the road that we call Cousin Henry, he was blind."

Winfrey got emotional and confessed to Dr. Oz that this is the first time she's publicly spoken about the experience.

"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. That is how we slept every night. I always slept listening for the cans. Listening for what happens if that doorknob moves."

In various Instagram posts, Winfrey shared that many of us have experienced trauma in our lives. Although trauma is often overlooked, it literally shapes the way "operate and interact in the world."

The title particularly calls out the way society tends to categorize people that have experienced intense trauma. The common question is usually: "what is wrong with you?" Winfrey subverts expectations and shifts the question to start a new kind of conversation related to trauma: "what happened to you?"

The famous host has also started sharing snippets of her own trauma.

Winfrey's book may very well start a fundamental conversation: one that regards the way we approach trauma and heal moving forward with it.

Winfrey's book "What Happened To You? Conversations On Trauma, Resilience and Healing" is now available everywhere!

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Andrea Laurenti