About this item
Through deeply personal conversation, Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Perry explore how what happens to us in early childhood influences the people we become. They challenge us to shift from focusing on, "What's wrong with you?" or "Why are you behaving that way?," to asking, "What happened to you?" Many of us experience adversity that has lasting impact on our physical and emotional health. "What happened to us" in childhood is a powerful predictor of our risk for health problems down the road, and offers scientific insights in to the patterns of behaviors so many struggle to understand. Here, Winfrey shares stories from her own past, understanding through experience the vulnerability that comes from facing trauma at a young age. Joining forces with Dr. Perry, one of the world's leading experts on childhood trauma, Winfrey and Dr. Perry marry the power of storytelling with science and clinical experience to better understand and overcome the effects of trauma.
About the Author
Oprah Gail Winfrey, born January 29, 1954, is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is now North America's first and only multi-billionaire Black. Several assessments regard her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study says broke 20th-century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream. By the mid-1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing a confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas, and an emotion-centered approach, she is often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. From 2006 to 2008, Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Barack Obama, by one estimate, delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race. Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/aphrodite-in-nyc [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ], via Wikimedia Commons.
