What Happened to You? summary

War veteran Mike Roseman was out on a date when, suddenly, he found himself cowering on the ground in a state of complete terror. His girlfriend tried to help him, but he lashed out blindly, hitting her in the process. It took ten minutes for him to come out of it and start thinking clearly again. 

What had happened? A car had backfired, its exhaust pipe emitting a loud popping sound. The noise was similar to gunfire, and it activated a traumatic memory of when Roseman had been in the Korean War 30 years before. His survival responses instantly went into overdrive, and he dived to the ground as if he were hiding from a sniper. 

When she was starting out as a journalist, Oprah routinely worked 100-hour weeks, doing everything she could to excel at her job. She was exhausted and stressed, but she ignored all the signals her body was sending her that something was wrong. The abuse she’d experienced had trained her to be a skilled people-pleaser. She completely ignored her own boundaries, trying to fulfill everyone else’s needs instead. And she numbed her feelings with her favorite drug: food. 

Whenever we become uncomfortable or stressed, it means that we’re out of balance. But, like Oprah, many trauma survivors have been trained to ignore the signals. And they haven’t learned positive strategies for regulating themselves and reestablishing balance when they’re stressed out. 

Put your hand over your heart for a moment, and get very quiet. You’ll feel it beating steadily against your chest. 

A heartbeat is the first, most primal rhythm we hear. We hear it in the womb. Our mothers’ resting heart rate of 60 to 80 beats per minute becomes our baseline, indicating safety and continuity. That’s why babies are instantly comforted by a rhythmic rocking motion. And as we grow up, rhythm remains important to our mental health.

How do you know how to love someone? If you grew up with doting caregivers, that will sound like a strange question. The capacity to love seems as natural as the capacity to breathe. But, actually, it’s something we have to learn from our earliest days. If you’ve never been loved, you simply won’t know how to do it. 

That was the experience of Gloria, a young mother who had grown up in a series of foster homes. She wanted to love and nurture her daughter, Tilly, but she had no idea how. In the end, Tilly was taken into care because she wasn’t being looked after properly. Usually, women like Gloria are demonized as bad mothers. No one takes the time to look at what happened to make them that way. 

Stress gets a bad rap. We read scare stories every day about how much stress affects our physical and mental health. But did you know that experiencing stress in small doses is a vital part of human development?

Every time we have a new experience, or do a work project that stretches our abilities, we experience stress. Managing that stress successfully is like lifting weights; afterward, we’re stronger and more resilient. 

Imagine you’re walking across the road with your mother when you pass a big dog. You feel your mother stiffen next to you, and suddenly you start feeling afraid. 

Emotions are contagious, especially for children. They soak up their parents’ thoughts and feelings like a sponge. In that way, trauma can be passed down through generations. So we don’t only have to ask, What happened to you? We also have to understand what happened to them – what happened to your parents and their parents, and what did you inherit from them?

Almost half of the children living in the United States have had a serious traumatic experience. And 60 percent of adults report having at least one traumatic incident in their past.

Given what we know now about how trauma affects the brain, imagine the effect of these experiences on our broader communities and country as a whole. If so many people have sensitized stress responses, is it any wonder that so many lash out with violence or with intolerance of difference? Is it surprising that adults aren’t able to give their children the support they need to regulate themselves?