Oprah helps launch trauma conference
Video address highlight of program on race
Oprah Winfrey, who many credit with shaping their own lives, on Wednesday described a life-changing revelation of her own.
Speaking in a pre-recorded video, taped specifically for a path-breaking three-day conference in Milwaukee on the topic of psychological healing, Winfrey told the attendees crowded into the new Fiserv Forum:
“Unless you fix the trauma that’s caused people to be the way they are, you’re working on the wrong thing.”
The Milwaukee native, who broadcast a “60 Minutes” report earlier this year about the city’s epidemic of childhood trauma and its toxic lifelong aftereffects, said researching the CBS-TV documentary led her to “a major ‘aha’ moment … that shifted the way I viewed trauma — and really the way I view everyone since.”
“I understand in a more complete way that the hole in the soul, where the wound started, is where we need to focus,” Winfrey said, speaking from the stadium screens inside the city’s new signature sports arena.
Winfrey’s video address, coming from a woman with a well-publicized
background of childhood adversity of her own, was a highlight of Wednesday night’s program, which was devoted to “Race and Trauma.” The evening featured a panel of experts discussing “historical trauma” — specifically the legacy of American slavery, one of history’s most extreme examples of collective traumatization.
“It’s a conversation that can make us nervous because it speaks of 400 years of pain and injury,” said Jermaine Reed, a prominent radio talk show host on WNOV-AM (860) who moderated a panel discussion at the event.
The evening’s larger focus was to give an emphatic kickoff to a conference that is both a culmination and a beginning.
Titled “Healing Trauma, Healthy Communities,” the Wednesdaythrough-Friday event is bringing together more than 1,000 people motivated by public health findings over the last decade that show that neurological trauma inflicted in childhood — violence, abuse, neglect, gunfire and chronic toxic stress — often is the root cause later in life for depression and mental illness, unemployment and poverty, addiction and incarceration, homelessness and suicide.
The conference is both a culmination of meetings that have laid the groundwork for how to apply that body of work in a high-trauma, high-poverty metropolis. It’s also the beginning of taking those efforts to the next level.
Six of the nation’s most prominent trauma researchers and clinicians will give keynotes, and dozens of traumacare practitioners will give workshops through Friday.
The first-of-its-kind conference was organized by a non-governmental consortium called Scaling Wellness in Milwaukee, known as SWIM. The collective includes social service workers, therapists, addiction counselors, university researchers, leaders of nonprofits, criminal justice authorities and health care representatives.
SWIM aims to explore whether there are strategic new ways to redeploy the region’s existing stable of clinics, counselors, healers and the small but growing number of trauma-responsive employment agencies and job training programs. That’s no small feat in Milwaukee, where agencies and nonprofits operate in silos.
Nor is healing work ever easy or simple, Winfrey cautioned in her address.
“I honor each and every one of you there tonight and the work that you are doing to begin to heal those in need,” she told the conference. “It’s an arduous process. It’s long and it’s ongoing. But I honor the work so that other people can live to be the fullest, highest expression of themselves.”
Bruce Perry, an internationally recognized psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher, used his turn at the podium to speak about race, trauma and the psychological effects of poverty that make it all worse.
Emotional neglect from overwhelmed caregivers or depressed parents too often is the starting point in life, which deprives the developing child of the “connectedness” and relationships that become the best means to calm the stress response system and develop resilience.
“If you are an overwhelmed single parent with multiple kids, this is what’s going to happen,” Perry told the crowd. “The ability to be present, attentive and attuned will be compromised.”
The empathy, compassion and community that are learned at a young age from attentive caregivers are shattered in environments of isolation and segregation, Perry said.
Then comes the nonverbal signals and microaggressions of growing up black, “which create a stress response and lead to an accumulation of stressors that is just as bad if not worse than capital-T traumas,” such as a shooting or natural disaster.
Winfrey grew up in Milwaukee. And over the past year, she has made no secret that her “60 Minutes” documentary, which was filmed in Milwaukee, “was life-changing for me” and also changed how she will direct her future philanthropic efforts.
The “60 Minutes” segment was inspired by a five-part 2017 Journal Sentinel series, “A Time to Heal,” which documented the epidemic of civilian trauma in the urban center of Milwaukee, one of the nation’s most impoverished cities. A follow-up two-part package used the same metrics of economics and trauma to show the underclass in rural Wisconsin suffers with the same dysfunctional demographic profile as the urban underclass.