Undiscovered potential lives inside each of us.
I wasn’t destined to become a doctor. When I was a child, my uncle sexually abused me. That trauma made me feel shame, guilt, and anger. It stole my childhood and my belief in who I could be. I can’t undo what happened to me, but I did get help, and that changed everything.
I found a wonderful psychiatrist. He said I was “a pearl in an oyster,” not the dirty, ugly thing I thought I was. He is the reason I became a doctor. I wanted to help people the way he had helped me.
Today, I am a physician, author, social entrepreneur, public speaker, mother, and grandmother. I am passionate about understanding how human beings become who they become. I study how we develop, learn, and reach our potential, and how each of us can help others reach theirs.
I started learning about these things at Cornell University Medical School. I was taught how hearts, lungs, and kidneys work, and also how humans love, attach, nurture, and heal after things go wrong. Most importantly, I learned that human brains, bodies, and abilities are malleable to experience. Brain growth happens mostly after we are born. So there are multiple opportunities to catch up as we develop and learn.
I put this knowledge to work as a child psychiatrist specializing in trauma. I saw children overcome the most extraordinary obstacles and unfairness and discover their resilience. Then, after the 9/11 attacks, I helped lead a study assessing trauma among New York City’s schoolchildren. The greatest levels of trauma, we found, were not in schools near Ground Zero but in neighborhoods of deepest poverty.
When I visited the schools, I could see that educators had not been equipped with what I had learned at med school about trauma and the brain. They struggled to help kids under stress. They often had fixed ideas about intelligence and low expectations for their students. This is why I founded Turnaround for Children in 2002—to translate science into tools and services for schools to become places where all children can learn, thrive, and succeed.
I wanted to unlock human potential. I still do.
I am passionate about understanding how human beings become who they become.