Oprah Winfrey Emotionally Recounts Traumatic Childhood Moment She’s Never Spoken About With Dr. Oz

Oprah Winfrey is opening up about a traumatic childhood experience that still affects her to this day. In Entertainment Tonight‘s preview of Winfrey’s appearance on The Dr. Oz Show Thursday, the media icon gets emotional revealing a memory that still causes her to feel unsafe while sleeping in a discussion about her new book, What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing, available now.

“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,” she recalls in the clip. “And I wake up and he has his hands around my grandmother’s neck and she is screaming.” Her grandmother manages to push her husband off of her and he falls, giving Winfrey and her grandma the chance to flee into the “pitch black” of the middle of the night in rural Mississippi.

“And she goes out on the porch and she starts screaming ‘Henry, Henry.’ There is an old man who lived down the road that we call Cousin Henry, he was blind,” Winfrey continues, getting visibly emotional as she reveals this is the first time she has spoken publicly about what happened to her. After Cousin Henry came from down the road to help get grandfather off the floor, Winfrey says her grandmother took new precautions every night after that to protect herself and her granddaughter. “And after that, my grandmother put a chair underneath the doorknob and some tin cans around the chair. And that is how we slept every night,” she says. “I’m sleeping, I always slept with, listening for the cans. Listening for what happens if that doorknob moves.”

Winfrey’s new book, written with the collaboration of neuroscientist Dr. Bruce Perry, examines trauma, the way it stays with us, and therapy that can help process it. “Most of us have experienced various levels of trauma that have informed how we operate and interact in the world,” Winfrey explained on Instagram earlier in April. “We hope that through these pages, we help people hold more empathy for themselves and others as we learn to shift from asking ‘What’s wrong with you?’ to ‘What happened to you?’” See Winfrey’s full appearance on The Dr. Oz Show will air on Thursday, April 29. Check your local listings for more information.