What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

by Stephanie Foo

None of this, of course, is reasonable or rational. But your brain is not trying to be reasonable. It’s trying to save your life.

And here’s what makes complex PTSD uniquely miserable in the world of trauma diagnoses: It occurs when someone is exposed to a traumatic event over and over and over again—hundreds, even thousands of times—over the course of years. When you are traumatized that many times, the number of conscious and subconscious triggers bloats, becomes infinite and inexplicable. If you are beaten for hundreds of mistakes, then every mistake becomes dangerous. If dozens of people let you down, all people become untrustworthy. The world itself becomes a threat.

Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear.

The psychologist is white, of course (86 percent of psychologists in the United States are), which isn’t ideal if you are a person of color. But, fine, whatever: You just need to receive an official diagnosis for your insurance. You are certain you have complex PTSD, but he can’t diagnose you with that because it’s not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Your insurance only covers treatment for conditions listed in the DSM in order to assign a number of sessions to you.

You learn on the internet that insurance companies haven’t updated reimbursement rates for therapists in up to twenty years, despite rising rates for office rent and other administrative costs. If therapists were to rely on reimbursement rates from insurance alone, they’d wind up making about $50,000 a year on average,[5] which is fine, but like, not great if you’re an actual doctor.

You want to find someone you can trust, someone you truly vibe with. Just like with dating (except without any of the booze, sex, or fun), finding your match can take time.

Feelings are a privilege.

No matter what I do, no matter where I try to find joy, I instead find my trauma.

We think our sadness is personal, pervasive, and permanent. Personal, in that we have caused all the problems we face. Pervasive, in that our entire life is defined by our failings. And permanent, in that the sadness will last forever.

The sympathetic nervous system, or the fight-or-flight system, is activated by stress. This is the system that gets us ready to run. The counter to this is the parasympathetic nervous system, the resting-and-digesting system. It lowers heart rate and blood pressure, slows breathing, and directly counters the stress response. Meditation activates the parasympathetic nervous system.[3] It’s literally the antidote to stress.

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”

“They’re just so desperate for help,” she says. But perhaps the kids are confident in the inadequacies of CPS. She’s submitted hundreds of cases to the agency, but almost nothing has come from any of them, because when social workers pull up to the kids’ clean, well-kept homes with nice-looking Asian parents, the children won’t talk.

The past is always here, haunting our homes, standing over us at night. They say you don’t get rid of a ghost by pretending it isn’t there. The legends tell us to address the ghost directly. Declare that this is our home and it isn’t welcome here anymore. But I’m the only one yelling, screaming at spirits in the living room while everyone else averts their eyes, pretending there’s nothing wrong.

These are not random attributes, a spin of the wheel. They were gifted to me with purpose, with necessity. I want to have words for what my bones know. I want to use those gifts when they serve me and understand and forgive them when they do not.

because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relational trauma. In other words, this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful. That meant future relationships with anybody would be harder for people with complex trauma because they were wired to believe that other people could not be trusted.

Fifty-one percent of children in the foster system have four or more ACEs, compared with 13 percent of children outside the foster system.[1] It’s not abnormal for foster kids to shuffle in and out of a dozen or more foster homes during their childhood, leaving them without a sense of the stability of a true home. One study found that foster children are ten times more likely to be sexually abused.[2] Of course, these painful childhoods have real consequences when the children get older. Ninety percent of foster kids who have had more than five placements will enter the criminal justice system.[3]

“It’s not the fights that matter. It’s the repairs.”

Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.”

you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.”[1]

“Pain is about feeling real, appropriate, and valid hurt when something bad happens. Suffering is when you add extra dollops to that pain. You’re feeling bad about feeling bad.”

Dr. Ham would tell me that PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace. The whole point of PTSD is to prepare you for being on the verge of death at any moment. My parents prepared me to face a vicious world with danger around every corner.

Healing is never final. It is never perfection. But along with the losses are the triumphs.