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

by Stephanie Foo

I probably hated my mother for being impossible to please. But I also loved her, and so I guess I must have felt guilty, too, and frightened.

Hers were more important. Because hers had greater stakes.

Your issues are solidly within my wheelhouse.

But your brain is not trying to be reasonable. It’s trying to save your life.

everyone will experience some form of trauma.

And people with C-PTSD are drama queen self-saboteurs who are impossible to love.

couldn’t tell which parts were pathologically problematic and which were fine as they were.

I came to these books in search of hope. But they provided so little.

Child abuse is often associated with reduced thickness in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with moderation, decision-making, complex thought, and logical reasoning.

She told me that our bodies have a limited number of metabolic resources. We need a certain amount of sleep and water and nourishment in order to think, to learn new things, to produce the correct hormones.

So, first step of hacking my brain: sustaining it with enough oxygen and nutrients.

My actions allowed me to assure myself that I was well rested, well fed, and healthy.

a low-income Black person has up to an 80 percent lower chance of receiving a callback for an appointment than a middle-class white person.

talk therapy can be useless for those for whom “traumatic events are almost impossible to put into words.” Some people are too dissociated and distanced from these traumatic experiences for talk therapy to work well. They might not be able to access their feelings, let alone convey them.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a form of talk therapy where patients unlearn negative patterns of behavior and try to practice strategically positive patterns, is widely accepted as a treatment for PTSD.

EMDR was far more effective for adult-onset trauma, and it cured only 9 percent of childhood trauma survivors.

What memories are actually upsetting to think about?

I am trying to impart a lifetime of love and warmth in a single embrace.

I had known that this wasn’t my fault. EMDR unlocked the gate to the next realm, toward understanding.

Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed.

I kind of wish I could feel again.

It was now clear that I had hung a veil up decades ago—a thick white sheet in the back of my mind to keep certain truths from myself.

When I used EMDR to move the veil aside, I found: My parents never loved me, and that’s not my fault.

Dissociation exists for a reason. For millennia, our brains and bodies have removed us from our pain so we can keep moving forward.

Feelings are a privilege.

she didn’t have to sit there and agonize over how to be decent because she was raised with love.

when you take the time to savor the good, you simply need less of it.

Every time I tried to touch a memory, doubts and questions multiplied around it, preventing me from being able to see my own past.

I had not only thrown out the bad. I had thrown out all the good.

Ugly things become uglier in the dark.

Every adaptation our brain makes is an effort to better protect our bodies.

I count and recount, as if I can nickel and dime my way out of having to love him.

We all want to be taken care of, and that’s okay.

It was all so beautiful. And it was excruciating, because it wasn’t mine.

Women are more than twice as likely to have PTSD than men.

Andreano has found in his neuroimaging studies that during the mid-luteal phase (the second half of the menstrual cycle after ovulation), we have higher levels of emotional arousal and more connectivity between emotion and memory. This finding is far more complicated than just “Bitches be PMSing!” This connectivity means that if we are unlucky enough to be abused during this time period, those abuses can lodge more deeply in our memories and become encoded in our brains. These memories are also more likely to encourage a negative memory bias, a tendency to return to these negative memories more than positive ones. Bottom line: We are more vulnerable to developing PTSD or depression if we experience trauma during a certain point in our cycles.

Children who experience trauma are more likely to hit puberty earlier.

We have to treat the underlying, original cause: the trauma.

It had been stored deep inside my joints and womb.

‘Hulk, you’re back? You think that I’m in trouble? Oh, thank you so much for loving me so much that you’re trying to protect me.’

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.

The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people.

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]

each of us is a delicate bundle of triggers, desires, emotions, and needs—and we all have our own ways of concealing those needs.

when our understanding of what people need fails to match up with what they want—therein lies conflict.

You need to stop judging your body and its natural feelings.”

The healthiest hearts are adaptable, and the quicker they adapt, the better.

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.”

these negative emotions are not simply something to endure and erase. They are purposeful. Beneficial. They tell us what we need.

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