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

by Stephanie Foo

I didn’t kill myself for three reasons. The first reason was I was too chickenshit.

When scientists and psychologists provide case studies of resilient individuals, they do not showcase a housekeeper who has overcome personal tragedy and now has impressive talents at self-regulation. They write about individuals who survived and became doctors, teachers, therapists, motivational speakers—sparkly members of society. Resilience, according to the establishment, is not a degree of some indeterminable measure of inner peace. Resilience is instead synonymous with success.

It’s okay to have some things you never get over. In the span of half an hour, this man whom I had known for less than a season did what nobody in my life ever had: He took all of my sins and simply forgave them. He didn’t demand relentless improvement. There were no ultimatums. He asserted that I was enough, as is. The gravity of it stunned me into silence. Joey was the opposite of the dread.

The books taught me that when we live through traumatic experiences, our brains take in the things around us that are causing the greatest threat, and they encode these things deep into our subconscious as sources of danger.

What we might think of as emotional outbursts—anxiety, depression, lashing out in anger—aren’t always just petty, emotional failings. They may be reflexes designed to protect us from things our brain has encoded as threats. And these threatening inputs are what many people call triggers.

Those triggers are only considered PTSD when an event is so traumatic that its triggers cause symptoms like panic attacks, nightmares, blackouts, and flashbacks—when the emotional response becomes debilitating.

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.

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

People with high ACE scores were about three times as likely to develop liver disease, twice as likely to develop cancer or heart disease, four times as likely to develop emphysema.[2]

But Anda underlined that ACEs are not a good measure of an individual’s life span or health outcomes.

The literature says this is normal for traumatized people. Experts say it’s all part of the three P’s: 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.

“Being grounded refers to a state of mental awareness where you’re fully present with the here and now. You know who and where you are, the current time and year, and what’s happening all around you. It is the opposite of dissociating. The act of ‘getting grounded’ means taking deliberate steps to bring one’s self out of flashbacks, dissociation, and/or other distress…. This is a vital skill for trauma patients.”[4]

My fear of being abandoned forced me to need proof of love in abundance, over and over and over again, a hundred times a day.

“Keep a journal every day this week of three things that you feel grateful for,”

I divided the first page into two columns. I titled the left column Gratitude and the right Pride. The idea was to make note of both the things that brought me joy in the world and the ways I brought joy into the world.

the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Cambodian genocide.

“It’s okay to be sad. You won’t be sad a week from now. I love you, and you are doing your best,”

One study showed that women who have suffered from childhood trauma were 80 percent more likely to develop painful endometriosis.

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

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.

When I lay down to try to do a body scan, I could no longer focus on the air on my palms because the throbbing in other parts of my body was so loud. I tried guided meditations designed for pain, but even these did not help. Focusing on my body, focusing on the way it felt, just brought up waves of dread, betrayal, and anger. Dread at the inflammation coursing through my body, bringing fears of my imminent death, of becoming another ACE statistic. Betrayal at a body that had never felt quite mine and that I now wanted to dissociate from more than ever before. And anger—because it was as if my mother’s hand was reaching forward, defying the laws of space-time, to hurt me again. The pain from being slapped to the floor or lashed with hangers—it was not gone. It had been stored deep inside my joints and womb. I was still being punished.

“The essence of what trauma does to a person is it makes them feel like they don’t deserve love,”

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]

What is important is to approach all of these interactions with curiosity for what that truth is, not fear. He said I should approach difficult conversations with an attitude of “What is hurting you?” instead of “Have I hurt you?”

“What do you need?”

Being part of an oppressed minority group—being queer or disabled, for example—can cause C-PTSD if you are made to feel unsafe because of your identity.

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.”

“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.”

When I’d expressed that I wanted a community-based wedding, Joey had not only agreed but also suggested we write a personal letter to every single person in the audience telling them why we were glad to have them in our lives.

Instead, our prefrontal cortices blink online—we become hyperrational. Super focused. Calm. Siegle explained it this way: “If running away has never been an option for you, you have to be cunning and do other things. So it’s like, this is time to bring all of our resources online, because we’re going to survive this.”

the dissociated state that means you don’t always have emotions that are totally appropriate for a situation—he called it Blunted and Discordant Affect Sensitivity Syndrome. The acronym for this? BADASS.

MY FAVORITE BOOKS ABOUT TRAUMA Journey Through Trauma by Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, MD The Deepest Well by Nadine Burke Harris, MD Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle Permission to Come Home by Jenny T. Wang, PhD MINDFULNESS RESOURCES No Mud, No Lotus by Thich Nhat Hanh When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön Yoga Mind by Suzan Colón How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell