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

by Stephanie Foo

But that’s exactly the problem. I’m tired of pulling. I don’t want to pull anymore. I want a dumbwaiter, or an escalator, or a floating rainbow drug cloud. Anything to lift me toward emotional stability. To fix me.

The question always feels absurd to me. How would I know how I felt? It was so many years ago. I was so young. But if I had to guess, I’d say it probably felt fucking bad.

Most of these symptoms rang true for me. But it was the hyper-specific ones that freaked me out, like the idea that C-PTSD patients spend their lives in “relentless search for a savior.” How could they have known about that? Somehow, this Wikipedia entry called it. Every time I met someone new who seemed wise and stable and kind, I wondered if they might be the answer to things, if they might be the new best friend who’d finally crack the code, the one who would make me feel loved. I thought this was a weird but very personal trait of mine. And this whole time it had been a medical symptom.

I told myself that self-care shouldn’t cost money or come from a place of obligation. Being truly healthy should feel like a pleasure.

The loss is enormous. An entire childhood’s worth of happiness. The bedrock for a happy life.

The doubt bloats heavily in my stomach. If I could twist mountains into hills, then what else did my traumatized brain dissolve? Can a mentally ill woman ever be trusted with her own story?

“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” she repeated to me, day after day. “Big things, make small. Small things, make nothing. When someone wrongs you, never keep it in your heart. Let it go.”

Except it isn’t, of course. 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.

I could not believe it had taken me this long to realize that punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love. Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.

Over and over, the answer is the same, isn’t it? Love, love, love. The salve and the cure. In order to become a better person, I had to do something utterly unintuitive. I had to reject the idea that punishing myself would solve the problem. I had to find the love.

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.”