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

by Stephanie Foo

“I’m sure you’re being more productive than you’re letting on,” she says, ignoring my eye rolls. “I’ve seen you pull yourself out of depressions like this before. I know you can pull yourself up out of this one.”

I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression since I was twelve years old. The pain is a fanged beast that I’ve battled a hundred times throughout the years, and every time I think I’ve cut it down for good, it reanimates and launches itself at my throat again.

“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” Auntie repeated to me. “Big things, make small. Small things, make nothing. When someone wrongs you, never keep it in your heart. Let it go. Smile through your tears. Swallow your pain.”

Hatred, I learned quickly, was the antidote to sadness. It was the only safe feeling. Hatred does not make you cry at school. It isn’t vulnerable. Hatred is efficient. It does not grovel. It is pure power.

When we say someone is resilient, we mean that they adapt well to conditions of adversity—they are strong, in possession of “emotional toughness.”

But when I made a mistake, the dread crept into my field of vision and I couldn’t see anything except my mistake for an hour, maybe even a day.

I thrust my face underneath the surface to try to name the source of this dread but surfaced only with the usual guesses: I must be lazy or I’m making mistakes in my career or I’m spending too much money or I’m a bad friend. And then I worked as hard as I could in a dozen directions in order to satiate the beast.

But when the dread was at its most terrible, no matter what I did, I was never good enough.

I cried at random moments during the day, my hair fell out in clumps, and I wondered if I should distance myself from everyone I loved in order to protect them from me. Because the dread told me that I was on the precipice of fucking everything up.

Sometimes the dread actually did strike—and it struck often with men. I was confidently flirtatious with boys I dated. But as soon as we made things official, the dread would ring like tinnitus in my ears.

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.

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. For others, they’re in such an activated state that they have a hard time reaching into difficult memories, and the very act of recalling them could be retraumatizing.

“You don’t have to fix anything to deserve love. I love you for who you are. You can fuck up. You can do whatever you want and you’ll still deserve love.”

But at the same time, I was crying because a small part of me was sad: How had I not known, until this moment, the pleasure of breathing? How had I not known that feeling air on my palms could be so comforting? How much pleasure had I missed because I was too in my head to pay attention? How often had I longed to leave all of this, to die, because I hadn’t understood how satisfying it could be? The tears started flowing even harder. Swaddled in a blanket, feeling utterly safe and comfortable, I felt…cradled. As if someone was taking care of me, flooding me with kindness and generosity and love. And I was that someone.

And scientists have found that some people who suffer from depression, anxiety, or C-PTSD have overactive DMNs.

The DMN is the seat of responsibility and insecurity. It can be a punishing force when it over-ruminates and gets caught in a toxic loop of obsession and self-doubt.