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.

need to stop being an unreliable narrator.

If I took up all that space with my feelings, what space could I maintain for hers? Hers were more important. Because hers had greater stakes.

It’s okay to have some things you never get over.

Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from those of people who haven’t.[8]

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”

Judith Herman, the woman who coined the term complex PTSD, wrote: “The abused child…must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. She will go to any lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame and responsibility…. The abuse is either walled off from conscious awareness and memory…or minimized, rationalized, and excused, so that whatever did happen was not really abuse.”[1]

I already made it out of this place once. I’m going to make it out of here again.

I am not entirely hard-hearted. Of course I fret about this. I have no interest in ruining anyone’s life. But also. If it weren’t for all the secrets. If we had simply said things, stated what was happening out in the open, then maybe someone could have stepped in to prevent my parents from ruining mine.

It made perfect sense to me later in life when I discovered that the Chinese word for endurance is simply the word knife on top of the word heart.

“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” she repeated to me, day after

But as Paul Gilroy writes, “Histories of suffering should not be allocated exclusively to their victims. If they were, the memory of the trauma would disappear as the living memory of it faded away.”[1]

Different State of Mind: Derealization and Depersonalization. The article was all about recognizing that being emotionally closed off—as if you’re looking at the world through a pane of glass—is a potentially dangerous way of coping with stress and a possible symptom of depression and anxiety.

The stuff we think of when we think about DNA—nose shape, eye color—only comprises about 2 percent of our total DNA. The other 98 percent is called noncoding DNA, and it is responsible for our emotions, personality, and instincts. The epigenome on top of noncoding DNA is very sensitive to stress and the environment. When a body adapts to constant, overwhelming stress—not a car accident or a bad flu, but long-lasting trauma—the epigenome changes. Trauma can turn on a gene that responds to the smell of cherry blossoms, for example. Or turn off a gene that regulates our emotions. It might turn on a gene for fear.

My family tried to erase this history. But my body remembers. My work ethic. My fear of cockroaches. My hatred for the taste of dirt. 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 expressing the kindness to yourself that you deserve often reminds you of the kindness you didn’t get.

Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee.

Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have t...

What other choice do you have? Nobody else is going to solve it for you. That sadness—the sadness of loss—is a different flavor than the sadness of reckoning. The sadness of reckoning feels visceral and angry and tinged with violence. It feels healable, somehow, with revenge or justice. But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.

They make these jokes because 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.

Antidepressants fail to outperform placebos in up to half of clinical trials. Armed with fMRI technology, brain scientists now understand that assuming we are born with chemical imbalances is putting the chicken before the egg—trauma changes the structure and chemical and hormonal responses of our brains. In many cases, we can’t just pump opposing chemicals into our brains with the assumption that things will change. We have to treat the underlying, original cause: the trauma.

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

Road to Resilience,