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

by Stephanie Foo

The world itself becomes a threat.

They were hyperalert to even the smallest twinges in facial expressions.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is a kind of bible for C-PTSD sufferers.

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

all elbows and angles.

a flinching, hissing animal,

She looked at the color of my tongue and told me I had too much heat.

But my body remembers.

what my bones know.

sibling

this sentence didn't make sense

Instead, I reflexively assumed that he was criticizing me.

this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful.

insight-trauma is relational and healing is relational

somewhere where people actually loved me.”

for people who are traumatized, all they know is rupture,”

It takes learning, practice, and time to learn that a blowup isn't the beginning of the end

You don’t know how to apologize by making it a two-way repair.”

And it takes a healthy person/partner to engage in this as well

punishment is

is the opposite of love.

personal, pervasive, and permanent.

It's about me, it's a never-ending pattern of defeat, and we're fucked for life