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

by Stephanie Foo

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 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 seemed as if other people might be immune to moments like these; they somersaulted through their failures and ended up on their feet. 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.

Always, always: I tried to be good. But when the dread was at its most terrible, no matter what I did, I was never good enough.

I thought I became a nice girl. I picked and picked at my memories, trying to figure out how, despite my best efforts, the horrible, rotten core at the center of myself managed to get past my defenses and worm its way out. I questioned every word I uttered, every movement I made. How was I supposed to be?

wrung my body out like a towel, twisting both ends with red fists and sinking my teeth into it, gritting out, “It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine,”

It’d be perfect. For that day. Or an hour. And then tendrils of the dread started peeking into the corners of my vision. And I had to start all over again.

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

If I possessed the anxiety-and-depression combo meal everyone else had, then why was I the only one crying on the subway every morning? Why couldn’t I figure out how to be like everyone else? Why did the dread follow me, leaving a path of destruction everywhere I went?

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.

No, having triggers doesn’t make you a fragile little snowflake. It makes you human. Everyone has them, or will have them eventually,

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.

In other words, complex trauma created a consistent set of defensive traits—of personality quirks—within its victims. And these were uniquely terrible even within the PTSD community. It seemed to suggest we had our own culture. Americans are individualist. Chinese people are oriented toward the good of the collective. The French are romantic and love cheese. And people with C-PTSD are drama queen self-saboteurs who are impossible to love.