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

by Stephanie Foo

“I’m just trying to apologize! Please! I’m really sorry. I just thought…maybe after that weekend…I thought maybe things would be okay.”

Here is what I have kept from my childhood: my whippings. My mother whipped me a lot. She whipped me for not looking her in the eye when speaking to her, but if I looked her in the eye with too much indignance, she whipped me again. She beat me for sitting with one leg up on the chair “like a trishaw puller” or for using

American slang like “don’t have a cow, man.” Once, she beat me for half an hour with her tennis racket for opening the plastic covering on her People magazine after it arrived in the mail. Sometimes the beatings would be mild—she’d use her hands, chopsticks, my toys. Other times she would whale on me with a plastic ruler or a bamboo cane until it broke, and then she’d blame me for it. “You made me do it because you’re so stupid!” she howled. Then she turned her eyes up to the ceiling and screamed at God: “What did I do to deserve an ungrateful, useless child? She ruined my life. Take her back! I don’t want to look at her ugly face anymore.”

A few times a year, my mother would get so tired of me that she decided God should take me back forever. She grabbed my ponytail at the top of a flight of stairs and used it to hurl me down. She raised a cleaver above my wrist, or she pulled my head back and pushed the blade into my neck, its cold edge pressing into the softness of my skin. I’d apologize frantically, but she’d scream at me that I didn’t mean it, to shut up before she sliced my jugular open. I’d fall silent, but then she said I was never repentant. So I’d start to apologize again, and she said my...

again. We’d sit there, trapped in a senseless...

I probably hated my mother for being impossible to please. But I also loved her, and so I guess I must have felt guilty, too, and frightened. I remember that I cried bitterly when I was beaten, and not because of the pain—I was used to that. I cried because of her words. I bit my lip and dug my nails into my palm, but I could never successfully hold back my tears when she called me stupid, ugly, unwanted. I’d

sniffle, which disgusted her, and she’d slap me again.

After the beating was over and the berating stopped, though, it was easy. I just turned off the flow of tears and stared out the window. Or I went back to reading a Baby-Sitters Club book. I put it all behind me and moved on. Once, after a severe beating, I had a harder time—my breath came in quick hiccups and I couldn’t slow it down enough to get air into my lungs. In retrospect, this was probably a panic attack. But I...

she whispered that I ruined her life,

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 how do you measure someone’s emotional toughness, exactly?

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.

First of all, I have an abandonment complex. Obviously. My mom left. My dad. Then everyone else.”

I hope you understand that none of those losses were about you, though.”

“Sure, whatever. And I need constant reassurance. I’m really insecure. And I have a really hard time trusting anyone.

“I don’t know, there’s a lot of trauma and abandonment and anger around here. Your issues are solidly within my wheelhouse.

Thanks for telling me. It’s good to know, and I think we can make it work.”

It’s okay to have some things you never get over. In the span of half an hour, this man whom I had known for less than a season did what nobody in my life ever had: He took all of my sins and simply forgave them. He didn’t demand relentless improvement. There were no ultimatums. He asserted that I was enough, as is. The gravity of it stunned me into silence. Joey was the opposite of the dread.

“I’m not totally together! Nobody is. But I’m here to tell you I’ve done a whole lot of healing. I’ve accepted that I’ll always have more to do, but I’ve made leaps and bounds and it feels manageable in ways I could not have imagined years ago.”

survivors need structure and purpose in order to heal.

healing from PTSD isn’t truly possible while you are still in danger. You can’t convince yourself that you’re safe if you’re actually unsafe,

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.

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.

The abused kids thought that more of these photos presented an angry threat than the children from normal homes. They were hyperalert to even the smallest twinges in facial expressions.