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.

Soon, my father and I found ourselves alone in this world, and our simmering hatred had nowhere to go but toward each other.

You accept the end. You lose hope. And then, with hope, goes sanity.

I liked that journalism was a puzzle. You lay out your evidence and order it from most important to least, the inverted pyramid a force against woeful attention spans and chaos. I could take feelings and injustices and even tragedies and figure out a way to shape them all into something purposeful. Something controlled.

It didn’t matter if my parents were proud of me. I was proud of me, and that was the most important thing. Because I had done this. I’d gotten myself here with my own hard work.

I was wild, swinging blindly at the terrifying world around me, hurting people in the process. I told myself that I needed to be this way to defend myself.

I gave her my pain to hold in this horrible time, instead of cradling hers.

The pile of abandonments started to make me feel like my life was a broken record. I kept spinning around and around, finding myself back where I started—watching people’s backs as they walked out the door.

I counted the people I hated and told myself that I could not know their struggle. I tried to see things from their perspective. And I wished them the best.

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.

It took so much courage to speak, but if I was quiet, he’d ask why I didn’t have an opinion,

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.

How could anyone be truly happy in a world filled with unrelenting suffering?

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.

If I could misinterpret a furrowed brow, what else could I misinterpret? I must possess a million subconscious triggers, so how much of the world, exactly, is my brain incorrectly afraid of?

My previous efforts to heal might not have fixed me, but they had woven me into this world, sewing me emotionally and professionally into a network of lives.

sometimes it’s the attempt that matters, you know, more than the success.”

I had more physical energy. My legs felt strong and capable. Exercise boosted my mood temporarily. But my psychic energy was supremely lacking. I could leap up subway stairs with a load of groceries, but I often still couldn’t get myself up off the couch to send an email.

This terror wasn’t coming from my body. My actions allowed me to assure myself that I was well rested, well fed, and healthy. This anxiety must have come instead from the dank alleys of my mind. Well, I thought, I guess I better muster up the courage to walk inside and look for the source.

“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.”

“They don’t love you like you deserve to be loved. They are buried in their own misery and hurt to the point where they just cannot give you the kind of love that you need.”

Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed. If it looks good and it feels good, it should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes.

I believe that they hated themselves too much to love me; their sadness made them too selfish to see me at all.

I didn’t know how to share my feelings because I still didn’t know how to not be a burden.

No matter what I do, no matter where I try to find joy, I instead find my trauma.

The literature says this is normal for traumatized people. Experts say it’s all part of the three P’s: We think our sadness is personal, pervasive, and permanent. Personal, in that we have caused all the problems we face. Pervasive, in that our entire life is defined by our failings. And permanent, in that the sadness will last forever. But, as usual, knowing that I am textbook doesn’t help me rise off the page.

Even though consciously I was completely in the present, my emotions were back in 1997, back when I was a little kid and making a mistake on a spelling test could literally be a matter of life and death. This return was an emotional flashback.

Being truly healthy should feel like a pleasure.

I’d eschewed my idea of a cruel, transactional God. Now I believed in a force greater than myself. Not a deistic being, per se…more like the idea that the universe might be organized around something like love.

there was one thing that could combat the void for a little while: gratitude.

when you take the time to savor the good, you simply need less of it.

in general, our parents were not taught to take slow breaths when they were upset to calm themselves down. And many of our parents were not taught to spare the rod.

We achieved the American Dream because we had no other choice.

The veil of my dissociation, I know now, has done some damage to my memories of this place.

Our memories are fallible, scientists say, and there is evidence that our brains are constantly rewriting them; in fact, the very act of conjuring or relaying a memory can change it in our brains.[3]

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]

But this narrative gives me a false sense of control. If it’s all my fault, then I can change it. I can fix it.

Pain is pain. We all suffered. Some of us turned out better, some of us turned out worse. Some of us healed, and some of us couldn’t.

Ugly things become uglier in the dark.

For a moment, I do not feel like a single traumatized freak. I am a product of a place. I am one of many. All of us are victims of a dysfunctional community that was very good at throttling itself while murmuring, “Smile through your tears. Swallow your pain.”

C Pam Zhang writes in an essay in The New Yorker.[1] She says her parents “depicted their pre-America lives as mere prologue, quickly sketched…. It is far too easy…as the naturalized citizen of a country that tries to kick dirt over its bloody history…to see only the castle on the hill and not the thickets of bone we trod through to arrive at it.”

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. You walk around with a knife in your heart. You do it with stoicism. This is the apex of being.

“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” she repeated to me, day after day. “Big things, make small. Small things, make nothing. When someone wrongs you, never keep it in your heart. Let it go.”

The past is always here, haunting our homes, standing over us at night. They say you don’t get rid of a ghost by pretending it isn’t there. The legends tell us to address the ghost directly. Declare that this is our home and it isn’t welcome here anymore. But I’m the only one yelling, screaming at spirits in the living room while everyone else averts their eyes, pretending there’s nothing wrong.

“Look at Henry,” I said. “He never worked on himself. He just lives his life being an asshole, pissing everyone off, without ever looking in the mirror. If he did, he’d see what you’re seeing now. He’d see a need for change. He’d be upset about the way he treated people. But he’ll never do that because he’ll never look. You, at least, are looking. It’s very brave. But change is hard. It’s possible. It just takes practice.”

Reparenting takes time, and concentration, and calmness. It takes an intellectual and physical effort to shove aside the comfortably worn neural pathways and go in a different direction. And even though that effort comes with joyous rewards, sometimes it also comes with sadness. 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.

Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself.