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

by Stephanie Foo

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

“I think…my default is to be distrustful and fearful and to be in a state of…bleh. And that bleh-ness ranges from being very depressed to walking around in a sort of dissociated state.

I’d turned off my awareness to talk about my trauma. And then I turned a corner and got lost, hardly aware of the words coming out of my mouth.

future relationships with anybody would be harder for people with complex trauma because they were wired to believe that other people could not be trusted. The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people. Not just reading self-help books or meditating alone.

What is important is to approach all of these interactions with curiosity for what that truth is, not fear. He said I should approach difficult conversations with an attitude of “What is hurting you?” instead of “Have I hurt you?”

It isn’t just racism. Being part of an oppressed minority group—being queer or disabled, for example—can cause C-PTSD if you are made to feel unsafe because of your identity. Poverty can be a contributing factor to C-PTSD. These factors traumatize people and cause brain changes that push them toward anxiety and self-loathing. Because of those changes, victims internalize the blame for their failures. They tell themselves they are awkward, lazy, antisocial, or stupid, when what’s really happening is that they live in a discriminatory society where their success is limited by white supremacy and class stratification. The system itself becomes the abuser.

The healthiest hearts are adaptable, and the quicker they adapt, the better. When you start running, your heart should ideally speed up quickly. Then, when you rest, it should slow down quickly. It’s the same for your emotions. When something really tragic happens, it would be weird if you were still happy, right? Or if you just sat there with no reaction. When something tragic happens, you should be there with that pain, feeling that sadness. When something unjust happens, you should feel how aggravating it is. And then, after you’ve sat with those feelings for the appropriate amount of time—and it could be an hour, or a day, or months, depending on the severity of what happened—then, you can go back to a state of rest. Or joy. Or whatever.

Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.”

Anger inspires action. Sadness is necessary to process grief. Fear helps keep us safe. Completely eradicating these emotions is not just impossible—it’s unhealthy.

“Pain is about feeling real, appropriate, and valid hurt when something bad happens. Suffering is when you add extra dollops to that pain. You’re feeling bad about feeling bad.”

Here’s a theory: Maybe I had not really been broken this whole time. Maybe I had been a human—flawed and still growing but full of light nonetheless. All this time, I had received plenty of love, but I’d given it, too. Unbeknownst to me, I had been scattering goodness all around like fun-size chocolates accidentally falling out of my purse as I moved through the world. Perhaps the only real thing that was broken was the image I had of myself—punishing and unfair, narrow and hypercritical.

PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace. The whole point of PTSD is to prepare you for being on the verge of death at any moment.

I am full of anger, pain, peace, love, of horrible shards and exquisite beauty, and the lifelong challenge will be to balance all of those things, while keeping them in the circle. Healing is never final. It is never perfection. But along with the losses are the triumphs.