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

by Stephanie Foo

I mean, twentysomething millennials are all really stressed out, aren’t they? Isn’t depression just shorthand for the human condition? Who isn’t anxious here in New York, the capital of neuroticism?

The more I read, the more every aspect of my personhood is reduced to deep diagnostic flaws. I hadn’t understood how far the disease had spread. How complete its takeover of my identity was. The things I want. The things I love. The way I speak. My passions, my fears, my zits, my eating habits, the amount of whiskey I drink, the way I listen, and the things I see. Everything—everything, all of it—is infected. My trauma is literally pumping through my blood, driving every decision in my brain. It is this totality that leaves me frantic with grief.

I am the common denominator in the tragedies of my life. I am a textbook case of mental illness.

every night before bed, I kneeled and said the same prayer over and over like a mantra. “Please, God—let me not be such a bad girl. Please let me be able to make Mommy and Daddy happy. Please make me into a good girl.”

I took it upon myself to keep everything in a tenuous kind of order. When my parents wanted to sleep in on Sundays, I’d force them to go to church so God could know how serious we were about maintaining the peace in our household. I’d remind them of things to be grateful for.

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.

This was how I discovered the power of journalism—not just as a force to right wrongs and change the world, but as a force that turned my anguished brain into a functioning machine.

I could take feelings and injustices and even tragedies and figure out a way to shape them all into something purposeful. Something controlled.

But how was I to begin letting it go when anger was the force that gave me momentum? My anger was my power. It was what protected me. Without it, wouldn’t I be sad and naked? I decided, in the end, to cleanse myself of all of it. An act of radical forgiveness was the only thing that might rip me out of the loop.

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.

But I thought I fixed this problem, I muttered to myself all day long. 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?

I wanted to be the kind of woman people didn’t leave. I had to find out what was salvageable, if I had good qualities underneath all of those layers of trauma and hurt and workaholism.

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?

Erasing C-PTSD from myself seemed as impossible as swapping out my collarbones. In order to heal, would I really have to throw away everything that made me who I was?

My grief kept growing with every progressive study I read about the biological effects of trauma, all the charts and graphs and diagrams that told me I’d sustained brain damage.

Trauma can result in reductions in the parts of the brain that process semantics, emotion and memory retrieval, perceiving emotions in others, and attention and speech.

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. I had friends who cared dearly about me, mentees who looked up to me. And Joey, of course. If I cut myself out of the web, I would leave a gaping hole that would hurt all those around me. And the whole point of this endeavor was to stop hurting people.

Dissociation exists for a reason. For millennia, our brains and bodies have removed us from our pain so we can keep moving forward. A tiger just ate your wife? Bummer, but breaking down or freezing up is not an option. You better go out hunting today or your kids will starve. Your house was just destroyed in an air raid? Okay, but you have to pack up what’s left and find new shelter, now. Feelings are a privilege.

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.

Beauty After Bruises claims that the way to fix these emotional flashbacks is to ground yourself. So the next time I found myself in a panicky and depressive state, I read their Grounding 101 tips: Open your eyes. Put your feet solidly on the floor. Look at your hands and feet. Recognize they are adult hands and feet. Name five things you can see and hear and smell.

The default mode network is so called because if you put people into an MRI machine for an hour and let their minds wander, the DMN is the system of connections in their brains that will light up. It’s arguably the default state of human consciousness, of boredom and daydreaming. In essence, our ego.

The DMN can be silenced significantly by antidepressants or hallucinogenic substances. But the most efficient cure for an overactive DMN is mindfulness.

I decided to cut down on the number of wellness activities I participated in, keeping only my favorites, the ones that brought me sincere and easy joy. And I spruced up my at-home meditation routine, setting down a special cushion in front of my bay window, surrounded by my plants. I told myself that self-care shouldn’t cost money or come from a place of obligation. Being truly healthy should feel like a pleasure.

Shrooms have also been shown to suppress your DMN and dissolve your ego, allowing you to look at your life with a childlike, brand-new perspective. They can draw connections between disparate parts of the brain, building creative solutions to our life’s struggles and strengthening areas we don’t use frequently enough.

I had so many needs, too. Needs from Joey, needs from my friends. Oh God, I thought. A woman is simply supposed to provide, not to need. The worst thing a woman can do is take up space with her hunger. With her hysteria.

But my trip had also shown me that there was one thing that could combat the void for a little while: gratitude. It was the flame that penetrated the darkness, that filled me all the way up. And the only way to keep the flame going was to keep feeding it. I had to force gratitude into my routines in ways I could not ignore or forget. I had to systematize the light.

Like with food—like that one miraculous Pret chicken parmesan wrap—when you take the time to savor the good, you simply need less of it.

I could breathe and count colors to get myself out of that terrified state. But grounding and gratitude were palliative care versus curative care. I was still treating the symptoms without treating the source, and I would never truly be healed unless I confronted it. Now that I had stabilized the present, it was time for me to dive back into the past.

All of our parents had accents, and some of us did, too, but none of us could hear them. When I was a teenager, the headlines read San Jose Becomes Majority Minority City. If you’re growing up in it, majority minority seems like a nonsensical term, a paradoxical way of saying, “This is not how you are supposed to exist.” But exist we did.

We could feel it looming somewhere, large and dark beneath everything: our parents’ pain. So when the hands came, we offered our cheeks. We offered ourselves as conduits for their anguish because they had suffered so we wouldn’t, so we could watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat sugary cereal and go to college and trust the government and never go hungry. We excused all of it, absorbed the slaps and the burns and the canings and converted them into perfect report cards to wipe away our parents’ brutal pasts.

The doubt bloats heavily in my stomach. If I could twist mountains into hills, then what else did my traumatized brain dissolve? Can a mentally ill woman ever be trusted with her own story?

In the universe my teachers painted, this community suffers mainly from a parental overemphasis on mathematics and an overprotectiveness that limits exposure to teen drinking. In this universe, this community is a paragon of immigrant success, privilege, and happiness. It is a miraculous place, a place where immigrant trauma comes to disappear. It is a place where death and war and rape are vanished by good grades and white-collar jobs and clean, two-story homes with pools. And I think, Maybe it wasn’t so bad.

“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]

This whole fucking narrative of all of these Asians settling gently into the American dream is bullshit. The facts just don’t add up. You have a community of immigrants and refugees who survived extreme violence—but they don’t believe in mental illness, don’t talk about trauma, don’t allow for feelings or failure, and everyone is just fucking fine? The worst angst here comes from not being able to make an essay sparkle? Come on.

IM SO GLAD SOMEBODY SAID IT

We’re not playing the game, the stupid pissing contest of Who Had It Better? Who Had It Worse? He’s not playing an adult version of the Oppression Olympics, either. 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.

Are we being overlooked because of the incorrect stereotype painting us as the model minority? The AP students? The well-behaved kids with swimming pools and those fancy laptops?

a functioning person doesn’t always equate to a healthy person.

Not all Asians are made equal in America, and the term “model minority” flattens our massive diaspora. Test scores could vary wildly among Chinese students—whose parents might have had more resources, more education, and a better grasp of English—and, say, Vietnamese or Cambodian students, whose parents were often impoverished refugees. To counter the rich-Asian narrative, Yvonne tells me about the significant population of kids who fall under the poverty line and the fact that a big chunk of her students qualify for Medicaid when she sends them to psychiatrists or therapists. She tells me about her kids struggling with homelessness.

All the books I’ve read on trauma tried to absolve me at some point. They said that my ferocious nature is not my fault, because I was abused. It’s like faulting a mountain lion for mauling a man; how can you blame its nature, a consequence of its programming? This never comforted me. I wanted to believe I had more agency than an animal.

Hurt rarely materializes out of the ether with no rhyme or reason. Why did this happen to us? To our community? What was the source material for our pain, for all the lashes we received? Did any of us know? Before I screamed, it was perhaps wise to listen.

All the women in my family—Auntie, my grandmother, my great-grandmother—had endured their difficult lives with silent dignity, not blinding rage. They had shown that suffering was the heart of strength. I was not capable of that decorum.

it’s true. immigrant women are forced to be so resilient.

It was the first time I could recall that Auntie had said that something wasn’t fair. Life had not been kind or fair to Auntie. How could my pain compare?

my great-grandmother’s history was worth our remembrance and our respect because of her hard work, her sacrifices, and, most of all, her unfathomable endurance. 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.

Taoists adhere to the concept of wu wei, which means “success through non-effort.” This idea acknowledges that there are forces in nature beyond us. The world is an immense and intricately organized system, perfected over millions of years. There is no point in pushing against this system. Effort only causes disruption. Instead, we must simply flow like water. Accept and adapt. Let the currents carry you where you need to go.

You always say positive, good things. Because you’re speaking that into reality. Have you heard this Chinese saying, ‘Eat bitterness’? You just take that grief and you swallow it.”

the Western approach is ‘We’ve got to heal, we’ve got to take control.’ And I think that’s a privileged position.” Jeung took a long pause again. “Most of the world expects trauma and suffering. Most people live through it. It’s not an exceptional, one-time experience. So even if you get health issues as side effects from trauma, it’s like, well, yeah. People suffer, people get sick. And so it’s only privileged people who think of it otherwise.”