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

by Stephanie Foo

“The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.”[2]

It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan, and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs.[6] People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view.

“How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma, but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.

Despite the fact that these mice had never smelled cherry blossoms before and had never been shocked, they still shuddered and jumped when it wafted into their cages. This generation of mice had inherited their parents’ trauma.

study from emory school of medicine on intergenerational trauma in mice

The study showed that Holocaust survivors and their descendants shared the same epigenetic tags on the very same part of the FKBP5 gene. Then Yehuda compared those genes with those of Jewish people who lived outside of Europe and did not suffer through the Holocaust. Their epigenetic tags weren’t altered. It was clear that the trauma of experiencing the Holocaust specifically created DNA methylation on the FKBP5 gene of survivors…and their children.

Every adaptation our brain makes is an effort to better protect our bodies. Some of these backfire—the deadly result of an overactive stress response. But some might actually be advantageous to our health.

I want to have words for what my bones know. I want to use those gifts when they serve me and understand and forgive them when they do not.

PTSD is generally considered a male condition. It is the warrior’s disease, a blight of the mind that must be earned by time in battle, in some dangerous overseas desert or jungle. But the real statistics suggest the opposite: Women are more than twice as likely to have PTSD than men. Ten percent of women are expected to suffer from PTSD in their lifetimes, as opposed to just 4 percent of men.

Sigmund Freud was the first to hypothesize that female “hysteria” stemmed from childhood sexual assault, but he retracted his theory once he realized that it meant the ritzy neighborhood in Vienna in which he practiced was rife with sexual predators and child molesters.[1]

Again, women who experienced childhood trauma are 80 percent more likely to experience painful endometriosis.[4] They’re much more likely to develop premenstrual dysphoric disorder. More likely to develop fibroids.[5] It may affect fertility.[6] They’re at greater risk for postpartum depression[7] and depression in menopause.[8] Fate had finally come knocking. I did not have to wait until I got older to experience the inflammation and health risks the books had warned me about. They were here.

When your own triggered Hulk starts to come out, the reflex is to think, Oh no. I’m getting rageful. I’m turning into a monster again. No, stop, Hulk! Go away! But Ham takes an opposite approach. He talks to his own Hulk tenderly. “What I’m trying to do is to say, like, ‘Hulk, you’re back? You think that I’m in trouble? Oh, thank you so much for loving me so much that you’re trying to protect me.’

this is the sweetest way to describe it

Then Ham said that we as a society should be tolerant of Hulks sometimes. He advocated explaining your Hulk to others. To tell those close to you, “Sometimes he comes roaring out. And then as soon as the Hulk is gone, I’m going to be back. But please don’t mistake me for my Hulk.”[1]

Self-regulation is a very insular thing. That’s just survival. Like, ‘I’m not going to actually learn how to be connected to you, but at least I’m going to be able to regulate how upset I get from you.’ And I don’t want you to just be self-regulating in a corner by yourself. Shame makes you want to hide and tuck away. But what if instead you were in this state where you could ask, ‘Who are you? What do you need from me right now? And what do I need from you?’ ”

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. We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place.