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

by Stephanie Foo

a framed copy of the poem “Desiderata.” You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

“I’ve seen you pull yourself out of depressions like this before. I know you can pull yourself up out of this one.” But that’s exactly the problem. I’m tired of pulling. I don’t want to pull anymore.

I care about how I seem to fuck everything up all the time. I care and I care, and I hate myself for it.

“Not just PTSD. Complex PTSD. The difference between regular PTSD and complex PTSD is that traditional PTSD is often associated with a moment of trauma. Sufferers of complex PTSD have undergone continual abuse—trauma that has occurred over a long period of time, over the course of years. Child abuse is a common cause of complex PTSD,”

For years I’ve labored to build myself a new life, something very different from how I was raised. But now, all of a sudden, every conflict I’ve encountered, every loss, every failure and foible in my life, can be traced back to its root: me. I am far from normal. I am the common denominator in the tragedies of my life. I am a textbook case of mental illness.

And I know where I have to begin. Every villain’s redemption arc begins with their origin story.

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.

In my line of work, I had learned a great many things about interviews and story structure, politics, and people. But I still had not learned how to be kind.

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?

“But, you know, it’s okay to have some things you never get over.”

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.

How could I read these words about myself and not be pounded by shame? How could I not want to protect everyone from the burden of these noxious traits?

If C-PTSD was a series of personality traits, then was everything about my personality toxic? Was everything about my history toxic? And would I have to throw it all away?

The average life expectancy for someone with 6 or more ACEs is sixty years.[5]

Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed.

I read later that breathing exercises can actually be more triggering in certain populations. Sounds about right.

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

Since reading about damaged PTSD brains, I’d been losing faith in my own mind. Every time I tried to touch a memory, doubts and questions multiplied around it, preventing me from being able to see my own past.

In these blurry intervening years, my entire childhood had disappeared along with the family photos I destroyed when my mother left. I had not only thrown out the bad. I had thrown out all the good.

Can a mentally ill woman ever be trusted with her own story?

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.

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.

Estrangement is not freeing. It has not felt joyful. It has not been happy. It has only felt necessary, and even that is something I question all the time: Does this make me selfish? Does it make me cruel? Then I think of the Thao Nguyen lyric, You made a cruel kid. Come look what you did.

Removing my parents from my life protected me, but it did not fix me. The excision was not healing in and of itself. Instead, it cleared the way for me to rebuild.

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]

“It’s because I hated being the patient of therapists like that,” he admitted. “It terrified me. It didn’t ever make me feel safe. You have to be aware of how big a power difference there is between patient and therapist. And if you really want to work effectively with people, you have to keep surrendering your power. And that means being humble and making mistakes and fumbling and being comfortable with that.”

This was Dr. Ham’s whole theory: that because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relational trauma. In other words, this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful.

That meant 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 relati...

“It’s not the fights that matter. It’s the repairs.”

According to Dr. Ham, complex PTSD further clouds our perception of basic sensorial instincts. We are jumpy creatures, expectant of danger and conflict, and so that’s what we see. We’re often blind to what is actually happening.

In order to become a better person, I had to do something utterly unintuitive. I had to reject the idea that punishing myself would solve the problem. I had to find the love.

I remembered how people with C-PTSD can often assume problems are about them—not out of selfishness or narcissism but because they want to have enough control to be able to solve the problem.

*lightbulb*

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.

PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace.

My struggles with C-PTSD made me more empathetic. They made me more attuned to what people needed and uniquely skilled in comforting them.

Rage will always coat the tip of my tongue. I will always walk with a steel plate around my heart. My smile will always waver among strangers and my feet will always be ready to run.

So this is healing, then, the opposite of the ambiguous dread: fullness. 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.