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

by Stephanie Foo

Every villain’s redemption arc begins with their origin story.

“How can things be okay when you keep making me look bad?” she screeched.

When we say someone is resilient, we mean that they adapt well to conditions of adversity—they are strong, in possession of “emotional toughness.” But how do you measure someone’s emotional toughness, exactly? 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.

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by author and psychotherapist Pete Walker.

one of my PTSD books said in its beginning pages that you should absolutely not quit your job after diagnosis—survivors need structure and purpose in order to heal.

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.

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.

Scientists have learned that stress is literally toxic. Stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline surging through our bodies are healthy in moderation—you wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning without a good dose of cortisol. But in overwhelming quantities, they become toxic and can change the structure of our brains. Stress and depression wear our bodies out. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres.

Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin.

Child abuse is often associated with reduced thickness in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with moderation, decision-making, complex thought, and logical reasoning.

I was constantly having to beg my parents to believe they were loved. That was my primary job as their child. It should have been the other way around.

He points at my parents. “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.”

There is a difference between knowing and understanding. I had known that this wasn’t my fault. EMDR unlocked the gate to the next realm, toward understanding. The difference is one between rote memorization and true learning. Between hypothesis and belief. Between prayer and faith. It seems obvious now—how can there be love without faith?

Dissociation exists for a reason. For millennia, our brains and bodies have removed us from our pain so we can keep moving forward.

Feelings are a privilege. And oh boy was I privileged. I no longer had my old tools of dissociation: work, booze, forgetfulness—a comfortable suit of armor that allowed me to move forward blindly.

No matter what I do, no matter where I try to find joy, I instead find my trauma. And it whispers to me: “You will always be this way. It’s never going to change. I will follow you. I will make you miserable forever. And then I will kill you.” 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.

It had always seemed that whenever we engaged in this dance, there was no door. There was no outside world. Our home was our entire universe.

Steve acknowledges, the repercussions from his abuse haven’t disappeared magically with time. “I think it’s why I work so hard all the time. I’ll take on other people’s work, I’ll do more than I should, because I have this need for acceptance. I need my boss to tell me that I did a good job or I’ll have this anxiety—this incompleteness, that no matter how hard I try, I can’t hit.” We trade stories of feeling anxious and inferior at work, echoes of what our parents made us believe when we were small.

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.

They say you don’t get rid of a ghost by pretending it isn’t there.

I learned about the Chinese practice of ancestor veneration—perhaps the oldest form of religion. We build altars to our dead and light incense to them, praying to them for guidance. These ancestors are equipped to advise us because they possess thousands of lifetimes’ worth of knowledge—the wisdom collected throughout our entire bloodline.

“I’m sure parents don’t talk to their kids about a lot of things. They don’t talk about their sex lives. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a Taoist approach. There are probably things they’d just rather forget. And there is a Chinese popular religion thing where people don’t talk about negative things. It’s why people don’t talk about cancer.

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.

I am the trauma you bury away. I am the lie you hold under your tongue, the thing you bury, vanish, erase, the thing you can almost always pretend is forgotten as long as you don’t touch it.

I am blood and sin. I am the sum total of my parents’ regrets. I am their greatest shame. —

“Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD; also known as complex trauma disorder) is a psychological disorder that can develop in response to prolonged, repeated experience of interpersonal trauma in a context in which the individual has little or no chance of escape.”

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.

Many believe that in order to heal from C-PTSD, we must receive kind and compassionate parenting. If we can’t receive that from our own parents, then we must find a new parent to do the job. One form of therapy actually enlists other people to assume the role of your parent. There are group therapy retreats in which other patients take turns “parenting” one another. Your new stand-in parent makes the apologies your parent cannot give you, then provides you with the generous affirmations you deserved to hear as a child—that they are proud of you, that you are inherently good and beautiful.

there are many other therapies built around teaching adults to reparent themselves. EMDR is one of them. In my first EMDR session, I embraced a child version of myself, “saved” her from her abuse, and told her she deserved love. But subsequent EMDR sessions were less effective, and I never was moved as starkly as in my first experience.

And as I flipped through all of these Stephanies, I kept repeating this sentence again and again: “You are suffering, but you are trying so hard.”

Self-parenting exercises taught me to slowly rebuild healthy self-talk. But it must be said: Even though I know reparenting has helped dozens of my friends and acquaintances, almost everyone has told me it’s exhausting. 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.

Joe Andreano is a cognitive neuroscientist and instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital, who, among other things, studies the changes that happen in menstruating people’s brains during their cycles.

Andreano has found in his neuroimaging studies that during the mid-luteal phase (the second half of the menstrual cycle after ovulation), we have higher levels of emotional arousal and more connectivity between emotion and memory.

This connectivity means that if we are unlucky enough to be abused during this time period, those abuses can lodge more deeply in our memories and become encoded in our brains. These memories are also more likely to encourage a negative memory bias, a tendency to return to these negative memories more than positive ones. Bottom line: We are more vulnerable to developing PTSD or depression if we experience trauma during a certain point in our cycles.

And if meds work for you, take them. More power to you!

Road to Resilience, a show put out by the Mount Sinai Health System. This episode, “The Long Arm of Childhood Trauma,”

For you to want to die means that you went to the threshold of what you could bear.

Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community.

punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love. Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.

minute details and misattunements in conversations. I picked up on them when people looked away, or didn’t respond to a bid for connection, or changed the subject. Instead of feeling insecure or guilty about it, I chanted to myself, Okay, curiosity. Curiosity, not self-blame. This change seemed so impossibly small. But all of a sudden, with just this slightest change in attitude, worlds of complex behaviors lit up like a secret plane of existence coming into view.

When I perceive someone being rude to me, I do not get it together to practice this dance of attunement every day. Not even most times. But more and more, I am curious enough to ask the magic question: “What do you need?” These four words open doors and break down walls. With the benefit of understanding, we are no longer two separate beings floating through these threads alone. We are giving and receiving.

neuropsychologist at Emory University, Negar Fani, who studies the effects of PTSD on people of color. She did a study where she scanned the brains of Black women who had experienced continued racist microaggressions in their personal lives and at work, and found that this abuse had changed the structures of their brains.[2]

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.

Negative emotions are of course terrifying in the context of our society’s obsession with happiness.

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.

Siegle told me, “As far as we can tell with complex PTSD, in really stressful situations, you’ve got this coping skill that allows the prefrontal cortex to just shut off some of our evolutionary freak-out mechanisms and instead have high levels of prefrontal activity. So our bodies stop reacting.”