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

by Stephanie Foo

the other kids didn’t like me. They said I was weird and intense.

it occurred to me that maybe the problem wasn’t everybody else—wasn’t human nature and its treachery. Maybe the problem was me.

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.

It seemed as if other people might be immune to moments like these; they somersaulted through their failures and ended up on their feet. But when I made a mistake, the dread crept into my field of vision and I couldn’t see anything except my mistake for an hour, maybe even a day.

I cried at random moments during the day, my hair fell out in clumps, and I wondered if I should distance myself from everyone I loved in order to protect them from me. Because the dread told me that I was on the precipice of fucking everything up.

I asked them for support, asked if I could come over even though I just saw them yesterday. Then I freaked out that I was turning into a needy leech and pushed them away. I disappeared for days, and when I returned, I was resentful of them for abandoning me.

once I sensed the men pulling away from me, I pulled away, too, so I could be the decider, the one with agency in the impending split. But then I was always a shameful, pleading mess when they told me they were leaving me for good.

Me af

I tried to emulate them—Ivy League–educated journalists who came from brilliant stock. But I was unsuccessful.

I had a habit of barging into co-workers’ offices and asking if they would go downstairs and smoke with me so I could complain about my mean boss. But the last few times I’d done that, my co-workers’ faces fell. I was exhausting, I realized. I should keep my negativity to myself, but also, I had nothing positive to say. So I drew my blinds and stopped talking to anyone, choosing instead to wallow alone. The one time I forced myself to go out with co-workers, I found myself whining miserably the whole time, like an unstoppable train.

Relate

If I possessed the anxiety-and-depression combo meal everyone else had, then why was I the only one crying on the subway every morning? Why couldn’t I figure out how to be like everyone else?

Veterans Affairs website, and saw the list of symptoms: People with complex PTSD have trouble holding down jobs and maintaining relationships. People with complex PTSD are needy. People with complex PTSD see threats everywhere and are aggressive.

More than symptoms, these felt like accusations. The scientists and doctors might as well have written, People with complex PTSD are awful human beings.

Lol

I’d dedicated so much to my career, gave it so much of my identity, missed dinners with friends, and let relationships die because I had chosen to spend my late nights at work. I had done it all because I thought it would make me respectable. But here I was, still the same nutcase I had been when I was a teenager,

“When [she] is not doing, she is worrying and planning about doing…. These types are also as susceptible to stimulating substance addictions, as they are to their favorite process addictions: workaholism and busyholism. Severely traumatized flight types may devolve into severe anxiety and panic disorders.”[1] Maybe work was not salvation. Maybe it was a symptom.

“The important thing was learning how to take good care of myself. To treat myself kindly,”

The very next day, on April 1, I officially gave my one month’s notice to leave the job I’d wanted my whole life. I told my boss, “Healing needs to be my job now.”

I’d always fantasized about indulging in a nervous breakdown. I watched Girl, Interrupted with a twisted, jealous fervor, felt envy when I saw celebrities enter rehab. What entitlement. What privilege, to just let life fall to the wayside, to stop working and pretending and just fall apart. To let my grief-swollen brain split at the seams and spend my days crying and sitting in therapy and drinking lemonade in meditative silence on a manicured lawn.

Omg felt

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.

My diagnosis called into question everything I loved—from ginseng abalone soup to talking a whole lot at parties to doodling during meetings. I couldn’t tell which parts were pathologically problematic and which were fine as they were.

In order to heal, would I really have to throw away everything that made me who I was?

Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear.

For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin.

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.

Quitting my job was a critical first step. Removing myself from the stressful stimuli of my boss snapping at me meant that I no longer had the accompanying problematic responses. I didn’t need to pull co-workers outside to smoke all the time. I didn’t need to complain about my boss over dinner with Joey every night. I didn’t constantly think I was the worst radio producer to ever live.

We need a certain amount of sleep and water and nourishment in order to think, to learn new things, to produce the correct hormones. If we don’t get all of those things, our bodies are “running at a deficit.”

when we’re dehydrated, we don’t necessarily feel thirsty—we feel exhausted. When we have something odd happening in our stomach, our body doesn’t quite know if we have a menstrual cramp or a stomachache or if we need to poop. We might not even be aware for a long period of time that our stomach hurts.

I could leap up subway stairs with a load of groceries, but I often still couldn’t get myself up off the couch to send an email.

And just like dating, even if finding the perfect person might be life-affirming, the process itself can be so demoralizing that you wonder whether it’s even worth it.

Thats also how i felt about finding a good therapist

“I want to know what passion is! I want to feel something strongly!” The psychiatrist responded, “I think that passion might be a chemical imbalance.”

Lmao what

talk therapy can be useless for those for whom “traumatic events are almost impossible to put into words.” Some people are too dissociated and distanced from these traumatic experiences for talk therapy to work well. They might not be able to access their feelings, let alone convey them. For others, they’re in such an activated state that they have a hard time reaching into difficult memories, and the very act of recalling them could be retraumatizing. One study showed that about 10 percent of people might experience worsening symptoms after being forced to talk about their trauma.

“I can’t leave. They need me. I have to protect them.” “No, you don’t.” Joey hugs baby me extra tight. “You don’t have to fix anything to deserve love. I love you for who you are. You can fuck up. You can do whatever you want and you’ll still deserve love.”

This is so heart wrenching

“THEY DON’T LOVE YOU.” 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.”

I believe that they hated themselves too much to love me; their sadness made them too selfish to see me at all. The reason I hadn’t been loved had nothing at all to do with me or my behavior. It had everything to do with them.

I was jealous of Joanna’s intuitive ease, how she didn’t have to sit there and agonize over how to be decent because she was raised with love. How could I be more like her when I was never given the ingredients for it?

Unfortunately, instead of finding kinship in the fact that we all had similar insecurities and struggles, I couldn’t help but silently pathologize them in the same way I’d been pathologizing myself over the past few months. Ah, they won’t answer phone calls from people. Classic case of avoidant attachment disorder. Blaming themselves for someone else’s bad mood even though they did nothing wrong. Anxious attachment, maybe anxious/avoidant—also, warped self-perception!

Each of the group’s members was profoundly shattered. But they were all trying their damnedest to piece themselves back together in a way that didn’t hurt anyone else. They told darkly funny jokes, set out good cheese when they hosted at their apartments, and wrapped their arms around one another when they cried. They all had fierce protective streaks and passionately defended one another against the negative voices in their heads. They were talented and charismatic, quick to be introspective. They read self-help books and danced all night and painted bright, joyful canvases.

aww

If I have yet to figure out how to balance my life perfectly, that’s to be expected from a twenty-three-year-old girl.

“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.”

Thats relatable

When I was sixteen, I was the main subject of gossip in our family.

Same

Eight years ago. I was nineteen. I had not known. Nobody told me. I wasn’t invited. Whenever my dad mentions her to me, he still calls her “my friend.”

Same :( and it's not fair

Look at you! I made mistakes, but you turned out so successful! You were just born with sense!” I rolled my eyes at this. It was just another way for him to avoid taking responsibility for his neglect, to let himself off the hook.

What a shitty parent

Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself.

Instead, you have to pull up your bootstraps and solve the painful puzzle of your life by yourself. What other choice do you have? Nobody else is going to solve it for you.

I’d spent my life telling myself I didn’t need a mommy or a daddy. But now I was beginning to realize that this hunger isn’t childish—it is a universal, primal need. We all want to be taken care of, and that’s okay.

Joey got me a claddagh ring and wrote me an exquisitely crafted love letter about how excited he was about our blossoming relationship. He had tried so hard to make the holiday special because he wanted me to love Christmas—but more than that, he wanted me to love the thing that Christmas represented. He wanted me to feel comfortable belonging to a family.

That is so nice and cute :(

One day, his mother asked me about my family and then said, “Well, forget about them; we’re your family now. You’re ours.”

She is so nice im crying :(

When I shared my anxieties around family with Joey’s mother, she grabbed my hand with tears in her eyes and said, “I promise you I’ll never leave you.”

Im crying :(

“Everyone here loves you so much,” he said quietly, as I continued to hyperventilate, tears streaming down my cheeks. “And they have good reason. You’re wonderful, and no one’s ever made me feel more at home than you have. I want to be your home, and I want to do it forever. I want you to be my family. Will you marry me?”

Awwww

How did you do this? How did you persuade someone to commit themselves to your crazy ass? I’d ask myself. And then, in awe: At last, somebody wants to take care of you. Somebody loves you so much. Somebody wants to stay. I turned toward Joey in the dark to look at his sweet face. Even though he was asleep, he responded to my stirring by rolling toward me and enveloping me in his embrace.

Aww that is soo cute

Throughout my life, people have wanted me to take meds because they assumed the drugs would “fix” me. After I went off Prozac in college because it made me foggy and unable to concentrate, one friend said not taking my medication meant I wasn’t “trying hard enough” and I didn’t really prioritize my mental health, so she couldn’t take care of me anymore.