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

by Stephanie Foo

the road would be long and difficult. That sounded about right, considering I was endeavoring to relearn how to be a person.

Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from those of people who haven’t.[8]

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

the first time I had ever experienced unconditional love. And I was receiving it from myself.

Every adaptation our brain makes is an effort to better protect our bodies.

I want to have words for what my bones know.

If you really loved someone, it would emanate from you, sincere and overflowing, generous and unconditional.

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.

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.

Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had.

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

But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.

I always feel like I’m having a crisis because I’m still not good enough at self-soothing.”

I feel weighed down by the amount of shit I need to fix. It just feels like I can’t even have a conversation with friends because there’s so much wrong. I think I always had a fear of being patently unlovable.

If you just go, ‘Okay, let’s move on,’ you’re only doing the regulation part but not the reconnecting part.

the most helpful thing for you is to be reconnected with another person. 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?’ ”

because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relational trauma.

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.

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 had preserved a relationship by navigating a real, live repair. A repair that didn’t involve groveling. A nuanced repair.

I started analyzing things more confidently in the world: 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.

I mentalized and metacommunicated—fancy terms Dr. Ham taught me that basically mean say what you’re thinking out loud.

Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.”

Perhaps the only real thing that was broken was the image I had of myself—punishing and unfair, narrow and hypercritical. Perhaps what was really happening was that, along with all of my flaws, I was a fucking wonder.