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

by Stephanie Foo

My friends got one thing right, though: I’m so tired now. Thirty years on this earth, and I’ve been sad at least half that time.

Something in her jaw becomes determined, and her gaze is direct. “You have complex PTSD from your childhood, and it manifests as persistent depression and anxiety. There’s no way someone with your background couldn’t have it,” she says.

“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,”

My trauma is literally pumping through my blood, driving every decision in my brain.

It is this totality that leaves me frantic with grief. 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.

I’ve always known that I carry my past with me, but it exists in moods and flashes. A raised hand, a bitten tongue, a moment of terror. After my diagnosis, I find myself in need of the specifics.

But I was still a child. I could not survive in a world where I simply fought, negotiated, and worked toward perfection.

Hatred, I learned quickly, was the antidote to sadness. It was the only safe feeling. Hatred does not make you cry at school. It isn’t vulnerable. Hatred is efficient. It does not grovel. It is pure power.

Soon, my father and I found ourselves alone in this world, and our simmering hatred had nowhere to go but toward each other.

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.”

It’s okay to have some things you never get over. In the span of half an hour, this man whom I had known for less than a season did what nobody in my life ever had: He took all of my sins and simply forgave them. He didn’t demand relentless improvement. There were no ultimatums. He asserted that I was enough, as is. The gravity of it stunned me into silence. Joey was the opposite of the dread.

The scientists and doctors might as well have written, People with complex PTSD are awful human beings. Okay. But now you know, I tried to tell myself. Knowing is good. Now you can fix things. Healing always begins with a diagnosis.

I’d always fantasized about indulging in a nervous breakdown. I watched Girl, Interrupted with a twisted, jealous fervor,

These associations are stored in your brain along with the corresponding emotions from that day. And they often do not come with full stories. Therefore, your brain might not encode the logical connection between the Krispy Kreme and the car crash. It might simply encode: KRISPY KREME. DANGER. The result is that when you see a glazed doughnut or a blue Wolverines T-shirt, you might become uneasy without understanding why. Your brain is recognizing a pattern that it has flagged with life-or-death importance, and it reflexively shoots out what it believes to be the appropriate emotional response. This reflex might manifest in a big way, like a panic attack. Or it might manifest in a smaller way, like suddenly feeling very grumpy. You might decide that you’re irritated at your girlfriend for a mildly stupid thing she said that morning and text her to say so. None of this, of course, is reasonable or rational. But your brain is not trying to be reasonable. It’s trying to save your life.

“The adults who had been abused as children often had trouble concentrating, complained of always being on edge, and were filled with self-loathing. They had enormous trouble negotiating intimate relationships,” van der Kolk writes. “They also had large gaps in their memories, often engaged in self-destructive behaviors, and had a host of medical problems. These symptoms were relatively rare in the survivors of natural disasters.”

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. Telomeres are like little caps on the ends of our strands of DNA that keep them from unraveling. As we get older, those telomeres get shorter and shorter. When they’ve finally disappeared, our DNA itself begins to unravel, increasing our chances of getting cancer and making us especially susceptible to disease. Because of this tendency, telomeres are linked to human lifespan. And studies have shown that people who suffered from childhood trauma have significantly shortened telomeres.[4]

In the end, these studies claimed that having an ACE score of 6 or higher takes twenty years off your life expectancy. The average life expectancy for someone with 6 or more ACEs is sixty years.[5] My score is 6. At thirty, I was halfway to the end.

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

Not getting enough sleep at night potentially affects developing brains’ plasticity and attention and increases the risk of emotional problems later in life. And the scariest factoid, for me anyway: 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.

There was a psychiatrist who tried to put me on Prozac. I quoted Brave New World. “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.”

Maybe I didn’t remember any of these events thoroughly enough to be disturbed by them? When I thought about each event, I could remember moments, feelings, and images, sometimes I could remember how long things lasted. But I only remembered a few sentences from what were often hours-long beatings. I remembered my mother’s hands, her body, but I didn’t remember her face. I couldn’t remember what she looked like without makeup. I couldn’t remember what she looked like when she cried. Maybe, in order to go back to one specific memory and make it detailed enough to be disturbing, I needed to retrigger myself. And I knew exactly how to do it.

So on a sunny Saturday, two days before my next EMDR session, I downloaded Mommie Dearest. I might as well have lit candles and drawn a pentagram underneath my laptop. My mother’s spirit was the demon to be summoned. I hit Play.

Finally, I went home and collapsed into bed, where I started sobbing. At first, I was mostly upset because I didn’t know why I was upset.

Dissociation exists for a reason. For millennia, our brains and bodies have removed us from our pain so we can keep moving forward. A tiger just ate your wife? Bummer, but breaking down or freezing up is not an option. You better go out hunting today or your kids will starve. Your house was just destroyed in an air raid? Okay, but you have to pack up what’s left and find new shelter, now. Feelings are a privilege.

Now I had nothing but time, the excruciating expanse of leisure. And without my armor, I was raw, the elements scraping against exposed muscle. What’s behind the veil? Pain. A lot of fucking pain.

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.

But meditation does not bring me peace. I’ve tried it maybe a dozen times before,

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

Even though consciously I was completely in the present, my emotions were back in 1997, back when I was a little kid and making a mistake on a spelling test could literally be a matter of life and death.

after all—and in my experience, if something wasn’t hard, it didn’t work.

But at the same time, I was crying because a small part of me was sad: How had I not known, until this moment, the pleasure of breathing? How had I not known that feeling air on my palms could be so comforting? How much pleasure had I missed because I was too in my head to pay attention?

I told myself that self-care shouldn’t cost money or come from a place of obligation. Being truly healthy should feel like a pleasure.

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

What could I expect? They hadn’t been there. They hadn’t seen what I’d lived through. They could never understand the lack of love that I intimately knew.

I did not call. I did not email. I had survived alone this entire time and would continue to do so.

Then, after the mice had offspring, the researchers exposed this next generation of mice to the cherry blossom scent. 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.

What was shocking was how this separation affected future generations of mice. When the traumatized mice had babies, and then when their babies had babies, the scientists never separated them from their parents. They led perfectly content, nurtured little mouse lives. But for three subsequent generations, the anxiety and depression persisted.

I want to have words for what my bones know.

“You’re right,” he said in astonishment. “Of course you’re right about it all. How did you become the parent and I became the child?” How did he not understand that this had always been the arrangement?

Why should I have to teach my father how to love me?

My stepbrothers hadn’t known I’d lived in San Francisco? I’d lived in the Bay Area for five years after college. Just a short drive from their home. I’d visited their home while they were at school. For years, I’d had those monthly dinners with my father. He’d helped me move four times, taking the same twenty boxes, bookshelf, desk, and mattress from tiny apartment to tiny apartment. Where had he told his children he’d gone those days? Had he told them, too, that he was meeting up with “a friend”? How had they not known what college I went to? How had they not known anything about me? On the train ride home, I made a note of it to Joey—that I had been so close and yet so far away. “It’s too bad for them,” he said. “They really would’ve benefited from having a great sister like you in their lives.” Sadness and fury bit into each other like two warring serpents in my stomach. “Don’t say that,” I managed, and I swallowed everything back down and opened up the crossword app on my phone. It took a couple of days for it to hit me: an unbearable understanding that changed everything. This time, I am the secret.

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. My mother goes to her tennis club with her new husband and plays in the local tournaments. My father goes hiking with his two sons and his wife. On Facebook, in private profiles I have to stalk to access, they smile widely in the photos with their new families, my mother flashes a big diamond ring and a little dog, my father posts vacation pictures, smiling with his sons. Their lives appear whole. But only if you forget I exist. I am blood and sin. I am the sum total of my parents’ regrets. I am their greatest shame.

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.

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. The childhood other kids around you had. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee. Or a dad who stayed and brought you a bouquet of flowers at your graduation. Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself. You have to stand in your kitchen, starving, near tears, next to a burnt chicken, and you can’t call your mom to tell her about it, to listen to her tell you that it’s okay, to ask if you can come over for some of her cooking. 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. That sadness—the sadness of loss—is a different flavor than the sadness of reckoning. The sadness of reckoning feels visceral and angry and tinged with violence. It feels healable, somehow, with revenge or justice. But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.

For days afterward, I couldn’t sleep. I was too happy. Too unbelieving. 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.

“It’s just, there are moments when you become hypervigilant and you presume to know what I mean. And you try to jump in.”

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.