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

by Stephanie Foo

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.”

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.

We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place.

“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”

What is important is to approach all of these interactions with curiosity for what that

truth is, not fear. He said I should approach difficult conversations with an attitude of “What is hurting you?” instead of “Have I hurt you?”

The system itself becomes the abuser.

Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. 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.”

Unbeknownst to me, I had been scattering goodness all around like fun-size chocolates accidentally falling out of my purse as I moved through the world. 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.

There is a Chinese saying that “a third of the world is under the control of heaven, a third is under the control of the environment, and a third is in your hands.”

In Eugenia Leigh’s poem “Gold,” she writes, “Tell me // I am not the thing / my children will have to survive. / Tell me // the mob I inherited will not touch / my son. Yes, the cavalcade / of all that’s tried to kill me // may forever raid my brain, but know / this: in my mother’s first language, / the word for fracture, for crack, / is the same as the word for gold.”[1]

I have hope, and I have agency. I know my feelings, no matter how disconsolate they are, are temporary. I know that regardless of how unruly it is, I am the beast’s master, and at the end of each battle I stand strong and plant my flag: I am alive, I am proud, I am joyful, still.