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

by Stephanie Foo

I mean, twentysomething millennials are all really stressed out, aren’t they? Isn’t depression just shorthand for the human condition?

The orange walls of my office close in on me. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. I try to stay another couple of hours at my desk in a desperate attempt to prove to myself that I am capable of a full workday, but I can’t see my computer screen.

my breath came in quick hiccups and I couldn’t slow it down enough to get air into my lungs. In retrospect, this was probably a panic attack.

Resilience, according to the establishment, is not a degree of some indeterminable measure of inner peace. Resilience is instead synonymous with success.

Here, I was nobody special. Which meant the dread became even more difficult to feed.

I knew this was an enormous privilege that most people don’t have. I also knew that 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.

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 freak-outs are more or less constant, a fixed state of being.

in order to heal, you will need to get help. I know you will try to look for the loophole in this argument—try to find a way that you can do this

We think our sadness is personal, pervasive, and permanent.

I tend to categorize people as ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe.’ And when I don’t like somebody, I see them as unsafe and I can’t deal with them. And then whenever anybody’s upset, I’m not good with sitting with their discomfort. I’m always trying to help and fix.

Completely eradicating these emotions is not just impossible—it’s unhealthy. These negative emotions only become toxic when they block out all the other emotions.

“Pain is about feeling real, appropriate, and valid hurt when something bad happens. Suffering is when you add extra dollops to that pain. You’re feeling bad about feeling bad.”