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

by Stephanie Foo

The pain is a fanged beast that I’ve battled a hundred times throughout the years, and every time I think I’ve cut it down for good, it reanimates and launches itself at my throat again.

Thirty years on this earth, and I’ve been sad at least half that time.

And it is not so much a medical document as it is a biography of my life: The difficulty regulating my emotions. The tendency to overshare and trust the wrong people. The dismal self-loathing.

How complete its takeover of my identity was. The things I want. The things I love. The way I speak. My passions, my fears, my zits, my eating habits, the amount of whiskey I drink, the way I listen, and the things I see. Everything—everything, all of it—is infected. My trauma is literally pumping through my blood, driving every decision in my brain.

For years I’ve labored to build myself a new life, something very different from how I was raised.

I need to stop being an unreliable narrator. I need to look at myself, my behaviors, and my desires with an unflinching, meticulous eye. I need to tease apart the careful life I have crafted for myself, the one that is threatening to unravel at any minute.

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.

This was how I discovered the power of journalism—not just as a force to right wrongs and change the world, but as a force that turned my anguished brain into a functioning machine.

Nothing lent more credibility to my healing than my career.

The books taught me that when we live through traumatic experiences, our brains take in the things around us that are causing the greatest threat, and they encode these things deep into our subconscious as sources of danger.

What we might think of as emotional outbursts—anxiety, depression, lashing out in anger—aren’t always just petty, emotional failings. They may be reflexes designed to protect us from things our brain has encoded as threats.

Women who’ve suffered childhood sexual abuse have smaller somatosensory cortices—the part of the brain that registers sensation in our bodies.

What these papers seemed to tell me is that however smart I am, I’m not as smart as I could have been had this not happened to me. The questions arose again: Is this why my pitches didn’t go through? Is this why my boss never respected me? Is this why I was pushed to do grunt work in the back room?

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes about how 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.

No matter what I do, no matter where I try to find joy, I instead find my trauma. And it whispers to me: “You will always be this way. It’s never going to change. I will follow you. I will make you miserable forever. And then I will kill you.”

The literature says this is normal for traumatized people. Experts say it’s all part of the three P’s: We think our sadness is personal, pervasive, and permanent.

Since reading about damaged PTSD brains, I’d been losing faith in my own mind. Every time I tried to touch a memory, doubts and questions multiplied around it, preventing me from being able to see my own past.

I want to have words for what my bones know. I want to use those gifts when they serve me and understand and forgive them when they do not.

I could not discern which feelings were real—the grief in my subconscious or my deep indifference in the light of day.

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.

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.

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 rage is not always evil. It can even be productive if deployed correctly.

Here’s a theory: Maybe I had not really been broken this whole time. Maybe I had been a human—flawed and still growing but full of light nonetheless. All this time, I had received plenty of love, but I’d given it, too.

Just when I believe I can see the ghoul for exactly what it is, it dissipates like a puff of smoke, then slithers into another crevice in the back of my mind. I know now it will emerge again in another form in a month or a week or two hours from now. Because loss is the one guaranteed constant in life, and since my trauma reliably resurfaces with grief, C-PTSD will be a constant, too. Rage will always coat the tip of my tongue. I will always walk with a steel plate around my heart.

I am full of anger, pain, peace, love, of horrible shards and exquisite beauty, and the lifelong challenge will be to balance all of those things, while keeping them in the circle. Healing is never final.