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

by Stephanie Foo

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

But that’s exactly the problem. I’m tired of pulling. I don’t want to pull anymore. I want a dumbwaiter, or an escalator, or a floating rainbow drug cloud. Anything to lift me toward emotional stability. To fix me.

care more than ever. I care about shopping cart placement and plastic in the oceans and being a good listener. I care about how I seem to fuck everything up all the time. I care and I care, and I hate myself for it.

“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,” she says.

I read the list of symptoms. It is very long. 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. The trouble I have maintaining relationships. The unhealthy relationship with my abuser. The tendency to be aggressive but unable to tolerate aggression from others. It’s all true. It’s all me.

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.

People often ask me what it was like to grow up with this kind of abuse. Therapists, strangers, partners. Editors. You’re telling us the details of what happened to you, they’d write in the margins. But how did it feel? The question always feels absurd to me. How would I know how I felt? It was so many years ago. I was so young. But if I had to guess, I’d say it probably felt fucking bad.

Then the fights would escalate, a soap dish would get thrown across the room, horrific threats would be made, and someone would drive off. I’d sit in the garage, shivering in the dark, praying for them to come home.

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.

My anger was a reflection of two people who had self-immolated with their own anger.

But when I made a mistake, the dread crept into my field of vision and I couldn’t see anything except my mistake for an hour, maybe even a day. Still, usually, these moments could be cured

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.

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.

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. And these threatening inputs are what many people call triggers. No, having triggers doesn’t make you a fragile little snowflake. It makes you human. Everyone has them, or will have them eventually, because everyone will experience some form of trauma. That annoying blank stare your ex used to give you. The sound of the ventilator your grandmother was hooked up to in the weeks before she died. Having an emotional response to a trigger is perfectly healthy. Those triggers are only considered PTSD when an event is so traumatic that its triggers cause symptoms like panic attacks, nightmares, blackouts, and flashbacks—when the emotional response becomes debilitating.

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.

If I could misinterpret a furrowed brow, what else could I misinterpret? I must possess a million subconscious triggers, so how much of the world, exactly, is my brain incorrectly afraid of?

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. Personal, in that we have caused all the problems we face. Pervasive, in that our entire life is defined by our failings. And permanent, in that the sadness will last forever.

I was approaching “wellness” with the same obsessive, perfectionistic tendencies I’d brought to my job. This was no less disordered than being a workaholic, and the pattern had a distinct echo: moments of intense joy through achievement followed by anxiety over finding my next success.

But for me, the effects of shrooms, although powerful, were always temporary. That feeling of freedom from self-doubt, of confident self-love, only lingered for a few days or weeks. Eventually, the dread always returned.

I sat there slapping my forehead, muttering, “You’re awesome! You’re awesome! You’re awesome!” until a question popped into my head. Why do people believe in you? Why? There must be something inside me that deserves that belief. Back up. Who believes in you? I scrolled through my phone. There were sweet little texts from a bevy of people. All of them were so smart. So talented. They were good judges of character, and none of them suffered fools. I looked at the last text messages some of these people had sent me. One friend said she missed me. Another said she thought I was one of the silliest people she’d ever known. An old co-worker told me just last week that she believed I was responsible for her career. Usually when these people send me compliments affirming my existence and worth, I send back some version of: “Oh, pshaw, you’re soooo nice, but I’m actually a fetid sewer marsupial, lolol,” and then I rush to catch my train or chop garlic or respond to my next email. The shrooms showed me that my C-PTSD was a void. When Dustin didn’t text me back for three days, when Kat snapped at me because I said something careless during a conversation, when Joey locked himself in the office to get away from me for a few hours . . . the black hole expanded, its maw impossible to fill, and it began to whisper dangerous things as it grew: Why aren’t you a priority? Why aren’t you loved? Surely this means they are about to leave. My fear of being abandoned forced me to need proof of l...

As Melody Beattie said, “Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”

But in general, our parents were not taught to take slow breaths when they were upset to calm themselves down. And many of our parents were not taught to spare the rod.

But even at a young age, without understanding what these things were, we sensed them as we kicked our way through the currents of our day. We could feel it looming somewhere, large and dark beneath everything: our parents’ pain.

My family tried to erase this history. But my body remembers. My work ethic. My fear of cockroaches. My hatred for the taste of dirt. These are not random attributes, a spin of the wheel. They were gifted to me with purpose, with necessity. 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.

“The essence of what trauma does to a person is it makes them feel like they don’t deserve love,”

I still felt so much shame when my Hulk emerged with all its terrifying rage. But to frame it this way was comforting. That rage is not always evil. It can even be productive if deployed correctly.

“I think . . . my default is to be distrustful and fearful and to be in a state of . . . bleh. And that bleh-ness ranges from being very depressed to walking around in a sort of dissociated state. It gets in the way of things like, you know, sitting in a meeting where I’m supposed to—it’s . . .” I sighed. “It still feels like a constant barrage of doubts and beliefs that everyone hates me.”

much that can be done about it.” “And it gave me much more awareness of things I need to change and bad patterns I perpetuate. But 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. But now I have all these scientifically validated reasons that prove I’m patently unlovable.

I would have kept crying for an hour, then held a grudge, then self-loathed for holding a grudge. I would’ve stayed triggered the rest of my visit.

“I have an immense amount of curiosity about why I do what I do. But it’s not like, Oh, that’s why I do that! It’s like, Shit. That’s why you do that, you fucking moron.”

Ooh. I’d turned off my awareness to talk about my trauma. And then I turned a corner and got lost, hardly aware of the words coming out of my mouth. How fascinating!

This was Dr. Ham’s whole theory: 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. 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.

“It’s not the fights that matter. It’s the repairs.” The repairs.

The truth is not an easy thing to discern. If it were, the world would be a much more peaceful place. Instead, each of us is a delicate bundle of triggers, desires, emotions, and needs—and we all have our own ways of concealing those needs. And so, when our understanding of what people need fails to match up with what they want—therein lies conflict. In order to minimize conflict, the trick is to ascertain some version of that truth. To identify what is actually happening around us. Only, as in a quote often attributed to Anaïs Nin, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”

He said I should approach difficult conversations with an attitude of “What is hurting you?” instead of “Have I hurt you?”

Punishment doesn’t work. I was taught that punishment and shame were the logical and necessary reactions to screwing up. The benefit of punishment was that it would keep my wild and terrible natural tendencies in line. It would shame me into being better. “Justice is the firmest pillar of good government,” after all, and justice meant people had to pay for their mistakes. When something went wrong, there had to be fault. There had to be blame. There had to be pain.

Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community.

I could not believe it had taken me this long to realize that punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love. Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.

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.

But this time I also knew: This self-punishment was all a waste of time. It solved nothing. What was really happening in this situation?

I remembered how people with C-PTSD can often assume problems are about them—not out of selfishness or narcissism but because they want to have enough control to be able to solve the problem.

Curiosity, not self-blame.

“I’m feeling worried that you’re shifting the attention to me because you don’t want to burden me with your problems. But I just want to say that your problems aren’t a burden—I’m so curious about what’s going on.

It isn’t just racism. Being part of an oppressed minority group—being queer or disabled, for example—can cause C-PTSD if you are made to feel unsafe because of your identity. Poverty can be a contributing factor to C-PTSD. These factors traumatize people and cause brain changes that push them toward anxiety and self-loathing. Because of those changes, victims internalize the blame for their failures. They tell themselves they are awkward, lazy, antisocial, or stupid, when what’s really happening is that they live in a discriminatory society where their success is limited by white supremacy and class stratification. The system itself becomes the abuser.

“Right. You’d allow everything.” Dr. Ham sat in silence with me for a while. Then he said, “You’re tiger-childing your recovery—you’re telling yourself you have to be perfectly happy all the time. And if you’re feeling sad, you’re fucking up. You’re not really recovering.” “Yeah,” I whispered.

“A healthy heart doesn’t pump at the same rate all the time. That would actually be a really unhealthy heart. The healthiest hearts are adaptable, and the quicker they adapt, the better. When you start running, your heart should ideally speed up quickly. Then, when you rest, it should slow down quickly. It’s the same for your emotions. When something really tragic happens, it would be weird if you were still happy, right? Or if you just sat there with no reaction. When something tragic happens, you should be there with that pain, feeling that sadness. When something unjust happens, you should feel how aggravating it is. And then, after you’ve sat with those feelings for the appropriate amount of time—and it could be an hour, or a day, or months, depending on the severity of what happened—then, you can go back to a state of rest. Or joy. Or whatever. 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.”

But, Dr. Ham told me, these negative emotions are not simply something to endure and erase. They are purposeful. Beneficial. They tell us what we need. Anger inspires action. Sadness is necessary to process grief. Fear helps keep us safe. 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. When we feel so much sadness that we can’t let any joy in. When we feel so much anger that we cannot soften around others. True mental health looks like a balance of these good and bad feelings. As Lori Gottlieb says in her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, “Many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.”1

“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.” “Double punishment,” I clarify.

You are allowed. You can do that. That would not make you a bad person. Go ahead. Surrender.