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

by Stephanie Foo

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. If a kid bumped into me in the hallway, I’d bodycheck him back.

But now it was morning and there was no music, just silence, which twisted something at the base of my scalp. I tried to recall all the good things from the night before, moments of dancing with old friends, sharing intimate confessions with new ones, thinking of the VIP press passes I had. Proof, proof, proof of my worth. I am awesome, I am powerful, I am okay. I am okay. But still, something felt treacherous. Like I’d forgotten something. Like something had happened that was about to end me. I racked my brain for the source of this danger. Did I get too drunk toward the end of the night? Did I say something wrong? Did I tease my friends too much, push too hard?

In this way, I was able to convince myself that the dread was good for me. It was the biggest driver of my ferocious work ethic. Because of the dread, in 2014, I got my dream job at This American Life—the biggest storytelling radio show out there, the one with several million loyal listeners and walls full of Peabodys and Emmys, so popular it had parodies on Saturday Night Live and Portlandia. It took just four years to go from Get Me On This American Life to actually working at This American Life. When I got the job, I screamed and threw a big party and then moved to New York to become a public radio superstar.

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.

I hadn’t lost the thing that allowed me to believe that everything was fine.

Hurt people hurt people. I didn’t want to hurt people anymore.

In order to do that, Lacey said, she’d needed time and space. Long walks in the middle of the day to practice holding awkward, painful new revelations. The ability to step away from her writing when she felt overwhelmed and sad. “The important thing was learning how to take good care of myself. To treat myself kindly,” she told me. And so I knew with certainty what I had to do.

“Healing needs to be my job now.”

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.

Let’s say, for example, that you are hit by a car. Your brain registers the noise of the car screeching to a halt, the grille speeding toward you. It shoots out an onslaught of stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol that elevate your heart rate and blood pressure, narrowing your focus to the thump of the impact and the pain and the sound of an ambulance. But at the same time, your brain is subconsciously taking in thousands of other pieces of stimuli: the foggy weather, the Krispy Kreme at the intersection, the color and make and model of the car, the Midwestern accent of the guy who hit you, his blue Wolverines T-shirt. And your brain imprints deep inside itself the powerful connections between these stimuli and this pain.

ptsd example

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 appro...

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 ...

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.

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.

and depression wear our bodies out. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres.

Victims who were screamed at might have an altered response to sound.

In Gretchen Schmelzer’s excellent, gentle book, Journey Through Trauma, she insists on the fifth page: “Some of you may choose a therapist: a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, counselor, or member of the clergy. Some of you may choose some form of group therapy. But I am telling you up front, at the beginning: 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 on your own—but you need to trust me on this. If there were a way to do it on your own I would have found it. No one looked harder for that loophole than I did.”1 After my diagnosis, I looked for that loophole, too, for a while.

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. For others, they’re in such an activated state that they have a hard time reaching into difficult memories, and the very act of recalling them could be retraumatizing. One study showed that about 10 percent of people might experience worsening symptoms after being forced to talk about their trauma.

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes about a form of therapy called EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a strange process reminiscent of hypnosis, where a patient revisits past traumas while moving their eyes left and right. It seemed too simple, almost hokey, but van der Kolk passionately sang its praises. He told the story of a patient who came out of a single forty-five-minute session of EMDR, looked at him, and said that “he’d found dealing with me so unpleasant that he would never refer a patient to me. Otherwise, he remarked, the EMDR session had resolved the matter of his father’s abuse.” Resolved! Here was a form of therapy, van der Kolk said, that could help “even if the patient and the therapist do not have a trusting relationship.” Then again, he said that EMDR was far more effective for adult-onset trauma, and it cured only 9 percent of childhood trauma survivors. But at this point, 9 percent was better than nothing. Nine percent was a beacon I couldn’t afford to ignore.

Oh my God. It hits me: I was constantly having to beg my parents to believe they were loved. That was my primary job as their child. It should have been the other way around.

how can there be love without faith?

I learned two critical things that day. First: Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed. If it looks good and it feels good,

should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle ov...

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. But, as usual, knowing that I am textbook doesn’t help me rise off the page.

I had expected that curing my trauma would be like climbing a sixth-floor walk-up while hauling a suitcase: hard-won and painful. This revelation proved that second chances did not always have to be fought for—they could be taken in handfuls for free like after-dinner mints. Could I truly clear the fetid swamp of a past like mine with dandelions and butterfly stretches? Was it really that simple?

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

And my spiritual beliefs shifted. After my parents’ divorce, I’d eschewed my idea of a cruel, transactional God.

Now I believed in a force greater than myself. Not a deistic being, per se . . . more like the idea that the universe might be organized around something like

l...

But my trip had also shown me that there was one thing that could combat the void for a little while: gratitude. It was the flame that penetrated the darkness, that filled me all the way up. And the only way to keep the flame going was to keep feeding it. I had to force gratitude into my routines in ways I could not ignore or forget. I had to systematize the light.

But after a couple of weeks of listing things I was grateful for, I came to see that the little things were everything. The little things were what I held on to at the end of the day. Single jokes that gave me the giggles. A beautiful flower arrangement, viewed through the window of a café. The fact that my cat came to cuddle me when she saw I was sad. These things gave me hope, pleasure, solace. Together, they added up to a fulfilling life.

when you take the time to savor the good, you simply need less of it.

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”

could feel it looming somewhere, large and dark beneath everything: our parents’ pain.

So when the hands came, we offered our cheeks. We offered ourselves as conduits for their anguish because they had suffered so we wouldn’t, so we could watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat sugary cereal and go to college and trust the government and never go hungry. We excused all of it, absorbed the slaps and the burns and the canings and converted them into perfect report cards to wipe away our parents’ brutal pasts. We did the work, as they like to say now. We got into good colleges, got internships and postdocs, and eventually moved on to successful, rewarding careers in big cities that paid us enough money to buy high-end audio gear for our modernist apartments. We achieved the American Dream because we had no other choice.

For a long time, this was the story I remembered about my childhood. I told myself it was not worth dwelling on. It was what it was. It was the price you paid for growing up in the Valley of Heart’s Delight. My story was t...

How much of my own experience had I projected onto other children because it was happening to me, because I hadn’t wanted to be alone? How much of my understanding of immigrant trauma was fabricated by a narrow reading of my own experience? And was this understanding, in fact, racist? I was casting abuse and bad parenting as a central theme across my community—was this perpetuating a negative, unhealthy stereotype?

But from underneath these shreds of doubt, a new woman punches her way to the surface, someone who has read the data. This whole fucking narrative of all of these Asians settling gently into the American dream is bullshit. The facts just don’t add up. You have a community of immigrants and refugees who survived extreme violence—but they don’t believe in mental illness, don’t talk about trauma, don’t allow for feelings or failure, and everyone is just fucking fine? The worst angst

here comes from not being able to make an essay sparkle? Come on. I don’t take a final look at the ridiculous facade of my happy home.

And, Steve acknowledges, the repercussions from his abuse haven’t disappeared magically with time. “I think it’s why I work so hard all the time. I’ll take on other people’s work, I’ll do more than I should, because I have this need for acceptance. I need my boss to tell me that I did a good job or I’ll have this anxiety—this incompleteness, that no matter how hard I try, I can’t hit.”

history was worth our remembrance and our respect because of her hard work, her sacrifices, and, most of all, her unfathomable endurance.

discovered that the Chinese word for endurance is simply the word knife on top of the word heart.

You walk around with a knife in your heart. You do it with stoicism. This is the apex of being. And so Auntie endured,...

“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” she repeated to me, day after day. “Big things, make small. Small things, make nothing. When someone wrongs you, never keep it in your heart. Let it go.”

The world is an immense and intricately organized system, perfected over millions of years. There is no point in pushing against this system. Effort only causes disruption. Instead, we must simply flow like water. Accept and adapt. Let the currents carry you where you need to go.

“Well . . . the Western approach is ‘We’ve got to heal, we’ve got to take control.’ And I think that’s a privileged position.” Jeung took a long pause again. “Most of the world expects trauma and suffering. Most people live through it. It’s not an exceptional, one-time experience. So even if you get health issues as side effects from trauma, it’s like, well, yeah. People suffer, people get sick. And so it’s only privileged people who think of it otherwise.”