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

by Stephanie Foo

Then, after the mice had offspring, the researchers exposed this next generation of mice to the cherry blossom scent. Despite the fact that these mice had never smelled cherry blossoms before and had never been shocked, they still shuddered and jumped when it wafted into their cages. This generation of mice had inherited their parents’ trauma.

Yet another study by the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich in 2011 exposed baby mice to stressful situations by separating them from their mothers.2 The abandoned mice experienced anxiety and depression—which, right, seems obvious. What was shocking was how this separation affected future generations of mice. When the traumatized mice had babies, and then when their babies had babies, the scientists never separated them from their parents. They led perfectly content, nurtured little mouse lives. But for three subsequent generations, the anxiety and depression persisted.

There is real scientific evidence that the traumas we experience can be passed on to our children and even our grandchildren. DNA, of course, is the genetic code that determines the shape of our nose, our eye color, our likelihood to contract certain diseases. So when our body is making and remaking itself, every cell in our body actually “reads” our DNA and uses it as a blueprint for what to build. But not every cell reads the entire blueprint—the whole, long string of DNA. Inside each cell is both our DNA—or our genome—and the epigenome, a layer of chemical markers that sits on top of our DNA. The epigenome is like a SparkNotes for the cells—it flags which genes our cells really need to read. So the epig...

The stuff we think of when we think about DNA—nose shape, eye color—only comprises about 2 percent of our total DNA. The other 98 percent is called noncoding DNA, and it is responsi...

Unfortunately, there is no brain injection that works for humans. And even if there was, what might the consequences be? If I was to remove the wiring that’s been written over generations, it’d be like restoring the factory settings on a computer. And what would my default settings be? Who would I be?

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. But now I turn my head like the Sankofa bird and see nothing. I want to reclaim my stolen past. I need it to write my future.

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. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee. Or a dad who stayed and brought you a bouquet of flowers at your graduation. 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.

I’d spent my life telling myself I didn’t need a mommy or a daddy. But now I was beginning to realize that this hunger isn’t childish—it is a universal, primal need. We all want to be taken care of, and that’s okay. The woman who appears to me when I meditate, in her soft, baggy clothes—she isn’t quite the same as a parent, and she never will be. But she takes me into her arms and whispers, “I want to love you.” I lean in and let her.

The essence of what trauma does to a

person is it makes them feel like they don’t deserve love,”

I noticed that I often derailed the conversation and changed the subject when I didn’t understand something he was saying. And often when I was confused, I didn’t ask for clarification. Instead, I reflexively assumed that he was criticizing me. I’d jump in and interrupt him, apologizing for my bad behavior. I said a lot of unkind things about myself. At multiple points, I rambled incoherently. I noticed one occasion where I was blabbering on about Joey’s job of all things. I made a comment: “What the fuck am I talking about. Where am I?” Dr. Ham responded, “YES! This is the aftermath of dissociation.”

“It’s because I hated being the patient of therapists like that,” he admitted. “It terrified me. It didn’t ever make me feel safe. You have to be aware of how big a power difference there is between patient and therapist. 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.”

That fumbling made it easier for me to fumble, too. In our first meeting, I simply uh-huh, okayed every time I got confused. I’d wanted to feel smart and competent and act like I understood what he was saying. But now, I knew that would get me nowhere. So I asked ten times as many questions in my second session, interrogating Dr. Ham on everything I was unsure of. I asked him to define all the jargony terms he liked to drop on me. I asked him why he made the decisions he’d made.

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.

And she was patient. On another day, when she felt like her whole class was ignoring her jokes and antics, she went to the beanbag chair in the corner of the room to be alone for a minute. “I was like, Willow! It’s just kids. I don’t know why you’re getting mad right now. It’s okay.” She was able to self-soothe, not explicitly because her teachers and therapists taught her to. She had picked this up intuitively. The brain’s fear reflex is very real. But it has an opposite force, too, as ancient and as powerful. Our bodies and brains melt into kindness in the presence of one key ingredient.

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.

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

So Dr. Ham advocates for what the Dalai Lama calls “emotional disarmament—to see things realistically and clearly without the confusion of fear or rage.”

He grunted in response. Hmm, I thought. That didn’t quite land right. Maybe I shouldn’t have compared our injuries, especially since mine is so much smaller. Maybe affirming his pain was what he needed instead.

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.

The father’s self-punishment did not grant him his daughter’s forgiveness. It did not whip his sins out of him. Instead, it removed him from his family by isolating him in a prison of self-loathing. Locked in this prison, he couldn’t hear what his daughter needed. He couldn’t give her what she was asking for. There was blame and pain in spades. But all of this actively prevented him from making amends, from healing his relationship with his daughter. Punishment did not ease Willow or Jeremy or the other children at Mott Haven back into their circles of friends. Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community.

Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.

For now, anyway, I had preserved a relationship by navigating a real, live repair. A repair that didn’t involve groveling. A nuanced repair.

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.”

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...

“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 wan...

“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.”

“Yes. So getting rid of suffering means you’re not adding to the pain. You appropriately felt awkward and uncomfortable and regretful that that dinner party didn’t go well. You appropriately feel annoyed and angry at one of your friends who is being prissy. You’re just accepting of it all. And if the feeling stays, you ask, okay, why is this feeling still in me? And then, assume that there’s incredible wisdom in your intuitions and just start listening to them. What is this? What is this thing in my body right now? What are you trying to teach me?”

“Love is not a finite resource, something you have to mete out carefully like a package of Oreos. Instead, providing love begets more love, which begets more and more love.

“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.”