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

by Stephanie Foo

Some therapists believe that you can learn everything there is to learn about how to heal in the first session. The rest of the time spent with your therapist is just theme and variation,

his vulnerability didn’t make him seem less competent or trustworthy. It did the opposite. I trusted him more.

Shame makes you want to hide and tuck away.

it took me months to adjust to the sound of my own voice when I first started working in radio.

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

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

Curiosity, not self-blame.

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.”

negative emotions are not simply something to endure and erase. They are purposeful. Beneficial. They tell us what we need.

Suffering is when you add extra dollops to that pain.

Perhaps the only real thing that was broken was the image I had of myself—

It makes sense why I lose my shit at Joey over him dropping a pot in the sink, but if he’s in a screaming brawl with his family, sometimes I can mediate the conversation. It makes sense why now that the world was falling apart, I was calmly gluing the pieces back together. When it came time for Siegle to name this phenomenon—the dissociated state that means you don’t always have emotions that are totally appropriate for a situation—he called it Blunted and Discordant Affect Sensitivity Syndrome.

Healing is never final. It is never perfection.