What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
by Stephanie Foo
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma:
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Over and over, the answer is the same, isn’t it? Love, love, love. The salve and the cure. 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.”
“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”
“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. “Relationships”
“Forgiveness is this act of love where you say to someone, ‘You’re an imperfect being and I still love you.’ You want to have this energy of ‘We’re not giving up on each other; we’re in this for the long haul. You hurt me. And, yes, I hurt you. And I’m sorry, but you’re still mine.’ ”
“It made perfect sense to me later in life when I 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.”
“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.”
“But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.”
“Dissociation exists for a reason. For millennia, our brains and bodies have removed us from our pain so we can keep moving forward. A tiger just ate your wife? Bummer, but breaking down or freezing up is not an option. You better go out hunting today or your kids will starve. Your house was just destroyed in an air raid? Okay, but you have to pack up what’s left and find new shelter, now. Feelings are a privilege.”
“But unfortunately, I do not have one foundational trauma. I have thousands. So my anxious freak-outs are not, as the books say, "temporal." They don't only occur when I see an angry face or someone pulls a driver out of their golf bag. My freak-outs are more or less constant, a fixed state of being. That infinite plethora of triggers makes complex PTSD more difficult to heal from than traditional PTSD. And the way the books seem to think about it, our fixed state of being also makes us more problematic.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The essence of what trauma does to a person is it makes them feel like they don’t deserve love,” the voice in my headphones said. I was on the train, on my way to yet another doctor’s appointment, but this statement rang so true that I dug furiously through my bag and pulled out a notebook to write it down. I was about to put away my pen when I heard another especially good line, so I kept it out, writing furiously on my lap. My friend Jen, who often sends me little poems and links throughout the day, sent me this podcast—Road to Resilience,”
“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,”
“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, it should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes. And the second thing I learned was: My parents didn’t love me.”
“The results of the study were astoundingly clear: The more childhood trauma someone had suffered, the worse their health outcomes were in adulthood. And their risk for contracting diseases didn’t go up just a few percentage points. People with high ACE scores were about three times as likely to develop liver disease, twice as likely to develop cancer or heart disease, four times as likely to develop emphysema.[2] They were seven and a half times more likely to become alcoholics, four and a half times more likely to suffer from depression, and a whopping twelve times more likely to attempt suicide.[3] Scientists have learned that stress is literally toxic. Stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline surging through our bodies are healthy in moderation—you wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning without a good dose of cortisol. But in overwhelming quantities, they become toxic and can change the structure of our brains. Stress and depression wear our bodies out. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres. Telomeres are like little caps on the ends of our strands of DNA that keep them from unraveling. As we get older, those telomeres get shorter and shorter. When they’ve finally disappeared, our DNA itself begins to unravel, increasing our chances of getting cancer and making us especially susceptible to disease. Because of this tendency, telomeres are linked to human lifespan. And studies have shown that people who suffered from childhood trauma have significantly shortened telomeres.[4]”
“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.”
“It’s okay to have some things you never get over.”
“Here’s a theory: Maybe I had not really been broken this whole time.”
“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.”
“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. If a simple flower arrangement could make this world just a little more bearable, then perhaps my own small actions meant more than I was giving them credit for. Maybe when I made dinner, or listened to a friend rant, or complimented a woman on her incredible garden, I was helping make this world survivable for others. Perhaps that evening, when tallying up their own wins and losses for the day, someone would think of something I’d done and smile.”
“Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from people who haven’t. Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin.Women who’ve suffered childhood sexual abuse have smaller somatosensory cortices—the part of the brain that registers sensation in our bodies. Victims who were screamed at might have an altered response to sound. Traumatized brains can result in reductions in the parts of the brain that process semantics, emotion and memory retrieval, perceiving emotions in others, and attention and speech. Not getting enough sleep at night potentially affects developing brains’ plasticity and attention and increases the risk of emotional problems later in life. And the scariest factoid, for me anyway: Child abuse is often associated with reduced thickness in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with moderation, decision-making, complex thought, and logical reasoning.Brains do have workarounds. There are people without amygdalae who don’t feel fear. There are people who have reduced prefrontal cortices who are very logical. And other parts of the brain can compensate, make up the lost parts in other ways. But overall, when I looked at the breadth of evidence, the results felt crushing.The fact that the brain’s cortical thickness is directly related to IQ was particularly threatening to me. Even if I wasn’t cool, or kind, or personable, I enjoyed the narrative that I was at least effective. Intelligent. 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?”
“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. When my boss said I was “different,” I thought it meant broken. Now I think it meant something else.”
“At the same time, in my readings, I discovered some evidence that traditional talk therapy might not actually be particularly effective for C-PTSD. In The Body Keeps the Score, van der Kolk writes about how talk therapy can be useless for those 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.”
“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.”
“Again, women who experienced childhood trauma are 80 percent more likely to experience painful endometriosis.[4] They’re much more likely to develop premenstrual dysphoric disorder. More likely to develop fibroids.[5] It may affect fertility.[6] They’re at greater risk for postpartum depression[7] and depression in menopause.[8]”
“You don’t have to fix anything to deserve love. I love you for who you are. You can fuck up. You can do whatever you want and you’ll still deserve love.”
“It takes an intellectual and physical effort to shove aside the comfortably worn neural pathways and go in a different direction.”
