Dealing with What Your Bones Know

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I recently read Stephanie Foo's What My Bones Know:  A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma. Foo is a producer for This American Life.  She is a woman who was extremely successful and functional despite her childhood abuse and neglect, but then she hit a wall and found she needed to take time off in her thirties to really deal with it and heal herself.  This memoir follows her journey to first learn she has complex PTSD and then find a unique path to heal herself from past trauma that haunts her and impacts her behaviors daily.

Foo's parents are first generation Malaysian immigrants who demanded perfection and high performance from their only child.  But there was a much darker side underneath this-- two mentally unstable parents who emotionally and physically abused their daughter to the extreme and eventually abandoned her while she was still in high school.  It is hard to believe that Foo came out of all that she experienced as a wildly successful media producer.  As she put it, "Achievement was my constant...my comfort."  She graduated early from college with honors. and landed her first job with the  well-regarded NPR radio show, Snap Judgement, But during that time her relationships and personal life were a train wreck and she knew something had to give.

She receives the diagnoses of Complex PTSD from her therapist in her thirties.  Complex PTSD refers to PTSD when trauma is not just a one time event, but occurs over time.  There isn't much research about this condition, but Foo uses her journalistic skills to find out as much as she can about the condition and explores modalities of healing.  She first explores her origin story and looks closely at intergenerational trauma in immigrant communities.  She goes back to Malaysia to speak to relatives about trauma experienced in the family and to learn more about her mother and father's experience growing up.  She visits the immigrant community of her childhood and speaks with classmates and teachers to better understand the pressures of model minority status and to uncover why everyone looked the other way.  She tries different types of therapy such as EMDR to get at the emotions behind her trauma.  She tries different medications and drugs to explore their impact.  She tries yoga and other therapeutic modalities to help her body heal.  She analyzes and explores her relationships.  Her journey is frustrating, humorous at times and heartbreaking.  Ultimately, it is the people she finds that offer the biggest source of healing.  .She eventually finds her way to Dr. Jacob Ham who is the director of Childhood Trauma and Resilience at Mt. Sinai.  He helps her not just find ways to soothe herself when she feel triggered, but to connect with the deeper wounds of her trauma to understand the why beneath her triggers.  Then there is the family of her husband who welcome her into their family and provide her with the loving environment her birth family wasn't able to during her childhood.

Foo brings to life the complexity of her unique story of trauma and healing and it is definitely a story of hope, but also a reminder that each journey is so unique and nuanced and demands a high level of attention and years of recovery. Many people who suffer from this kind of trauma don't have access to and never get the help they need.  It is my hope that this book will help bring light to mental health struggles that many people have and the need and possibility to heal those who have it.