Trauma & Dissociation discussion
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What My Bones Know
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Feb 2025 BOTM: What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo
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Even just reading those first few chapters on her life story makes the whole book worth it.
She presents the typical background and solution approaches to resolving a life of trauma, including for example EMDR. I think it’s a good book, but I feel it misses the mark, giving too much credit to some therapy at the end. She is now interviewed and quoted in articles and says go get therapy � there’s a great sunny side out there, which seems to imply that if you just get some therapy it is as guaranteed to work as ordering a burger with fries and then someone simply hands them to you. In my experience, ... no, ... not quite that easy. Yes, go do that. Good idea. But ... this isn't as easy as buying a pair of shoes. The last therapist does help her become aware of and interrupt some thoughts that do not serve her. But, notably as she tells about her life, she finds a boyfriend, and gets married at the end of the book. I think she credits the therapy and her quest as being successful, while seemingly oblivious that it is actually the finding of a loving relationship like she has never had in her life that is far more effective than the therapy in turning her life around. If she had done all of that while single � with no love or marriage � would have been a totally different outcome � in my opinion.
A memoir of a former public radio show producer who is told she has Complex PTSD, doesn't know what that means, and applies her skills to bring light to bear on it with her experience of the trauma and seeking recovery.
Publisher’s Summary
A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life.
"Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bones know."
By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.
Both of Foo's parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.
In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don't move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it.
Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman's ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.