What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo (review)
What does somatic healing from C-PTSD look like?
Reading Stephanie Foo’s sarcastic, enraged, and triumphant memoir What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex PTSD could be life-changing for anyone who has experienced childhood trauma, especially due to the cultural displacement felt by Asian American immigrants. Here is a summary of the book, followed by my perspective as a somatic coach on Foo’s healing journey.
Foo is a former This American Life reporter whose therapist diagnosed her with Complex PTSD after Foo experienced a breakdown at her job because she was criticized by a former boss while she was reporting about the rise of white supremacy in 2017. This reminded her of criticism she had experienced from her parents during her intensely abusive childhood. Deciding that “healing is my job now,” Foo quit what had been a dream job for her and used her savings and the support from her loving partner to embark on a healing journey. I was riveted by Foo’s journey because it allowed me to reflect on my own path.
Foo’s skill as a storyteller shines as she illuminates her internal conflict against a pervasive feeling of dread. C-PTSD is a beast that tells her she’s not lovable, that she’s toxic. Actually, some of her former friends also tell her the same thing; an acquaintance recovering from cancer claims that Stephanie is the real cancer because of how much she complains about herself. Foo’s descriptions of being physically and emotionally abused by her parents, both of whom abandoned her, are wrenching. (Her dad did pay for college, and at one point she reconciled with him. But ultimately, she told him she only wants to engage if a mediator is present).
“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” Foo’s Malayan great-aunt tells her. It’s this theme of resilience that Foo struggles with and eventually learns as she comes to accept her diagnosis. Thanks to her friendships, and an influential journalism teacher, Foo’s is very successful professionally from a young age. Perhaps this early success it what gives Foo permission to step away from her hyper-achiever tendencies in order to heal.
Throughout the memoir, Foo’s skills as a researcher and synthesizer shine. As just one example, Foo points out bullying allegations against Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, a book that served as a reference point for her when she first delved into understanding trauma. (It did for me too).
Additionally, Foo points out that C-PTSD overlaps with one’s Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) score. The ACE study is a long-term study initiated by doctors working at Kaiser in the 80’s who found that the number of adverse childhood experiences one has is correlated with the number of health issues one faces later in life. Initially, Foo is floored when she learns that people with an ACE score of 6 tend to die by age 60. Later, she updates her understanding when, in 2020, an expert explains that more complex factors go into predicting life-span. (Phew!)
Complex PTSD is not officially in the DSM-V, the manual that clinical psychologists use. The term was coined by Dr. Judith Hermann, whose name I’m familiar with through my own study of somatics, resilience and trauma under Staci Haines. Foo’s point is that C-PTSD is a hard diagnosis to get. Yet, when she learns the symptoms associated with it, many aspects of her struggles get illuminated in a new light. Nonetheless, Foo is upset that her therapist didn’t tell her the diagnosis for eight years, so she goes in search of a new therapist.
She lucks out when Dr. Jacob Ham, a trauma therapist, offers her $6400 worth of therapy sessions pro bono after she interviews him. Dr Ham helps her distinguish between pain and suffering (i.e. legitimate pain versus shame about that pain). Ham’s relational approach is unique. He offers to give Foo access to audio recordings of their sessions and she ultimately embeds some of the audio recordings of their work together in her audiobook. He also comments on Google doc transcripts of their sessions together so that they are able to have a meta conversation about the micro-exchanges within their session. Thanks to the quasi-parental role Ham plays in her life, Foo ends up becoming a better listener, someone who is better able to take in all the love that her friends and her partner give her. To me, this is remarkable because there are so few Asian American therapists out there and it can often be very difficult to build trust with the right therapist for someone with C-PTSD. Wow—how dreamy :-)
Foo’s healing journey continues as she delves into trauma-sensitive mindfulness (restorative yoga as offered by a Chinese-American woman who doesn’t stop talking helps her; breath-focused meditation doesn’t) and psychedelics. There is a moving scene in which psychedelics lead her to fully feel loved, as she scrolls through her phone and perceives all the glittering jewels of unread text messages from supportive friends.
And as she feels better, Foo is more able to investigate the larger social context surrounding her upbringing. She describes a little-known war between the Malayan-Chinese community and their British colonizers which impacted her ancestors. And she tracks down the counselor at the high school in San Jose she attended, who tells her that abuse and addiction are all too common amongst the high-achieving Asian-American students who are the majority there. In fact, the counselor has more than 260 cases that she’s handling. “There is a Chinese saying that ‘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.’ I got here through forces of war, luck, dowries, parents, bad bosses, and good boyfriends. But I took what was given to me, and I used my third of the equation to make choices to heal some of the wounds that had coursed through our family for generations.”
By the time COVID appears in 2020, Foo writes, “the fog of pathology burned off, and my understanding of my superpower blossomed.” Thanks to an interview with neuroscientist and psychiatrist Greg Siegle, she comes to understand that “many people with C-PTSD had more active prefrontal cortices—so our bodies stop reacting and don’t go into fight or flight—instead, we become hyperrational.” She continues, “The whole point of PTSD is to prepare you for being on the verge of death at any moment. My parents prepared me for a vicious world with danger around every corner. But as an adult I hadn’t lived in that world. My fear was misplaced and paranoid here. Until the pandemic.”
Foo feels a sense of familiarity when she’s faced with scarcity and supply-chain shortages in the early days of the pandemic. She perceives herself as having been present, in her grandmother’s ovaries, when her grandma couldn’t find rice, and sewed Japanese flags from clothes sold to her by grave-robbers. “I could never live up to the stories that Auntie had told me of their impossible endurance. I was the entitled and delicate youngest daughter in this line, the one with soft hands and a shaky temperament. But now, I have survived history, have I not? I’ve done so with my own strength and grave. And I’ve done more than survived. I’ve fought.”
She quotes a poem by Eugenia Leigh:
“Tell me
I am not the thing
my children will have to survive
tell me
the mob I inherited will not touch
my son.
Yes, the cavalcade
of all that’s tried to kill me
may forever raid my brain, but know
this: in my mother’s first language,
the word for fracture, for crack,
is the same as the word for gold.”
The memoir ends with Foo’s description of her joyous wedding to a wonderful cis-gendered Italian-American man and his supportive family. She recounts how much she has changed due to her healing journey and quotes affirmations from her partner and friends. Particularly, she says that she no longer loses her friends/lover because she was able to stop trying to fix their pain when they confided in her.
But there’s a twist: she also gets diagnosed with endometriosis, a painful condition that is more likely amongst people with adverse childhood experiences. Despite her uterine challenges, Foo conceives a child, and reflects on what she wants to pass on. She perceives herself as being able to give her future child “The shining thing, the thing that none of us got, the thing that only I, in all of my resilient power, can give. The thing that all this pain has given me. I will hold her tight and tell her I love her more than anything in the world. That she can always come to me with anything at all and I will fix it if it needs fixing or just listen if she needs to be listened to. And, as long as I live, I will never leave.”
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Here’s my take on this story as a somatic coach. This book gives one very personal account of someone’s healing journey. On Instagram, Foo has mentioned that some readers are prone to comparing their own journeys with hers. This can be both inspiring and painful for the person who hasn’t yet found their dream partner or dream therapist/coach. Both are incredibly lucky breaks that, arguably, Foo was in the right place to find due to her perspicacity.
I often work with clients on finding their window of tolerance—the comfort zone where you don’t go into fight/flight/freeze/fawn, etc. And having been through a journey of estrangement and reconciliation with my dad, I enjoy holding space for compassion, grief, and forgiveness in my practice—alongside rage.
I also suggest reading the brilliant comic novel Big Swiss as a complement to this book. (Like What My Bones Know, it’s also a great audiobook). Big Swiss is the story of Greta, a sex coach’s transcriptionist. While transcribing, Greta falls in love with one of the coach’s clients, a repressed married woman whom she calls “Big Swiss.” Inevitably, the two meet and have an affair in the small town of Hudson, which reminds me of Lawrence, Kansas, one of my hometowns. This fictional story allows us to laugh at some of the inevitable elements of healing journey, such as the tendency to compare it to other’s journeys. Such expansiveness is one of the reasons why I often recommend both fiction and non-fiction to my clients. And discussing with a friend is highly recommended. I can’t wait to discuss Foo’s book with my friend Miyuki, who writes the Beautiful Scholarship newsletter.
What about you? Have you read either of these books? Regardless, what resonates and what doesn’t? Anything else you’d recommend? Please let me know in the comments.