Reading | What My Bones Know

What My Bones Know | Stephanie Foo

Stephanie Foo is a highly successful Malaysian-American professional in her mid-thirties. She is also a survivor of intense child abuse and abandonment. 

Seriously intense. Her parents took turns screaming at her, hitting her, humiliating her to an inhuman extreme, and threatening while driving to kill them both by sending the car over a cliff or into a cement barrier. By the time she was a teenager, both of Stephanie's parents physically and emotionally abandoned her. At least her dad kept paying the mortgage to keep a roof over her head and occasionally tossed her a few dollars for food. But beginning in high school, Stephanie was utterly alone.

As a young adult, Stephanie poured all her energy into her work to great success, but noticed that her personal relationships and her interior life were a mess. Fighting off suicidal impulses and self-destructive urges while desperately seeking answers, she began a journey toward wellness that covered many twists and turns, steps forward and back, and searching out the foremost experts in the gradually emerging world of Complex PTSD.

Eventually, Stephanie found a therapist who helped her discover two essential truths about herself: during the worst days of Covid, she marveled at her own C-PTSD-trained ability to handle tragedy and at the same time, Stephanie tapped into her enormous capacity to love. 

Stephanie says she is not healed from her C-PTSD; she's not even in remission. But she has agency and she has hope. Stephanie has realized her own strength; rather than being crushed by her emotional burdens, she has learned to dance.

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I'm not gonna claim that my walk has been as bad as Stephanie's. My parents never laid a finger on me, neither parent ever trash talked me, and even though my dad walked away, my mother moved heaven and earth to keep a roof over my head and food on the table. 

But I've also learned that comparing trauma - even Big T trauma or what Stephanie explains as Complex PTSD - with another person is fruitless. Along with so many others, she and I both went through things that no child should ever experience, and that is common bond enough.

What's interesting to me is that despite our different journeys, Stephanie and I have come out at the same place,. As the book lays out, Stephanie's self image shattered into a thousand tiny pieces and it took her well over a decade of therapists, self-help books, and wellness exercises to finally hit upon the right combination of influences that helped her learn the necessary lessons.

The PTSD always told me I am alone. That I am unlovable. That I am toxic. But now it is clear to me: That was a lie.

Yes, I have read some super useful books and have seen a few therapists. But that's not where the main part of my journey toward healing has laid.

As a tiny child, four or five years old, I would lie in bed listening to my parents' fights wind up, and I would think, "Somewhere there is someone who loves me. Who loves me bigger than all of this. Who protects me. Who keeps me safe, even when those two cannot."

I thought it might be my teddy bear. 

But as a young adult it dawned on me. The force of love that I was feeling was and is God. 

Here's a theory: maybe I had not really been broken this whole time. 

And though my experiences with churches have ebbed and flowed over the years, my understanding of God is unwavering. He has loved and protected me through the nightmare of my childhood - and the extended nightmare of my trauma - and has kept my heart light and open. He's protected me from any sense that I was at fault for my parents' misery; my self-image has always been healthy and strong. And he showed me from a very early age that my pain makes me stronger that people who have had less traumatic lives. He has given me a heart for other people's suffering, and he's connected me countless times to other people who need encouragement and hope. Just as Stephanie learned during Covid, it is a joy to use your own pain to help others. I have felt that joy.

God has showed me how much he loves me, time after tine after time, and his love has made all the difference in my journey. 

Love, both Stephanie and I have learned, is the answer to healing ourselves. 

Over and over, the answer is the same, isn't it? Love, love, love. 

I gather than Stephanie does not have a strong faith in God, and that's fine with me. Her journey toward love took a different, more earthy route than mine but we both ended up in the same place.

Love is the answer. 

And for us children of trauma who were not properly loved by our parents, love comes to us as a priceless.gift. 

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More stories about books I've read in 2024:

Books By Anthony Doerr

What My Bones Know

Books By Emily Henry

The Poisonwood Bible

Harvesting The Heart