fiefoe | "What My Bones Know"

Reading Stephanie Foo's account of her "burnout of my own", I'm greatly impressed by her work ethic and journalist skills.

I’ve waited for that mature, elevated calm, but my thirtieth birthday was months ago, and if anything, I care more than ever. I care about shopping cart placement and plastic in the oceans and being a good listener. I care about how I seem to fuck everything up all the time. I care and I care, and I hate myself for it.
Complex PTSD. 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
* The more I read, the more every aspect of my personhood is reduced to deep diagnostic flaws. I hadn’t understood how far the disease had spread. How complete its takeover of my identity was. The things I want. The things I love. The way I speak. My passions, my fears,
To revisit my story, one that has until now relied on lies of omission, perfectionism, and false happy endings. I need to stop being an unreliable narrator.
Then my father got a perfect 1600 on the SATs. Back then, this score signaled academic virtuosity. That 1600 was his ticket out of poverty and out of Malaysia. His older sister, who’d married well, loaned him the money to apply to colleges in the United States. He got into every single school, and every college offered him a full ride.
_There can only be one “first.” You are still writing too much “Then.” Then I went on a ferris wheel. Then I played two frog games. Try to use other words. And I did it well. Very well. Not good! <> Then she slapped a large grade at the top: C-minus.
as I read through it now, it appears her mission miscarried. I have no recollection of the Santa Cruz trip, or this lion dance, or that trip to the beach in Mendocino. The only thing I remember vividly is that clear plastic ruler on my palm.
The other girls leaned into their embraces. My mother did not touch me but stood alone and wept loudly. She cried all the time in the privacy of our home—ugly, bent-in-half sobs—but she never fell apart in public, and the sight alarmed me. <> If it hurt her so much for me to grow up, I wouldn’t. That moment determined my actions for the next few years: I did not tell her when I got my period
* Do you know how competitive you were during Pictionary? You got upset when other people didn’t know what you were drawing, like a big baby. Everyone felt uncomfortable. Everyone was staring at you. I wanted to die watching you. I wanted to say, ‘That is not my daughter.’ ” <> It felt like I’d sat up quickly in a top bunk and thwacked my head on the ceiling. Now? Really? Of all times, after a mother-daughter bonding trip?
* Please. My feelings didn’t matter. They were pointless. If I felt all those soft, mushy feelings, if I really thought about how messed up it was that my mother threatened to kill me on a regular basis, could I wake up and eat breakfast with her every day? Could I sit on the couch at night and cuddle her to keep her warm? No. <> If I took up all that space with my feelings, what space could I maintain for hers? Hers were more important. Because hers had greater stakes.
But I was still a child. I could not survive in a world where I simply fought, negotiated, and worked toward perfection. I needed play. I needed release. So I handled that like I handled everything else. I made the time for it. All it required was popping Sudafed before I went to bed—baby meth, to keep me awake.
I was furious. I spent my whole life being vigilant, trying to preserve my mother’s tenuous sanity and hold together their marriage. So this felt almost insulting. How could my father be so careless? Still, I had this under control. I made myself the primary account holder on AOL and changed his parental controls. Now he could only look at content appropriate for a thirteen-year-old boy.
I loved the language, which I can wield like a native. Its elegant conciseness (Can lah!), its phalanx of exclamations (Alamak! Aiyoyo! Aiyah! Walao eh!), the many languages it steals from (Malay: Tolong! Cantonese: Sei lor! Tamil: Podaa!), its fun, puzzling grammar (So dark! On the light one! Wah, like that ah?).
“It’s simple,” she said. “Your dad is the eldest son in the family. And you are his firstborn child. So naturally, you are the favorite.” This sounded enough like something out of an Amy Tan novel for me to believe it.
* “When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” Auntie repeated to me. “Big things, make small. Small things, make nothing. When someone wrongs you, never keep it in your heart. Let it go. Smile through your tears. Swallow your pain.”
Before the divorce, my father used to call me a pet name, Noi Noi. It’s a sweet diminutive for girl. He never called me that after the divorce. I was not a girl. I was his caretaker.
* 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.
Soon, my father and I found ourselves alone in this world, and our simmering hatred had nowhere to go but toward each other.
* I had faced death so many times before that I knew the feeling well. At a certain point, your body gives up on wild, animal panic and instead settles into a foreboding calm. You accept the end. You lose hope. And then, with hope, goes sanity. <> That’s how I found myself in his room in the middle of the night, standing above his bed... It shames me to admit that threatening his life felt…satisfying. To hold so much power. To feel so much control. He squirmed, and for the first time in forever, I was not afraid.
This was how I discovered the power of journalism—not just as a force to right wrongs and change the world, but as a force that turned my anguished brain into a functioning machine... I liked that journalism was a puzzle. You lay out your evidence and order it from most important to least, the inverted pyramid a force against woeful attention spans and chaos. I could take feelings and injustices and even tragedies and figure out a way to shape them all into something purposeful. Something controlled.
I pulled many extremely stupid and offensive stunts. For one story, I wore a nude bodysuit that I drew boobs and a bush on with Sharpie, declared myself a militant feminist, and ran around campus trying to get free things from various cafés as reparations for patriarchal oppression.
It was only then, in the wake of so much I had demolished, that I realized I had done this to myself, and I had done it because it had been done to me. My anger was a reflection of two people who had self-immolated with their own anger... But how was I to begin letting it go when anger was the force that gave me momentum? My anger was my power. It was what protected me. Without it, wouldn’t I be sad and naked?
* The next time I was at a taqueria, some drunk guy cut in front of me, demanded food, then meandered away, oblivious. My whole body burned with the desire to yell, to call him pathetic, rude, bald. Not doing so felt like leaving a chunk of rice at the bottom of the bowl, like dipping out without paying the bill—unfinished business, a miscarriage of justice. And yet. What would it accomplish? I let it go. I strong-armed myself into normalcy.
Resilience, according to the establishment, is not a degree of some indeterminable measure of inner peace. Resilience is instead synonymous with success. <> Which of course made me resilient as fuck. Like a good Protestant American, I continued to save myself through work.
One of these men was a guy who loved cyberpunk and postapocalyptic fiction. (It was San Francisco, after all, and my childhood sci-fi obsessions had transformed me into a dystopian dream girl.)
* I wrung my body out like a towel, twisting both ends with red fists and sinking my teeth into it, gritting out, “It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine,” until one day, I woke up and there would be a new accolade on my shelf, a new accomplishment I could never have dreamed of, and then—finally—it would be fine. It’d be perfect. For that day. Or an hour. And then tendrils of the dread started peeking into the corners of my vision. And I had to start all over again.
New York: They actually were indifferent if you were merely normal. Everyone had their job and their side project and their speaking circuit. They all wore overpriced black sack dresses and geometric statement jewelry.
So I started scrolling through Twitter. It was like swimming through kelp, painfully pushing my way past apocalyptic predictions by talking heads and stupid hot takes on even stupider tweets from our president, searching desperately for the respite of a cat video. <> Cat with Roomba. I began to be placated. Cat with owl. I felt merely dead inside instead of incomprehensibly sad. Cat reunited with its owner. Well, fuck. Tears again. Back to the drawing board.
In time, I learned that putting white supremacists on the radio was emotional terrorism for both myself and listeners of color, and it actively aided the KKK’s agenda. But it seemed like raging racial injustice was the only thing my bosses wanted to hear about. They were no longer interested in my pitches about human joys and foibles if they didn’t include a contrarian political angle.
joy seeping out of the bar with a butter-yellow glow. The disconnect was painted in vibrant relief. Maybe other people were angry about the state of the world, but in real life, they were laughing about television shows... They were remembering to call people back. Everyone was…generally okay. If I possessed the anxiety-and-depression combo meal everyone else had, then why was I the only one crying on the subway every morning?
* But it was the hyper-specific ones that freaked me out, like the idea that C-PTSD patients spend their lives in “relentless search for a savior.” ... Every time I met someone new who seemed wise and stable and kind, I wondered if they might be the answer to things, if they might be the new best friend who’d finally crack the code, the one who would make me feel loved. I thought this was a weird but very personal trait of mine. And this whole time it had been a medical symptom.

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But after ten years of constant work, buying the least expensive entrées, and thrift-store shopping, I had finally saved enough money to not work for several months. At last, a burnout of my very own.
but the faceless arbiters of mental health behind the DSM—a group of psychiatrists I envision as a society of hooded figures chanting around a sacrificial child star—decided that it was too similar to PTSD. There was no reason to add a “C,” no need for a distinction between the two.
* What we might think of as emotional outbursts—anxiety, depression, lashing out in anger—aren’t always just petty, emotional failings. They may be reflexes designed to protect us from things our brain has encoded as threats. And these threatening inputs are what many people call triggers.
* here’s what makes complex PTSD uniquely miserable in the world of trauma diagnoses: It occurs when someone is exposed to a traumatic event over and over and over again—hundreds, even thousands of times—over the course of years. When you are traumatized that many times, the number of conscious and subconscious triggers bloats, becomes infinite and inexplicable. If you are beaten for hundreds of mistakes, then every mistake becomes dangerous. If dozens of people let you down, all people become untrustworthy. The world itself becomes a threat.
This was the most disorienting and upsetting idea that emerged from my reading: the idea that C-PTSD was baked into my personality, that I didn’t know where my PTSD stopped and I began. If C-PTSD was a series of personality traits, then was everything about my personality toxic?
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.
The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes about a form of therapy called EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a strange process reminiscent of hypnosis, where a patient revisits past traumas while moving their eyes left and right.
One theory is that EMDR mimics the way the brain processes memories during REM sleep. Other research suggests that these eye movements tax our short-term memory, dimming the painful vibrancy of past experiences and making them easier to revisit with a sense of clarity. Whether or not either of these theories is true, many studies keep showing real results: Somehow, this weird process is surprisingly effective in helping patients recover from trauma.
“It’s interesting you say that you aren’t dissociated,” Eleanor said carefully. “When you describe some terrible things being done to you, you have a remarkably flat affect when talking about them.”
It’s not just about finding the most traumatic memory you can possibly dredge up. In fact, some might argue that starting C-PTSD treatment by diving into the back of your closet and chasing out your scariest, most deeply buried skeleton is a terrible idea. You could find a murderous clown in the storm drain of your life, and he could start haunting your everyday existence.
* But my childhood abuse was old hat. Still, perhaps there were less-cited abusive moments somewhere in my skull, the B sides of my trauma history. Perhaps these would hurt. <> On the train ride home, my brain fumbled through traumatic events like a hand in a junk drawer, pulling out a stapler, then a fly swatter.
Mommy Dearest: The part of the wire hanger scene that was most familiar was the very end, after Joan leaves Christina alone in the bathroom. Christina sits there, still, in quiet shock. While you are getting the shit kicked out of you, there isn’t much room for injustice or disbelief, just survival. How do you calm the monster? Manage their rage? But in this silence, after it’s over, that’s when the sorrow finds you. “Jesus Christ,” Christina whispers to herself, and I recalled multiple perfect reflections of this moment. That quiet slice of time you get when the monster retreats and you have a minute to survey the wreckage—the powdered soap everywhere, the lace dresses strewn all over the floor—and sit with the absolute what the fuck of your life before you have to pull it all back together, clean up the mess, and pretend that everything is fine.
I’ve always said there are forest people and desert people. Forest people are nurturing and fertile, but they have a tendency to hide behind their branches. I’m a desert person. Hard and acerbic and difficult to endure, but honest. You always know what you’re getting in the desert because there isn’t anywhere to hide.
I had recalled that moment of abuse two hundred times and not once had I ever cried. I never flinched. I always felt calm all over, a flat, barren nothing. Past therapists told me many times, “The abuse was not your fault.” And I felt that windless chill and responded, “Yeah, sure. I know that.”... But this had been something else... I didn’t just understand the weight of my abuse logically. I felt it, like a blade through flesh, like a bone popping out of place. I felt it like a lover saying it’s not going to work: sharp, immediate, and terrifying. I actually felt, with searing clarity, the horror of what happened to me—maybe for the first time ever. I felt how tremendously sad it was that I was forced to make my parents feel loved at such a young age.
There is a difference between knowing and understanding. I had known that this wasn’t my fault. EMDR unlocked the gate to the next realm, toward understanding. The difference is one between rote memorization and true learning. Between hypothesis and belief. Between prayer and faith. It seems obvious now—how can there be love without faith?
And the second thing I learned was: My parents didn’t love me.
If I’d acknowledged these feelings earlier, I could have asked for the attention I wanted. But instead, I felt that hollow, dry, fine feeling. The same feeling I had when I talked about knives to my throat. The same feeling you get when you have to stop crying, pick up the rag, and finish cleaning up the soap. The silent, soundless expanse.
Maybe you can hide in the desert after all.
I may not have United States of Tara levels of dissociation. But it’s now clear I do have my own kind of dissociation, tamer and perhaps more dangerous in its subtlety, because up until now, I’ve been able to ignore the fact that it even existed.
It was now clear that I had hung a veil up decades ago—a thick white sheet in the back of my mind to keep certain truths from myself.
The dread was a catchall. It was a colorless amalgamation of feeling because I did not have the tools to tease out the wild knot of my real emotions and needs. The dread was a sliver of light escaping from behind the veil.
When I used EMDR to move the veil aside, I found: My parents never loved me, and that’s not my fault.
The books say that in order to stop being a burden, I must learn how to “self-soothe.” I need to learn how to calm my anxieties by myself, without immediately texting everyone in my phone. Therapy and EMDR might eventually work to heal my trauma on a longer timeline. But to ease the searing pain of the present moment, everyone says the first step should be meditation and mindfulness.
Even though consciously I was completely in the present, my emotions were back in 1997, back when I was a little kid and making a mistake on a spelling test could literally be a matter of life and death. This return was an emotional flashback. <> Beauty After Bruises claims that the way to fix these emotional flashbacks is to ground yourself... Grounding 101 tips: Open your eyes. Put your feet solidly on the floor. Look at your hands and feet. Recognize they are adult hands and feet. Name five things you can see and hear and smell.
* I learned that what happened that first day at restorative yoga hadn’t been entirely spiritual.. Instead, my instructor’s techniques happened to be the perfect mechanism to turn down my DMN. <> The default mode network is so called because if you put people into an MRI machine for an hour and let their minds wander, the DMN is the system of connections in their brains that will light up. It’s arguably the default state of human consciousness, of boredom and daydreaming. In essence, our ego.
In order for the DMN to start whirring, it needs resources to fuel its internal focus. If you’re intently focused on something external—like, say, filling out a difficult math worksheet—the brain simply doesn’t have the resources to focus internally and externally at the same time. So if you’re triggered, you can short-circuit an overactive DMN by cutting off its power source—shifting all of your brain’s energy to external stimuli instead.
One of my favorites was mindful eating... And there was one mindfulness trick that was like a giant emergency button I could whack in a crisis... : counting colors. I whirled around the room and counted all the red things:
His invention, holotropic breathwork, is a fancy term for “hyperventilating until the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your body are so whacked-up that you hallucinate.” Some people report having intensely cathartic experiences afterward, akin to those associated with hallucinogens.
I was approaching “wellness” with the same obsessive, perfectionistic tendencies I’d brought to my job. This was no less disordered than being a workaholic, and the pattern had a distinct echo: moments of intense joy through achievement followed by anxiety over finding my next success. <> I decided to cut down on the number of wellness activities I participated in, keeping only my favorites, the ones that brought me sincere and easy joy.
These trips were not confetti-strewn party extravaganzas. Instead, they often involved lots of crying and digging through hard truths, coming out on the other side with a clearer lens through which to witness this sublime world.
But my trip had also shown me that there was one thing that could combat the void for a little while: gratitude. It was the flame that penetrated the darkness, that filled me all the way up. And the only way to keep the flame going was to keep feeding it. <> These acts of generosity kept staying with me. Kept filling the void. <> Like with food—like that one miraculous Pret chicken parmesan wrap—when you take the time to savor the good, you simply need less of it... As Melody Beattie said, “Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”

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We knew that Filipinos always had good streetwear from 555 Soul; the white girls and hot Viets could hook us up with discounts at Abercrombie; Taiwanese girls went home for the summer and brought back outfits with bows and lace in odd places; and aZn and Mexican girls knew how to apply impeccable eye and lip liner. <> But we also knew that as this unit, we were allowed to borrow from one another: You could bring chana masala to school even if you weren’t Indian
nobody ever said anything about what must have happened: abuse, sexual assault, the traumas of poverty and war. But even at a young age, without understanding what these things were, we sensed them as we kicked our way through the currents of our day. We could feel it looming somewhere, large and dark beneath everything: our parents’ pain.
The loss is enormous. An entire childhood’s worth of happiness. The bedrock for a happy life. A smart girl with a gap-toothed grin who conversed easily with strangers at the checkout aisle. Wiped. What a waste. Outside, the birds sing. It is a perfectly warm day, the sky a shameless expanse of blue.
There was a different lesson that could have been taught about forced assimilation—about Native American boarding schools, “Kill the Indian, and save the man,” Chinese men in San Francisco who were forced to cut their queues. But instead, they taught us to cross-stitch. <> Surely, I think, the racial divide might blind white teachers like Mr. Dries to our plight—immigrants can be very good at blending into the scenery.
* But from underneath these shreds of doubt, a new woman punches her way to the surface, someone who has read the data. This whole fucking narrative of all of these Asians settling gently into the American dream is bullshit. The facts just don’t add up. You have a community of immigrants and refugees who survived extreme violence—but they don’t believe in mental illness, don’t talk about trauma, don’t allow for feelings or failure, and everyone is just fucking fine? The worst angst here comes from not being able to make an essay sparkle? Come on.
“Intergenerational trauma, am I right?” “Yaaas, girl, you know!” <> Our laughter is that of relief. My conversation with Yvonne, as dismal as it is, feels so much lighter than my conversations with the other teachers because it is true. Ugly things become uglier in the dark. For once, we don’t have to cushion the truth, massage it into something palatable. We hold that difficult truth, together.
* I read up on my classmates’ painful family histories: the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Cambodian genocide. I realized that my community was built in large part from the wreckage of America’s brutal proxy wars against communism... San Jose is America’s consolation prize for those who lost Saigon and Seoul.
C Pam Zhang writes in an essay in The New Yorker.[1] She says her parents “depicted their pre-America lives as mere prologue, quickly sketched…. It is far too easy…as the naturalized citizen of a country that tries to kick dirt over its bloody history…to see only the castle on the hill and not the thickets of bone we trod through to arrive at it.”
But under Japanese occupation, the mines closed entirely... To avoid suspicion and harassment—and to make a little bit of money on the side—my great-grandmother bought clothes for cheap from grave robbers, who dug up corpses, looking for gold. She and her daughters unraveled the dead people’s clothing, spooled the thread, and used it to sew new clothing…and make Japanese flags. She sold these flags back to the Japanese soldiers—the World War II equivalent of undocumented immigrants selling Trump hats on Canal Street.
my great-grandmother’s history was worth our remembrance and our respect because of her hard work, her sacrifices, and, most of all, her unfathomable endurance. 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.
* But the truth was something better than that: I had been seen. My family had seen me. And they loved me enough to orchestrate a grand performance that had spanned decades and involved my entire family. All those years of “Ho gwaai, ho gwaai. You’re so well-behaved. You’re such a good girl.” At first, those lines were crafted to show my mother that I was deserving of love. That didn’t work. But perhaps they were also endeavoring to show me.
But something about this didn’t sit right with me—if my desire for accountability and acknowledgment was entitled, did that mean disempowered people did not deserve justice? Still, as I hung up the phone, my family’s voices scolded me: “Ah girl. You are just too American.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.”
I learned that Auntie and my grandmother had not just survived World War II, as I’d previously thought. * There was another war they lived through, a secret war that history would prefer to forget. <> Under Japanese occupation of Malaysia during WWII, a Communist guerrilla force grew in the jungle. With half a million members, they called themselves the Malayan National Liberation Army, or MNLA... After the British came into power yet again, the MNLA waged an all-out war against them for twelve years. But the British never called it a war. They dubbed the conflict the “Malayan Emergency,” because calling it a war would have meant that insurers wouldn’t cover losses for their many assets—tin mines... Britain’s success in this war was actually what persuaded America to go to war with Vietnam.
Like their mother before them, my grandmother and Auntie became the main breadwinners of their household. And like their mother, they tried starting up illegal gambling operations to survive.
* Did the thousands of dollars he spent on me allow him to pay off his sins? But I went to a state school, I tell myself. But I graduated in two years. But I didn’t take money from him after graduation. I count and recount, as if I can nickel and dime my way out of having to love him.
It took a couple of days for it to hit me: an unbearable understanding that changed everything. This time, I am the secret.
I am the same as my long-lost half sister, her existence so cobwebby that nobody in my family can even remember her name. I am my grandparents’ jail time and my mother’s birth parents. I am my mother’s opaque childhood, her missing siblings. I am the great-uncle who cross-dressed, whom my aunts used to peek at beneath the floorboards to catch a glimpse of him putting on lipstick. I am the great-aunt who maybe had a female lover, the one nobody likes to talk about.
I am the trauma you bury away. I am the lie you hold under your tongue, the thing you bury, vanish, erase, the thing you can almost always pretend is forgotten as long as you don’t touch it... Their lives appear whole. But only if you forget I exist.
I am blood and sin. I am the sum total of my parents’ regrets. I am their greatest shame.
estrangement: “I don’t think it brought anyone joy. It didn’t make people happy to have to do it. It was just necessary.
He was trying to be quiet, hoping the growing awkwardness would force me to eventually feel so itchy that I’d fill in the space with my talking. I knew this technique because I used it all the time with my interview subjects.
But I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and leapt in. I embraced my February self. And then I tried to shift to embracing my current self, which was harder. To be held by my own consciousness. I pushed through the wall. It felt like curling up in a tulip. Like throwing a bull’s-eye and winning the prize I’d always wanted. Foreign. Wholesome. Good... Love yourself. Ah, there it was. For the first time without the help of hallucinogens: unconditional self-love.
Self-parenting exercises taught me to slowly rebuild healthy self-talk. But it must be said: Even though I know reparenting has helped dozens of my friends and acquaintances, almost everyone has told me it’s exhausting. Reparenting takes time, and concentration, and calmness.

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Symptomatically, men with PTSD are more likely to exhibit anger, paranoia, and an exaggerated startle response. Women are more likely to be avoidant and have mood and anxiety disorders. Women generally focus on regulating their emotions, while men focus on solving problems.
* As I read through, a comment popped up on the screen. Dr. Ham was adding notes to the transcript!... I loved this form of therapy. If Dr. Ham had called me out for that in the moment, I would’ve gotten defensive or confused. But something about editing this on a Google Doc gave it a pleasant distance. It gave our interaction objectivity—laid out the truth for everyone to see so there was no “he said, she said.” And it turned my therapy into an interesting project to investigate rather than a depressing way to obsess over my flaws... This felt the same—we were editing my trauma out of the conversation. It thrilled my journalistic sensibilities.
So often, past therapists I’d encountered had presented themselves as a kind of all-knowing, all-seeing Wizard of Oz... In contrast, Dr. Ham was only too happy to give me a tour of the engine room. <> “I was tracking your facial expressions here and realized I was floundering,” he commented at one point. At another point, where he had told me a small personal story, he noted: “I gave a self-disclosure to empathize with you on the pain of growing.”
“In my mind, the most helpful thing for you is to be reconnected with another person. Self-regulation is a very insular thing. That’s just survival. Like, ‘I’m not going to actually learn how to be connected to you, but at least I’m going to be able to regulate how upset I get from you.’... But what if instead you were in this state where you could ask, ‘Who are you? What do you need from me right now? And what do I need from you?’ ”
* This was Dr. Ham’s whole theory: that 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... The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people... We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place.
I thought about this for a moment. “You mean…I was only taught how to apologize whenever there’s a problem and say, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so fucked-up.’ ” <> “Exactly. You don’t know how to apologize by making it a two-way repair.”
Dr. Ham advocates for what the Dalai Lama calls “emotional disarmament—to see things realistically and clearly without the confusion of fear or rage.” For every narrow, fear-based C-PTSD reading, Dr. Ham said, there is a wider truth—layers and layers of truths. Of course it isn’t possible to always know that entire truth, because the people we love might not even be aware of that truth themselves. What is important is to approach all of these interactions with curiosity for what that truth is, not fear.
Dr. Ham would try unsuccessfully to stifle his chortles, and he’d call me stupid. For some reason—which I can only attribute to Asians! That’s how they are!—I would not take this personally and would instead yell back,
“Justice is the firmest pillar of good government,” after all, and justice meant people had to pay for their mistakes. When something went wrong, there had to be fault. There had to be blame. There had to be pain.
Now I knew I was wrong. Punishment didn’t make things better. It mucked things up even more.
The father’s self-punishment did not grant him his daughter’s forgiveness. It did not whip his sins out of him. Instead, it removed him from his family by isolating him in a prison of self-loathing.
tense fights, when they dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night to arrange some premature custody agreement... maybe I was just tired. So when my mother asked, “Who do you love more?” I answered, “I guess Mommy. Because she punishes me more. So she must love me more.”
“I’m feeling worried that you’re shifting the attention to me because you don’t want to burden me with your problems. But I just want to say that your problems aren’t a burden—I’m so curious about what’s going on. My life is so boring right now, and I want to spend time learning about you!”... she started sharing the tough stuff she was going through and let me comfort her. I felt privileged to be able to hold space for a friend I love.
* he had taken to smiling at me and saying, “You feel curious today.” He might as well have been telling me that I was his favorite patient. It was a glowing compliment... But more and more, I am curious enough to ask the magic question: “What do you need?” These four words open doors and break down walls.
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.”
“Pain is about feeling real, appropriate, and valid hurt when something bad happens. Suffering is when you add extra dollops to that pain. You’re feeling bad about feeling bad.”
* With freezer trucks full of dead bodies parked outside morgues and Asian women being kicked, burned by acid, and shot, my PTSD transformed from a disability into a superpower. Because objectively, PTSD is an adaptation, a mechanism our genius bodies evolved to help us survive. <> All of a sudden, I was no longer hypervigilant. I was just vigilant.
Siegle told me, “As far as we can tell with complex PTSD, in really stressful situations, you’ve got this coping skill that allows the prefrontal cortex to just shut off some of our evolutionary freak-out mechanisms and instead have high levels of prefrontal activity. So our bodies stop reacting.” <> In other words, in some moments of intense stress, we are super-duper good at dissociation.
Rage will always coat the tip of my tongue. I will always walk with a steel plate around my heart. My smile will always waver among strangers and my feet will always be ready to run. In the past few years, my joints have continued to rust and swell. I cannot transfuse the violence out of my blood.