Boundless Press | What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Heali...

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

Stephanie Foo
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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.

“Achingly exquisite . . . providing real hope for those who long to heal.”—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, NPR, Mashable, She Reads, Publishers Weekly
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.

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Identity exploration and normal variability deserve better marketing. Why do so many people expect identity to arrive fully formed, laminated, and unchanged or like with a flashing neon sign that gives you the answer. If only it was that easy, I'd be out of a job. Identity, for many people can often be fluid across years because development responds to context. Research in developmental psychology shows identity formation continues across adulthood, not only during adolescence. Stay with my because I'm about to nerd out for a second, Erikson described identity as an ongoing task across the lifespan. Later researchers expanded this view. Kroger and Marcia (more dead psychology researchers) tracked identity statuses across decades and found shifts tied to relationships, work roles, parenting, loss, and social pressure. Longitudinal studies show stability in core values alongside movement in expression, labels, and priorities.