Stephanie Foo describes her childhood that was filled with trauma and neglect and how it led to her developing Complex PTSD. While not yet a diagnosis in the DSM-V, it is a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years. Her incredible memoir is not only enlightening, but an incredible powerful read about how she navigated this road. 

C-PTSD symptoms: emotional flashbacks, a tendency to overshare, trust the wrong people, tendency to be aggressive but unable to tolerate aggression from others, and see threats everywhere. The world itself becomes a threat.

It is a learned set of responses, and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks. It is environmentally, not genetically, caused. It is caused by a lack of nurture. A LACK OF NURTURE. 

 

Some people say it takes 3-5 years to feel substantially healed from C-PTSD.

Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself. Instead, you have to pull up your bootstraps and solve the painful puzzle of your life by yourself. 

 

The essence of what trauma does to a person is it makes them feel like they don’t deserve love. 

 

Judith Herman, the woman who voiced the term complex PTSD, wrote: “The abused child.. must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. the alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. to preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. she will go to any lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame and responsibility… the abuse is either walled off from conscious awareness and memory… or minimize rationalize an excuse, so that whatever did happen was not really abuse.” 

 

Grounding 101: 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. If when you are grounding, you only do the exercises, then you are only doing the regulation part but not the reconnecting part. I would ask you to make sense of why your aunt talks the way she does. And first understand why it bothered you so much. 

 

If I took up all the space with my feelings, what space could I maintain for hers (mother). Hers were more important. Because hers had greater stakes. 

 

They did not require careful intervention from me, so I was free to be a kid (when she is discussing being around extended family). 

 

I gave her my pain to hold in this horrible time, instead of cradling hers (discussing a friend that was going through cancer). 

 

An act of radical forgiveness was the only thing that might rip me out of the loop. I must learn how to “self-soothe”. I needed to learn how to calm my anxieties by myself. You need to keep practicing curiosity and exploration rather than judgment. 

 

I needed to learn to love better. I began to promote kindness over vengeance. I had earned that love through sheer determination. 

 

Do you want me to care enough that I push you to get better and call you on your stuff? you want me to be both tough and gentle at the same time? 

 

Once I sensed men pulling away from me, I pulled away too, so I could be the decider, the one with agency in the impending split. 

 

(In discussing her boyfriend) He didn’t demand relentless improvement. He told me “you don’t have to fix anything to deserve love. I love you for who you are.” He later told me, “They don’t love you like you deserve to be loved. They are buried in their own misery and hurt to the point where they just cannot give you the kind of love that you need”. 

His constant, unwavering love has healed me in ways I never could have imagined. Through him, I learned that you can make mistakes and still deserve love. You can fight and then repair. 

 

“For people who are traumatized, that means they’re constantly apologizing…but they’re not having their own issues witnessed and repaired.” 

 

“You’re an imperfect being and I still love you.” Each of us is a delicate bundle of triggers, desires, emotions, and needs- and we all have our own ways of concealing those needs. We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are. 

 

“You hurt me. And, yes, I hurt you. And I’m sorry, but you’re still mine.” Approach difficult conversations with an attitude of “What is hurting you?” instead of “Have I hurt you?”

 

I tell myself, “You don’t know any kind of love outside of this. but I promise there’s different kinds of love out there, and you will meet other people who will give you what they can’t.” I reflected back to my inner child and told her, “ I just want you to know that you haven’t actually done anything wrong. just remember that eventually you will be loved, I promise. and I want you to know how powerful you are. You’re vigilance. your diplomacy. You are only a small child, but you are the nucleus that keeps his family together. with or without you, these two toxic adults would be fundamentally unhappy. but you make them less unhappy, if anything. their grief is not your fault. “

 

OMG. It hit me: I was constantly having to bed my parents to believe they were loved. That was my primary job as their child. It should have been the other way around. 

I didn’t just understand the weight of my abuse logically. I felt it, like a blade through flesh. I felt it like a lover saying it’s not going to work: sharp, immediate, and terrifying. I felt how tremendously sad it was that I was forced to make my parents feel loved at such a young age. I felt how courageous I must have been to endure that torture, by the people I trusted most in this world. I felt a sense of love and adoration for my childhood self that I never been able to summon before. 

 

The U.S. Department for Veterans Affairs and the United Kingdom National Health Service both recognize C-PTSD as a legitimate diagnosis. 

 

Studies have shown that people who suffered from childhood trauma have significantly shortened telomeres. These studies indicate that having an ACE score of 6 or higher takes 22 years off your life expectancy. 

 

Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed.

 

 Over the years, I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes. 

 

I finally saw the real reason they could not love me, had never loved me. They hated themselves too much to love me; their sadness made them too selfish to see me at all. The reason I hadn’t been loved had nothing at all to do with me or my behavior. It had everything to do with them. 

 

See I was taught, “Smile through your tears. Swallow your pain”. 

 

At the Emory University School of Medicine in 2013, researchers conducted an experiment with male mice. They exposed the mice to the smell of cherry blossoms, then gave them an electric shock. The mice came to associate the smell of cherry blossoms with danger. Eventually, the mice were able to identify the smell at trace concentrations. The smell receptors in their brain enlarged-  they changed to identify the scent. Researchers even identified changes in the mice’s sperm.

 Then, after the mice had offspring, the researchers exposed the next generation of mice to the Cherry Blossom scent. Despite the fact that these mice had never smelled cherry blossoms before and had never been shocked, they still shuttered and jumped when it wafted into their cages. This generation of mice had inherited their parents’ trauma. There is real scientific evidence that the traumas we experience can be passed on to our children and even our grandchildren. Both the genome and our epigenome are passed down generationally.  The stuff we think of when we think about DNA, like nose shape or eye color, only comprises about 2% of our total DNA. The other 98% is called non-coding DNA, and it is responsible for our emotions, personality, and instincts. The epigenome on top of non-coding DNA is very sensitive to stress and the environment. When a body adapts to constant, overwhelming stress, like long-lasting trauma- the epigenome changes. 

 

Your body knows better than you. Think to yourself, maybe this life I’ve got is going to be spectacular after all. 

 

Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself.

 

 If you want to mute the pain, you’ll also mute the joy. Pain is about feeling real, appropriate, and valid her when something bad happens. suffering is when you add extra dollops to that pain. you’re feeling bad about feeling bad. 

 

I wasn’t freaking out,  because I felt I was made for this moment. I learned that PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace. My PTSD transformed from a disability into a superpower at this time. It makes sense why now that the world is falling apart, I was calmly gluing the pieces back together. In naming this phenomenon- the disassociated state that means you don’t always have emotions that are totally appropriate for a situation- is called Blunted and Discordant Affect Sensitivity Syndrome. The acronym for this? BADASS!

 

“Desiderata”= you are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;you have a right to be here. 

 

To read this book and get a copy for yourself, go HERE!

 

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