What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

Author:Stephanie Foo [Foo, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

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Judith Herman, the woman who coined 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 minimized, rationalized, and excused, so that whatever did happen was not really abuse.”[1]

Despite the fact that I know what happened to me—that I’ve always known that what happened to me was awful—I keep applying a level of journalistic skepticism to my story as if it were a complete stranger’s. Over and over, I create excuses: Maybe EMDR is bunk, maybe the teachers are right, maybe some level of privilege erases abuse. But this narrative gives me a false sense of control. If it’s all my fault, then I can change it. I can fix it.

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.

I don’t take a final look at the ridiculous facade of my happy home. Instead, I turn the key in the ignition and head to Starbucks to talk to the person who is my last hope at validation.

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