Stephanie Foo’s memoir What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma tells her story of her childhood, where she suffered abuse and abandonment from her parents, and how those experiences led her to suffer from complex PTSD.  Complex PTSD differs from regular PTSD, as it is caused when someone is exposed to a traumatic event repeatedly, over the course of years.  Complex PTSD also doesn’t officially exist in the DSM-5, and so there is relatively little literature on the issue. 

We speak with Stephanie Foo about her childhood trauma, her coming to terms with her Complex PTSD diagnoses, and how she’s worked to overcome it.