‘Working through trauma is nothing to be ashamed of’
WHEN STEPHANIE FOO DISCOVERED SHE HAD COMPLEX PTSD FOLLOWING HER ABUSIVE CHILDHOOD, SHE SET OUT ON A HEALING JOURNEY. HERE’S WHAT SHE LEARNED
‘Do you want to know your diagnosis?’ my therapist asked me, her face glowing on my screen. I had already been seeing her for eight years, because I’d dealt with anxiety and depression for most of my life. But this was the first time I wondered – was there something else? I blinked at her. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course, yes.’ ‘You have Complex PTSD,’ she said. ‘Oh, yeah. Post-traumatic stress disorder.’ I’d experienced a few traumatic events as a child, so I kind of figured.
‘Not just PTSD. Complex PTSD. Traditional PTSD is often associated with a moment of trauma. People with Complex PTSD have undergone continued trauma over the course of years, usually from abuse. Oop! Well, that’s our time for today. Same time next week?’
And then she logged off.
Huh. Fascinating. I had never heard of Complex PTSD, also known as C-PTSD. And so, as soon as her window disappeared from my screen, I googled it. Most of the information I found was clinical, but the list of symptoms read like a biography. The difficulty regulating my emotions. The dismal self-loathing. The trouble maintaining relationships. The person described on the screen seemed like a broken person. She was me.
As a child, I was brutally physically and verbally abused by my parents. They were both Malaysian immigrants, who had arrived in our Californian hometown of San José when I was two. They put knives to my neck, beat me with tennis rackets and wire hangers, and threatened to drive our car off a cliff with me inside it. They both struggled with their own undiagnosed mental illnesses, stemming from mysterious traumas and hazy childhoods they never spoke about. My mother’s moods swung precipitously. One moment she’d be laughing, and the next she’d have her hands around my neck, telling me that I was stupid, worthless. She’d demand that I try harder. Be better. And I would. But no matter how many perfect report cards I brought home, it was never enough for them to love me.
My mother left when I was 13 and I never saw her again; then, when I was 16, my dad went, too – he left me our house in California and a card with just enough money for gas and some food. From that point forward, I took care of myself. I had no other family in America, no adult support system and few friends. So I shoplifted microwaveable dinners and dresses for school dances. As a teenager, I chased away my feelings of despair and loneliness with work. I started writing for my local paper while I was in high school, and by the time I was 26, I was working for This American Life, one of the biggest public radio shows in America. In this way, I was able to punch down my depression and fool myself and everyone around me. I was clearly fine. Sure, I had chaotic romantic relationships and the occasional big friend breakup. But how could someone so successful be ‘crazy’?
In 2017, everything bubbled up to the surface. While reporting on Donald Trump and racism for a whole
miserable year, I started getting panic attacks at work. I felt hopeless about the state of the world; I’d walk into my office every morning in tears and need to watch cat videos for two hours to calm myself down. But, I would learn from my therapist, it wasn’t just that I was anxious about global warming. I also had C-PTSD. My parents’ hands coming forward in time to grab me again.
I was humiliated by my diagnosis and all of its pathologising stigma. But I was lucky – from my decade of overwork and obsessive saving, I had the resources to quit my job and dedicate a few months to finally healing.
Immediately, I applied a journalistic rigour to my journey. I wanted to understand everything I could about C-PTSD. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much information available – C-PTSD isn’t officially in the DSM (Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders), the bible of mental health conditions, even though it’s acknowledged as real by the likes of WHO and the NHS. I couldn’t find a first-person story of healing, which made me feel isolated, but I wouldn’t give up. I signed up for every form of therapy I could afford and tried all the acronyms. IFS, EMDR, CBT, holotropic breathwork, sound baths, yoga, supplements, group therapy, gratitude journalling, magic mushrooms…
After about a year, I felt as if I had more control over my life. This came down to three critical elements. First was the importance of gaining mind/body awareness; meditation, deep breaths and brain hacks, such as naming colours I could see around me, to calm me down when I felt triggered. I can’t control my triggers – my brain will always race when I hear yelling – but I’ve learned to slow my response to them.
The second was about healing relationships. C-PTSD is a relational disorder – when your foundational relationships were dangerous, that makes it hard to trust any relationship. Often, when I faced conflict in my relationships, I ran from them instead of being able to state what I needed or make amends. So I began something called rupture/repair therapy, which helped me to see with explicit clarity when I shut down or became fearful, eventually improving my interactions and allowing me to become a better friend.
The third element was silencing my shame. C-PTSD ingrains within its victims a belief that they don’t deserve love. For years, I’d used career success to try to earn the world’s love, instead of knowing that I inherently deserved it. Through innovative therapies like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), gratitude therapy and psychedelic therapy, I was able to finally recognise the horror of what happened to me as a child, and to validate my feelings. I saw that the self-image my parents imbued me with was inaccurate. I recognised that I brought joy to many – I had just been too mired in my fear to appreciate it.
As part of my research, I returned to my hometown.
I had grown up in a community of Asian refugees and, in speaking to the therapist at my old high school, I learned that hundreds of students from the community were still dealing with physical and verbal abuse at home. I began to understand that my trauma was not just personal – it was communal. Cultural. Political.
I started digging into the concept of intergenerational trauma, and learned that my grandfather was imprisoned for five years during The Malayan Emergency and came back severely traumatised. This didn’t make me forgive my parents, but I did understand some context behind my abuse. I realised that my anxiety had its roots in generations of poverty, starvation, war and imperialism; the way I feel, the coping mechanisms I have… they’re not all my fault.
Studies have shown that experiencing persistent racism can cause severe trauma symptoms, while poverty is a contributing factor to C-PTSD. Being made to feel afraid because of your identity – be it queer or disabled – is traumatising. We live in a society scarred by past and current traumas and as author and physician Dr Gabor Maté writes in The Myth Of Normal, ‘Someone without the marks of trauma would be an outlier in our society.’ Having to work through trauma is nothing to be ashamed of, and most of us should probably do that work in some form. Many of the therapies I was fortunate enough to try are expensive and inaccessible to many – that needs to change if we want to truly address trauma in our society.
I don’t think I will ever be completely ‘healed’. I don’t even know what that would look like. I will always carry my triggers and my grief. But my therapist, Dr Jacob Ham, told me that people with C-PTSD are valuable as they are. ‘They’re empathetic, they’re grateful… and they are great healers,’ he told me. Now, I can see that he was right.
‘WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY SCARRED BY PAST AND PRESENT TRAUMAS’