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

Dive into a memoir that is both deeply personal and rigorously researched with “What My Bones Know” by Stephanie Foo — essential reading for anyone navigating complex trauma, the mental health professionals who treat it, and readers drawn to memoirs that combine genuine emotional honesty with real intellectual depth.

Stephanie Foo was a successful radio journalist when she was diagnosed with complex PTSD, a condition resulting from prolonged childhood trauma that differs in important ways from single-incident PTSD. Rather than simply documenting her experience, she did what journalists do — she researched the condition exhaustively, interviewed leading trauma experts, explored multiple treatment approaches from EMDR to somatic therapy to traditional talk therapy, and tried to understand both the neuroscience of what had happened to her and the cultural and generational context of her family’s trauma as Malaysian-Chinese immigrants. The result is a memoir that functions on two levels at once — an unflinching personal account of growing up with abusive parents and the long process of healing as an adult, and a genuinely useful exploration of how complex trauma is treated and understood in modern mental health care. Foo’s writing is sharp, honest, and often unexpectedly funny given the weight of the subject matter.

Whether you are someone navigating your own complex trauma, a therapist working with trauma survivors, or a reader who values memoirs that combine real vulnerability with genuine research, this book delivers both in equal measure.