Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 452: How To Live With The Worst Things That Ever Happened To You | Stephanie Foo

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

We’ve all had difficult, and sometimes horrible things happen to us. While some people may be luckier than others, it’s rare that anyone goes unscathed. This episode is part of our Mental Health Reboot series to mark Mental Health Awareness Month. In this episode, Stephanie Foo shares her story of being diagnosed with complex PTSD and how she learned to process her trauma and live with her past. The result of her journey is a new book called What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma. Stephanie Foo is a journalist and radio producer. Her previous work includes This American Life, The Cut, Reply All, and 99% Invisible. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times and Vox. In this conversation we talk about: The various therapies, meditation styles, and wellness modalities Stephanie explored to help process her traumaWhat actually worked for her, and how it might be relevant to other survivorsShame, gratitude, and self-loveHer transformative work with Dr. Jacob Ham, who will be featured in another episode this week. Content Warnings: Discussions of trauma and abuse, references to addiction and mental health challenges. Explicit language. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/stephanie-foo-452See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, we've all had hard, even horrible things happen to us. Some of us are luckier than others, but nobody goes unscathed here. We talk a lot on this show about how to handle the vexations and vicissitudes of life, but today you're going to hear from somebody who has had way more than her fair share and has endeavored to use the kind of techniques that we often discuss here, including meditation, under some extreme circumstances. She's really battle-testing a lot of the techniques that many of us use. Stephanie Foo's life by her own description looked good on paper. She was a successful journalist.

She's worked on such shows as this American life and 99% invisible, and she was also in a happy relationship, but she was having daily panic attacks in her office for months. He was at this point that she was diagnosed with complex PTSD, which I will let her describe in detail, but in short, it is as she describes it and under-researched under-diagnosed condition. In her case, it appears to have been the result of intense and protracted child abuse. After receiving the diagnosis, she said about trying to figure out how to live with her past. And the lessons she learned are applicable to all of us, I believe, no matter what our background might be. are applicable to all of us, I believe, no matter what our background might be. The result is a new book called What My Bones Know, a memoir of healing from complex trauma,

and in this conversation we talk about her remarkably thorough exploration of a whole slew of therapies and meditation styles and wellness modalities, what actually worked for her and how what she found might be relevant to both trauma survivors and to those of us with no history of trauma. We also talk about shame, a practice I've never heard of called counting colors, gratitude which she talks about in a non-gooey, super practical way, self-love, ditto. And we dwell for quite a while on her transformative work with somebody named Dr. Jacob Ham, who will in fact be my guest later this week.

So it's quite apparent we're gonna hear from Stephanie Fu, the great memoirist, and then we're gonna hear from the therapist with whom she worked and who has a really compelling approach to doing life better in all sorts of ways. That episode with Dr. Ham coming up on Wednesday will be the final episode of our mental health reboot series. All month we've been pairing personal stories with science-based experts and we hope you enjoyed the series.

It was super interesting to do. Heads up before we dive in here. There are some Frank very Frank discussions in this episode of trauma and abuse references to addiction and other mental health challenges and multiple curse words, unbleaped, bleaped versions exist over on our website and also on the 10% happier app. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate

to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our Healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher, Alexis Santos. To access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show.

Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Skiggy Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. Stephanie Fu, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Maybe it makes sense to start at the moment you got your diagnosis, because as you've written on paper, it seemed like you were doing great.

So can you just talk a little bit about where you were in your life and what you learned when you got this diagnosis? Yeah, sure. I was 30. I was a producer at this American life. One of the biggest public radio shows out there. And I had been a journalist, a successful journalist for about a decade. And it was finally catching up to me. Essentially working, you know, 50 to 70 hour weeks for 10 years, sort of basing all of my self-worth on achievement, all of that, trying to sort of be perfect in life as much as I could be in my relationships

and my career. It was really getting to me and I was really burned out and sort of losing it, especially after the 2017 news cycle. And so I went to my therapist kind of being like, I think I'm losing it, what's going on. And she told me, you have complex PTSD, which I had never heard of before. And so I immediately Googled it and learned that complex PTSD is a form of PTSD that is a bit more complex in that it happens when the trauma occurs many,

many, many times over the course of many years rather than just once. And it's a relational trauma. And so just upon a first Google, there wasn't that much information about it except for a really pathologizing list of symptoms saying that I was broken, that I would have trouble with relationships, that I was quick to anger, had a bad temper, had tendency towards addiction, all of this stuff that just made me feel irreparable, I guess, like a bad person.

And so that's why I sort of quit my job, quit my life, and decided to focus entirely on learning more about complex PTSD and trying to heal from it. I want to read you back to you because there's some moving passages from your book. The list of symptoms is not so much a medical document, as it is a biography of my life, the difficulty regulating my emotions, the tendency to overshare and trust the wrong people, the dismal self-loathing, the trouble I have maintaining relationships, the unhealthy relationship with my abuser, the tendency to be aggressive but unable to tolerate aggression from others, it's all true, it's all

me. The more I read, the more every aspect of my personhood is reduced to deep diagnostic flaws. I hadn't understood how far the disease has spread, how complete it's takeover of my identity was. The things I want, the things I love, the way I speak, my passions, my fears, my zits, my eating habits, the amount of whiskey I drink, the way I listen and the things I see, everything, everything, all of it is infected.

My trauma is literally pumping through my blood, driving every decision in my brain. Right. How does that feel to have it read back to you? It takes me back to a time when my tie-hicknosis seemed like almost a death sentence. I mean, it doesn't feel good reading that list of symptoms. It's horrible. Nobody wants to be described not as a full person, but as a list of things that are wrong with them that make them freakish or abnormal.

I can only imagine this is a hard thing to ask, but to the extent that you're comfortable, would it be okay to discuss what the source of the trauma was? Is? Yeah, I think complex PTSD is really common in survivors of war, survivors of domestic abuse. Mine is from childhood drama, child abuse. My parents were both very physically, emotionally and verbally abusive, and they both abandoned me, leaving me to spend the last couple of years of high school on my own.

If I recall your mom left first and then you spent many years largely unhappily with your dad. My mom left when I was 13 and my dad left when I was about 16, yeah. Probably about two and a half years in between them. And what was your mind like at this time? It was my mind like.

I think it was probably in a state of fear and rage all the time. I think mostly rage masking, probably the deep fear that I had. I think particularly after my mom and dad left, I had been taught my whole life to just be on edge to sort of encounter the world with knives out, ready to fight at any given time because I had literally had to sort of fight for my life as a child.

And so that was the only way you had to interact with the world. And especially being on my own at such a young age, I think I encountered everyone around me as a potential source of threat. And probably was not the nicest or friendliest person back then. Well, but that's what your parents had taught you to be. That's true. Yeah. For all the shame that I feel over things that I did back then, I also have a lot of empathy, admiration, and forgiveness for that girl, because I mean, she did survive.

She used those tools to stay alive. Just to say, I'm sorry this happened to you. It shouldn't happen to anybody, and it sucks. It does suck. Yes, that's true, but it's okay. It's interesting to watch in your story, how things play out, because you described journalism.

You became the editor in chief of your high school newspaper, I believe. As something that saved you, it really gave your life's direction, I believe, as something that saved you, it really gave your life's direction, meaning purpose. And yet, your relationships as you were going about this work were not always the healthiest. Yeah, I had been taught as a young person

through capitalism, through my community, through my parents, that achievement, success, academic achievement, career achievement, are the most important things. And a person's worth is tied to those things. And it worked as a young person as somebody in my 20s. I could have sort of crazy chaotic breakups and relationships. And that didn't really matter. Everyone still thought that I really had my shit together because I had masked it with this success, this achievement. I was basically producing 75% of a national NPR show by the time I was 23.

And so people just saw that and they were like, wow, she really has it together, she's great. And it didn't matter that internally I was really battling a lot of demons. And I think my career became a crutch. It was a way to dissociate and silence those demons. Just okay, open up logic, open up pro tools, get into a new session, get into the flow, forget about everything else in life. So there you are at age 30, you had been kicking ass in this career while battling demons. And you get this diagnosis as you just grab it, you kind of quit your life to work on this.

What did you try? I tried all of the letters. I tried the CBT EMDR, IFS. I tried hallucinogenics, various kinds of hallucinogenics, a bunch of different therapists, meditation, mindfulness, ashramaganda, breathwork. I just I tried everything I could afford and get my hands on at the time. Did any of it help? I think a lot of it helped a little bit. I think I gained something out of most of the things that I tried, but I think the real lasting impact that has helped the most was my work with Dr. Homme. Okay, let's talk about Dr. Homme. He's gonna be on the show two days from now,

so people will be able to listen to this as a pair. Who is Dr. Homme. He's going to be on the show two days from now, so people will be able to listen to this as a pair. Who is Dr. Homme? Dr. Homme was my therapist, Dr. Jacob Homme. He is the director of the Center for Child Trauma and Resilience at Mount Sinai in New York City. And he is an incredible therapist who sort of combines a few different modalities to practice this form of trauma treatment that is really about closely listening and attuning and practicing

rupture repair therapy, which is sort of practicing how to have conflict with people, how to trust other people, how to listen to them better, and how to repair whatever conflicts may arise. So is the logic there that trauma, especially child abuse, is relational violence, and sometimes physical violence, and it impairs your ability to have healthy relationships as a grown-up. So his goal is to kind of teach you how to have relationships. Is that a fair, rough summary?

I think so. Yeah, it's almost reparenting in some ways. Complex PTSD is most commonly a result of other people betraying you, letting you down, because unless you're tremendously unlucky, most of the time, the way that you would experience so much trauma over years is through the hands of other people. And so what he's doing is teaching you how to love and be loved, how to trust if you did not experience that form of love as a child. So how does he teach you that? What's the modality?

The way that we practiced it, I think, was a bit unique. But essentially, I radio-produced the whole thing, of course, because that's how my brain works. I recorded every session with him, and then immediately after each session, I would go to the cafe downstairs and have the whole thing transcribed, and then put it in a Google doc and shared it with him. And we would go through our conversation and comment on it and nitpick all of the little details in it and give a really close read of exactly what was happening in the session, all of the times that we misatuned, all of the times that I suddenly changed the subject

that I was hiding from him. That my voice was sort of flat and dissociated and he sort of pointed out, you know, here's where maybe you were triggered. Why did you retreat from me here? Where are you here? And we could sort of very intimately look at the landscape of a conversation and how both him and I interacted and therefore teach me how to listen better, how to attune better, how to make myself more vulnerable.

So there are a couple of terms of our you've used here. I'd love to get you to say a little bit more about this is fascinating. Rupter repair and misatunement. Yeah. So rupture repair is essentially really paying attention to all the ruptures in a conversation, and they don't need to be like big fights even. Necessarily, ruptures can be something as minute as me changing this subject abruptly, or my voice going very flat, or him saying something to me where it's clear that I'm not really listening, or I'm just like, okay, or me saying it's fine. I always said it's fine around him and that's me always knew when I said I was fine, I was actually not fine. And really delving into each of those

and inquiring what was really happening, trying to get to the bottom of it and repairing that, so that we were both really seeing each other fully, me making myself and my feelings and what was going on with me more available to him and the same to him for me. And asking just all the time, like, what's going on? What's really going on in this conversation? And misatunement is another way to look at ruptures. Again, a lot of these little minute ruptures,

those are essentially misatunements. Like I just wasn't attuned to what he was saying or he wasn't attuned to what I was saying. And I needed to sort of set him straight, that kind of thing. Rupters can be bigger, of course, in terms of like actual fights or disagreements, but a lot of times even fights can stem from these little misatunements. So you said it was a kind of reparenting. It feels a little bit like he was just teaching you how to be a human, which is,

I guess what parents are supposed to do first and foremost. That's exactly right. Yes. During this whole experience, it felt like I was having these big realizations of, oh, that's how you listen to people. Oh, that's how you like sit and actually describe what you're feeling, which might sound really basic to most people. But yeah, I was never taught those things. I would argue that while it may sound basic to most people, first of all, childhood tromas, extremely widespread, unfortunately. So there are a lot of people who may need this work,

whether they know it or not. And even if you had good enough parents, this kind of being human 101, or what you might call love 101, is something very few, if any of us are actually ever taught. How to listen, how to be honest about what you're feeling right now, which you might call vulnerability. These all strike me as important life skills that very few of us are getting.

So that land for you? I think it's certainly on a spectrum in which I'm probably on the farther side, but yes, I do think that these skills are applicable to all of us. And I think that we would communicate so much better and have so much less conflict and would be able to understand and hear each other so much better if we all try to learn these skills. Coming up Stephanie talks about self-love, shame, and the power of a simple mindfulness technique called counting colors. That's right after this. called counting colors. That's right after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday

parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there.

We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wonder E app. or Wondery app. So say more. Can you just walk me through some of the more intense and revelatory moments for you in

these sessions with Dr. Ham? Sure. I mean, we could talk about the punishment moment. I listened to this other incredible session, which had a father and a daughter. And the daughter was asking the father to be more caring and engage more deeply with her. And he acknowledged that he had made past mistakes,

but he kept sort of self-flagulating and being like, I'm the worst, I'm the worst father. This is horrible. And I could see that it didn't help the situation. It didn't help the daughter. It didn't help him. It just isolated him more and more and made everyone in the room more resentful of him,

quite honestly. He thought that self punishment would fix it, which is I think a lot of what we are taught. Like if we do something bad, we must be punished and if nobody else is punishing us, we must punish ourselves. And there was this moment where he was able to stop punishing himself and instead turn to his daughter and just be like, I love you and I want to be here for you and just be totally connected to her and he was just giving of himself. And I sort

of realized that like self punishment and the cruel voice that I had going in my head all the time it wasn't productive at all. This whole time I thought that that voice was trying to make me a and their cruel voice that I had going in my head all the time, it wasn't productive at all. This whole time I thought that that voice was trying to make me a better person, but instead it was holding me back from truly being present and giving people what they needed. That was just one of the small moments in my time with him that sort of cracked my skull open and made me rethink how I needed to interact with the world.

Just to say that back to you kind of, the self-punishment, I'm such a bad person, a ritual abasement that we do because in part we may feel it's what the other person wants to see. Actually is an evolution, it gets you further coiled in on yourself, it's more your stories about you and what you've done wrong, et cetera, et cetera. It's you, you, you, instead of opening up and saying, yes, I have remorse for what I've done. But here's how I feel about you, the other person. Anyways, am I close?

Yes. Exactly. Focusing on the rupture rather than focusing on the actual repair. What can I do to make this up to you? Like, how can I show you how much I care about you rather than turning it inwards and focusing on yourself? That's exactly right. It's funny these conversations because you just ultimately bump up against an immovable wall of cliche. So here I go. But it seems to me that if love is the oldest cliche, it's uber corny subvariant, self-love is even more treakly, but it does sound like self-love understood here not as

a kind of empty bromide hurled at you by your spin instructor, but as an ongoing practice of having your own back was really important for you and something you picked up in these sessions with Dr. Haam. I really learned about how important self-love is for taking care of other people. I always thought it was some sort of corny yoga instructor thing that makes you feel better when you're stressed out. And it is instead a key ingredient to attuning with other people. It's been shocking how centering my feelings

and focusing on them more and calming them and loving myself has allowed me to love other people better. Like in that instance, you know, in that moment of not going into what Dr. Ham calls a shit spot and going into that self-legulation and self-punishment. If I have enough self-love and respect and understanding for myself where I'm like, you know what? I mess up and it doesn't make me a bad person.

I'm just human. Then I'm able to say, you know what? Yeah, I messed up and move on to the like, how are we going to repair this instead of going deep down into my like self-loathing spiral? And even recently I feel like just in conflicts with my husband, for example, I found that talking about my feelings more in an argument like, you know, I think I'm feeling stressed because of this or I think I'm feeling angry or sad or whatever.

You think it's self-centered, but instead it's really clarifying for the other person because they're not guessing where you're at. They're seeing exactly where you're at and they can meet you where you're at and give you what you need so that you can then give them what they need. It's like a constant back and forth of giving and receiving and being able to give to yourself first allows you to Have more space to give and receive the whole like cliche of putting on your own oxygen mask first before you can help others I kind of think about it as spirals So you use the term shit spot my friend Evelyn Trouble A talks about the toilet for text

So you are being mean to yourself, then you're mean to other people because you take it out on them. That makes you feel worse about yourself and then down you go. The opposite is what I call the cheesy upward spiral, which is you have some basic compassion understanding for why you've done whatever you've done.

You're taking it a little bit easier on yourself without being indulgent or writing blank checks or just excusing everything you've done, you're taking it a little bit easier on yourself without being indulgent or writing blank checks or just excusing everything you've done, but just kind of having a basic sense of having your own back, as I said before, that improves your relationships with other people and because our relationships with other people are the most important variable probably and when it comes to human flourishing, our inner weather improves even further and up you go. And these spirals seem to be perennially available to us and you get to make the call,

which one do you want to go on? That's exactly right. And I think the spiral too is a great metaphor because it really is the shape of what healing looks like in that it is not linear and it's not like a perfect straight line, but it is really more like a spiral in that like you have to slowly

get better at it and then mess up again and then get better at it again and then mess up again and slowly build your self confidence, your self love, your ability to love others better with each of these mistakes. You said the course of healing is not linear. So let's pick up on that. Can you the course of healing is not linear. So let's pick up on that. Can you maybe just give us at least one more example of moments with Dr. Ham where you learn things that were breakthroughs for you that you can now apply your life and so you're not in the grips of complex PTSD all the time. Yeah, I think one other lesson that I learned from him that was really important was about the importance of feeling your feelings. We've talked a little bit about this already, Yeah, I think one other lesson that I learned from him that was really important was about the importance of feeling your feelings.

We've talked a little bit about this already, but I think in my head, when I thought about what a normal person looked like, especially after I was diagnosed, I was like, oh, normal people are just, they're like Instagram people. They're just happy. And they're making muffins. And that happy is the default. You know, they're going around floating around their life. Dude, to do, having an awesome time,

and I'm the only one who is miserable all the time. And then I think in my course of healing, I knew that I was getting better, but I was still sad and depressed a lot, and I was getting upset at myself all the time for those feelings. Because I was like, well, a healed person, a happy person, a normal person wouldn't be feeling depressed over whatever about not getting

this grant that I applied for or something like that. And Dr. Ham sort of normalized that for me and taught me that someone who is mentally healthy is actually not happy all the time. Mental health is being able to feel the full spectrum of emotions that comprise the human experience. Because there is value to feeling sadness and grief, and there is value to feeling anger and fear. Fear tells you how to move, how to get out of the way. Anger gives you the motivation to change things. Sadness is key to being able to like, grieve relationships that we treasured and have lost. And once he told me that it was okay to feel all the feelings, that a healthy person just feels those feelings in balance, that no one feeling takes over all the rest,

I was able to feel so much less shame about it and that made all the difference. That actually did help my happiness and my joy come out more because I was feeling less suffering and shame over. Being normal, I think what was really problematic at first was pathologizing everything as being this has to be a complex PTSD response. And not everything was, I'm just a human being. We all, again, it's on a spectrum. We all kind of do this to a certain degree. We all have lessons to learn about,

to communicate better with people. I mean, your podcast is all about happiness. And we're all struggling to learn how to have a better balance of that. So I think once I stopped shaming myself for that, I actually did become so much happier. Yeah, shame is in this context, and there are lots of ways to understand shame, but in this context, it sounds like, in my experience, it sounds like in your experience, it's supremely unhelpful.

And I can only imagine how confusing it must have been for you because you had this seemingly endless list of pathologized symptoms that were on offer to you via Google once you got your diagnosis. And then how do you draw the line between that and quote unquote normal? Right. I mean, one of the symptoms was that I was emotionally unstable. How was I to know what emotionally stable looks like? I've never seen emotionally stable. And so what it looks like is having all the feelings, but not necessarily being owned by them

all the time. Exactly. Yep. So I get that this really intense back and forth with Dr. Ham and we'll hear more from him soon about his technique. I get that these sessions turned into I get that these sessions turned into a kind of reparenting, mainlining a healthy childhood in an office at Mount Sinai. But are you supported today by practices that you can do? You know, you listed that you had examined all the letters, IFS, which is internal family systems, which is a kind of therapy that we've talked about here on the show. And we'll put a link to the interview I did with the founder of IFS. You talked about EMDR, you talked about meditation, mindfulness, restorative yoga,

mindful eating, counting colors, acupuncture, sound vibration, massages. You even say at one point that you approached wellness with the same perfectionistic and obsessive tendencies that you brought to your job. But so what of these practices are still with you now and helping you in what I would imagine is an ongoing healing process? Of course, and it will always be ongoing forever, because once we stop growing, we're dead, right? So I think I have kept a lot of these things. I think meditation or mindfulness has been really important just as like a first step, a block in terms of when I feel really, really triggered,

getting to that baseline of getting my prefrontal cortex back online and just being able to think a little bit more clearly. So that's the first step, just breathing, counting colors, feeling the feeling of air on my palms. to think a little bit more clearly. So that's the first step. Just breathing, counting colors, feeling the feeling of air on my palms. I think a lot of the tools that Dr. Homm has taught me have been super valuable just in terms of communicating, attuning, really paying attention how I'm feeling. I think IFS, I kind of poo pooed it in the book, but

it afterward it is becoming a slightly more important force in my life, talking to my inner child a lot as a form of self-suiting has been really important. And also being held by and relying on my community and gratitude practice, mostly for my my community has been really key. You said a lot there that's probably worth unpacking one by one. So if it's okay with you, I'm just gonna circle back some of those techniques you listed because people listen to the show really my sense is that they like to hear about specific techniques they can use themselves counting colors. You listed that under mindfulness or meditation. I actually have never heard of that before. What is counting colors?

So counting colors is like my emergency stop button when I'm really really off the rails where I will just start counting red things in the room and it is just this really visceral easy practice that gets you to pay attention to your surroundings and sort of count, like pay attention. It's like a very simple form of mindfulness. And I have found that actually it does have a significant impact and sort of calming me down. And then maybe even calming me down enough to practice other mindfulness practices. Yeah, I can see how that would work.

You're activating the newer, more rational, prefrontal cortex that evolved part of our brain instead of being owned by the amygdala, the stress and fear center. And it's calming your default mode network, essentially, which shutting off your default mode network. Can you define that for folks, the DMN? The default mode network is so called because if you get put into an MRI, it's the part of your brain that lights up the default part.

And it's basically thinking about the past and the future, worrying about things that happen in the past, coming up with stories about it, or worrying about things that are going to happen in the future. And people who are pressed or have complex PTSD often have overactive default mode networks. And the one thing that's really great at shutting off your default mode network is focusing on the present, because it actually just, your brain doesn't have the bandwidth to focus on the past and the present and the future at the same time. And so that's what counting colors does.

That's what mindfulness does, like mindful eating or focusing on sensations in your body. Is it gets you to completely just focus on the present and therefore sort of short circuits, the default mode network? Thank you for that. You also mentioned IFS, which you had poopued a little bit in the book, but now has become a larger force in your life. As I referenced, I had the originator of IFS internal family systems on this show. I've never done it myself, although he did do a little bit with me in real time, which was interesting.

Can you say more about how it works and why you're finding it to be positively forceful now? Yeah. IFS is internal family systems. It is essentially kind of recognizing that your brain has a whole family of people that is helping it function. Like, for example, my network, my family is comprised of like a sort of traffic cop that keeps everything in line and keeps me super organized and meets deadlines and things like that. And it's also comprised of a firefighter

or several different firefighters who sort of calm me down by pushing me to have a drink or work or cry about it to a friend. It's all these different coping mechanisms that allow me to survive as a human being. And I think what I didn't like about it to a friend. It's all these different coping mechanisms that allow me to survive as a human being. And I think what I didn't like about it when I was first trying it from a few different people was that I had to have conversations with these animated caricatures of these different personalities. And it was just too weird for me.

But I think just looking at it in a more abstract and intellectualized way has been helpful, just understanding. Like, okay, this is a coping mechanism that really, really helped me in the past, and actually it did literally help me survive. And so, can I really hate it that much? Can I really like punish myself for defaulting into this coping mechanism. No, I have to acknowledge how it's helped me in the past. And even sometimes how these things help me now. And then, like say, okay, thank you for your service. Let it go. I'm gonna try something new this time.

Yeah, I mean, it's the, for me at least, the big bearer to adopting many of these really helpful techniques is I just can't get over myself Can't deal with the cheesiness how forced some of this feels but having a relationship with your various inner dramatic persona is You know first of all seeing them clearly disambiguating is massively helpful and clarifying and then being able to treat them warmly when they show up and try to take over the show is I mean my experience incredibly helpful. So I'm glad to hear that it's working for you Yeah, and I think one of the things that was really good about dr. Ham is I think a lot of therapists refuse to like do the work for you essentially

They're like you have to come up with the people and you have to talk to the people and like Yeah, I feel so corny talking to these disembodied figures. And Dr. Haum would be like, I would just ask him, like, can you just model it for me because I can't get my head around this? And he would just do it for me. He would talk to the figures for me. And I'd be like, actually, that helps a lot. Thank you.

Speaking of Dr. Haum, the other thing you listed in your list of practices that are kind of supporting you in your ongoing healing was listening. Now, that's the type of thing. You know, people describe themselves as good listeners, et cetera, et cetera. But what is a practice that helps you actually listen? Well, I mean, doing this Google Docs therapy that really taught me what not listening looks like was so helpful. I mean, I'm an interviewer, right? So I do know how to ask questions and interview and sit there and ask them to share their story.

So I thought I was a really great listener. But listening, I think, really, it wasn't just about questions and answers. It was like this whole body attunement almost. It was attuning to the way answers, it was like this whole body attunement almost. It was attuning to the way people would have hurt their eyes sometimes or tense up or change the subject. At least like my new ways in which they gave little clues to actually how they were truly feeling. And I think that our general way of approaching that is to, okay, someone has this moment of seeming uncomfortable or someone's eyes shift. And so we move along with them, we let them drive the car, we change the subject with them, or maybe we feel uncomfortable a little bit in ourselves, but we don't quite chase

it down. And learning how to listen better, almost allowed me to pay really close attention to those cues and to inquire about them and actually try and get in front of them and try and actually understand the full truth of everything that was happening in this conversation, which I had never really done before. I guess in my amateur way, the way I'm computing this is that it feels like maybe the abuse in your childhood drove you in on yourself quite understandably, provoked you to put up a lot of armor that was blocking your ability

to send and receive signals to the other humans in your environment. And Tom was getting you to take some of that armor down and learn how to attune both to yourself and others so that you can negotiate the world more successfully. And I don't think it was just my childhood. I think that many of us act in this way, where we're afraid of going truly deep and asking what exactly is happening in the situation, or asking to clarify, to commit a communicate on that level. I think that certainly my childhood affected my ability to read social cues and to do that. And it certainly also pushed me to be a people pleaser in that I always wanted to let people

drive the car. And I, when there would be these little misatunements, I would assume like, oh, I must have said something wrong. And I would just apologize all the time over things that I didn't need to apologize for. I still do. Or make up stories in my head for what was going on with them and try to solve them on my own. But I think we all kind of do that a little bit.

We write stories about what's going on with other people instead of just asking what's going on with them. The skills you learn from harm are the skills that all of us need to learn. You might have had more of a reason to learn them because of things that are a thousand percent out your fault that happened to you, that shouldn't have happened to you. But this story of yours is remarkable, not only because of what you've been able to do in the face of deeply shitty circumstances, but also because the lessons you've learned

are applicable, I think, for the rest of us. You don't get through this life unscathed. I think we all have some form of trauma. If we didn't, you actually would be probably much less capable of surviving in this world because you wouldn't know what to fear. So I think all of us learning these skills again to learn how to better care for each other and ourselves and sort of see the truth of the situation outside of our trauma triggers is critically important. After the break, Stephanie talks about the power of community,

how she works gratitude into her daily routine and how she's doing now. into her daily routine and how she's doing now. You listed what I provoked you earlier to list a bunch of the skills that are supporting you now. Another one you listed was community, which again can come off as just one of those things that people say, oh yeah, community is important, but it's a truism, but it got to be a truism because it's incredibly and urgently true. So what does community look like for you and why is it so important? When you don't have a family growing up, you have to build your own family. Speaking for myself, I can't survive in this world on my own. That's a hard lesson I had to learn that I have to trust others and let others

be my family to let myself be taken care of. Right now, my family looks like the chosen family that I built for myself as a child even. Two of my best friends I've had since I was nine years old. And they understand everything about me and where I come from. And they have this like full view of me and all of my flaws and they accept all of it. And that is an immense privilege that I'm grateful for every day. I also have a great network of friends and I allowed myself to fall into my husband's

big Irish Italian family, which was really, really tricky and scary and hard at first. Having brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and going to grandma's house once a week at least and eating scones with her. It's all really foreign to me, but I have really come to see how valuable it is in terms of being able to ask for, hey, can you guys help me move? So like, hey, can somebody watch the cat for us when we go on vacation?

Just, and hey, can you listen to me right now as I talk about what I'm struggling with? Yeah, investing in other people and having them invest in me has made me feel so much less freakish and alone and unlovable. It's validated the fact that I am a really caring, loving, good person who has a right to exist in this world. I love that. One of the things you did after getting your diagnosis and deciding to

work on it full time was to go back home to the community in which you grew up. Talk a little bit about what you learned doing that. Yeah, it was important to me to understand my trauma not just as a single familial thing, but as a community thing. And understand like the communal trauma that me and a lot of other children had gone through in San Jose, California where we grew up. I just, I seem to remember, as a child, a lot of kids being abused in my high school. And a lot of kids dealing with a lot of mental illness from their parents at home.

And in retrospect, looking back on it, I was like, well, I was in a community of immigrants. I lived in a majority minority city. I think like 60 or 70% of my high school was Asian and we had a lot of refugees Vietnamese refugees, Cambodian refugees, people who whose parents had fled the Korean War, the Chinese cultural revolution, poverty, and I just thought and I just thought, how could it be that our parents had survived such whores and then didn't go to therapy and didn't pass it on to us? There's gotta be something happening there.

And I went back to San Jose and all the white teachers around me were like, you guys weren't traumatized. You guys were good kids. You guys weren't like the ghetto kids, at the high school with the gangs and the stabbings. You got perfect grades and you're in five AP classes. You guys are just ambitious and maybe you have helicopter parents.

And I was like, oh, that doesn't feel right. And then I spoke to the high school therapist and she told me like, oh no, there's a lot of problems happening here. There's like suicidal ideation everywhere. There's a lot of child abuse. There's a lot of physical abuse, sexual abuse, poverty, psychosis, mental illness that is ignored essentially because of these high performing students. It's kind of like how I hid my crazy

by being on this American life. And I realized that, you know, the model minority myth is just that a myth and that there was this giant population of kids who weren't getting the help that they needed, who weren't resourced, because the people who were supposed to take care of them could only see their achievements. And just to clarify, your parents, if memory serves were immigrants who were ethnic Chinese from Malaysia. Yeah. The final skill and practice that you listed was gratitude, in particular gratitude for your community. What does a gratitude practice look like for you?

My gratitude journal often has two columns. It's all of the wonderful things that other people have done for me that day, whether it's just receiving a text message from someone being like, how are you to someone making me dinner and a column of ways that I contribute to others in this world as well? Because complex PTSD, again, has all the self-loading and teaches you that you're a bad person.

And so being able to even just keep track of the fact that, hey, I gave advice to this person today. Hey, I listened to this person who's going through a breakup today. And having like hard evidence for that has been really helpful. And sometimes I do it in general. Sometimes I just think about it before I go to sleep. I send a lot of thank you texts. It really allows me to focus more on the positive and focus on loving and being loved, rather than letting the fear of abandonment take over. I think that's phenomenal too.

And I just want to hang on the lantern on the point you made about being grateful, not only for other things other people have done for you, or just positive things happening in the world, but also grateful for your own acts of generosity. In Buddhism, many teachers will advise people to sit and contemplate your SEALA, SEALA, SILA, SIN agents, subcontinental term for ethical conduct or conscious conduct. And teachers will sometimes encourage students to focus on the things they've done that are good, not as an ego-boost boosting thing, but just to throw into relief

the universal capacity for generosity. Yeah, and I've read that in some areas of Buddhist thought, it's okay to do good things just so you can feel good about doing good things. They're like, yeah, sure, whatever gets your rocks off. You know, this is all good for humanity. Feel good about doing good. So I'd be curious as we get to the end of our time together, how you're doing now. I mean, you've gone through this long list of, as you said, all the letters and all the practices that you

tried after getting this devastating diagnosis some of the years ago, you did mention your married now. So how are you? Because I mean, the diagnosis I would imagine doesn't go away. Your childhood can't be quote unquote fixed. Yeah, I'm still a wacky and imperfect person. Definitely. I am not perfect by far. And I definitely have my episodes.

And I definitely get really sad and self-loathing, but like these incidents are so much shorter than they used to be. Like I would have months where I was just kind of like, I'm thinking my bad person now, it's like an hour, you know what I mean? Because I have these tools to be able to practice self-talk and get myself out of these ruts more quickly. I definitely mess up all the time in my interactions with other people. And I'm sure people are going to be listening to this having me say,

like, this is the way to not self-punish. And this is the way to not apologize. And my husband would be like, you did that yesterday. But again, I think I have a lot less self-loathing for the times that I mess up. And I'm trying my best to put these practices in my head enough over and over and over so that they'll become more comfortable and easier to do and quicker to reach for the older I get. So I'm feeling hopeful. Just to remind you, you're on a show called 10% happier here.

So we don't expect perfection effect or suspicious of it toward the end of your book you talk about the ways in which CPTSD complex post-traumatic stress disorder has been a boon for you and just to one final time quote you back to you you say there are two main differences now i have have hope and I have agency. I know my feelings no matter how disconsolate they are or temporary. I know that regardless of how unruly it is, I am the beast's master. And at the end of each battle, I stand strong and plant my flag. I'm alive. I am proud. I'm joyful still. Yeah. I think the agency has been the key thing. All of these tools that Dr. Homme gave me that I gained on the journey from the meditation

to the IFS to the listening, they've given me a form of control over this thing. And I don't have control over it all the time. I mean, none of us have control over much in this world, but I have a little bit more control over the way that I perceive things and the way that I'm able to interact with others. And that gives me so much more peace and confidence and joy in this world instead of feeling like a victim of the horrible things around me. One final question for me, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and any other resources you've put out into the world that people might want to access? The name of my book is what my bones know, a memoir of healing from complex trauma. It should be available everywhere.

And the audiobook actually features real tape from my sessions with Dr. Homme. So yeah, I think that's pretty much it. Well, I really commend you. You just accomplished so much in deeply suboptimal circumstances. And then when you got this diagnosis, doing all of this work that I think is going to help other people and writing about it so beautifully. So I commend you and congratulate you. Thanks. Yeah, I just, I really didn't want anyone to feel like I did when I was first diagnosed. I just wanted there to be another narrative out there. I've told stories my whole life. I needed to tell a different story than that list of symptoms that I found on the internet. You have succeeded. Thank you. And thank you for your kind words. My pleasure.

Thanks again to Stephanie Foo. Thank you as well to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davey, Maria Wartell, Samuel Johns, and Jen Poyant. And we get our audio engineering from the good folks over at Ultraviolet Audio. And we'll see you on Wednesday for a brand new episode. As mentioned, we're going to be talking to Stephanie Sterepis, Dr. Jacob Homb. I would like to him a lot. He's extremely interesting.

His approach is very, very compelling. So you'll hear all about that from him directly in a couple of days. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus

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