my bones know everything

I have suffered from anxiety and depression for many years.

This pain is like a monster with fangs, and I have fought it hundreds of times.

Every time, just when I thought I'd beaten it, it struck again, heading for my throat again.

Stephanie thought she had the perfect life, not only working her dream radio job, becoming an award-winning producer of the show at a young age, but also living in a nice gated apartment, with an ideal lover and a naughty cat. But when she is addicted to work and talks about herself at parties, or when she is challenged by her supervisor and insists that her colleagues accompany her to complain and accept her negative emotions, she will show embarrassment on everyone's face Discover that maybe you're the one that's exhausting everyone, and yourself.

Healing always begins with a diagnosis. After meeting with a counselor, she learned that she actually suffered from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (Complex PTSD, which is caused by patients who have experienced trauma for a long time and lasted for many years). Verbal and physical violence by parents. She always thought that she had gotten rid of the past, but the diagnosis showed that everything in the past was still hurting her, making her panic attacks and crying for no reason, making her hurt like a sharp sword.

Suddenly, I realized that every conflict, every failure and flaw in my life could be traced to its source:

That "source" is myself.

The things I want, all the things I love, the way I talk, my fears,

Down to my acne, my eating habits, how much whiskey I drink...

I began to wonder, was my trauma running in my blood, driving every decision in my head?

So, Stephanie plucked up the courage and desperately wanted to understand her illness: she talked about her childhood memories full of violence and conflicts, and re-established a healthy self-talk; The relationship between physiological reactions; she visited a psychologist and tried a variety of treatments ranging from eye movement hypnosis, grounding meditation, to the inner family system; and finally returned to her hometown on the West Bank where she grew up, and talked about her past self with her teachers and friends , and at the same time go deep into the root of the trauma, digging out the life trauma buried in her parents that she never thought she needed to know, and even the family stories of the two in Malaysia.

Once, she regarded anger as a prescription for relieving sadness, and work as salvation. But in the process of seeing and understanding all the hurts she has suffered, she dismantled the factors that triggered her emotional reactions step by step, thought about her feelings, and listened to her needs. She gradually realized: Maybe she is not a broken person. What was really broken was the way she saw herself.

Once, I thought I could escape from the past, that what happened in the past had already passed away,

But to this day I understand that the past has always been here.

If the injured keep hurting, then I don't want to hurt anyone anymore.

For that, I must stop being an unreliable storyteller,

I had to be fearless, scrupulous, examine myself and my actions,

I have to unravel the cocoon of my carefully crafted life, which may collapse at any time...

This book is authored by Stephanie. Hu takes his own life story as the starting point, and unfolds a delicate interpretation of trauma through psychological counseling. Trauma may never heal, but Stephanie accepts this lifelong battle—in addition to digging out the rotten bones buried in the deepest memory and trying to piece together a complete self, what is more important is to take the initiative to change the relationship between herself and the diagnosis. Relationships between people, rebuilding the cognition of self. Even as pain vines engulfed her entire body, she knew that trauma did not represent her, nor did it define her entire life.