Childhood Trauma & Complex PTSD ~ A real conversation with author Stephanie Foo

Hi everyone, welcome. Hello, hello. We're letting people in. Great to see you. Thanks for spending part of your Sunday with us. Hello, Barry Leener Grant. Hello, Amy Doman. Hello, Chrissy. Lots of people here who are familiar in the Motherless Daughters community, and lots of new people on this call today too. Hi, Lynn Preston. Hello, hello, everyone. So happy to see you here today at this next Hour of Hope. These are our free quarterly calls to the Motherless Daughters community. Um, we do them 4 times a year, and we always have a special guest. We're thrilled today to be welcoming Stephanie Fu, author of What My Bones Know, a memoir of healing from complex trauma. We're going to say hello to Stephanie in just a moment. But while people are filtering in, wanted to introduce myself. I'm Hope Edelman.

I'm—

for those of you who haven't met me yet, or I haven't met, I'm the author of Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers. My most recent book is The After Grief: Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss. And I am the founder here at Motherless Daughters. I've been doing this work since 1995, offering support and services online and in person, weekly, weekend, and quarterly support. I'd like to introduce you all to Christina Currie, the marketing director at Motherless Daughters. Christina is going to be handling all of your IT needs, so if you're having any trouble with your camera or your mute or Zoom, you can private message Christina in the chat and she will try to help you. Christina will also be monitoring the chat box, and because we're such a big group today, we're already at 136 people on this call. We're going to do the Q&A by dropping questions in the chat box. So if and when you have a question for Stephanie for the end of the call, please put it in the chat box, and Christina will be reading the questions and choosing Some for Stephanie to answer toward the end. Stephanie and I'll talk for about half an hour or so, and then I'm going to talk with you about some of our offerings. Please stay on the call because we have a very special offer today just for those of you who are here live, and then we'll come back for the question and answer session with Stephanie Fu. So without any. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce you or let Stephanie introduce herself. Stephanie is here as the author of What My Bones Know, which is a groundbreaking book about complex PTSD. And she's also a journalist and a resident of New York and a native Californian and an incredible writer. And we're so happy to welcome her and have her here with us today. Hi, Stephanie.

Hi.

Hi, thank you so much for having me, Hope. I'm really happy to be here today.

We really appreciate it. I have written newsletters and sent out invitations for this event talking about how— what a game changer your book was for me as someone who has also struggled with complex PTSD, as many, many women in our community have as well. We devoted a whole week at a Motherless Daughters community call talking about it and barely scratched the surface because there's so much we can talk about. Of course, you wrote a whole book about it. But I was wondering if you could start us off with a general description of what complex PTSD is and maybe a summary of the childhood experience you had, experiences you had that resulted in your diagnosis.

Sure. Complex PTSD differs from classic PTSD— turn off my AC so it's not humming there— differs from classic PTSD in that you can get classic PTSD from a single traumatic incident. Like if you're in a car crash, you can get PTSD from that. Complex PTSD is like if you were in that car crash every week for years at a time. And the only way that you're going to experience that sort of trauma, unless you're extremely unlucky somehow, is if somebody close to you in your life is the one who is traumatizing you, who is hurting you. And so complex PTSD is often diagnosed to domestic abuse survivors. My complex PTSD comes from extreme child abuse. My parents were very verbally, physically abusive. I had to worry about my safety and my life quite frequently when I was growing up, and my mom abandoned me when I was 13, and my dad abandoned me when I was 16. And so I've been on my own since then. Talk about being a motherless daughter. And I didn't really know the effect that that had on me until I was diagnosed with complex PTSD at the age of 30. I always sort of thought I had anxiety, depression. And then when I got the diagnosis of CPTSD, I realized, oh, wow, the trauma. that I endured as a child is still here in my brain, in my body, every minute of the day.

And what, what we see in the Motherless Daughters community is complex PTSD showing up in one or two ways or both. Um, for those who had moms maybe who struggled with mental illness, um, or addictions, um, which may have resulted in their deaths, or those whose mothers were really struggling with, um, their own survival due to a long-term illness, often cancer, and seeing their mom suffer and feeling helpless and not being able to escape it in the home, um, has resulted in diagnoses of complex PTSD for some members of our community. But also often what happens after, which is when neglect can occur, which is when various forms of abuse can occur because they are not protected by—

Mm-hmm.

a parent or sometimes any adult at all. So if this is ringing true for any of you, let us know in the chat box, drop it in. There's an overlap between complex PTSD and adverse childhood experiences, it seems, because some of those are the ones that are— and we've talked about that here. We did an Hour of Hope about ACEs. And so those of you who came to that call might remember how we talked about it with Donna Jackson Nakazawa. about— she described it as, imagine that you're out in the wild and you see a bear and you have to run to save your life. Now imagine the bear is in the living room with you every day. That's complex PTSD, or that could lead to complex PTSD. You know, Stephanie, when I was reading your book, I was so struck. You'd been seeing the same therapist for 8 years when she diagnosed you with complex PTSD. And since it's such a relatively new diagnosis, right, the term was only coined in the 1990s. '90s, and it didn't come into common usage till even later. Do you think that's because she just recently learned about it, or was there a reason you think she held back on sharing the diagnosis with you? Because it made a big difference to you to have a diagnosis in the book.

Right.

Um, I don't know. Sometimes I suspect that maybe she had just learned about it recently. Um, because in the past, in the months prior, I feel like her therapy did become more trauma-centered. But I mean, she said that she told me when— during our first or second session or something like that, and then just never brought it up again.

Mm-hmm.

And then, yeah, didn't want to— I mean, I was 22. I didn't know what I was doing when I first started seeing her. I didn't know what that meant. And so I didn't even remember being diagnosed if she did diagnose me. And she just said that she, if I was in a good place, she didn't want to bring me down. And if I was in a bad place, she felt like it would make me feel worse. So she just avoided it.

Hmm.

And from the memoir, it sounds like she wasn't wrong because getting that diagnosis made you at first feel broken. That was the word that you used, which is something I'm sure that readers— I'm sorry, listeners here can relate to.

On the one hand, yes, I think that it did really screw me up receiving that diagnosis. On the other hand, the way that she gave me that diagnosis pretty much guaranteed that it was going to screw me up because she was just like, you have complex PTSD. But by the way, our hour is up. All right, I'll see you next week. And she just bounced. I think that a more responsible therapist would have spent a significant amount of time really going over what that meant, how that meant that I wasn't broken. I know that there are incredible therapists that I wrote about in my book who actually go over the advantages of having complex PTSD to show that you are That it is an adaptation for our minds and bodies that is trying to keep us alive rather than a disability, though often it can feel like a disability. I don't want to say that it's like a superpower and it feels awesome all the time. It doesn't. It sucks. I would trade it in in a second. But at the same time, having a more nuanced grasp of it, I think, would have allowed me to go out into the world with a little less shame, especially since she was just leaving me to Google. And Google is a dark, dark place and a very pathological place.

Yeah.

All it did was show me my— the negative symptoms and show me, like, very depressing case studies. There were no first-person stories that I could find on the internet. So, yeah, I think The reason why I wrote the book is because I didn't want anyone who was so abruptly diagnosed to be left in the same lurch that I was. And with that very pathological, narrow vision of what complex PTSD is.

I see Angela Schellenberg, who is a therapist who leads one of our support groups, wrote in this chat box that you got a drive-by diagnosis. I've never heard that term before, but it's, it's pretty apt.

Yeah.

We talk a lot about coping strategies here. And, you know, I'm thinking about when you said that it's adaptive. This is, these, this was coping strategies and mechanisms that our younger selves developed to protect us, to keep ourselves safe. It was, if not a superpower, then a resource, right, that we tapped into, an inner resource. And, um, Over time, it becomes maladaptive, which we see with so many of the coping strategies that children have to develop in order to get through hard times. But then as adults, they kind of outlive their purpose or their utility, and sometimes they start harming us. So can you tell the group what it— what was it that sent you into therapy? Because you were so high achieving, right?

Mm-hmm.

And that was part of— that can be a symptom of complex PTSD is workaholism. Addiction to achievement. People look like they're doing really well because they're so successful, but inside they're coming apart.

Well, yeah, I struggled with really terrible depression and anxiety, like I said, since I was like 12. I sought help for it for the first time in college when I was starting to feel a lot of suicidal ideation. And I cycled through a few therapists until I landed on one when I was 22 who I really enjoyed. And that's the one who I had for 8 years. But yeah, I think I wrote about in the book about feeling essentially what I called the dread, which just meant that at any given time, I felt like if I messed up, the world was going to end. Nobody would love me. I would get canceled. I'd get fired just if I ordered the wrong thing on the menu, or if I messed— made the tiniest mistake at work, or if I wasn't, you know, um, if I didn't look perfect going into work every day. It's just I had to be perfect all the time, or I was unsafe, because that is what my childhood was like. Um, and that is not a happy way to live. And yes, it will get you a lot of career accolades, um, but I also, you know, didn't sleep, drank a lot, smoked a lot. Was pretty miserable.

You know, I'm thinking about how sometimes to keep ourselves safe, we just sort of narrow the range of human experience where things are safe and predictable, and there's a right way and a wrong way. And when we veer from that path, we start to panic. And that's when anxiety can, can bubble up. You know, in your book, you refer to healing from complex PTSD as relearning how to be a person. And that phrase just like struck me so, you know, really grabbed me. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and what you meant by that or what it meant to you at that time?

Yeah, I mean, I, I think that I wasn't really brought up in a way that, um, allowed me to know how to trust anybody else to— and what love should look like. What safety should look like. And so I had to relearn all of that. I had to relearn how to ask for help, if it was okay to ask for help. I had to learn, relearn how to listen to people, because often I would be so dissociated or freaked out that they were mad at me in conversation that I wasn't actually like paying attention to what they were saying. I had to relearn how to, you know, try and listen to people and be there for them instead of fixing their problems, because I always had to fix everything in order to make it safe. I had— it was just sort of human interaction 101. And I had to relearn what I was worth and how to how to accept love from others as well, um, and be confident in that love. It was very, very, very tricky.

I was really struck by your use of the word relearn. Did you feel like you had once known how to do that and then you had to create adaptive mechanisms that undid it, or were you actually learning how to do some of these things for the first time?

Oh, I was learning everything for the first time. I mean, a reeducation in terms of like my, my first education had been based entirely on fear.

I see.

Um, and—

You had learned how to be a human in one way, and now you had to learn a different way. Yeah.

Um, I had, I had learned how to be a human in a war zone, and I did not know how to be a human in peacetime, essentially.

Hmm.

And, you know, I mean, my family grew up and survived in multiple wars in Malaysia, and so there's a real reason why that's how they thought living should be. But here I am in cushy America, you know, acting like the Japanese soldiers are coming to break down my door and rape me, you know, and that's just not how it's working here. And so obviously the nice, well-bred, privileged people around me in my office at This American Life and like, you know, at— in my college, they're all like, what is wrong with you? Why are you losing your mind over the smallest things? So You know, I had to learn what life in peacetime looks like.

Yeah. And you had, but you had, I mean, a sense, in a sense, in your workplace, someone who was attacking you on the regular. So did that mimic for you what it was like being at home when you were—

Oh yeah, definitely.

You know, just to be specific and not vague, there were, you write about a boss who was Really, it sounded quite abusive in the workplace.

Yeah, he was pretty abusive. I think everyone in my workplace would describe him that way. And yeah, I mean, there were moments, you know, I had to go play my work for him and I would sit like catty-corner to him and he would— or right behind him and he would listen to it. And I would sit there and have to listen to all the criticisms as he told me how terrible it was. And it was just exactly like how my mom would make me write these journals, and I'd have to sit exactly the same place next to her as she read through my journals and told me how terrible my spelling or punctuation or whatever was when I was like 6 years old, and then asked me to put out my hand. And then hit it with a ruler. And so every time that I had to go in for these edits, I remember I would need to load like endless kitten GIFs on my computer and pretend I was taking notes, but the whole time just like cycle through kitten GIFs to feel like I wasn't going to die. Yeah, it was, it wasn't like the healthiest workplace. So I mean, that didn't, that didn't help my healing. There's a reason why, um, I sort of had my breakdown at work and, and, you know, got diagnosed and all of that at work.

Right.

And, and then made the choice to leave work because as you point out in the book, it's really hard, if not impossible, to heal from complex trauma when you're being exposed to those trauma triggers. On a regular basis, right?

Yeah. And I think that that is what makes it really hard for people to heal from complex PTSD, or impossible to heal from it, if people are still in abusive environments, who are still living with their abuser, or who may be living in situations where they are not safe because they don't have stable housing.

Or healthcare or community violence or racism.

Yeah, exactly. Community violence. So it's very real. I was very privileged that I could leave my abusive situation.

After being diagnosed, you went on a journey and leaving work on a journey through multiple modalities to find the ones that worked best for you. So I don't want to give any away because I hope people will buy your book and read it because—

Okay, we can give it away. I'm not keeping anything.

Looking back, looking back, which of the various modalities that you tried did you find most successful, bearing in mind that what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another?

You know, I— people always ask that, but I think Unfortunately, I hate to break it to you, there is no silver bullet when it comes to complex PTSD. I think trying a lot of different things was actually what really helped me. I think there was essentially like a 3-pronged approach to healing from complex PTSD for me. The first was the body element. So just, I was so dissociated, I never knew what I was feeling and why I was feeling it. I just felt like bad a lot of the time with no awareness at all as to why I felt that way. And so I really needed to slow down, sit with my feelings, figure out why I was feeling what I was feeling, and also figure out like how to calm my body when it started freaking out. Because, you know, when you are in a triggered, panicked state, you're not going to just be able to think logically your way out of it if you're not calming your cortisol, your adrenaline. And that requires actually calming down your body. And so that was like yoga, meditation, having a Fitbit that I checked a lot. And the second approach was going back and revisiting my childhood trauma and recognizing that You know, what happened to me was not my fault, recognizing the, the, the horror of it, essentially. And that, and reprocessing, reprocessing it in terms of like going back and taking care of the little inner child that still existed there. So I would say that that was like EMDR. Some meditation again, and going back to my hometown and spending time there, also researching why it happened to me in terms of researching the Malayan Emergency and World War II in Malaysia. And then the third approach was, of course, the relearning how to be a person. So I practiced what I called rupture repair therapy, or not what I called, what is called rupture repair therapy with Dr. Jacob Hom, a wonderful therapist who is still my therapist, and which involved, well, we did a little interesting twist on it where we recorded all of our therapy sessions and then had them, I transcribed them immediately after each session and I put them in a Google Doc and I sent them to him. And then we went through each Google Doc And then we marked it up, like put comments all over it. And he would show me like, here's where you were triggered. And I'd be like, oh, interesting. Oh, I see that I'm going on and on here. Why is that? He's like, ah, here's where you're dissociated and look at why. And then I'd scroll up and be like, oh, interesting. That's what set me off. You know that. So it was really interesting to— I mean, I had done that for my career as it was. And so I think it was really— a real— a safe place and an interesting place to have like a little bit of intellectual distance from the emotions of shame and all of that, and, and look at it on paper and just see objectively like, oh, this is what it looks like when I'm triggered. Um, and, uh, yeah, rupture repair was also just that, like, he would point out every little rupture that we had. in session, and then we would be forced to repair it together. And I wasn't used to that because I would just run away from ruptures or conflict, and— or I would think like, there's a conflict with a friend. Oh, I guess they hate me now. Bye. Never see you again. And we practiced repairing and figuring out what exactly was going on and why these ruptures happened. over and over and over again in therapy. And that's essentially what taught me how to be a person again.

You and I have talked a bit about parenting with complex PTSD because this is a lifelong process, healing from and learning how to be a person again. And then in the midst of it, some of us have to learn how to be mothers and/or choose to learn to become mothers. And can you say a little more about how you feel it colors your mothering because you have a young son now. You're recently new mom. And tell us a little bit about how complex PTSD intersects with parenting in your experience and your research.

I think, you know, there's a lot of research that says that complex PTSD can make parents more— that experiencing very traumatic childhood could make people more violent towards their children or, yeah, more abusive in various ways. And I had read that literature and I was really terrified of it. And I told everyone in my life, like, if you see me abusing my child, like, step in, you know, don't be afraid, tell me off. And I have found in practice that especially for those who have worked on themselves a little bit beforehand, that was not my experience. And I have also read some literature that contradicts that. And in fact, um, states more that, um, people who have been abused may actually be potentially overly lenient in a mother-child relationship because we don't want to enforce those boundaries. We don't want to punish. We— and, and we're a little bit scared of doing— of, of— we're extra scared of traumatizing them, so we let them get away with a bit too much. And so that's like kind of my struggle. I mean, it doesn't I don't have to really enforce that many boundaries right now because he's like not even a year old yet. But yeah, I'm just like, he bites me and I'm like, I guess I just let you bite me. I don't know. Yeah, so that's a struggle, a current struggle. And I think it just can look very different for different people because there's a million different ways to be abused. and to process that abuse. But I think that one thing that is very real is that generally people who have survived complex PTSD don't have the support networks that those who had healthier families did. I mean, again, motherless mothers, if you don't have a mother, you're kind of up shit's creek in terms of feeling mothered yourself, in terms of feeling cared for when you have a kid, in terms of being able to just drop them off for the weekend or like an afternoon and having a break. And so it can feel lonely and relentless and sad. And there's a lot of grief behind that. So yeah, I mean, I think the experience of mothering naturally makes every woman want to be mothered. And so having that void is— it's sad.

You know, when I was writing Motherless Mothers, we didn't have the term complex PTSD yet. But I interviewed hundreds of women who had lost their moms when they were young, some to violent causes, some to long-term illnesses, some to sudden death. And what I found was they— what we now call complex PTSD, though they didn't have that diagnosis. So I'm, of course, I'm just guessing and not diagnosing in retrospect. But the constellation of symptoms they described were similar to what we would see with complex PTSD. And it seemed to make them very hypervigilant, you know, very anxious about whether they were doing things right and keeping their child safe. But in many cases, it also made them incredibly present, incredibly attuned. And I remember a therapist saying that a lot of women who've lost their moms or have had traumatic childhoods are actually doing the good job that they don't think they're doing. Because you also tend to put your actions under a microscope and, and, and have extreme self-doubt and lack of confidence is one of, you know, some of the outcomes of complex PTSD. So she said they were going through the motions of being very attuned and very caring and affectionate moms while doubting Their own competence at the same time. So that was kind of a catch-22. Yeah, you're not—

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, God. Yeah. It was like the first, you know, 9 months were just constant terror. But thank God I'm good at dissociation because I'd be like constant terror but with a huge smile on my face like, yeah.

So Have you been able to rupture repair through parenting at all? Do you feel like some of what was ruptured for you when you were younger is repaired through childhood and through having good relationships as an adult with your husband or your child?

Um, I think it's lovely. And I think, you know, I think I— one thing that's nice is that, um, he's very securely attached. And Dr. Hamm has like viewed me with him, and we even tried like one of the experiments, which is like the strange situation experiment where I walk out of the room and he just like stays there, and then I come back and he's like obviously very securely attached. And so it's clear that like I'm doing a good job. So that is like—

I'm surprised.

So that's nice. So that, you know, just having to— knowing that, like, it's possible for me to attune to another being so closely and, like, intuit what they need is really nice. I mean, he's not a teenager yet, so we'll see what happens then, you know. But I don't know if I've quite gotten to the part where I'm healing my inner child. I think maybe that'll come after year 1 when I have some time to sleep and eat and meditate on it. I certainly, you know, I certainly know how I should have been parented now more. And, um, it makes me pretty bummed out that that's not what I got, and, and confused as to how you could do that to a child. So, I mean, I think it makes the Abuse, certainly, um, more clearly abused, like inexcusably so, I guess.

I think that's going to resonate for a lot of people here, especially after their moms died, but in some cases while she was still living. Thank you for being so honest with us, Stephanie, about this.

Of course.

That brings me to my, my last question for you, which is that this book is so personal. And so honest, and I mean that in the very best way. I know we've got a bunch of writers on the call. I see some of them here, mainly memoirists, some who have finished manuscripts, and I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share, given that you've gone public with a very personal story in a time when readers and family members can very easily and publicly disagree with or take issue with your version of events. It's your story. But they appear in it. What would you say to anyone who's considering doing the same, writing a story about their own personal past experiences and putting it out into the world?

Yeah, I mean, I will say I'm very privileged in that, like, I mean, it's— I'm not privileged as a human in that both of my parents abandoned me as a child, but as a writer I am because I don't really have to care what they think at all. Because they're— I haven't talked to them since I was a teenager, you know. But I would say, so it's much harder if your parents are at all in your life. But I would say that, like, you— I get dozens, dozens, I would say, of messages a day. Of how impactful sharing my personal story has been to other people's healing versus, say, reading The Body Keeps the Score.

Because—

and I knew that working at This American Life, I knew the power of the first-person story, right? Because nobody wants to feel alone in this experience. Everybody wants to know the real intimate human story of somebody else going through this. And also, my experience is mine personally, but there's so much more space for other narratives of complex PTSD because, again, you can be traumatized a million different ways from a million different backgrounds, resources. So I think that I, I never regret or doubt having put that out there because of the good that it has done others. And even if people in my own family have been like unhappy with it, I'm like, well, I guess you're bummed, but like thousands of other people seem to have benefited. So, okay.

Mm-hmm.

Tough.

Hey, we're gonna take a little pause here, and then we're gonna come back for a Q&A. I see we've got a lot of questions in the chat box. Christina, how's it looking over there? Are you able to pull some for Stephanie to address?

Yes. So Lynn asks, how has the patient-therapist relationship changed between you and Dr. Hom after the book was published?

I think we've gotten closer to— it's almost like sibling-y sometimes. Like, I'm more willing to, like, fight with him. Like, I was already pretty comfortable fighting with him. But yeah, it's— but it's good. It's really good. I feel very loved by him. I think he feels loved by me too, and that makes it easier for me to initiate ruptures sometimes and be like— I've never been in therapy before where I'm— I've been able to just be like, stop doing that. I'm not liking this, what you're doing right now. I want you to try something else today. I'm pissed off at you right now. You know, it's very hard for me to do that. in my real life too. Um, and so, yeah, it's, it's, it's really nice being able to do that with him.

And, um, well, that, that's evidence that you have built trust in that relationship, right? Because oftentimes we're not going to even initiate something that could potentially result in a rupture. Unless we feel relatively safe in that relationship or we're willing to let it go.

Yeah, definitely.

We're going to take just a few minutes break here because we want to let you know about some other things that are happening over at motherlessdaughters.com. And then we're going to come back with some more questions for Stephanie. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. We're just going to pop off for about, I don't know, 3 minutes, maybe 4, and I'll come right back. Here we go. My very messy desktop. Now you know what it looks like. Okay, can everyone see? Thumbs up. Great. Okay, we're going to, um, just let you know about our weekly Motherless Daughters community calls. If you've liked being on this call so far, um, we've got group support with weekly check-ins and discussions about topics of interest to our community. We do these just for motherless daughters. They're 60-minute support calls on subjects that are of interest to you. So the group of women on Tuesday and Thursday choose what they're going to talk about in coming months. In August, we're going to be talking about— well, actually, this month, next week, this coming week, we're going to be talking about generational trauma, which is really pertinent given that that's what Stephanie was talking about. Is her— how her parents' trauma in Malaysia and her ancestors' trauma was passed down to her through their behaviors. We're gonna be talking about that. And then next month we will be talking about who was my mother really? How to learn about who our moms were. This is for motherless daughters. I know that this call is not just motherless daughters, but these calls are the weekly calls. And then we're going to be talking in week 4 about endings and goodbyes and why separations, breakups, divorces, and the ending of various chapters in our lives can be so challenging for early parent loss survivors. We've got an optional 30-minute open facilitated discussion at the end of every call. So people are invited to stay on. They say it's often their favorite part where we can talk about— they can talk about anything that's going on for them and in a community of people who understand and are there to support them. Our calls are international. They're intergenerational, which is really beautiful. The age range is generally from college students all the way up to women in their 70s and 80s. They're interactive. They're always different. No 2 are ever the same. And they're intentional. We create the community together, and we're always asking for feedback. How can we continue to serve you and give you what is going to help you most. So we've got 3 options. If you lost a mom in the past, meaning more than 2 years ago, we meet on Tuesdays at 5 PM Pacific time, 8 o'clock East Coast time. Thursdays at 11 in the morning, um, Pacific time, 2 o'clock East Coast time. So the Tuesdays are good if you're in Australia or New Zealand. The Thursdays we have It's a very international call. We have women from the UK and the EU and all over. And then on Thursdays earlier this year, we started a recent loss call just for women who lost moms within the past 2 years because your bereavement needs are different from those who have loss in the more distant past. And that Thursday call is led by Angela Schellenberg. Angela, can you wave and say hello? Angela's a grief, loss, and trauma therapist. With a co-facilitator, Devin, who came from within the community, Devin Brinkley. So those are the 3 options we have available. And if you can't make it live, we will always send you a recorded link within 48 hours. So you don't have to worry about being there 4 times a week to participate. The cost is just $59 a month for 4 calls per month. But we're offering a special offer, which is if you sign up this week, in fact, by midnight tonight, and you use the discount code— oops, this is the wrong code. Darn it. Christina, it's discount code HOUR29, right? HOUR29. You receive—

Yes, it is.

Yes. Oh, this is the wrong slide. I apologize, everyone. You use the discount code HOUR29. You will get Motherless Daughters community calls for the first 2 months 8 calls for just $29 a month. People, that's less than $8 a call. It's the lowest we've ever, ever offered. We have a commitment to make these calls as accessible to everyone as we can. So you use the discount code HOUR29, and we'll be sending that to you in an email as well. By midnight tonight, you get the first 2 months, 8 calls for just $29 a month. You go to motherlessdaughters.com/communitycalls. Christina is going to put it up. Remember, use the call, not HOUR39. You Use the code HOUR29 to get your discount, and this is for new members only. So for the first 2 months, $29 a month, and then it goes up to the regular, the regular cost per month. We hope you'll want to stay with us because we have a real community that forms there, quite beautiful, and we'd love for you to be part of it. So please consider joining us. Check it out, check it out for a month or 2. We've got lots of women on this call today who come to our weekly calls. I'm there at the past loss calls 3 times a month, and then we've got a week 3 where we always have a special guest, and you'll be with our co-facilitators, Zan and Christine. So we'd love to see you there and continue the relationship. But now we're coming back to Stephanie and Christina. What's the next question for Stephanie to answer?

So Liz asks, how do you manage emotional flashbacks? And has that changed since becoming a mother?

I think managing emotional flashbacks before becoming a mother was— sometimes you don't manage them, and they take over, and then you just yell and freak out. And that's it. And that's— it happens. And don't get mad at yourself for doing it. That's just how it is. Sometimes it's Like me stepping away into a quiet room and then just lying face down on the bed and just breathing for a few minutes and just focusing on my breathing. Some of it is counting colors around the room. That would— that used to be a favorite one for me, just counting how many red things are in the room. Or phoning a friend, sometimes like texting a friend with CPTSD and just being like, This is what's going on, and having them help talk me down a little bit. Talking to my husband and/or just like taking a walk around the block, eating a snack. Since becoming a mother, I think it's more just like dissociation. Just like, I don't got time for it. Okay, it's all Put it deep inside. I don't think it's the best thing, but, you know, like, if you've got, like, a screaming kid who needs to eat or whatever it is, like, sometimes the, the whatever it is, that self-care needs to come hours later or days later or weeks later. But I do try and write a little bit every week at least, and that sort of helps me. Um, get my head on straight sometimes.

It sounds like there's a lot of self-compassion and giving yourself grace in there. Sometimes you just can't show up the way that you'd like in the moment, and you set it aside and come back to it later.

Yep.

Thanks.

I have a pretty popular question. Um, can you speak to being estranged from a parent I'm still living.

Yeah, I have a couple of chapters in my book about that. I think it's a really tricky thing. I think a lot of people will guilt trip you for it and make you feel bad about it. But I think it was definitely the best choice for me. I don't think anyone chooses something like that casually. I think that, like, especially now being a mother, oh my God, like, I would, I would love to have a mother. Are you kidding me? And my mom is alive. But you don't make that kind of decision unless you know how much it's gonna hurt. If, like, it would— if my mother was in my life, it would be— Very nasty. You know, she'd be— she'd hurt me every time she interacted with me. And so I chose to move away from that. I chose to move towards relationships and people that actually love me and want to show me that they love me and make time for a family that wants to take care of me and feels invested in my joy and wants to listen and attune to me. So yeah, I think I had— I feel proud to have the courage, to have had the courage to choose better love. And I think that Um, also, um, you can only make that choice for yourself, I guess. Uh, nobody can make that choice for you. So sometimes it takes a long time to be— to, to go through the estrangement process to make that choice for yourself.

Stephanie, you write so beautifully in the book about meeting the man who became your husband, who is— he comes across as so supportive and compassionate. I'm wondering, has his family stepped in? What's your relationship with the in-laws like? Your son with his grandparents? Do you have that extended family on the other side?

I loved my mother-in-law. Very, very much. She loved me. She would have made an excellent grandparent. We moved in to take care of her in 2020, and she passed in 2021. So unfortunately, uh, my son does not have any grandparents, um, which is a huge bummer.

Yeah.

Do you, um, seek out people of that generation for him, or not quite yet? I have.

I, you know, my husband is very close with his uncle and aunt, and they're in his life. His siblings are very present in our lives. I mean, we see them like 3 times a week. And I have gone and tried to find an Asian grandmother in Chinatown for him. that I take him to every month or 2, and she fawns over him, and it is what it is. So it's not the same, but, you know, I'm trying.

Thank you.

Christina, how's it going with the questions? Do you have another one in the queue?

Yes. So how do you manage dealing with the news cycle, Liz, She is an Asian American and feeling extremely triggered when she sees stories of abuse, especially when it's within the Asian community.

Yeah, I think that one of the reasons why I was diagnosed with complex PTSD and I had my complete breakdown was because I— it was 2018, beginning of 2018 when I was diagnosed, I guess. And so I had just— Reported all about Trump's first year with— as working for This American Life, and I had to report on all kinds of— I had to interview racists who would tell me during the interview, you seem nice enough, but if the race war happens, I wouldn't hesitate before shooting you in the face. You know, like, I— it was very— I had a very close relationship with the news cycle. It was very unhealthy. And, um, I think the thing that I learned from it was just to distance myself from the news cycle. Um, and so now I just don't look at the news, I guess. I, I don't read it. I don't engage with it. I, I sort of read the headlines scrolling down Reddit, and I don't click on anything. And if there are issues and things that I actually do care a lot about that I feel like I have power over, I do engage with that. Like, I engage with mental health news, I engage with environmental news, because that's something that, I mean, I work a lot, or I volunteer a lot in environmental space. I read and interact a lot with like, you know, local politics and whatever. And so I've learned to sort of engage with the stuff that I have control and power over. And to not care about the stuff that I don't have any control or— and power over, I guess. And that has been very helpful to me.

That reminds me of the saying, how you feel about me is none of my business. And because I, I know that from one of the symptoms of complex PTSD is this preoccupation with how other people perceive us. And, um, the fawning response to keep ourselves safe and how that can factor in. Yeah, absolutely. Christina, what's the next question? We probably have time for one or two more.

Okay. Uh, so Carol said she would love to hear you talk about how you were diagnosed with HEDS and if you think it's related to CPTSD. Just like you, she has both.

Yeah, so, um, so I have Ehlers-Danlos, um, which means that, uh, my— I'm especially flexy, um, which is, uh, it has a genetic component to it, um, I know that much, um, but I— and I was diagnosed with it because basically I just like kept dislocating everything, um, And I continue to just dislocate things all the time. Like my third trimester, I couldn't stand up or walk because every time I walked, like my hips would just dislocate. So it sucks. But do I think that it's related to complex PTSD? You know, I asked that. I actually interviewed my, my doctor about it because this is how I operate in the world. And he said that it has a genetic component. So, but the way that it manifests can be exacerbated by trauma because trauma increases inflammation in the body. And it also can tend to increase or increase our body's pain, essentially increase the amount of pain that we feel. And so people who have Ehlers-Danlos who have also gone through trauma may have a harder time healing, may experience more pain than someone who does not. So yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot of research about how trauma can affect our long-term health because of the cortisol effect of cortisol on inflammation.

Thank you.

So not necessarily a causal link. But one can exacerbate the other.

Yeah. Okay.

Christina, what have we got next?

Angela said that she spent 9 years living in Asia, living in Asia, and she knows how difficult to talk about and how it's often not allowed, these things. So how have you found the Asian community has responded to you?

You know, I was actually quite worried about how the Asian community would respond to me, um, especially because I talk about my entire Asian community in San Jose. Um, well, not the entire community, but it— but child abuse being extremely pervasive in my majority Asian community growing up in San Jose. Um, and I, I just didn't know, like, if people would be upset with me for being open about that, or if even I was getting it right. And, you know, I have not heard any complaints, not one, from an Asian American person who has told me, like, you got it wrong. Which to me tells me that there's a real problem there, and there's nobody talks about it. And I was the first one to talk about it, and everybody knows that that's a real problem. So, yep.

The last Hour of Hope we did was with Susan Liu, who wrote The Manicurist's Daughter, the memoir of losing her mom. And she talked about how she was raised also in Northern California, actually. And she talked quite a bit about that as well in her community. And not to the extreme of what she would term abuse, but what other cultures might look at and think was abusive behavior because Child raising and grief are culturally relative. And yeah, so your family was influenced not just by the culture, but also the generational trauma that they had experienced, which is something we didn't really get into, but I heard you touching on. We're going to be talking about that actually this week on our weekly calls. The women have voted to talk about generational trauma. But in, in the case that you mentioned, it sounds very much like your parents Developed behaviors as a result of trauma that they and their ancestors had experienced. And then your behaviors created this outcome in their— and then their behaviors created the outcome in their child. So it was passed down. And that's, in a sense, you know, what parenting can be, a form of cycle breaking, which sounds like a bit like what you were talking about earlier.

Yeah. Yeah.

Definitely.

Yeah.

Well, on that note, we are coming to the very end of the hour. So my very last question for you, Stephanie, is after the success of your very first book, what's next? What are you working on? Are you taking a break? What's, what's happening over there in creative life?

Yeah, like I said, I try to take some time to write every week. I am— when I have childcare, which is very unstable at the present, I try and work on a book about parenting with complex PTSD. It's not really like a parenting guide. It's more just like how to be a parent who has complex PTSD, if that makes sense. And a memoir about the feelings associated with that. So I've done some interviews and hope to keep researching and writing more.

Great. It sounds like a fantastic follow-up to this book. And as you're moving through motherhood yourself, you'll be living your story, right?

I hope so. I hope it goes well and he comes out good. Fingers crossed.

But with our kids, I hope it for you too. Thank you so, so very much for joining.

Really appreciate it.

Thanks to all of you for coming today. We do these 4 times a year, so the next one will be 3 months from now. But in the meantime, I really look forward to seeing you either at our weekly calls Or at our retreats. I'm in Iowa City right now, in my house in Iowa, to lead a retreat this coming weekend. So we've got our 25th retreat coming up this Thursday through Sunday. We've got one in September in Oxfordshire in the UK, and then we'll be on hiatus until 2025 with our retreats. But we still do our weekly calls and more. So check us out at motherlessdaughters.com. Please be sure. To look up Stephanie's book, we've been dropping in the chat box the link so that you can order it online and follow Stephanie on Instagram, where she also posts about complex PTSD and parenting and more. Stephanie, what is your Instagram handle? Can you let us know? Christina, can you drop it in the box?

Oh, I just dropped it. It's foo foo foo. It's just my last name three times.

Great.

@foofoofoo at Instagram. We're at Motherless Daughters. I'm at @hopeedelman. It's great to see so many familiar faces. Also so many new ones. Thank you again, Stephanie, for being so generous with your time. Thank you, Christina, for all the tech support. Thank you, Angela, for leading our Thursday recent loss community calls, and I'll hope to see all of you again soon.

Bye. Thank you.