My parents came from lines of - where their parents had suffered immense traumas. And my parents, I think, were pretty alone and isolated in their ability to take care of me and in terms of having other people be able to take care of them and the mental illnesses that they suffered from. We didn't have access to a lot of family. So I'm wondering if you could talk about your parents' histories a little bit and your family's immigration from Malaysia and how that shaped your childhood.įOO: I think my parents being recent immigrants gave them fewer resources in some ways. MCCAMMON: Something you come back to a lot in your memoir is the idea of inherited trauma. And I think it always had me on edge, hypervigilant, made it really hard for me to trust people - and to sort of bury that with intense workaholism, drinking a lot, partying a lot, that kind of thing. The difference between PTSD and complex PTSD is that complex PTSD sort of has the potential to have a constant fear sort of churning underneath the surface.
It manifested in my life as anxiety, as depression. Complex PTSD is kind of like if you were hit by that car every week for years. So you can get traditional PTSD from a single traumatic event, like, say, you were hit by a car. But how is complex PTSD different?įOO: Right. MCCAMMON: I want to start with your diagnosis, because listeners have likely heard of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
The result is her new memoir, "What My Bones Know." And Stephanie Foo joins us now from New York City. Years of trauma and violent abuse as a child had left her with a diagnosis - complex PTSD, a little-studied condition that Foo was determined to understand. She graduated from college, landed a job at "This American Life," became an award-winning radio producer, was dating a lovely man, but she was also struggling. Stephanie Foo grew up in California, the only child of immigrants who abused her for years and then abandoned her as a teenager.
0 kommentar(er)
