Though she doesn’t linger on it, Foo seems to attribute her survival to her hatred. ![]() “I’m going to kill myself because I’m tired of this life, and you’re a fucking bitch so you’re coming, too.” He almost killed us a dozen times each time, I’d beg and plead and placate him, feeding him reasons why we needed to live. “It’s time for both of us to die,” he’d sing, smiling. My father didn’t hit me once after my mother left, but he was a fan of car terrorism. Worse was what she calls her father’s car terrorism. ![]() “Why do you have to be like this,” he’d ask. It’s just that I’m bad, I’m awful, I’m evil,” I told him, and he believed me. Please let me be able to make Mommy and Daddy happy. “Please, God - let me not be such a bad girl. But I do know this - that every night before bed, I kneeled and said the same prayer over and over like a mantra. Those would be some very big feelings for a very little girl. How did I feel about the fact that my mother blamed her suicide attempts on me? I couldn’t tell you. ![]() We’d sit there, trapped in a senseless loop for hours. So I stayed quiet until she screamed at me to speak again. So I’d start to apologize again, and she said my apologies were worth nothing, plus now my tears made me so ugly she was certain I had to die. I’d fall silent, but then she said I was never repentant. I’d apologize frantically, but she’d scream at me that I didn’t mean it, to shut up before she sliced my jugular open. She raised a cleaver above my wrist, or she pulled my head back and pushed the blade into my neck, its cold edge pressing into the softness of my skin. She grabbed my ponytail at the top of a flight of stairs and used it to hurl me down. Her abuse was spectacularly awful, becoming worse as she entered puberty.Ī few times a year, my mother would get so tired of me that she decided God should take me back forever. It’s worth spending a little time with her story in her own words. Foo, like so many, was relieved to find a diagnosis that helped make sense of her experience. The psychiatric community generally seems less interested in the diagnosis than do those who suffer from it. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD 11) does but limits it to those already suffering from PTSD, a compromise that has never made sense to me. ![]() The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM 5tr) does not recognize C-PTSD. Dissociation is a predominant coping mechanism. Often it involves sexual abuse, but not always. Complex PTSD refers to long-term exposure to trauma, usually beginning in childhood and continuing for years. In another post I’ve discussed the definition of C-PTSD. Her use of intergenerational trauma theory is deeply touching and theoretically unsophisticated. It includes her account of intergenerational trauma in general and her family in particular. Not always well-written, it is a horrifying story of her childhood, her encounter with at least a dozen unavailing therapies, and finally finding one that worked. She is a radio journalist and author of an account of her journey through C-PTSD, What My Bones Know. Stephanie Foo went through hell, finally coming to terms with C-PTSD.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |