A Night to Celebrate C-PTSD Survivors

350 Grand Street,New York NY 10002

01 March, 2023

Description

ABOUT WHAT MY BONES KNOW By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years. Both of Foo’s parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she’d moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD. In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don’t move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it. Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman’s ability to reclaim agency from her trauma. Stephanie Foo is a writer and radio producer, most recently for This American Life. Her work has aired on Snap Judgment, Reply All, 99% Invisible, and Radiolab. A noted speaker and instructor, she has taught at Columbia University and has spoken at venues from Sundance Film Festival to the Missouri Department of Mental Health. She lives in New York City with her husband. Natalie Gutierrez is a Puerto Rican licensed therapist in New York and the author of The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color. She has spent 15 years supporting BIPOC in her trauma counseling practice that were hurting from the soul wounds of Complex Posttraumatic Stress. She has worked to help people on the healing journey navigating racial trauma, attachment trauma, intergenerational trauma, and sexual trauma. She is a certified internal family systems therapist and trainer at the IFS Institute. Natalie’s individual and group healing work blends the intersections of psychotherapy, activism, intuitive and ancestral wisdom. Her psychotherapy work focuses on connecting the cultural burdens of larger systems to the legacy burdens passed down throughout the generations. She is a mother of two beautiful spirits and works intentionally everyday to disrupt cycles of legacy wounding. Qian Julie Wang is a New York Times bestselling author and civil rights litigator. A graduate of Yale Law School and Swarthmore College, Qian Julie is managing partner of Gottlieb & Wang LLP, a firm dedicated to advancing education, disability, and civil rights on behalf of marginalized communities. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Cut, and she has appeared on the TODAY Show, MSNBC, and NPR. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two rescue dogs, Salty and Peppers.