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I know, I know, I know. I’m embarrassingly behind on PTSD Bookclub posts; it’s been nearly a year since I wrote regularly for the blog. Around this time in 2021 I was hard at work on round after round of edits for a personal essay that was published in July by the New York Times Magazine: “His PTSD, and My Struggle to Live With It” (that should be an unpaywalled link).
Writing that essay consumed my life for more than a year. This blog certainly suffered, but I’m incredibly proud of the final result. Hope that if you haven’t read it, you’ll give it a look.
After the essay was printed, it took me some time to recover from the intensity of the writing process, the (mostly extraordinary and gratifying) response from readers, and all the shifts that going public with my PTSD and caregiving story entailed. Here are some of my public reflections on that experience:
“Surviving PTSD: A Q&A with Virginia Eubanks,” an interview with the insightful Margaret Hartley for my university’s magazine; and
“How to Live with your Partner’s PTSD,” an interview with Shannon Paulus for The Waves podcast on Slate.
One thing that I think I didn’t articulate as clearly as I’d hoped is the difference between single-incident and multiple-incident trauma, and how the two are not equally well-served by the diagnostic instruments (or treatments) for PTSD. I’ve talked about thiselsewhere in the bookclub as the difference between “explosive” and “erosive” trauma.
It’s too bad that I missed an opportunity to make that distinction on The Waves, because it is so central to our experience. Jason’s trauma was explosive — two single-incident experiences of extreme violence. Mine was erosive — the slow accretion of the “small-t” traumas endemic to caregiving in the United States.
That’s why I’m so glad we’re going to read Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma next. Foo’s “sharp, insightful, and stirring memoir” (Kirkus) explores her experience with Complex PTSD (C-PTSD), as well as migration, racism, hope and healing.
Foo’s work is critical because so much of the literature of PTSD explores single-incident, explosive traumas: an IED, a sexual assault, a natural disaster. Stories of C-PTSD can help us understand the particularly pernicious impacts of ongoing trauma. And those lessons will help open up conversations about structural violence, moral injury, and the social and personal costs of care.
I’m eager to get started, and I hope you are too! If you are following along, here’s the reading schedule for What My Bones Know:
Prologue and Part I (pages ix – 71 in the 2022 hardcover edition) — Thursday December 1
Part II & III (pages 75-206) — Thursday December 8
Part IV (pages 209-317) — Thursday December 15
Go ahead and buy a copy of What My Bones Know at your local bookstore, take it out from your library, or use one of those online sellers. Albris and Abebooks have a few copies for under $20. If you’re not in a reading mood this month, Foo has spoken beautifully about the book for Kobo here, with Esmé Weijun Wang at the San Francisco Public Library here, and in conversation with her therapist Jacob Ham on Instagram Live here.
And if you are joining us for the first time, WELCOME! You can find the list of blogs in this series, in order, here: https://virginia-eubanks.com/ptsd-bookclub/.
Virginia Eubanks 