Opening
In these chapters, Stephanie Foo chases a therapy that promises relief, breaks through the numbness that has muffled her life, and then crashes into the messy aftermath of feeling again. The arc moves from the risky hope of EMDR to the sobering reality of dissociation, shame, and the brain’s rumination loops—while also discovering practical tools that steady her journey of healing and recovery.
What Happens
Chapter 16
EMDR catches Stephanie’s eye in van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Skeptical yet desperate, she finds an affordable therapist, Eleanor, whose office is cluttered and unremarkable. Asked to choose a target memory, Stephanie recites incidents of extreme childhood abuse and family dysfunction: a golf club raised in threat, cars veering toward cliffs.
Eleanor asks for a disturbance rating; Stephanie gives these memories a two or three out of ten. The mismatch between horrors described and calm delivery alarms Eleanor, who suggests dissociation—a hallmark of Complex Trauma and Its Lifelong Impact. Stephanie resists. She remembers everything, so how could she be dissociated? By the end, she realizes she can list facts without feeling them. If EMDR relies on emotion, she needs a way to access it.
Chapter 17
Before her next session, Stephanie rewatches Mommie Dearest to provoke feeling. The "wire hangers" scene lands like a punch. The sheer volume of the movie’s screaming makes her question her own memory’s missing soundscape, and the discomfort primes her for EMDR.
Back with Eleanor, she grips the vibrating buzzers, listens to bilateral tones, and drops into a scene of her mother beating her with a wire hanger. The image sharpens; the pain finally arrives. She realizes her job as a child is to endlessly reassure her parents they are loved. Invited to bring in a savior, she imagines Joey rescuing her child-self, who protests she must stay to caretake her parents. Joey says the unsayable—“THEY DON’T LOVE YOU”—and adult Stephanie steps in to confirm that both parents eventually abandon her. She leaves dazed, relieved, and changed: she doesn’t just know it wasn’t her fault; she understands it. Two insights crystallize—her numbness signals a deep, unhealed wound, and her parents’ inability to love her reflects their self-hatred, not her worth.
Chapter 18
For five days, she floats—clear, light, almost “normal.” Then the high collapses. On her anniversary, Joey is swallowed by work; her best friend, Kathy, spends their visit elsewhere. Stephanie feels invisible, turns prickly, and withdraws. The next morning, she wakes submerged in a foul mood and cycles through self-care, ending in sobbing without knowing why.
Hours later, she links the pain to feeling dismissed by Joey and Kathy—and immediately scolds herself for being “needy,” triggering a wave of identity shame and the faint beginnings of identity, self-loathing, and self-acceptance. Then a realization lands: it takes her nearly a full day to name her feelings. That delay—the “hollow, dry, fine feeling”—is dissociation. An old journal describing life “through a glass” confirms she has lived behind a veil for years. EMDR parts the veil, but what else lies behind it?
Chapter 19
Dissociation kept her alive; now, with safety, time, and no frantic busyness, she lacks her old armor—like workaholism and forgetfulness. Rawness replaces numbness. During an evening with her warm, well-adjusted friend Joanna, Stephanie spirals: self-monitoring, shame, jealousy of Joanna’s ease. She feels like a “hissing animal,” unfit for connection, a feeling that lingers long after.
She cancels plans and isolates. The inner voice of trauma hisses that this is who she is, forever. She recognizes the “three P’s” of traumatic thinking: sadness as personal (her fault), pervasive (defines everything), and permanent (never ending). Knowing the model doesn’t stop the pain; it simply names it.
Chapter 20
Searching for relief, Stephanie tries meditation and mindfulness; traditional sits spike her anxiety. She learns about grounding to interrupt dissociation and emotional flashbacks but struggles to make simple exercises work. Then comes a candlelit yin/restorative yoga class: the instructor’s soft, continuous cues keep her attention anchored in sensation rather than rumination.
Propped in supported poses, she feels safe, held, and vividly present in her body; tears come—grief for lost years and gratitude at being able to self-cradle. Later, she learns why it works: mindfulness can quiet the Default Mode Network (DMN), the brain’s rumination hub, which runs hot in C-PTSD. By orienting to sensory input, she short-circuits the DMN’s loops. She builds a toolkit—restorative yoga, mindful eating, counting colors during conflict—and discovers that healing lives not only in breakthroughs but in small, repeatable moments of presence.
Character Development
Stephanie shifts from detached reporter of her own life to a participant who can feel and comfort herself. The EMDR session cracks open empathy for her child-self and reframes her parents’ failures as theirs, not hers. The subsequent crash teaches her that openness requires daily care, not a single cure.
- Moves from intellectual “knowing” to embodied “understanding”
- Identifies her dissociation as delayed or absent feeling, not lack of memory
- Releases self-blame by recognizing her parents’ self-hatred
- Experiences rawness without dissociative armor and learns to tolerate it
- Adopts practical grounding and mindfulness strategies to navigate emotional flashbacks
- Transitions from passive endurance to active, self-directed healing
Themes & Symbols
Healing as a winding path: The narrative underscores that recovery is not linear. A soaring EMDR breakthrough is followed by a crash, then steadied by repeatable practices. The work stretches from high-intensity processing to gentle, daily rituals—an evolving toolkit that sustains the long [journey of healing and recovery].
Complex trauma’s reach: These chapters render the subtle face of C-PTSD. Dissociation appears not as dramatic fugue states but as numbness, time-delayed feeling, and emotional flashbacks. The “three P’s” blueprint how trauma distorts meaning-making, framing pain as personal, pervasive, and permanent—an illusion that mindfulness can interrupt.
Symbols:
- The veil: A “thick white sheet” between facts and feelings. EMDR parts it, exposing grief and truth; life afterward is learning to live with the veil thinned.
- The DMN: A neurological stand-in for the inner critic. When Stephanie anchors to sensation, she quiets rumination’s engine and reclaims agency over attention.
Key Quotes
“THEY DON’T LOVE YOU.” Stephanie’s imagined intervention lets a trusted voice speak the truth her child-self cannot face. The sentence severs the caretaking bond and relocates responsibility from child to parent, unlocking grief and relief.
“I watched my life through a glass.” This image captures dissociation’s distance—seeing without feeling. It reframes her emotional delay not as a character flaw but as a survival adaptation now ready to be unlearned.
“Hollow, dry, fine.” Her shorthand for numbness exposes how dissociation masquerades as okay-ness. Naming it helps her recognize when she is disconnected and prompts grounding.
“I felt cradled.” In restorative yoga, safety comes from within. The line marks a pivotal reparenting moment: she can provide the holding she never received.
Personal, pervasive, permanent. The three P’s distill trauma logic into a memorable rubric. Identifying the pattern gives her leverage to dispute it in real time.
Key Events
- Stephanie begins EMDR and confronts her inability to feel her memories.
- She triggers emotion by rewatching Mommie Dearest and has a major EMDR breakthrough.
- She accepts that her parents’ failure to love her reflects their own damage, not her worth.
- A post-EMDR high collapses, revealing ongoing dissociation and delayed emotional awareness.
- She identifies the veil of numbness and recognizes emotional flashbacks.
- Shame and the “three P’s” drive isolation, even as she intellectually understands the pattern.
- Restorative yoga and mindfulness provide grounding; shifting attention to sensation quiets the DMN.
- She assembles practical self-soothing tools for daily use.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This stretch is the memoir’s therapeutic apex and reset. The EMDR session fuses fact and feeling, giving Stephanie a foundation of self-compassion and a new narrative about blame. Just as important, the chapters that follow puncture any myth of instant cure, showing how vulnerability brings fresh pain that must be managed, not erased.
By pairing breakthrough with skill-building—grounding, restorative yoga, attention training—Stephanie reframes recovery as craft: sustainable, practiced, and bodily. The shift from spectacle to daily tools connects this section to the memoir’s larger argument—that true healing is not only confronting the past, but learning, moment by moment, to inhabit the present.