Complex PTSD, Yes, But Also Sleeping and Three Minutes in Paris
Don't worry, you'll see all of Paris in three minutes.
Will you please be a person who shows up in San Francisco to make people sleepy?
Sleeping with Celebrities first ever live show happens this coming Saturday! Only five sleeps away! Come see me hang out with Moshe Kasher, John DiMaggio, and Meredith Edgar. It’s going to be a lot of sleepy fun. Sleeping with Celebrities, when you get down to it, is a comedy show dressing up in pajamas as a sleep show.
Stephanie Foo had a ROUGH childhood. Then she had to figure it and herself out.
And that’s really the focus of this week’s podcast episode as well as Stephanie’s book, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex PTSD. An only child, Stephanie suffered all sorts of physical and emotional abuse and neglect at the hands of her mom, up until her mom just up and disappeared when Stephanie was 13 years old. Hasn’t heard from her since. The abuse was there from her dad was there too but he at least kept in touch when he moved out while Stephanie was in high school. So Stephanie had to parent herself and attempt to parent her parents as well. She didn’t do all that great at it, of course, because how could she?
Stephanie has spent much of her adult life assessing what the damage from all that was and her therapist finally told her that it was complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). Whereas regular PTSD might stem from one car accident, one tour of duty in a war, complex PTSD is a result of repetitive trauma over a longer period of time where you feel there’s no escape. Like child abuse.
Stephanie has gone on to a successful life, producer at Snap Judgment and This American Life, author, married with a two-year-old. But as she says, your childhood stays with you. Of course it does. In our conversation, she traces how the way her mother used to pick through and criticize Stephanie’s journal at age 6(!!) was very similar to how her boss at This American Life berated her while picking through her radio stories. She was even made to stand in the same place (behind, one foot to the side) for both humiliations.
She’s had success with EMDR and other therapies but it’s a journey. Her ability to relate to others was damaged, taking compliments is hard, trusting people is a conscious effort.
It’s a really great interview. Have a listen.
Here’s what I said at the end of this week’s show about what’s going on here in Minnesota
Before we go, I feel compelled to talk to you from the perspective of a Minnesotan. Which I am. Not born here but been here 18 years, love it here, been embraced. You may have heard about our difficulties here. I’m not confident that our situation is being adequately explained and amplified to people around the country and around the world. I’m tempted to say it’s worse than you know because I don’t know how much you know. I’m not tempted to say it’s easier than you know because I’m confident it’s not.
Abductions, people getting hurt, children getting hurt. Us parents going to school dismissal every day to guard our kids. And all around us, stories. My Korean-American friend being followed into a bakery and surrounded when she was just trying to pick up a cake. Other stories far more unpleasant than that.
I do want you to know this: if the goal was to divide Minnesotans, to make us turn on our neighbors of color, our Somali neighbors, our Latinx neighbors? Ain’t working. Like at all. Quite the opposite. We are more charged up than ever to protect our communities of humans. If the goal was to silence Minnesotans, well, that was never going to work. Have you ever met a Minnesotan? They never stop talking. Saying goodbye alone can take hours. We’re still talking.
And we’re taking action. People are volunteering to bring food, bring groceries, to neighbors who are scared to leave their homes because of our own government. And I hear more and more people taking on the idea of hey, if I get hurt or killed, it’s worth it for this cause. If they sought to divide us, well, whoops, because we’re more united and stronger than ever. And we’re sticking around longer than they will. So we’re hurting but we’ll be okay. Because we love our community and we’re just ridiculously stubborn.
As for me, doing this job has been harder. Concentrating has been harder. Depression and anxiety, I don’t need to tell you, are really fucking real. But I am so fortunate to get up, go to work, and do something that helps people. And thank you for being part of that.
Wow. Wordy newsletter today.
Great news on SAINT approach to treatment-resistant depression
I’ve mentioned SAINT before. It’s this new, more concentrated approach to TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) out of Stanford. New testing is showing it’s remarkably effective.
Zeko wasn’t the only participant who benefited from the trial, the results of which are detailed in a study newly published in the journal World Psychiatry. Half of the 24 participants in the treatment group achieved remission by one month after undergoing SAINT, compared with nearly 21% of the 24 people in the placebo treatment group.
“We have brought mental health treatment into the same precision medicine as the rest of medicine itself,” said Bentzley, a lead developer of SAINT and a lead author of the therapy’s first randomized controlled trial, which was published in 2021. Bentzley’s company, Magnus Medical, holds the SAINT license.
This CNN article also mentions Nolan Williams, who headed up the Brain Stimulation Lab at Stanford and led the effort to develop SAINT. Williams was motivated by his own experiences with depression to develop something new and more effective. Williams never actually tried the treatment and died by suicide last year.
Mental health clinicians never have mental health problems because they just cure themselves, right?
Nope.
Following my mom’s death, I struggled with similar doubts and fears. I worried about how it would look if I opened up about my grief, whether to a therapist or even trusted friends in our field. Could I really admit vulnerability when I’m supposed to be the one helping others through theirs? That silence felt heavy and painful.
The truth is, hesitation, guilt, and quiet self-judgment often keep depression hidden in clinicians, sometimes even from themselves.
Here’s the whole growth of Paris in three minutes
Maybe you want to take three minutes and watch Paris emerge. I don’t know.
Rachael Yamagata on Sleeping with Celebrities
Rachael is the best for two reasons. One, her beautiful singing as in this duet with our Rhett Miller.
Two, because she tells us about her yard on the new Sleeping with Celebrities.
Rachel Yamagata is an accomplished musician and singer who has recorded several acclaimed albums, including Starlit Alchemy just a few months ago, and performed and recorded with the likes of Rhett Miller, Jason Mraz, and Bright Eyes. When she’s not making beautiful music, she’s watching her back yard like a hawk. Like a hawk that takes on several ambitious backyard projects. Relax in Rachel’s sonic virtual yard and drift off while she tells you about the persistent squirrels, whether you can ever have enough gravel, why you actually can’t ever have enough gravel, and why it’s so important to call Cobra Kai to deal with snakes. No, not the morally ambiguous Karate Kid dojo, just this guy Kai who happens to be really good with snakes. The critters are all taken care of. Shh. Sleep time.
The detail about how Stephanie's early childhood journal criticism mirrored her later workplace experience really stood out. Trauma patterns repeating across contexts like that is somethng I've noticed in my own life too. The SAINT treatment results sound promising, especially that 50% remission rate.