the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable… — Stephanie Foo

PTSD is an adaptation, a mechanism our genius bodies evolved to help us survive. (Chapter 43)

Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee. Or a dad who stayed and brought you a bouquet of flowers at your graduation. Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself.

It takes an intellectual and physical effort to shove aside the comfortably worn neural pathways and go in a different direction.