Top 60 Stephanie Foo Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Over and over, the answer is the same, isn’t it? Love, love, love. The salve and the cure. In order to become a better person, I had to do something utterly unintuitive. I had to reject the idea that punishing myself would solve the problem. I had to find the love.”

— Stephanie Foo

2. “You have to be aware of how big a power difference there is between patient and therapist. And if you really want to work effectively with people, you have to keep surrendering your power. And that means being humble and making mistakes and fumbling and being comfortable with that.”

— Stephanie Foo

3. “No matter what I do, no matter where I try to find joy, I instead find my trauma. And it whispers to me: “You will always be this way. It’s never going to change. I will follow you. I will make you miserable forever. And then I will kill you.”

— Stephanie Foo

4. “You got married, what, eight years ago already?” Tai Koo Ma laughs. Eight years ago. I was nineteen. I had not known. Nobody told me. I wasn’t invited. Whenever my dad mentions her to me, he still calls her “my friend.”

— Stephanie Foo

5. “The PTSD had always told me I am alone. That I am unlovable. That I am toxic. But now, it is clear to me: That was a lie. My PTSD clouded my vision of what was actually happening.”

— Stephanie Foo

6. “Restorative yoga is just one way to slow down the DMN. Once you start searching, there are plenty of good mindfulness exercises that can “ground” you – get you out of your damn head and into the world. I started trying all of them out and asking friends what worked for them.”

— Stephanie Foo

7. “You’ve interviewed sixty people who are estranged from their parents,” I stammered. “I don’t know if you have studies on it, but, um, in your experience – did the people who estranged themselves, did they feel free afterward?” “No,” Catherine said with certainty. I waited. There was nothing else.”

— Stephanie Foo

8. “I sat with that a moment. I remembered how people with C-PTSD can often assume problems are about them – not out of selfishness or narcissism but because they want to have enough control to be able to solve the problem.”

— Stephanie Foo

9. “Learning to need a family – to rely on them and give myself to them – was a skill I had to learn in order to date Joey.”

— Stephanie Foo

10. “Resilience is instead synonymous with success.”

— Stephanie Foo

11. “Antidepressants fail to outperform placebos in up to half of clinical trials. Armed with fMRI technology, brain scientists now understand that assuming we are born with chemical imbalances is putting the chicken before the egg – trauma changes the structure and chemical and hormonal responses of our brains. In many cases, we can’t just pump opposing chemicals into our brains with the assumption that things will change. We have to treat the underlying, original cause: the trauma.”

— Stephanie Foo

12. “Removing my parents from my life protected me, but it did not fix me. The excision was not healing in and of itself. Instead, it cleared the way for me to rebuild. Because now came the hard part: replacing them. Many believe that in order to heal from C-PTSD, we must receive kind and compassionate parenting. If we can’t receive that from our own parents, then we must find a new parent to do the job.”

— Stephanie Foo

13. “It made perfect sense to me later in life when I discovered that the Chinese word for endurance is simply the word knife on top of the word heart. You walk around with a knife in your heart. You do it with stoicism. This is the apex of being.”

— Stephanie Foo

14. “Dissociation exists for a reason. For millennia, our brains and bodies have removed us from our pain so we can keep moving forward. A tiger just ate your wife? Bummer, but breaking down or freezing up is not an option. You better go out hunting today or your kids will starve. Your house was just destroyed in an air raid? Okay, but you have to pack up what’s left and find new shelter, now. Feelings are a privilege.”

— Stephanie Foo

15. “My fear of being abandoned forced me to need proof of love in abundance, over and over and over again, a hundred times a day.”

— Stephanie Foo

16. “In the end, these studies claimed that having an ACE score of 6 or higher takes twenty years off your life expectancy. The average life expectancy for someone with 6 or more ACEs is sixty years.”

— Stephanie Foo

17. “Removing my parents from my life protected me, but it did not fix me. The excision was not healing in and of itself. Instead, it cleared the way for me to rebuild.”

— Stephanie Foo

18. “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.”

— Stephanie Foo

19. “But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.”

— Stephanie Foo

20. “Hatred, I learned quickly, was the antidote to sadness. It was the only safe feeling. Hatred does not make you cry at school. It isn’t vulnerable. Hatred is efficient. It does not grovel. It is pure power.”

— Stephanie Foo

21. “In my mind, the most helpful thing for you is to be reconnected with another person. Self-regulation is a very insular thing. That’s just survival. Like, ‘I’m not going to actually learn how to be connected to you, but at least I’m going to be able to regulate how upset I get from you.”

— Stephanie Foo

22. “I learned two critical things that day. First: Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed. If it looks good and it feels good, it should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes. And the second thing I learned was: My parents didn’t love me.”

— Stephanie Foo

23. “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.”

— Stephanie Foo

24. “Here’s a theory: Maybe I had not really been broken this whole time.”

— Stephanie Foo

25. “Even though consciously I was completely in the present, my emotions were back in 1997, back when I was a little kid and making a mistake on a spelling test could literally be a matter of life and death. This return was an emotional flashback.”

— Stephanie Foo

26. “I read later that breathing exercises can actually be more triggering in certain populations. Sounds about right.”

— Stephanie Foo

27. “The problem with this premise, of course, is that whereas other children had programmers who fed their brains with love and kindness, my programmers were evil. My code is flawed.”

— Stephanie Foo

28. “It’s okay to have some things you never get over.”

— Stephanie Foo

29. “Dr. Ham would tell me that PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace. The whole point of PTSD is to prepare you for being on the verge of death at any moment. My parents prepared me to face a vicious world with danger around every corner.”

— Stephanie Foo

30. “Pain is about feeling real, appropriate, and valid hurt when something bad happens. Suffering is when you add extra dollops to that pain. You’re feeling bad about feeling bad.” “Double punishment,” I clarify. “Yes. So getting rid of suffering means you’re not adding to the pain.”

— Stephanie Foo

31. “But how was I to begin letting it go when anger was the force that gave me momentum? My anger was my power. It was what protected me. Without it, wouldn’t I be sad and naked?”

— Stephanie Foo

32. “Catherine was right. Estrangement is not freeing. It has not felt joyful. It has not been happy. It has only felt necessary, and even that is something I question all the time: Does this make me selfish? Does it make me cruel? Then I think of the Thao Nguyen lyric, You made a cruel kid. Come look what you did.”

— Stephanie Foo

33. “If I took up all that space with my feelings, what space could I maintain for hers? Hers were more important. Because hers had greater stakes.”

— Stephanie Foo

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

— Stephanie Foo

35. “Here’s a theory: Maybe I had not really been broken this whole time. Maybe I had been a human – flawed and still growing but full of light nonetheless.”

— Stephanie Foo

36. “Grounding 101 tips: Open your eyes. Put your feet solidly on the floor. Look at your hands and feet. Recognize they are adult hands and feet. Name five things you can see and hear and smell.”

— Stephanie Foo

37. “During EMDR, I was able to conjure two separate, simultaneous versions of myself – the child version and the present version. I was able to feel child Stephanie’s emotions and my own. I was able to comfort her with my present wisdom. I was able to simultaneously be the one giving love and the one receiving it.”

— Stephanie Foo

38. “The literature says this is normal for traumatized people. Experts say it’s all part of the three P’s: We think our sadness is personal, pervasive, and permanent. Personal, in that we have caused all the problems we face. Pervasive, in that our entire life is defined by our failings. And permanent, in that the sadness will last forever.”

— Stephanie Foo

39. “I was not the only one my mother took her moods out on. She lashed out at him for chewing with his mouth open, for sweating too much, for talking too much or not enough.”

— Stephanie Foo

40. “I learned that you can make mistakes and still deserve love. You can fight and then repair. Through his love, I understood how to unconditionally love myself.”

— Stephanie Foo

41. “The books say that in order to stop being a burden, I must learn how to “self-soothe.” I need to learn how to calm my anxieties by myself, without immediately texting everyone in my phone.”

— Stephanie Foo

42. “But grounding and gratitude were palliative care versus curative care. I was still treating the symptoms without treating the source, and I would never truly be healed unless I confronted it.”

— Stephanie Foo

43. “So instead of trying to convince everyone I was normal, I leaned into my freakishness, doubled down on my fury. In his adult circles, my father wasn’t faring much better.”

— Stephanie Foo

44. “It’s okay to have some things you never get over. In the span of half an hour, this man whom I had known for less than a season did what nobody in my life ever had: He took all of my sins and simply forgave them. He didn’t demand relentless improvement. There were no ultimatums. He asserted that I was enough, as is. The gravity of it stunned me into silence. Joey was the opposite of the dread.”

— Stephanie Foo

45. “Most of the world expects trauma and suffering. Most people live through it. It’s not an exceptional, one-time experience.”

— Stephanie Foo

46. “Four months later, I got my diagnosis. And now that my past was spilling over, exploding, a volcano spewing hot toxic waste all over my present life, it was all I could think about.”

— Stephanie Foo

47. “He didn’t answer. He’d stopped calling months ago, now that I’d helped resolve his relationships with his family. I waited and I waited. My phone stayed silent.”

— Stephanie Foo

48. “There was no outside world. Our home was our entire universe. I was all my mother had. My mother was everything I knew.”

— Stephanie Foo

49. “I go from Wikipedia to a government page about C-PTSD as it relates to veterans. I read the list of symptoms. It is very long. And it is not so much a medical document as it is a biography of my life: The difficulty regulating my emotions. The tendency to overshare and trust the wrong people. The dismal self-loathing. The trouble I have maintaining relationships. The unhealthy relationship with my abuser. The tendency to be aggressive but unable to tolerate aggression from others.”

— Stephanie Foo

50. “So it felt significant – generous – for Auntie to sit here and tell me that the way my mother raised me was unfair. It was a permission of sorts to recognize – even among this generation that was so inured to pain – that the way I was brought up was not right. Not how it was supposed to be.”

— Stephanie Foo