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In this memoir, Miller recounts her lifelong battle with complex PTSD stemming from childhood traumas.

The book opens in 2015 as the author’s husband, a diabetic who had just undergone open heart surgery months before, experienced yet another life-threatening medical event. The extreme stress triggered a character-defying response from Miller, who texted her husband that she was going to leave him. As the paralyzing anxiety that had prompted the text slowly abated, the author realized that the wounds from her childhood trauma remained unhealed. “I should have gotten over it by now,” she recalled at the time, noting, “I’d already had years of therapy. Something was still wrong.” After consulting with a psychotherapist, Miller was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which is caused by reoccurring trauma across long periods of time and results in debilitating anxiety, emotional dysregulation, and difficulty managing relationships with others. This book explores the ways in which childhood traumas reverberate into adulthood. The author recalls, for instance, her grandmother’s death by suicide in the 1960s, when Miller was a child. She describes the instability and neglect of her parents, who suffered from their own multigenerational trauma. By the time she entered high school, the author had lived in multiple states in homes that ranged from trailers and motels to the back seats of cars. “I had no scars to show that I had been physically abused,” she reflects, describing an adolescence of psychological abuse, neglect, and emotional withholding that instead left deep internal wounds. Written in an intimate style that includes raw depictions of traumatic memories, this is an absorbing work that effectively captures the ways in which childhood trauma can haunt adults for decades. The book, written in part to serve as “a beacon of hope for others” who struggle with CPTSD, blends her story with broader commentary on the mental health disorder, all backed by scholarly endnotes.

An emotionally intense yet ultimately hopeful account of confronting childhood trauma as an adult.