How to Cope Through Pain: Shigeko Ito on Complex PTSD and Family Healing

Shigeko Ito is an author, educator, and mental health advocate with a PhD in Education from Stanford University. Drawing on her cross-cultural experience and academic insight, she writes about intergenerational trauma, the lasting effects of childhood emotional neglect, and the healing process. Her memoir, The Pond Beyond the Forest: Reflections on Childhood Trauma and Motherhood, tells the story of a middle-aged Japanese immigrant mother struggling to raise her teenage son and save her marriage while confronting memories of her own childhood trauma as her son enters adolescence. Throughout the journey, Shigeko remains committed to healing herself and improving her relationships with her husband and son.       Her story resonates with many readers, especially those who feel burdened by unresolved trauma. In her interview, Shigeko spoke about the challenges of parenting as a survivor of childhood trauma, healing from complex PTSD, and how writing her memoir deepened her self-understanding, self-compassion, and acceptance. She is passionate about raising awareness of complex PTSD, a still-emerging diagnosis that many people overlook because of its subtle and elusive nature. INTERVIEW READ HER MEMOIR HERE     For fans of Stephanie Foo's What My Bones Know, a memoir of a middle-aged Japanese immigrant mother's struggle to raise her teenage son and save her marriage when she finds herself triggered by memories of her own childhood trauma as he enters adolescence. At age twenty-two, Shigeko Ito immigrated to America to escape Japan's rigid society and a neglectful childhood home that landed her in a mental hospital at seventeen. She thrived in her new, healthier environment and thought her traumatic past was all behind her. Until it wasn't. Motherhood, she realized, was far more challenging than she could have ever imagined. But it was her son's high school years that proved to be particularly daunting, and that was when her past reemerged—in the form of intense flashbacks to her childhood trauma and tumultuous teenage years. With the stream of daily stresses compounded by menopausal irritability, Shigeko often found herself regressing into a bunker-like mentality with childish coping mechanisms, a pattern that threatened to undo her most prized achievement: her happy family. In The Pond Beyond the Forest, Shigeko faces her past head-on, taking the reader along on her quest to uncover the root causes of her lifelong struggles—a journey that leads to deeper self-awareness, understanding, and acceptance, and ultimately saves her family and marriage.