I recently sat down with Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy, and our conversation completely reframed how I think about healing from trauma.
Anna spent 17 years seeing 11 different therapists, but felt that she was getting worse with each appointment. But she discovered something that changed her approach to addressing childhood PTSD. Her story is both heartbreaking and incredibly hopeful.
Before you listen, I want you to know that Anna’s opinions differ radically from conventional trauma treatment. She’s not asking people to relive their past or process trauma endlessly. Instead, she focuses on practical, immediate tools that help your nervous system re-regulate right now. This isn’t theoretical; it’s something anyone can do, anywhere, anytime.
Anna’s methodology has helped thousands of people move from being stuck in dysregulation to actually thriving in their lives. She’s the author of two books, creator of a wildly popular YouTube channel with a million subscribers, and she’s currently in federal court defending her right to teach these techniques. Her work is changing how people understand and heal from childhood trauma.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Anna and I discuss:
- Why talk therapy can actually make trauma worse for some people and what to do instead
- The neuroscience of nervous system dysregulation and why you can’t process information when dysregulated
- Practical tools you can use immediately to re-regulate your nervous system (no therapist required)
- How trauma-driven behaviors re-traumatize you and keep you stuck in old patterns
- The difference between healing trauma and accepting what happened and moving forward
- Why “it gets worse before it gets better” is terrible advice that almost cost Anna her life
- How to recognize when you’re dysregulated and what to do about it in the moment
- The role of sovereignty in healing: you get to decide what works for you
- How Anna went from being unable to function to getting into grad school and getting promoted
- The 3 things everyone needs to know about trauma recovery and nervous system healing
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Introduction: Anna Runkle, the Crappy Childhood Fairy
Ari Whitten: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome back to The Energy Blueprint podcast. With me in this episode is Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy. She’s the creator of the popular YouTube channel, blog, courses, and coaching programs that provide practical tools for adults to heal nervous system dysregulation and other common effects of early trauma and to begin feeling better and changing their lives in everyday ways.
Her methods have been developed through research, mentoring hundreds of individuals over the years, and direct experience healing her own symptoms of early trauma. She’s also the author of two books, Re-Regulated: Set Your Life Free from Childhood PTSD and the Trauma-Driven Behaviors That Keep You Stuck, and the book Connectability: Heal the Hidden Ways You Isolate, Find Your People, and Feel at Last Like You Belong. Enjoy this conversation talking all things childhood trauma and how her methodology and her thinking about this topic differs from other common approaches and paradigms around trauma and trauma treatment. Enjoy. Anna, welcome to the show.
Anna Runkle: Thank you. We finally meet. [laughs] I’ve been following you for so long and going to your webinars and things. It’s really nice to meet you.
Ari: Oh, awesome. That’s great to hear. I would love to get started by asking you how you got into doing what you do. I have a lot of personal experience in relevant territories. I did a PhD program in clinical psychology. I have a lot of friends and family members who are psychotherapists, marriage and family therapists, things like that. The stereotypical pattern, of course, is that people get into these areas because of some past history, some childhood that they had experiences that relate to this, that sent them down this career path. Is that true for you? What’s your personal story? How did you come to do what you do now?
Anna Runkle's Childhood Trauma and Recovery Story
Anna: I had a difficult childhood. It was rougher than most. I grew up in a commune. The gist of what was going on there was a lot of drugs, drug dealing, alcoholism, crazy stuff going on with the grownups in front of the kids. There was a lot to overcome. When I started trying to get professional help, it wasn’t hitting the spot. I didn’t feel really understood. There were a lot of truisms that they were operating under about why a person who grew up in a difficult childhood acts the way they do. They would say stuff like, “You’re just trying to recreate your childhood.”
That never felt true. Especially then, still somewhat now today, although it thankfully is evolving, but what you did back then is you did talk therapy, talk about the trauma, talk about the trauma. I had a lot. It was so dramatic and interesting, I think, to therapists. I saw about 11 therapists over 17 years. I didn’t improve at all. I got worse. I just felt awful every time I left appointments. It was all there was. What else could you do? What else were you supposed to do?
I really judged myself. I thought that there was something unfixable about me, that I must be so much crazier than other people. Why do I take this so hard? Because other people seem to like therapy so much. It was a long time ago now. It was about 32 years ago. I was assaulted on the street. You carry childhood trauma, and you can compartmentalize it in a pretty good way. Sometimes something really bad happens, and you can’t. You just can’t stuff it back down anymore.
I would say that I had PTSD. I was very badly beaten unconscious by strangers, just random attack. I wasn’t able to function afterwards. The doctor was just like, “Well, your brain’s not bleeding, so go to a therapist.” The therapist just said, “Let’s talk about it every day.” Then I wasn’t getting better. I went back to the doctor, and he goes, “Take Xanax.” Everything that I was doing was probably the worst thing you could do for what was wrong.
Thankfully, right before I did something harmful for myself, this acquaintance showed me something. It was just a writing technique to express my fearful and resentful thoughts on paper. It was something that she was doing as part of her AA program, but it wasn’t what everybody in AA does. It was different. It seemed to attract people who were really hardcore, which I identified with, even though alcoholism wasn’t the issue. [chuckles] I would say now, the people who took to this were people who, like me, had complex trauma.
It was just a really helpful way to get the storm out on paper, get a little space, and to re-regulate. The word nervous system dysregulation, that didn’t even exist back when I was learning this stuff. I just knew that it just dramatically helped me. I popped out of having PTSD symptoms within two weeks of doing this technique every day. I’d follow it with meditation. Then after about a month, I wasn’t depressed anymore.
This was such a huge miracle. Everybody in my life could see the difference if they hadn’t already kicked me out of their life because I’d been so difficult when I was so dysregulated. People kept saying, “What are you doing? Are you doing something new for your skin? Did you lose weight?” What had happened was my nervous system came back. I wouldn’t learn those words or that understanding of what happened for 20 more years until that information became publicly available. I just knew it worked, and I set about showing it to everybody.
People were fascinated. They’re like, “Show me how to do that. Show me.” For 32 years, I’ve been showing people how I did it. The hardest part was you get re-regulated, and then you still have all the life problems that come to traumatize people. Growing up without any supervision, I didn’t know a lot of things about etiquette, manners, dating protocols. What should you bring to a dinner party? [laughs] How much should you talk when you’re sitting around talking to people? How much should you disclose?
All of these are like hard life lessons for people who grew up with trauma are really neglected. My parents were actually well brought up. They were well educated, but they were on drugs. They were not there for me. All those life lessons, along with my basic tools of how to get your nervous system re-regulated is what I started sharing people as Crappy Childhood Fairy. So many people were asking me. I had to make a website. Then I had to make some videos. Then the videos started going viral. Next thing you know, it became my whole life was just sharing Crappy Childhood Fairy. That’s how I got here.
Ari: I was right. There is some personal upbringing as far as stemming from the childhood that sent you down this career path, as is the case for, [laughs] I think, just about all of us who go down that career path.
Anna: The best ones. [laughs]
Ari: Yes, indeed. There’s a couple different ways we can go. There’s two things on my mind right now. One is to build out the conceptual framework for what you do to talk about nervous system dysregulation and your methodology or approach to that. There’s something also that you mentioned in your story there about the psychotherapy that you were doing and the talk therapy and how you felt like it was making you worse. I want to dig into both of those. You tell me which feels like the most natural way for this conversation to unfold.
Anna: Oh, yes. Whatever is top of mind for you. I’ll go [crosstalk]
Why Talk Therapy Can Make Trauma Symptoms Worse
Ari: Let’s go into the talk therapy bit, then. Maybe from there, we can segue into nervous system dysregulation and your approach and why it differs from talk therapy. This is an experience that sometimes happens with people. Now, the overall body of literature is very supportive. Speaking in broad brushstrokes, we can say that overall, the body of evidence speaks to benefits from psychotherapy approaches, including talk therapy approaches, but there is maybe a subset of people that gets worse from it.
There are certain conditions where a person might be made worse by engaging in particular kinds of talk therapy. There’s many different variables here, including the therapist. The particular style and approach of the therapist. Also, the biases and the personality elements of the therapist, because ultimately, we’re all human, and it’s two humans sitting across and talking to each other, and sometimes different dynamics emerge in that interaction between those two personalities.
There’s also growing awareness, and I would say maybe a growing movement even of people who are speaking more to the neuroscience of how talk therapy approaches can actually reinforce rather than heal those kinds of bad patterns, let’s say. How do you explain and conceptualize why talk therapy would have made you worse rather than better?
Anna: There’s a lot of layers of it. I agree with everything you just said, and I’m delighted that the field is really opening up to a wider consciousness of what this is. I’ll tell you, when I was going through this 30 years ago, it wasn’t there. They didn’t know. These were good people, well-educated, well-intentioned. They were kind to me. I had a trusting relationship with them. It’s just that this thing about talking about what happened, whether it was the recent trauma or childhood stuff, would always tend to make me just activate. That’s the word I now know.
These words weren’t there before, but I would get very charged up. My heart would start beating. I would have a hard time staying present. My hands would be shaking. I’d be trying to explain myself. Once I was in that dysregulated state, it was easy for me to feel frustrated, like, “You don’t understand.” Then they just would have these platitudes about it, like, “Well, of course your mom loved you.” In my case, she didn’t, actually. That is a trauma. It was real. They couldn’t believe it, I think.
There’s not being believed. There’s that level of trigger. When I say trigger, I mean something that starts up the dysregulation, that kicks it off. Everybody gets dysregulated sometimes, and virtually everyone re-regulates eventually. I just notice, and I have a lot of connection to people who had childhood trauma, it’s really, really common that we get dysregulated more than other people, worse than other people. We have trouble coming back from it. It really helps if you have language for what it is.
Talking about it, I would get so dysregulated; I would have to go sit in my car for 45 minutes afterwards, and I would be crying, start to have very dark thoughts. At the time, when I would say, “I don’t know if this is working, I feel terrible. I just seem to be getting worse,” they’d go, “Well, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. You’re processing a lot of stuff,” but this is the secret: I wasn’t processing anything, nothing. I could never remember what we talked about last week.
We now know when a person is dysregulated, they can’t process information. Your cognitive function is going at about, I don’t know, I’d say 30% for me, which also explains why I was a smart kid, but I was not good at math. My math class teacher would always be six days of homework ahead of me. I would get very dysregulated just sitting there, seeing everybody else understand what was going on and go, “Oh, why don’t I get it? What am I going to do?”
That feeling started expanding in my life and carrying into many things where I just felt like, “There’s something weird about me I can’t keep up.” One little dysregulating event can snowball into more, like, “I’m going to be very inappropriate now. If I talk, I’m going to come off as shrill, then everybody’s going to hate me. Then I’ll lose my job.” These experiences start compounding. What I really needed was something that would help me just come back out of dysregulation into re-regulation. As you may know, I wrote a whole book about it, [laughs] about how I did that and what I learned about it, and then therefore what I teach. If you can notice that–
Ari: For people listening who didn’t see the visual, you just flashed your book on the screen there.
Anna: Re-Regulated.
Ari: Just, yes, tell people the name of it and–
Anna: Set Your Life Free From Childhood PTSD and the Trauma-Driven Behaviors That Keep You Stuck.
Ari: That’s a great name, by the way, Re-Regulated.
Anna: Thank you. It’s the behaviors. [laughs]
Ari: Yes. In the current culture and trending term of nervous system dysregulation, how that’s become a common way of speaking, I think that’s a great title for a book.
Anna: Yes, thank you. It’s a manifesto of what I’ve been working on all these years and what I’ve been sharing with people. It’s delightful to me that I’m not this lone voice anymore saying this weird thing that nobody’s ever heard. It’s really catching on. I hear people talking my language. I think many people see it a little differently. I see it a little differently. Sometimes people talk about the nervous system like a person or something. I don’t see it that way. I’m very straightforward, stoic about it. I’m just like, “It’s part of your body. It’s there to serve you. It doesn’t work very well.”
What Is Nervous System Dysregulation?
Ari: Let’s get into that. What exactly is nervous system dysregulation from your perspective? Then clarify maybe any distinctions about how your way of conceptualizing it differs from other ways that are maybe currently popular.
Anna: Yes. It has to be emphasized that this is my perspective because I’m not a brain scientist. I’m not a therapist. I read books, and I experience it. I talk to other people all day long who are experiencing it. Anecdotally, I can watch this massive longitudinal study of what they do that causes them to get better and what they do or don’t do that causes them to stay stuck. I can just tell you how this has informed me over the years.
Your nervous system is this incredible system. I’ve looked at this illustration of it before, like an illustrated diagram of the shape of the body with the nervous system in it. There’s all these lines. There’s the spine. There’s the brain. There’s all these nodes on it. It’ll often be animated with light traveling through it. I love that. When you look at it and you squint your eyes, it looks like an angel. It looks like there’s an angel inside your body.
I like to think of it that way. That there’s a part of me that just knows what to do. It knows how to get myself out of danger when I’m slipping. It knows how to connect with people. It can sense what the mood is in the room, but only if it’s regulated. The other thing our nervous system does for us, the other category of things, is physiologically, it’s running your immune system, your endocrine system. It’s telling you when to go into puberty and when to go into menopause. All of that is coming from the nervous system, knowing what to do.
It knows what time of day it is. It knows the season. It has a sense. It has a sixth sense for if something’s wrong here, something’s not right, I’m very uneasy. It’s this beautiful part of ourselves that knows what to do. Isn’t that always what we needed? It’s in us, and it’s real. It gets dysregulated in everyone sometimes. Everyone knows that feeling where you just get overwhelmed and flustered.
All of a sudden, you can’t find your keys, and suddenly everything falls on the ground, and you have to pick it up, and you’re embarrassed, and then your hair’s in your face, and it’s just like, “Ugh.” That’s dysregulation. Or a newborn baby who can’t be consoled is turning red and rigid and, “Waaahhh.” That’s dysregulation. A baby gets to dysregulate when it’s held and fed on skin, and nervous systems talk to each other. That’s co-regulation.
If you didn’t have enough of that, you may have been affected developmentally. That’s thing one. It could have changed the way everything developed. We don’t have a way of actually measuring that precisely. I would say, given that my mom would run away from the family for a month at a time starting when I was a newborn, that probably affected my development. The way that I feel different than everybody or the way that I feel like I react to things too strongly, maybe it’s from that. That would be reasonable.
Ari: Reasonable. Agreed.
Anna: Reasonable. I never put too strong a thing on it, though. I don’t want to use it like a horoscope, like, “Therefore I have to be this way.” I hold it all lightly because a lot of change is possible, and you don’t really know until you undertake a willingness to change. There are other layers, and one of them is cultural. My parents being drunk, I just didn’t feel like I could invite a lot of people home.
The only people I felt safe with also came from really troubled families. The people who I felt attracted to for the early part of my life often had drug and alcohol problems themselves. That’s that mysterious thing. That’s where I felt affinity. You can’t really fix that with your mind and go, “Oh.” You can tell yourself you’re going to change everything, but who you’re attracted to is very deep. You don’t cognitively change that. It eventually changed, thank goodness, but that one can be very hard to get at.
Then some of it is just cultural, behavioral. How to act in certain situations. My family, if somebody was upset, they just started yelling and breaking dishes. I hated that, but I hadn’t really had modeled for me a lot of healthy ways of saying, “I’m so angry about something; we need to talk,” or just normal conversations when you’re in distress. I had to learn by trial and error and by actually really trying. That’s not something I got in therapy. I went to the 12-step program for families of alcoholics. That’s a lot where I got socialized.
Probably most of it was from television. Just watching TV shows about nice families and modeling that, how they spoke gently or expressed their feelings. That’s not terrible. It’s not ideal, but it’s not terrible. I’m grateful for it. [chuckles] I put some TV shows in the acknowledgments in my book. [laughs] Mister Rogers. I figured things out, but a lot of things I had to figure out the hard way. Eventually, I got the courage to ask for mentorship on how to do that.
Trauma-Driven Behaviors: How Childhood Patterns Persist
I learned that not only do I have an organic problem with dysregulation, but I get dysregulated again when I do things– I call them trauma-driven behaviors. They’re just really common for those of us who had a rough childhood to be– well, certainly substances, having a lot of conflict with people, seeing things in a very black-and-white way, underselling myself. Always having jobs that pay a lot less than they should. Patterns like that. Getting together with people or falling in love with people who are unavailable. Those are really common patterns.
It was really a relief when I found out what that was, but I still had to change it. There was not a thing my past was going to do for me. Talking about the past lost its usefulness very early in my process. It didn’t have any information for me except for, “Well, that makes sense why things are hard for me.” It was really being honest with myself and being around other people who were being honest with themselves and willing to help me see things that I was able to gradually learn how to be a proper person. There’s really not a better word for it.
Of course, I was human, but I was so poorly socialized for how to deal with things that are hard. That’s what Crappy Childhood Fairy became in my books and my YouTube channel. I’ve got a million subscribers. I teach a lot of– you could call it etiquette, like how do you stand up for yourself when somebody does this? What if somebody doesn’t like you? How can you tell if somebody is just being manipulative? All of that stuff goes right over your head when you were raised in a barn, so to speak, and you didn’t have anyone helping you with that.
How Nervous System Regulation Improves Self-Awareness
Dysregulation is the foundation. This has been my real honest experience, once I learned how to re-regulate, and I didn’t know that dysregulation was the problem, and I didn’t know there was a word for the good feeling I got when I had tools that worked for me finally, but once you do that, you can become self-aware. You can go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, they just said something that really got a rise out of me. What was that?”
That sort of self-awareness was submerged before. It would get very noisy in here, and I’d just go, “Oh, God, I’m a loser. I can’t do this.” I would go, “Okay, I noticed something. I could learn to express myself.” I was, for the first time in my life, on a level playing field. Within a year, I got into a really hard grad school to go to. I started getting promoted, finally, as things started happening for me. I also had a lot of personality that I hadn’t really known before, good sides and bad sides, things that I had to suppress.
I feel like sometimes early healing from trauma, it’s a little bit like you have to go to this accelerated reprogramming like you would have had when you were 2 and 13 and 19, and all of these stages of development come out again. When I first learned how to set a boundary, it was like a toddler. Yay. [laughs] Then like a 13-year-old, “I can’t believe you won’t even listen to me.” [laughs] Then it’s accelerated, thank goodness. I could start to be like an adult setting boundaries and do it gracefully. What a pleasure that is. What an incredible superpower it is. It’s really nice.
Ari: How do you differentiate your methodology, your approach to dealing with trauma? Would you conceptualize it as healing trauma or re-regulating the nervous system? I’m curious about that as well. To what degree do you conceptualize the process as being about healing “the trauma” that someone experienced? How do you differentiate your methodology and approach from, let’s say, typical talk therapy, psychotherapy approaches?
Anna: Well, it’s not really the same at all. I think it’s something that anybody can do all day long as needed, whether or not they have access to professional help, which would be different. In professional help, there would be a lot more looking at the past, what happened. There would be things like diagnosis and things like a treatment plan. This is not that. These are practical tools that you can use as needed.
Daily Practices to Re-Regulate Your Nervous System
I recommend, everyday start your day with the daily practice. Do it again before dinner. Like hygiene, a way to discharge just the buildup of these anxious, angry thoughts and feelings that are very difficult to process. Scientifically, that’s true. Traumatized people don’t process well, meaning convert an experience from a charged, loaded-with-adrenaline and cortisol memory to a memory. Just a plain memory that you can go, “Yes, I remember that happened,” but your heart doesn’t start pounding every time you think of it. We’re just doing practical things.
I’d say half my students are also in therapy or still pretty into it, even if they’re not doing it right now. Half of them are people like me who weren’t getting help there. 15% of my audience are therapists and students. They come because I’m teaching something a little different than they got in school or that they’ve learned before. It doesn’t conflict. It’s something different. It’s something a little bit more in your hands.
It supports the idea that I heal my trauma. That’s a really important idea to me. It’s not doled out to me by somebody who knows how to do that. They’re like an advisor. They can help you. They can direct your attention. Some of them are going to have information that’s incredibly helpful to me. Some are not. The hard thing is when you’re in a crisis is it’s really hard to navigate all those possibilities.
I use a couple criteria for people who ask. I just think when you’re in the middle of a trauma storm, however you get help, it needs to help you feel better. That old idea that I was given that, “Well, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.” Frankly, I would not be alive today if I hadn’t run away from that. It had to feel better or I wouldn’t have been able to take it. Or that it’s going to take a very long time. A lot of things don’t take a very long time. Some do, some don’t.
Feeling better can happen pretty quickly is my experience, and what I’d say, thousands of my students have experienced. If they didn’t experience it, they moved on, and they went to some other thing. I’m not trying to compete with therapy necessarily. It’s not something I think I’d be likely to go back to. A, a lot of my problems are better now. Also, I no longer feel that, for me, trauma is what happened. You can define it different ways, but this is how I think of it. Trauma is what happened and you can’t do anything about it. You can’t heal it or anything.
Post-Traumatic Growth: Why Some People Recover and Others Stay Stuck
The people who hurt me, they definitely did it and it’s their fault, but I can’t do anything about them either. Even people who do nice things for me, I can’t make them change. What I can change is how this is rolling through my life in present time. I’m very focused on what’s happening with me right now. That’s why I focus on the trauma-driven behaviors. When I listen to the wide variety of people on the internet talking about trauma, I’m always marveling.
How would anybody get so much value out of talking about the past? I agree. We got to tell somebody. There needs to be a time for it to tell the truth, to get some understanding and relatedness. Maybe there’s something scientific you can learn if you share that with somebody who knows things. In terms of changing your life, I feel like that’s all present time and right here. That’s my angle.
Ari: The trauma in your model is not something to heal so much as it is something to accept. Would you say that’s accurate?
Anna: I guess you don’t really have a choice but to accept it because there it is. Although, I will say my perspective on my own traumas– I don’t know. I don’t want to compare it to everybody’s. On the scale of things that people experience, it wasn’t the worst thing, but it was fairly bad for somebody who lives in a First World country. I had a lot of resilience factors like being sociable and really good at finding teachers and moms in the neighborhood who would feed me and take me in when everything got rough.
When I was a kid, they didn’t report you to anybody. People just quietly dealt with it. My elementary school even let me bring my baby sister to school with me every day because they knew what was going on at home. They just let me bring her. I don’t think you’d be allowed to do that anymore. These were the early ’70s in California. It was a lot freer then. It could just be sensible. That helped us a lot. I don’t think my parents ever even knew we did that. I don’t think they knew where she was. It was pretty chaotic.
That level of trauma is different. Everybody’s trauma is a little bit different. The thing that I can address for people, wherever it came from, because a lot of my students, maybe it wasn’t directly the trauma I’m talking about. It would have been more like bullying at school, or it would have been a recent marriage that was abusive, or it would have been just a lifelong feeling of being so different that they couldn’t be themselves.
There’s different ways that people come at my work. I don’t require that people have a certain kind of trauma. I just say, “Well, if you resonate with what I’m saying about what this feels like to have this problem of dysregulation, you’re in the right place. I have some tools you might find helpful.” That’s what it is. I’m not the person to go to for trying to really go deep into the past about that. I probably will never be that person, just because I didn’t find it helpful. Yes.
Ari: The way I see trauma, there are two trajectories that someone can go down after experiencing a trauma. One of them is to be debilitated to one degree or another by the trauma, to be impaired in life by that trauma. Another one is post-traumatic growth. Some of the mentally strongest, toughest, most resilient people are people who were dealt a lot of adversity, sometimes extreme adversity in life, maybe in childhood as well, and we’re able somehow to transform that.
Of course, maybe that’s a small portion of people. Also, there’s this huge territory of varying degrees of trauma. It’s very easy for an innocent child to experience trauma that is debilitating. It’s very hard to discern why someone would grow stronger versus why someone would be debilitated by a particular kind of trauma. Do you have any insights into what are some of those factors that determine whether someone is likely to experience post-traumatic growth or to be impaired by that trauma?
Anna: I do have insights. My 25 years sitting in 12-step meetings virtually every night, the longitudinal study I refer to, I paid very close attention to who gets better and who doesn’t. I’d say a majority of people in 12-step programs are traumatized people. For what it’s worth, there’s a variety there too, but I noticed that people who really identified with the wound and the problem as their main thing didn’t tend to get better.
People who moved on to “What can I do about this? What are the things that I’m doing that keep causing the thing to come back?” Literally, the trauma-driven behaviors re-traumatize you; they reactivate the whole thing. I dithered around for decades of my life, not getting better, with all that retrospective, and then finally working on things. What I loved about the 12-step program is the 12 steps are like a plan. “Okay, here’s what you do. Here’s how you take stock of the stuff that you’d like to fix about your life. Here’s how you actually fix it. Here’s how you apologize for your mistakes.”
This was stuff I had never heard before, and it was gold. It helped me so much. I made a lot of progress there. The only limitation was I was there in a place for families of alcoholics, which I definitely qualified for. Most of my family has died of alcoholism or drugs, but I always knew that’s not the thing. It affected me, to be sure, but there’s this thing in me. I don’t have the drinking and the drug compulsion, but something was very wrong with me.
Even when all the alcoholics and addicts died, I still had that. It was still progressing. What was that?
Complex PTSD (CPTSD) and Understanding Dysregulation
That’s when I heard the term complex PTSD. I think diagnosis and labeling can go too far. There’s different problems with all of that. I had never had a word for what was quirky about me. I read it in The Body Keeps the Score when that first came out. I read the phrase, the name complex PTSD, and the phenomenon of dysregulation, and they were life-changing for me because I had never had a name for it. I literally thought I was just a very damaged, dysfunctional person who, no matter how hard she kept trying, just kept making the same mistakes over and over again.
Once I had words for it and I had a framework of where that came from, I rocketed forward. I had previous breakthroughs when I learned how to re-regulate, even though I didn’t know that’s what it was. Finding out the name for it is when I plugged in all the stuff I had been teaching people as a 12-step sponsor and applying to my own life for 20 years. Then I plugged it in: “Oh, it’s trauma. That is the bull in the China shop in me that’s different from everybody else in the room. That’s what it is.” It just clicked; it fits so neatly.
I started talking about it, and so many people then wanted my experience about it that I said, “If you want to talk about it, I can’t talk about it in meetings. It’s an outside issue. Come to my house.” Then people came over, and I couldn’t even fit them all. Then everybody wanted to talk about their trauma because everybody had been programmed: if you get together in a group that’s about trauma, then you talk about it.
I was the weirdo who came in and said, “In this group, we’re not going to talk about trauma. We’re just going to talk about science, what we do, techniques, but we’re not going to go tell our stories here.” That required a level of organization; that required that I create a thing called Crappy Childhood Fairy to work that. There were a couple of factors that I knew were helpful. I remembered going to 12-step meetings where I used to advise newcomers too. I’d go, “Look for a critical mass of people.”
A good meeting is one where a lot of people have done the 12 steps enough that they’re working with others. When they say, “Is anybody in the room willing to sponsor,” there should be some hands going up. If a meeting has nobody, that’s a bad sign. It’s going to be a lot of people still talking about what happened. There’s a phase where everybody needs to do that, but if it’s all that, there’s nobody to show you the path out. Those are some important things.
I had a lot of time in those meetings to figure out my way and to really apply myself. Then I had a few life, hard, just trauma storms, a bunch of hard stuff happening at once that required that I go deeper. Things would get better. I’d go, “Oh, I’m fine, I’m basically fine. I don’t really need to do all this crap anymore. [laughs] I’m not going to meditate; what a waste of time.”
Then I’d get my experience with that and just be like, “Well, I really need to meditate. I actually do need to do this every day. I change when I don’t.” Getting that experience is also really valuable, and the only way you get it is if you quit and just test your hypothesis that you’re all great now.
Should You Reframe Childhood Trauma as a Gift?
Ari: Do you think it’s important that someone reframes the trauma that they experienced early in life, in their mind? That they form a different relationship with that trauma and start to see it maybe not as something that has permanently impaired them or harmed them, but as something that maybe offered them a gift of some kind? Is that something that in your paradigm and in your approach you see as important or not so important?
Anna: I think it’s a byproduct, but not necessarily something that one person should tell another person they have to do. It’ll come in its own due time. The techniques that I do, of the daily practice, it’s a radical ownership of my behavior today. Doing that naturally leads me to reframe things. It naturally starts to change my perspective on what happened. I just wouldn’t call things necessarily a gift. It’s always troubled me.
I’ve had things happen to me when I was a kid and been asked, “But don’t you think, in a way, that was really for your growth?” I’m like, “No, I don’t think it was. I think it was tragic.” People have free will, and they did that. Luckily, I’ve been able to recover from it. I don’t think it was– it’s never the plan. It’s not the plan. In my family, my brother died of all these troubles. I have another sibling who still is not really on their feet, and one who’s just perfect. His question is: “Was it really so bad?” Different siblings are different.
The change in perspective came as a result more of having a lot less trouble in my life and seeing my own potential to change things. When I’m able to change my problems, it’s so empowering. I always tell people, “Oh, is it your fault? Awesome.” If you can see your part in a problem, you just got given a key that can change what is happening as a result. It might not be all our fault, but if we can find the role we play, we actually can change that.
We can change the role we play, whereas other people– boy, I’ve tried to change a lot of people, and they don’t change unless that’s something they are doing. I can’t really manipulate somebody into changing. It really belongs here. That changes my perspective. The whole thing of reframing, for me as a person, I really don’t like it when people try to do that to me. It’s like cognitive imperialism. “Oh, I think I know what you should be thinking.” It’s like, “No, you don’t.”
It’s easy to think that about somebody else, but I would say I hold sacred, and I teach people this a lot, that we are sovereign over our own healing, unless we’re incapacitated and unable to make decisions for ourselves because of grave mental illness or a physical, medical problem. It’s we who get to decide if something helps us or not. A lot of the bad paths I’ve gone down were where I distrusted that. I thought I couldn’t trust myself, and I had a bad feeling about something.
I’ve had medical mistakes made to my body that I didn’t want that to– I was already saying, “No, I don’t want to go in that direction,” but I didn’t say it very strongly. Now I know I could have just gotten up out of the hospital bed and said no. I just could have. I feel more that way now. When people come to my programs, I just always tell them, “If you just think I’m wrong and you hate what I’m saying, just ignore it, really. If something I say makes you cringe, just discard it, because even though it might be my favorite thing in the world, nobody should do that.”
That’s what a cult does. They groom you to accept something that doesn’t sound right. A lot of what we lose in the traumatic experiences is trusting our perception. To get that back is a little bit messy sometimes, and we don’t always know what we’re doing, but we have to start to have a safe way to experience our choices and then the consequences of the choices and to be able to rapidly course correct. I think that’s the whole name of the game, rapid course correction, but we have to experience it.
The woman who showed me these techniques, when I had something just really– My first husband left when I had two small kids. It appeared to be the greatest tragedy of my life, and she said, “Yay.” I was like, “How could you say that?” She goes, “Because now you get to face what got you into this marriage.” Now you get to really face it. The pain is what you’re going to face. Without the pain, you don’t face it. You can just keep papering it over and justifying it and keeping up your look good.
I paid a lot of prices for living that way. When the pain just got out, and everybody knew that I’d been left and I was a mom and everything was terrible, my ego was deflated, and I was dealing with reality once again. I had always been in that reality of it not being a good marriage, but now I was forced to be with that, and that was where I was able to grow.
In that sense, yes, post-traumatic growth, but you can’t do that without honesty. I would say of the different therapists I saw, the ones who were most helpful were the ones who would be honest and who had enough wisdom to know what was going on. What wasn’t helpful was them trying to reframe me, or them trying to force my experience into a modality. A modality is a modality, but a person’s experience is something you have to attend to and actually hear and hold a little bit of respect for, even if you don’t get it yet, I think. That wasn’t very helpful.
Then it’s not helpful when people say, “Well, we all have trauma.” I’m like, actually, you don’t, not like what I’m talking about. Not all trauma actually will damage your nervous system and cause you to have an elevated risk of autoimmune diseases and cancer and diabetes and reproductive disorders. We’re talking about a certain thing; we just have one word for all the scales of it. That happens sometimes when I talk to people, where they assume they understand what I’m saying.
I think that’s one reason why we traumatized folks tend to gravitate together for better and worse. That used to be all I ever dated. [chuckles] My husband is a non-traumatized person, not in any big way, and that ends up being very helpful. I have a reference. He doesn’t go down that rabbit hole, and he doesn’t create drama in the family for us, and so I was able to pretty quickly pull myself together in the presence of somebody who was grounded like that.
I used to love people who had been through equally hard stuff, and I didn’t know that’s who I was choosing, but there’s an understanding that we have of each other. It’s like, oh, I know. Sometimes you just have to be completely full of drama and unreasonable and emotionally dysregulated and yelling things in public and making a scene. Yes, it’s just how we roll. Learning how to change that in myself gave me a choice of who to hang out with, basically, and opened up a lot more social avenues.
Ari: What is the core of your methodology? I know you’ve mentioned, interestingly, there’s a focus on behavior and etiquette and teaching people proper ways of, I think, to use your words, something along the lines of behaving like a proper human.
Anna: Yes.
Ari: How do you conceptualize what is at the core of what you are trying to do? Is it about re-regulating the nervous system? If so, what exactly does that mean?
Anna: Can any of us really say exactly what it means? I don’t know. I think everybody talks a bit fast and loose about what it is. It’s definitely something, but we don’t really have a little thing that you can actually– You can do a brain scan, but it still doesn’t tell you everything. Healing means that you can function. It means that you can have close relationships with people, that you experience hard moments as a situation in which you have choices about how you want to respond. It allows you to liberate your creativity and your gifts so that you can use them and become really actualized as a person to become fully yourself.
I’ve experienced this, and I’ve seen it in a lot of people. I believe people have something to bring to the world. That is all lost. That’s one of the great casualties of trauma, and most people who had childhood trauma probably never get that back. I believe we’re here to bring something. I’m very spiritual. I didn’t start out that way, but my experience having such dramatic healing made me a believer.
I think every person is meant to bring something that’s uniquely theirs into the mix that people bring, and it’s supposed to be different. Everybody brings something different. It takes all kinds. When people are traumatized, they don’t have access to that. If you were supposed to be a painter, and you grow up in such poverty that you never have paint, that’s going to be hard to develop.
Part of healing is just to set yourself up in a level of stability that you can find out, where’s my thing? I teach people a lot about how to find that. I think the point of healing; it’s not just to not be depressed or making a scene in the restaurant. It’s to become fully yourself and bring the gifts. For me, it’s doing what I’m doing right now. I had signs of that very early in my life that that was how I was made.
I would always play the teacher. I would set up little schools out in any cardboard box we could find. It’s the school, and I’m the teacher, and I’ll teach everybody. I was also really interested in spirituality as a kid. Even though my parents were atheists and scoffed at it, I would put on my little nylon suit every Sunday. We were really poor. I had just one outfit. I would walk myself to church, and I would go, starting when I was 11. I look back and I go, that’s really unusual. I’m not the only person who did that, but it’s just a sign of what you’re made of.
The stories that I loved were things like Heidi, where– Do you know the story of Heidi, where she–
Ari: No.
Anna: Johanna Spyri wrote it, I think. She’s a little girl who is orphaned, and she goes to live with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps. Her grandfather is a sour old bastard, and he doesn’t love anything or anybody. He’s bitter because his wife died or something. She’s just so optimistic. They milk the goats, and they make cheese, and they drink fresh milk. She runs around in the grass. She’s just so full of sunshine and wonder that he recovers. Of course, from the presence of a happy little child.
Ari: I should read it because I actually just took my kids to the Swiss Alps. On one of our hikes deep into the mountains there, we met a young Swiss girl who lives in this amazing place in the forest surrounded by giant waterfalls and with cows and goats. She lives in this house from the 1800s, and she’s a cheese maker.
Anna: Cheese maker, yes. I learned Swiss cheese is 138 different things there, yes.
Ari: Yes, we had a beautiful day with her, so maybe my daughter would like that story. I should [crosstalk]–
Anna: Yes, it’s a beautiful story, and it’s an archetype, and it’s my archetype and that was it. You could see why I fantasized it as about– when I was a kid with my parents and all their troubles, very violent, and if only I could heal them. It was there. It’d be easy to dismiss that and go, “Oh, it’s just obviously a psychological cope,” but no, it was my gift shining through very early.
When we start healing, we can start to make space for that and practice it. If you can stay regulated, you can experiment. Doing what I do, being a YouTuber and getting these thousands of comments every day, some of them really unkind. Somebody today just said, “Please stop with the AI, thank you.” [laughs] It was so mean, and I was like [gasps]. Sometimes I say stuff back. You’re not really supposed to do that—
Coaching vs. Psychotherapy: Anna Runkle's Legal Dispute
Ari: Someone was accusing your video of being AI-
Anna: Of being AI, yes.
Ari: -instead of you or a fake version of you?
Anna: Yes, and the fact that they said please and thank you just really pissed me off. Do you think you’re being nice or something, just attacking me like that? I get that sometimes. The State of California Board of Psychology has actively tried to stop me doing what I’m doing. They say I’m practicing psychology without a license, and I’ve been forced to sue them in federal court to continue having my constitutional right to teach my experience. I can do this.
Ari: What’s your response to that? How do you clarify your methodology versus psychotherapy?
Anna: Well, there is no law exactly that tells you this. That’s why their shutting me down was inappropriate and illegal and unconstitutional. What I’ve always done is I follow guidelines about therapy is about processing– First of all, you deal with people who are gravely mentally ill. You know what to do with that. I don’t. I will tell you, “You need to go talk to a therapist.”
Also, we don’t talk about the past, so we’re not processing emotions. I’m not using a modality. I don’t offer treatment or treatment plans. I certainly don’t prescribe anything. Instead, I just say, “So, here’s my experience, and here’s a thing that you can write. You can write this every day, and now we’re going to do a simple meditation.” There are a handful of people out there who feel really threatened by that, maybe because the following is so big.
I honestly think if people knew what we did, they would calm down. I don’t think they knew, but I got put through quite a witch hunt over it. Where things stand, I wasn’t allowed to defend myself, and they said I wasn’t allowed to coach for money. I can coach for free, tellingly, but I’m not allowed to coach for money. I can teach. I can do YouTube. I have books out. I can do all these things, but I’m suing them because what they’re trying to do is make coaching illegal, and that’s not right. People have a right to choose the person they would like to help them.
The way the law is set up, both in the United States and specifically in California, there’s a precedent that money is not really the thing that makes something psychology; it’s practice. But we have these very loose words called psychological principles, and they say, if you’re using psychological principles, and so I drilled down, I’m like, what is that? Now, mind you, in the three years that this has been going on, they would never tell me what exactly I’m doing that bothers them. Is there something they would like me to change? They just said stop, and so that’s not fair. That violated my right to due process as well.
Psychological principles are defined as any one person helping another that involves discussion of relationships, motivation, goals, or emotions, which are basically what we all talk about all the time in our friendships, in our romantic relationships, with a 12-step sponsor, with a clergy person, with a basketball coach. This is what life is made of, and so to me, this is a very important battle to protect the human right to help other people in the way that we would like to.
I haven’t broken any laws. I haven’t violated any ethics codes or anything. I’ve always been prudent and careful about that. I think if I had to guess what their case is about is they’re worried about quality control online. The internet and all its proliferation of whatever is scary for them, but I would just point out that that’s also true if you go into the office with somebody face-to-face. That you don’t really know exactly what’s going on and things could be happening, and that actually shutting people down isn’t going to solve anything. Instead, maybe they want to clarify something.
Recently, in a case called Chiles v. Salazar, licensed clinicians got their right to– it was acknowledged that what they say behind closed doors is their business. The government can’t tell them things that they must say or can’t say. Because they have that, I expect– I mean the Board doesn’t actually have purview over me, so I will win too. I’m expected to win, but it’s going to take years, and it’s a big burden on my life. It’s a surprising turn of events when everything was just so great, happy, easy, successful.
Signs and Symptoms of Nervous System Dysregulation
Ari: How do you help people achieve re-regulation? What is at the core of your approach?
Anna: Well, I’m always careful to say that I don’t have like a Geiger counter that tells you whether you’re dysregulated. You’re going to have to notice how you feel. This is an internal feeling. In most aspects of dysregulation, you can’t even feel. When you’re dysregulated, stuff changes, like the blood flow in your capillaries, the secretion of hormones. Is this hormone balanced with that one? You can’t feel that. You might feel the downstream consequences in 10 years when diabetes shows up, but you can’t feel most of it.
The symptoms you can feel are things like feeling flustered, discombobulated, spaced out, can’t feel your hands, all of a sudden. There are common signs, and we all have a different combination. Then there’s emotional dysregulation, and that’s the one that other people, including therapists who don’t have what we have, often think that constitutes all of dysregulation.
I often get introduced as somebody who’s an expert on emotional dysregulation and that that’s what this book is about. I’d say that’s about an eighth of the pie. The emotional dysregulation is the one that hurts all your relationships, though, so it’s very important. That’s the one they see because you hurt them with it. They’re not hurt when your capillaries are tight. Nobody notices that, but it’s the emotional dysregulation is a big deal.
I just have practical tools of what do you do when you feel it coming on. Everything depends on being able to notice it’s happening. I’m getting a feeling of like, “This is urgent. I have to express my anger right now. I must have resolution on this right now.” I’m just like, “Oh, whenever you get that urgent feeling, if you notice your vital signs are racing, pause.” You pause, and you can say helpful things.
If I were to maybe be– an argument was starting between my husband and me, and I felt like I was starting to lose my grip on calm communication, and I was escalating, and my voice was getting sharp and loud, he actually has my permission to call it as well, and to just say, “Hey, you sound like you’re getting dysregulated,” but I’ll say, “You know what? I’m getting really dysregulated. Could I have 10 minutes?” Then I go use tools.
How to Calm Nervous System Dysregulation in the Moment
There’s very simple things you can do about dysregulation on the spot, like move your body, wash your hands, take a shower, jump up and down. I have a little self-EMDR thing I do, making a little infinity thing with my eyes while I think about things. Some things, it’s so urgent that you feel like you can’t stop, I just have to go forward, but you can teach yourself not to do that anymore.
That trauma reaction is often you either want to fight with the person, you want to– it’s fight, flight, freeze. You want to grab the keys and drive away and not say when you’re coming back and all that stuff. I also had to learn, and I teach, things that you say, “I’ll be back. Can I have a 10-minute break? I’ll be back. I’ll meet you right here, okay?” If you do that, then you’re not triggering the other person’s sense of injustice or their abandonment wound, and everything can go so much better. In fact, they might do some calming while you’re off using your tools.
I take full responsibility for my dysregulation. I was operating under a very bad understanding for many years that when I had that feeling going on, the other person caused it, and therefore, they had to fix it in me. I’d basically, metaphorically speaking, be shaking them by the shoulders, being like, “Come on, say the thing that’s going to make me feel better.”
Really, when you’re dysregulated, there’s nothing anybody can say. Kindness, gentleness, not peppering you with demands or questions, it can help, but it’s got to come from within. That radical ownership of my job to re-regulate has helped me tremendously. It turns out I have a lot more flexibility to deal with life– That’s what keeps life small is when you think you can’t, and you just have to avoid parties, and avoid people who drink, or avoid people who are the neighbors, whatever it is, avoid, avoid, so that no dysregulation happens. As you start to learn, if I get dysregulated, I know what to do, the walls of your life can start opening up.
Ari: This is interesting because I feel like the way most people are conceptualizing this territory, it’s about healing something; healing something psychological, healing something physiological. It sounds to me like there’s an element of that in what you’re doing. You correct me if I say anything wrong.
Anna: Yes.
Ari: The way that I’m hearing you talk is almost like, yes, there’s an acceptance of what’s going on. Not only an acceptance of the past, but an acceptance of what’s going on psychologically, an acceptance of what’s going on physiologically, an acceptance of what this past experience, this trauma, how it’s shaped you. It’s like, okay, now let’s accept all of that. Let’s accept who you are, and now let’s be solution-oriented of how we can take positive action to make life better.
Anna: Yes. I guess I never use the word acceptance because it just sounds too long term to me. This stuff is very fluid. The understanding of this happened, and therefore, I’m this way, that’s– one of my little key phrases is I say, one of the worst words in your vocabulary is because. A lot of people have married some ideas about, “Well, I can never handle travel because my mom always made trips so stressful,” or something.
It’s like, well, when you use these techniques, the daily practices about naming and releasing all the fearful, resentful thoughts, that would be a fearful and resentful thought or feeling. It’s not that it didn’t happen, but it’s causing a very strong kind of calcification of an experience there that can start to dissolve. I call it WD-40; just like dissolve a little bit, see what moves.
If only everything moved on command; it doesn’t. Some does. Some takes a while. Well, I call trauma wounds, it’s something like– some of them are like an amputation. You’re not going to get another limb, but you can get a prosthesis. Some of them are like a scrape, and you’re going to grow skin again, and it’ll be done, and you’ll be all right. Some things can heal quickly, and it’s a lot quicker than most people think.
When I meet stuck people, stuck people often have this thing going on where they just have almost a religious belief in the cause and effect between their troubles now and what happened because it’s psychology. It starts that way, but it’s fluid. It doesn’t have to be always that way. It can soften, it can recede, or it can be something that only occasionally happens. That’s a good– that is healing. That’s good, and especially if you start to notice.
Trauma Triggers in Real Life: Anna's Panic Attack
I had a trigger come up over the summer that I didn’t know that I still had. The brakes went out on a mountain road with my son driving, and he capably handled the situation, but, oh, it was– I have so much wreckage about being in a car with drunk parents driving, and a car that was totally unreliable. I was having a panic attack. I’m like, “I got to pull over. I can’t handle this.”
Ari: Were you going downhill? How did you [crosstalk]–
Anna: Yes, we had just gone over a 10,000-foot [crosstalk]–
Ari: I’m asking out of curiosity because I’ve had the experience one time while driving in Costa Rica in the rain on a dirt road. A road that had not been repaired properly. My car didn’t fail, but the road was–
Anna: Terrible roads there, I remember.
Ari: Yes, the short version of it is that the people who own this property, friends of mine, had hired some– out of the goodness of their heart, they didn’t want to hire the big guy, the normal company that does all the repairs. They hired the little guy to try to help out the little guy. The person used all the wrong material on the road, so the road basically turned into a mud slide in the rain, the first rain of the season.
Anna: That’s literally my worst nightmare, yes.
Ari: I was the lucky person who went down the road first, and it was a steep hill that basically was just a mud slick. I’ve had the experience of driving downhill where the brakes are totally non-functional, and I can just feel the car drifting. I ended up having to turn the car into a ditch. The car nearly flipped with my kids in it. It was pretty scary, but fortunately-
Anna: Oh, yes, I feel for you. That’s a legit trauma.
Ari: -no one was hurt. I’m listening to you tell this story. I’m picturing myself on a mountain with the brakes of my car not working. I’m like, how do you navigate that? Do you crash into the wall like I did?
Anna: Ours wasn’t as bad. They had not bled the brakes after a brake job, it turned out. When the car was hot from going up the pass, when we went back down the other side, they were squishing down to the floor. My son was able to slow us down to about a crawl and use the hand brake to get us down. That’s how he did it. He’s very capable. In a zombie apocalypse, it’s him I want driving my armored van. He’s good, but my trigger just went off to the sky, and I couldn’t come back down. I was begging, “Can we just stop the car?”
I was in this dilemma because with my kids, I try to have some limit on how much I tell them about how bad it was. I give them a clue and maybe as they get older, I can tell them a little more. Part of me healing from trauma is not being all about that story, and not always trotting out the sad stories and, “Hey, give me a break because I’m just really damaged.” I’m not trying to hide it or anything. It’s also just not appropriate to trouble your kids with these horror stories about creepy relatives and everything. They know vaguely, and they prefer not to know, kind of like we have other taboos with kids. It’s sort of a taboo.
I was trying not to freak out in front of him, and he got very annoyed with me. I just said, “Oh, look, a stream. You want to do some fly fishing over there?” We pulled over and he did, he was fishing. I spent an hour writing my daily practice and just languaging it out, putting it in words, naming it. You don’t have to fix it when you write it. It’s got a prayer at the end, or for people who aren’t spiritual, you can release it.
In my case, I’m like, “God, please remove these fears and resentments.” It’s so old, and it was ruining one of the best trips I’ve ever taken. We had such a good time, but I was ruining the day with my panic attacks and my inability to pull it together, and it scared him to see me not able to pull myself together. That was like, wow, I still have a trigger there.
The beauty of getting all triggered is you have a chance. When you’ve got a practice that works, you have the opportunity then to face it and be rid of it or a lot rid of it. Sometimes it’s very iterative. That’s fine. I was glad for it in the end. I was able to remember and understand things about the situation when I was small that I couldn’t have otherwise have seen. My parents died very young, and I’ve had to put it together.
I realized, some of those car experiences, I could see what was going on in the family and in their minds right then. Not just understand or have compassion. One of them was that someone in our lives was having homicidal thoughts by driving recklessly. I saw it. I was like, “I see now. No wonder I’m so effed up. Yes, okay.” I saw it, and that was emotionally a lot to see, but it was there. That’s why I was freaking out. It’s just nice. I have tools that help me process what is just buried, stuck somewhere inside, on a mountain road.
Three Takeaways for Childhood Trauma Recovery
Ari: Anna, I want to wrap up the podcast, and I want to ask you, what are three things that you would like to leave people with? Either things that you’d like them to know about trauma, about themselves, or about your methodology?
Anna: Well, I’d like people to insist that they have something that helps them feel better now. That when you’re feeling really bad, you must have tools that help you feel better now. Some people have that. They have that in exercise. You could have that in my technique, and I’ll give you a link. It’s a free course. Anybody can take and learn it in an hour. You have to have something to feel better.
It’s when we feel the most lonely and miserable that we’re driven into the worst behaviors that we have. If we have a way to feel better, those things can fall away. I used to be a two-pack-a-day smoker, and three years into my daily practice, that fell away finally. I needed another way to comfort myself and feel okay. You’ve got to feel better. Prioritize that. Don’t listen to people who say, “You’re going to have to feel worse before you feel better.” You don’t have to feel worse. Some things take a long time, but comfort is good.
I’d also like them to know that other people are 100% responsible for traumatizing you, but right now, guess what? They’re not going to help you. Even if they apologize, it’s not going to make that much difference. They’re not going to apologize, chances are. You actually can change the effects of trauma working just with your own present-time life. You can change how that affects you if you put your mind to it.
Third, that you’re sovereign over this. There’s nobody who’s withholding healing from you. If you have a therapist, you don’t like or something, you don’t have to go to that one. You don’t have to settle for that. You can try again for somebody who does get it and who can help you. I call that sovereignty, just sovereign over your healing. If you don’t do that, it could take a very long time to find the things that work for you. It’s a good way to go, “This isn’t really working,” and instead of getting angry and resentful at whoever practitioner that was, just say, “I don’t think this is working. Let me try something different.” Don’t give up. Don’t give up at all. It gets better.
Anna Runkle's Books, YouTube Channel, and Resources
Ari: Beautiful. Is there anywhere you want to direct people, to your book, to your website, anything like that?
Anna: Sure. My website and my YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is usually where people go first, Crappy Childhood Fairy. My website is called the same thing. It just has dot-com at the end. You can see the courses and things that I offer. My books are available on Amazon. My name is Anna Runkle, R-U-N-K-L-E, and you can find them there. They’re available on all online booksellers, and they’re in seven languages, so chances are you can find it in your own language.
Most people who actually have trauma, they prefer my book in audiobook form. Which I read, but let’s be honest, when you have complex PTSD and it hasn’t been going very well, you can’t read more than a paragraph. I can’t. I have to be very regulated to read a book. The audiobook has been the biggest seller of the formats.
Ari: Anna, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope to do it again at some point.
Anna: Thank you.
Show Notes
00:00 – Introduction: Anna Runkle, the Crappy Childhood Fairy
02:35 – Recovery Story
08:25 – Why Talk Therapy Can Make Trauma Symptoms Worse
14:31 – What Is Nervous System Dysregulation?
19:45 – Trauma-Driven Behaviors: How Childhood
21:27 – How Nervous System Regulation Improves Self-Awareness
24:04 – Daily Practices to Re-Regulate Your Nervous System
26:36 – Post-Traumatic Growth: Why Some People Recover and Others Stay Stuck
33:06 – Complex PTSD (CPTSD) and Understanding Dysregulation
36:19 – Should You Reframe Childhood Trauma as a Gift?
48:58 – Coaching vs. Psychotherapy: Anna Runkle’s Legal Dispute
53:35 – Signs and Symptoms of Nervous System Dysregulation
55:51 – How to Calm Nervous System Dysregulation in the Moment
1:00:43 – Trauma Triggers in Real Life: Anna’s Panic Attack
1:05:29 – Three Takeaways for Childhood Trauma Recovery
1:07:54 – Anna Runkle’s Books, YouTube Channel, and Resources
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