 Hello, Psych2Go viewers. Our guest for today's live stream is Anna Runkle, host of her very own amazing YouTube channel, which has been viewed by millions of people, and it makes empowering content on the topic of childhood trauma and abuse. And her expertise on this subject comes from her own experiences of trauma. Welcome, Anna. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Michelle. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background, as well as what inspired you to help others with their childhood trauma through your content? So I grew up in the hippie days of Berkeley, and our house was sort of a commune some of the time, and it wasn't like the peace and love kind. It was like drugs and alcohol. So I grew up with a lot of alcoholism and addiction in the family, and a lot of the problems that go along with that, which are well known. And when I grew up, I was determined to be the kid in the family who had it together, who got straight As, who rose above all that stuff. And I did pretty well. I think if you're gonna have a coping mechanism for growing up in a hectic environment, that's at least that one you end up with a job, but you end up carrying so much stress. And so it was in my 20s, and especially towards my later 20s, when it started to really catch up with me, and I had stomach problems and relationship problems. And I was academically really accomplished, but I would get on the job and my own, what I now know was neurological dysregulation would make it really hard for me to consistently focus, to stay calm, to show up and do the job and not get into conflicts with everybody. I was starting to, it was really starting to fray at the edges there. And so I had a perfect storm of traumas happen one night. I was randomly attacked on the street, violently assaulted and they broke my teeth and my facial bones. And in the same two weeks, somebody broke up with me and my mom died. And that was the period of time that sort of turned me into who I became for better and worse. And at first it seemed like a disaster. I couldn't read, I couldn't use a telephone. I went to the doctor, the doctor said, your brain scan looks fine. And we now know I had PTSD from the assault and I had childhood PTSD. And this is not uncommon that somebody who had a rough childhood sort of holding it together, compartmentalizing it, then something bad happens and boom, it gets out. And then you can't get the genie back in the bottle. It's very hard to control. And at that time, you know, this was in the late 90s or mid 90s, they did not know what it was. They said, you're fine. And they said, go to a therapist, go talk about it. So I was going three times a week to talk about what happened. And you know, the attack was very interesting in a therapy environment. But the more I talked about it, the worse I got that we now know that talking about trauma is not always the therapeutic thing. There's a time for it, there's a place for it, but it's not the solution all by itself. And it wasn't known then. And so I was going down, down, down. And I felt like I was at the end of my rope. And I told a friend, I said, I just, I don't think I can kind of stay around. You know, I think I've come to the end of the road here. And I'm speaking gently here because I just feel like those words are so triggering. They are for me too. She said, you know, I felt that way. She wasn't even a friend. I barely knew her, I gave her a ride one night. And she said, oh, I felt that way. Come in, have a cup of tea, let's talk. And I went in to her, you know, she had this funky warehouse apartment and we had some tea and we ended up staying up all night talking. And she had said, do you want me to show you? She was a sober alcoholic. Now I'm not an alcoholic, but I was sort of acting like when she goes, do you want me to show you what I did to get sober? And she showed me something that is from some people in AA, not everybody in AA does it, but it's this way of writing fearful and resentful thoughts, a very specific technique that I now call the daily practice. And it's sort of a prayerful thing. People can do it as a prayer or as a release statement and then go into meditation. And she suggested I go learn meditation. I learned transcendental meditation at that time, which was very compatible with what I was doing. And I didn't expect anything to work. I had read dozens of books, I had gone to 11 different therapists, I had tried so many things to feel better. I was just like, oh, one more thing, but whatever. She said, you don't really have anything to lose. And this thing all of a sudden made this dramatic difference. And within two weeks, not only was I out of PTSD, I was out of depression, I was having an ability to focus my mind like I had never had in my life. And I had been a bright little kid, I was bright, but by the time I was 30, I was so hard for me to pay attention or not be kind of triggered by everything going on around me that I had sort of lost access to my intelligence. And boom, it came back. So it was really a powerful experience. And I thought this isn't gonna last, but it's now 29 years later and it's lasted. That I now know was me learning how to neurologically re-regulate. That was not a language, those were not words for that back then, but I've been staying with my practice. I've been continuing in my healing and my recovery and changing my life all this time. And now I know that's called neurological dysregulation. And that's known. I read about it in Bessel van der Kolk's book and Pete Walker's book, Bessel van der Kolk Body Keeps the Score. A lot of people have read that. And Pete Walker, CPTSD from Surviving to Thriving. I read those books. They came out in 2013 and 2014, respectively. And it absolutely blew my mind. I was like, oh, this is a thing. I have a thing. This is not just me being a weird and problematic person. I have classic, common, normal symptoms of complex PTSD. That's the kind of PTSD that comes from chronic, ongoing exposure to stress. And my childhood was very, very stressful. Violence, drugs, people having sex on the floor. When I was five, I was given LSD when I was four years old, accidentally. Just things kept happening. And we were very poor. And no matter how much I tried to act normal, there was only so much I could cover at home. We were hungry sometimes. We weren't supported. When it was time to go to college, I had no idea how you'd do that, like nobody told me. People just assumed. I think I looked okay on the outside sort of. I was very dirty. I often had like rat's nest. But by the time I was in high school, I knew how to brush my hair. Everybody just assumed, you know, there's a white girl. She must be supported at home to do this. And there was nobody to tell me. And so I didn't even, I didn't apply. I walked to the university when the semester was beginning and I was like, how do I go here? And they were like, well, you have to apply last year. You have to take these tests. I just didn't even know any of that. So I had a lot of growing up to do at that time. But back to that time in the mid-90s, when I first learned how to re-regulate, that put me on a level playing field with people who were non-traumatized. But what I didn't know is how you do life. I didn't know how you do relationships. How do you apologize? How do you accept an invitation? How do you tell somebody politely, no, you would not like to go on a date with them? Like I was feral. I didn't know any of this stuff. And so once I was re-regulated, I could start to get busy learning how you do life and solving the problems of my life. And I had problems, you know, I just, I had a lot of problems to solve. Like I was a really heavy chain smoker. I was really self-centered, I would say, which I think is really common when you have trauma. You think about your own feelings and it may be not so much other people's feelings. And so then I was on the journey to understand like how to be a good person, how to be empathic towards other people. And that's been like the most exciting thing in the world. So Crappy Childhood Fairy came about, this is like a long story, are you with me so far? Yeah. Okay, keep going, okay. So this became this thing that I taught people on the side and I started going to Alanon, which is the 12 step program for families of alcoholics. And it helped me so much back then. And there I showed them these techniques that I was using to get re-regulated. And I was told, if you wanna recover and stay recovered, you have to be willing to give it away to other people. So over the years, I sponsored about 300 women and I showed them how to do this and many of them continued and some of them didn't and just like a normal range of outcomes with that. But I had a lot of practice listening to people and showing them how to do this written technique. Now what's really cool about a written technique is we now know that talking about trauma can reactivate dysregulation and trauma symptoms. You can write those same thoughts out and express them. You can write them and read them to somebody and it does not, in most people, it will not activate, it will not re-trigger that dysregulation. So I wanna say something about dysregulation, what it's like and a lot, I think everybody gets dysregulated sometimes. But people with complex PTSD get dysregulated more often, they might have a harder time getting back out of it and when it happens, it's more intense, perhaps, but everybody does it. And so you can think of like a newborn baby. And if you've ever met a newborn baby and when they start crying, they turn red, they arch their back, they're like, ah, they just freak out. And then they get held by the mom, they touch that body, maybe they nurse, there's touch and there's maybe some eye contact, there's verbalizing and the baby goes, ah, ah, and then they open their eyes and they're attentive again. That's what it's, that's re-regulation. And we're all still working on that as adults. We just better at hiding it, but always not that good, right? Right. So that's what it's like. And when, as an adult, getting re-regulated can feel like discombobulation, numbness, spacing out, there's an emotional component, you can have emotional dysregulation and like the helping professions know about that one because it affects other people so dramatically. They might not notice that you're checked out or numb, but people can tell when you're emotionally dysregulated because you're flying into a rage or you're freaking out crying or you can also be very dysregulated around positive feelings like falling in love where it's too much. You know, it's like not quite anchored in the information available, like is this appropriate, is it safe? And so what you'll see is people who have childhood trauma can get into some really dodgy relationships very quickly and their attachment wounds will just like activate and go, hold on, hold on tight, Russian, hold on. And then if you have abandonment wounds, it's really hard to get back out. So that's a typical pattern that can happen. So emotional dysregulation is probably the big killer of relationships. So a person can be a very kind, good person, but when a certain thing triggers them, and when I say trigger, I mean neurological trigger of the phenomenon of dysregulation, we use trigger for a number of ways that we would respond to things that happen, but when I'm saying it, I mean it sets off dysregulation. So something triggers a person and typically that would be like criticism, feeling left out, too much noise, being pressured, having to hurry. Those are some common CPTSD symptom triggers. So that happens, dysregulation begins and it's very, very difficult to pay attention, to think in a straight line. If you're ever trying to pack your suitcase in a hurry to get to the airport and going, where'd I put everything? Where'd I put everything? It's like that. It's like that. It's like that. Yeah. Yeah. That probably is. I'm so sorry. Go ahead. No, you go. For our viewers, I just wanted you to define and explain what complex PTSD is for those who maybe don't know. Yeah. Well, so regular PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder sort of came to the public attention back in the 80s when people were coming back from wars, really messed up and they were like, oh, let's call this PTSD. And the symptoms would be typically emotional dysregulation, flashbacks, maybe nightmares, high rate of addiction, high rate of suicide, things like that. Complex PTSD is the kind of PTSD that comes, maybe not from an acute, like I was in this one battle, I was in combat, I almost died, I saw my friend die. That could cause PTSD. Complex PTSD is a kind that comes from just chronic ongoing stress. And some things that could cause that would be growing up in an abusive family, being neglected. You know, you think that abuse was like, oh, hands down, like the one that caused the most problems, but being neglected has a lot of neurological repercussions. Like if somebody was not attending to you when you were in your formative, your brain was forming first three to five years, it can be very difficult to feel connected to people, to read other people's emotions, to self-regulate. So luckily, these things can be learned. You can learn in practice, but it's a real setback. And so a lot of things that have probably been diagnosed as ADHD. ADHD is a thing, but maybe not everything diagnosed as ADHD is that. Sometimes it might be just complex PTSD. It makes it hard to focus. So complex PTSD is what we know about it so far. And I say we, meaning what's been validated by the people who are empowered to do that. I bring a lot to it, but technically, because I'm not a licensed professional, I'm not a therapist or a doctor, I can tell you my anecdotal experience. But what is recognized is that it has symptoms similar to PTSD, but it often has a much bigger relational component, very hard to connect difficulty in the romantic relationships. And I think PTSD could do that too. But some people say, like right now in the DSM manual, there's a lot of debate. It's not recognized in the United States. It is in other countries as a, it's got a code and it's a distinct thing. Here, they're debating, should we lump it under borderline personality or PTSD? And if you asked me and my students, we would go, oh, it's not quite either one of those things. It's its own thing, but nobody asked us. And also there's not really any official treatment that has been proven to work to help it. And that has not stopped the, medical and mental health care world from just sort of pushing people through a standard thing that you might do for depression, which is talk therapy, medication. But the thing is talk therapy, it's not always well targeted for complex PTSD, especially because the talking can re-trigger trauma. And I'm living proof. Therapy can do more harm than good when you have complex PTSD. I would just go sit outside in my car. I would go to a therapist and we'd talk. And I'd always go in like with the greatest intentions going, well, this is what's going on. This is what I'm working on. This is what I'm having a hard time with. By the end of the 50 minutes, I would be a puddle and I would have to go sit in my car and wait 45 minutes to drive home. I was so dysregulated, I couldn't even use my hands. Do you feel that sometimes with talk therapy, for some people it might re-traumatize them in a lot of ways? It did me and I thought that I was just like a weirdo. And then I started this YouTube channel in 2016 and I said, well, I learned this technique because I would go to therapy and it was just like wrecking me and it wasn't helping. And I thought that I was a hopeless case and then I tried this and it worked and why don't you try it if you feel like you need some help. And that's when I began to hear back from people going, I have that, I have exactly what you described. And I was gonna also add with medication, often if you go to 10 appointments on your insurance and you haven't improved, they'll say, well, let's try medication. But this process of learning to re-regulate, which virtually everyone does eventually re-regulate, but you can learn to do it faster and better and to go, oops, I'm dysregulated, I'm noticing the symptoms, I'm gonna pull back from that. So if you can notice that and you can re-regulate yourself, it's completely life-changing. But if you're on anything mind-altering, including many psychoactive, anti-depressants or anti-anxiety drugs, it can kind of put a damper on how well you can get re-regulated, how well you can sense that. And so even while drugs may be very necessary for people because of other things going on, it's not necessarily well-targeted for CPTSD symptoms. So the techniques that I was teaching people, I was so shocked, there's like half a million people using my daily practice now. And all over the world, people, I've had women who they do the daily practice secretly because they live in a Middle Eastern country where they're not supposed to be on the internet and they're right now, they're in Russia and they're not supposed to be in communication with the United States and we're just like, we have a PDF for you, here you go, here's a PDF, this is how to do the technique and re-regulate. So we work with people all over the world for free with this daily practice. I have paid courses, but the daily practice is just shared for free with anybody who wants to learn it. And I think sometimes people try it and they go, I don't like it or focusing on this, doesn't feel good to me. And, but there are so many people who have responded strongly to it and had a similar experience. And if it hadn't been for people hearing how I described what it was like to be me when I was struggling and what it was like when I got dysregulated, I would never have known that I have a normal thing. And there are other people like me all over the world. So it feels a bit like a movement. Yeah, and I think that's a good point. Like people when they're going through something and they want to seek treatment, they should explore every option, different options, not just talk therapy. I mean, for a lot of people, talk therapy is extremely effective, but it's not for everyone. So it's important to, you know, explore different options and, or maybe different therapist, because sometimes people feel like they have to stick to one therapist. Like maybe that therapist doesn't work for you, but there's another one who does. Yeah. Well, there are a lot of types of approaches to treating trauma. And there's like body centered stuff and movement oriented treatments. There's, some people are using psychedelics. Some people are, you know, there's many ways that people approach this. And I encourage people, if they have an intuition that something sounds good, it appeals to them, it's worth a try. But on a practical level, a majority of people simply can't afford professional help. They do not have access. And even, you know, depending on what country they're in or what health insurance system they have, it can be a very long wait to get access to professional help. And so, you know, I feel really good about offering tools that can help bring that comfort and ease and relief like right now. I, and I feel strongly like when a person is trying, is this going to help me? Is this going to help me? I do feel like you should feel improvement fairly quickly. And I hear some people who have stayed years in something and they go, well, I keep being told that it's going to take a long time of feeling worse before it gets better. And I think, you know, if that had happened to me, I would not be alive. If I had not found something that helped me now and helping me now doesn't mean it's going to solve all my problems tonight, but a person with CPTSD needs a way to get emotional relief. Exactly. And you know, from that, how can a survivor of abuse begin the healing process after falling into destructive patterns in adulthood, such as getting into abusive relationships or self-destructive behaviors? Yeah, that's, so part of what I work with people a lot on is relationships, romantic relationships. And so there are a few different patterns that you see often. And one is getting into abusive relationships. And I can talk about that, but I feel like there is some awareness about that. Something that there's not a lot of awareness about that may be even more common is getting into romantic relationships with people who are not emotionally available or available at all, or even know who you are. And when there's an obsession with somebody you can't be with, that is called limerence. And it's like an addictive, it's this delicious happy feeling that you've sort of come into technicolor as a person, but it depends on longing for somebody and imagining what it would be like if they felt the same way. And people, I've just, you know, I answer a lot of, I do, I'm sort of like Dear Abby, or you know, I give advice on YouTube. I do one teaching video every week and then I answer two letters a week. And in my letters, I'll often handle the relationship stuff, but it's, I've answered hundreds of letters now and there's such a clear pattern that for people who were neglected often with an alcoholic parent, like I had, that I call it a crap fit. You fit yourself to crap when your parent couldn't really love you, but as a child, you needed to believe that you were lovable and loved. You develop an imaginary sense of love and you can talk yourself into it and you go, you know, my dad may not have called me in a year, but I know he loves me and we have this incredible special relationship and I know he thinks of me and I wait for him at the window every night just in case he comes home. Like that's the sort of thing a child who has been neglected or abandoned will do. And it becomes like a superpower that protects the child and helps them survive into adulthood. And then there comes a time when it's a maladaptation and it's too easy to just be hooked on somebody. So I help people who are, maybe they have an ex that they just cannot get over or they have a platonic friend who they cannot confess their feelings but they're just completely hooked on them and devastated every time the other person goes out on a date. It's a strange kind of looping addiction where it requires you to have hope. Like hope is the dope, I say. Having hope that it can turn into something is essential for the limerent thing to continue. But often people who are limerent won't say anything because on some level, we know that if you say anything the whole thing is gonna come down like a house of cards. The person's gonna go, oh, what? No, I'm married or no, I'm not interested or that's not gonna happen. And that would take away this thing that's giving you this like happy place. And I've noticed it happens for people who had trauma in the past, who were neglected and whose lives today feel empty. They don't have a lot of friend support. They don't have a lot of joy. They're, you know, the job, the apartment, whatever they've put together in their life. It's like not enough for them to feel good and to be growing as a person. And so instead of like the, you know, the good thing to do, if you had every resource inside is you'd begin to work on yourself and you'd make friends and get, you know. And what happens with limerents is instead you just kind of hitch your imagination on this ghost who you can't have and all this energy that would be going into falling in love, maybe having a family, all that. It's just going into nowhere. It's very tragic. And so I help people with that. And for that, I help people rebuild a life, a life that has joy and connection and support with people. You'll often hear people like women who have been through neglect and abuse will say, I don't really have women friends and likewise men and it's a sad, it's a sad situation. And so I help people learn to have friends again. In a lot of ways, do you think that limerence is like an emotional escape for the traumatized individual who's like disconnected and maybe emotionally numb? Yeah, I do. I think that that emotional numbness and depression, there's a couple of ways that people with trauma will try to self-medicate unconsciously. This is not, nobody does this on purpose, you know. But to get up and out of that depressed state, one is to be angry. You know, you have all these people who are just like, oh, it's angry. And if they can't get it from real life, they watch the news all the time. And, you know, I do feel that a lot of the ways some people have really gotten into social division as a whole past time, just to be so angry at this group or that group all the time that it's people trying to get up and out of depression. Cause anger, anger is not great, but anger is better than suicidal depression. It feels alive, but you can't stay there forever. And so soon that needs to be kind of worked through. And I don't mean suppressed, but whatever, you know, people used to tell me, you need to go talk about this. And so I'm here to tell people, I relate. If people tell you, you gotta work through your trauma, you gotta love yourself. If you feel alienated when people say that, like, what are you even talking about? I don't even know what you're saying. Like, how would you even do that? I hear you, that's how I am. And so what I learned was a practical tool where I could release fearful and resentful thoughts, not so that I could pretend everything's fine, but so that I could have less like, hamster wheel thinking about everything troubling me and have true thoughts and have lucid thoughts and be like, you know what, I'm gonna do something about this problem or I'm gonna confront this person or I'm gonna like ignore that problem. You have a choice about how you deal with things that are hard, but it's not a choice when CPTSD is just making all that noise in your head. It's just sort of like self suppression until you have a big freak out and just blow up at everybody and burn your bridges. And that's how people hurt their careers and their relationships and hurt their kids. And it's a really hard thing. And there is a way to calm those symptoms and begin from there to make changes. And that anger is kind of like a facade and a barrier that keeps people, good people from coming into their lives, right? It does. Or yeah, good people because it will attract a certain kind of person who's like, yeah, Misery loves company. How would you, I hate those people too. You know, let's hate them together. Let's just sit around and drink beer and watch TV about how much we hate everybody. And I just like, it's so toxic, but I understand because it's got a little life in it. You know, it's very attractive versus depression and people are very depressed and the pandemic did not help. Yeah, I know like rates of, I was reading about something, research shows that like rates of depression, even suicidal ideations went up during that time. And that's very scary. Like it was a mental health crisis. There still is. There still is and what I noticed because I sort of hear the murmur of my YouTube community every day. And you know, you're on a YouTube channel too. But I read the comments and it gives me a read like, how's everybody doing? And they're self-selecting. They come to my content. But I noticed that as we went into the pandemic, people had a certain set of feelings. And as it wore on, they started to show real signs of mental health, wear and tear. And then things got better towards the end. And I'm seeing this like second dip right now where there's a real pessimism and cynicism, not in everybody, but just a lot more than there used to be. Like it's hopeless. People are no good. I give up. It's just, you know, I'm gonna just me and my dog and I'm not gonna deal with people anymore. And I'm always there like trying to gently just say, hope there's reason to hope you can heal these symptoms. Connecting with people again is a choice that you have. And so that's, I teach some, I teach a course called connection bootcamp. Or it's like a 30 day program to just a little at a time, have one conversation a day, then go back to your safe place, recover. And then go back out, you know, say hello to the person who brings you your mail and just gradually come back. And there needs, this is my observation. What a person needs to make any change that's difficult. When there's trauma, anytime you stick your neck out, like for me, having a YouTube channel was very triggering. You know, I get criticized. I'm putting my dirty laundry out there. I just, you know, shame comes up, you know, and I only did a bad job with a stupid video. I looked terrible, you know, it comes up all the time. And sometimes people will helpfully say, yes, I'm awful. You're always gonna get haters. Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. Mostly I get so much love, I've never had anything like it. So I don't mean to, I don't mean to paint it like that, but it'll come and it stopped me for years from sharing this publicly. I just was so afraid of how people would take it. And I had worked for 30 years like in healthcare and community clinics and, you know, helping people, helping organizations improve their patient experience. So I was very used to controlling my language, being appropriate, not saying what I thought, but what the organization thought. And so it was this really big thing for me to begin to express myself and my experience and my opinions about things which are sometimes different than the opinion you're supposed to have about like how does recovery work from trauma? You know, what really is it? Cause sometimes I'm there, I don't know, that's not my experience that that works. This works for me. And so that was very dysregulating for me. And then I started up slowly, I would put something out there and then I'd have to use my techniques. I'd be writing, I have fear, I've screwed up fear. I never should have said that fear. This will ruin my career. So for me, a little kind of silver lining of the pandemic was it did ruin my career. I had a video production company. I was making all kinds of patient education. And in the pandemic, you couldn't make videos. And I just started working on Crappy Childhood Fairy which had been sort of a side project for me. And then my audience and me, we met each other. We found each other and the whole thing just like blossomed and it's been fantastic. I have a lot of friendships with therapists and doctors and also clients who are in mental health and medical health and we're teaching each other and we're sort of growing a new understanding. I do feel that we're in the midst of a revolution and it's gone a long way towards helping me be resilient against people who would criticize me online. And I get that they're like, who the hell do you think you are trying to help people recover from PTSD? And I used to just get so upset and wanted to defend myself but now I'm just like, that's so sad that somebody is actually practicing and they don't realize that people who have recovered from CPTSD do have something to bring to the table. But it's kind of their problem now. Yeah. I mean, lived experience is absolutely valid. Absolutely. And so like who would know better than someone who lived it, right? Yeah, of course. Well, I was just gonna say though, but my background, my educational background, I have a master's in public policy. And I worked at a very high level at a national healthcare organization before. So sometimes when people are sort of critiquing my opinion and it's true, I'm not licensed in mental health but I have 30 years of helping people recover one-on-one using a 12-step program which is certainly recognized as a positive and legitimate way for people to heal. And I read books and I'm very well educated and I know how to read studies and think critically about when we're looking at data that's like maybe trying to get you to think about something rather than know the truth. And so I thought critically about what I was seeing and I put it together with my experience and then mentorship from various areas of my life when people were helping me. I've got to tell you at some point in this interview how bad it got for me even though I knew how to re-regulate, I was still having very self-destructive patterns in my life around relationships in particular. Yeah. And it wasn't abuse in my case, it was I twice found myself not realizing I had gotten into it but sort of waking up in the middle of a relationship realizing I was with a drug addict. Oh my gosh. Yeah. But it's amazing and empowering how you've taken that pain and turned it into power to help others. And I wanted to mention, you went to a really prestigious university, you went to UC Berkeley, right? Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, I was older when I did it because when I was the age for that, it was a little harder for me to put stuff like that together. But that was part of my recovery. I got the daily practice within about six months what my lucid thinking was like, I should be in grad school, I'm an intelligent person. I've been like totally like wrecked with life problems but things were coming together so quickly and I was able to get into, it's a very difficult program to get into and definitely hard to get through. Yeah. So that was a really meaningful accomplishment to me and it empowered me to express my opinion in a way that was careful, honest, legitimate. No, that's amazing. And really it is empowering and you're turning your pain into power which is something that inspires others. And so I wanted to move on to audience questions. And so the first one we have here is by Leah. Hey, so I have childhood trauma. Is it normal to be a whole different person and push away almost everyone that is even close to that trauma? Yes, it's perfectly normal. Sounds like you're one of us. It is normal that I take it from like family of origin or people you used to know and that getting around them basically is a neurological trigger for you to kind of lose it. So there's some things people can do. I feel like our culture has been very quick to think in a black and white thinking is a trauma symptom, one of many. And black and white thinking says either I'm totally loved and accepted by my family or I have to cut off all contact. And I'm always here going, well, let's see what the gray area is. And I teach people, there are ways that you can have a relationship with people from your past that are very, very boundaryed and that you can learn that you don't have to. Like when they go, how are you doing? Seems like you've put on a lot of weight or something like that. That you, you know, with super boundaries, you just ignore things that people say and you're like, I'm really happy to see you. Do you need any groceries, mom? You know, I'm running to the store and you can be of service and you can have the kind of relationship you want and not open up every part of yourself to the person. And that when you have CPTSD is really hard to recognize where boundaries can be and how to actually hold them. So a lot of us, we first learn how to have boundaries around people that are hard for us to be around. And it's sort of like, I always think it's like we have a developmental delay where first we have to be two years old and go, no, no, no. Then we have to be 13 years old and go, mom, why are you so mean to me? Right. And then, but, you know, in healing when we're healing from the drama we can accelerate really fast and get back to our right sized age and just be like, mom, I love you. We're not gonna talk about weight today. Thanks. Do you need groceries? You know, like I'm setting your boundaries, establishing them, like not today. Yeah, but that's another one of those things that like normal healthy people talk about. They talk about boundaries or loving yourself or, you know, oh, I, you know, go get a good therapist. Well, I just wanna say like, how would anybody know what that is, right? Not everybody is good or a fit. There's not transparency around that. But if you're from the, you know, I just call it the wrong side of the tracks. You know, I was poor. I didn't know these things. I don't know what a good therapist is. I was very gullible and easy to, easy to, I would just get into weird things and then think I had to stay and think it was just me. And so we can't make assumptions that people know when you say, you need to set boundaries. I literally didn't know what that meant and had to read books. And I learned a lot from 12 step programs where people who had been doing it longer than me were talking in the group about problems they had and how they solved them. That's a lot how I got socialized on how to be a person. It was really helpful. That makes sense. Not everyone knows those mental health terms. No, not if your mom's on heroine, she didn't tell you about boundaries. I agree with that, right? Absolutely. Or if you have a family who doesn't even believe in mental health to begin with. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So ironically, sometimes parents who totally believe in mental health can be equally full of it, you know? Oh, right, yeah. And then, you know, like, well, I'm the exception who gets to do things in my own weird way. But what I say goes, I know how people, you know, you're just having a da-da-da complex and can be just as invalidating, just as not hearing a kid who needs to be heard and understood and guided, you know? So I always remind people wherever the trauma came from, like, that's not the source of trauma. Like, people can be bad parents with any belief system, you know? Any religion or lack thereof or in a school system or a church or, you know, it can happen anywhere. It's really just like this negative part of human nature that can happen. So we can't get it too mixed up in like, you know, oh, it's these, you know, it's, you know, religious people are, oh, it's dads or, oh, it's, you know, just like people are very quick to stereotype who would be a victim of trauma and who isn't. And there are certainly socioeconomic patterns, but they don't mean much. And assuming that people are traumatized because they come from a certain group or that they're not because they come from a different group is very wrong thinking. It's always like more complex than that. And so Cagda's asked, I have difficulty in expressing my emotions. What should I do? Oh, well, not being able to express emotions is sometimes a form of dysregulation or like flat affect it's called or a freeze response. There's a number of things it can be. And so I don't know you, so I can't really tell you exactly what's going on with you, but it's definitely one of the sides of complex PTSD. Some people feel frozen for like years at a time. Some people have a huge emotional outburst and then go flat and their face shows nothing. It's a weird, it feels like a migraine, you know, you get very upset and then it's like, I don't care. I don't care what anybody thinks. So getting in touch with emotions, I think for a person like me, I was always told, you have to feel your feelings. And that was a stereotype of what a traumatized person needs to do. I feel my feelings. I'm, you know, I get flat affect sometimes, but the feeling your feelings is not a cookie cutter solution for people. People are very different. Some people are feeling their feelings too much and they need to learn to manage their emotional regulation, like re-regulate emotionally so that they're, so that you have access to this is how I feel about it. Some people though, you could be emotionally dysregulated. This was maybe a little more, my speed was, I would get very, very upset about things, but really in the end, before I had learned, began my recovery, I would be confused about what, I thought I knew what I was feeling. I'd be angry, but really when I was angry, I was sad. And when I was depressed, really I was angry and there was all this stuff going on. I thought that I had to hide how I felt. I didn't think my feelings were acceptable. So I had all these little dodges that I would do, kind of trying to get people to care about me without risking that they would push me away. And getting pushed away is everyone's core fear. And it is something that happens with CPTSD. We push them, they push us. And there's so many subtle ways that we do that. And it's very painful, but there's a way that you can teach yourself. And I always thought we kind of need a charm school, like an etiquette school for people who have this so that we can learn like, when I'm feeling really triggered around a group, rather than just going blank or running away or shutting down or getting really angry that I can take, I can like, what I do is I write my fears and resentments. I ask for them to be removed. I take a minute. I can text my friend if I need to. I'm just like, everybody here is like, talking really judgmentally about such and such. And I just feel really upset. I feel like I wanna argue with them. And my friend will go, ha, ha, I totally know that feeling. And then I go, okay, fortified, I go back out there and I can be professional, neutral, polite, or I can say, I'm sorry, I disagree with that. My choices are back. So I think when you can't feel your feelings, you've lost dimension and I call it color. You're not in color right now. And yeah, and it's a maladaptation. And I've seen thousands of people come back out of it if they had an outlet for the bad feelings, fearful and resentful feelings that was comfortable and worked for them. I call it pooping it out. It's like, you just get a lot of shit. Sorry. It just piles up. It's gotta get out. And it's gotta get out. And that's the technique I have, is it just helps like, it's like rinsing your feelings out periodically a couple of times a day. So they're just moving and moving along. And you're not just like getting them pressed down to where, if you're gonna stay alive and cope with it, you have to shut it down. And nobody's, you're not doing this consciously, I'm sure. So, but once you have an outlet for a little while and a way to rest your mind, you might find that your feelings come back out like little dandelions between the cracks of the sidewalk. It can't help but come out. They're there, but they're waiting for there to be sunshine and rain and safety. It's that inner child, right? I know a lot of people feel that. This is one of the things about me in particular, I just don't relate to that concept. I'm like me all the way through. But I know that people, to me, that's a metaphor. I think for some people, it's definitely like a part of themselves that they feel very in touch with and feel loved for. And it's a way that they can understand the tender importance of their feelings and their need for safety and for things to be good. And so they use that technique, yes. And then Lea asked, I feel I have never believed in love. Is that normal when you have complex PTSD? I've certainly heard a lot of that, not to believe in it. And yeah, I feel like I wanna jump in there and fix that and say, no, love is real. It's real. It's all around us. But it's very hard to detect when you've been hurt so badly. There's a little bit, I should mention something too. And I don't know if this is true of Lea at all, but sometimes there's an overlap with people who are on the autistic spectrum and CPTSD. There are similar symptoms. It's not the same thing. One is something that a person is born with and one is like basically an injury. It's a neurological injury to the ability to connect and self-regulate. But the symptoms can be the same and that love feels very fraught. It's like, what's everybody doing here? They're all getting together and having, you know, boyfriends and girlfriends. And I just don't get how you do that. And why, or I would get this in mom's group. My kids are college age now, but I would be in mom's groups and I would go hang out with these moms and they would all be, and I would just be under a lot of stress. Like, am I acting right? Am I saying the right thing? And that's like that weird, you know, a disconnection. People, you could feel it in a group. You could feel it with an individual and you could feel it in romance. And it's one of those things that could be, it could be a number of things, but I sure see a lot of it from people who have been hurt so many times starting with their own parents that they just think that's just a lie that other people are doing. That there's actually, I think that we, my theory is, and it's not just my theory, based on what I read and how I understand things, I think there's a researcher in England who calls it the interbrain and says it's sort of like Wi-Fi. His name is Digby Tentum. And it's sort of like a Wi-Fi metaphorically where people can communicate non-verbally with each other. And so when you walk in and you can tell everybody's really sad, you go, hey, everybody. Well, a person with CPTSD or autism maybe can't detect that when they walk into a room that everybody's really sad, something has happened. What, what happened? So we might come in going, hey, everybody. And everybody looks at you like, what is wrong with you? Why are you like this? Why do I know that feeling? And then the shame and like, why don't I know this? Why am I such a stupid idiot? Is it because I'm poor? Is it this? And a lot of times it's, there's a neurological injury going on and you can learn the reconnection gradually. And we never know. You know, we do know that the brain has plasticity. Some injuries maybe are not so easily fixed but we can learn to work around. One type of person I really admire as a role model is people who have lost a limb or two and they get a prosthetic leg and they begin to learn to walk again and then they start working again and some people go on and do Olympics and that's great. But even just people who just carry on and they have a purpose in life and they're living life, they're having problems and good things and falling in love and they have a prosthetic leg. And so it's not exactly perfect. They can't grow their leg back but they're carrying on. And I think that trauma is a lot like that in some ways. There's a lot we can fix and a lot where we learn to carry on. Exactly. So the audience segment is over now. Thank you so much for that, Anna. We really appreciate you being on today. It was amazing. And honestly, we really appreciate the work you do. It's really empowering. Thank you. Thank you. So have a good day, everyone. Bye. Bye-bye.