Even when you're actively healing PTSD from childhood, there are trauma patterns that seem
to come out of nowhere that can make you very fragile at times. One day you feel like you're
good, you're full of energy and ambition and you're focused and working hard and then the next day you
might be like hey why don't I step up a little here and you take on something new or you put
yourself out there in a new way and then bam! You do what my friend Ken in Australia calls crashing.
It's a thing trauma survivors do like a cycle or a wave pattern have you ever had that where you're
going up up up up up and you're doing good and you're keeping busy and then you withdraw and it's
not depression per se that I'm talking about here it's more like going into a shell. Now is it bad?
It can be very bad totally destructive but I don't think it has to be. I'm Anna Runkle, also known as
the Crappy Childhood Fairy and I teach people how to heal from the effects of childhood trauma
and how to set up your life so that you can calm PTSD triggers and build a sustainable way of life
that makes you happy so here's the letter from Ken, he writes "Hey Anna I'm a big fan of yours
from Australia and I have a question for you that I'd love to see answered on your Youtube channel
so here we are he says this is in regards to what I call crashing every time I get ahead in
life with anything at all even if it's just for a few months or weeks or days
I crash and I lose all momentum and by crashing I mean I lose all drive and motivation
and I end up spending a day or two in bed leaving me feeling run over and exhausted and
then it takes a day or two to get up to speed with adjusting my sleeping eating and routine pattern
sometimes these crashes mean that I can fall behind on bills and commitments
and this bad habit has held me back from doing what I really want in life in regard to work,
love, friendship, and well everything, please help." Ken I totally know what you're talking about
and I love your word for it crashing I also crash it used to be much worse than it is now
like it's really tempered now but I'm still it's still very cyclical for me and I've noticed a
lot of people with CPTSD are like this to the point that I think it might be a CPTSD thing
we we work in bursts so that...that might not be true for everybody out there but I'm going to talk
about this common trait. We work in bursts meaning we hunker down and focus for a period of time
maybe days if you're lucky maybe it's weeks or months so let's call that state humming along and
then usually following a big step that you take because you have some confidence because you've
been humming along then you crash and crashes don't always look like anything on the outside
but they are something and what it feels like it feels like it's a terrible countervailing force
that just comes to pull you back down when you're starting to get somewhere when you're getting a
little too free a little too real and it almost seems like CPTSD has claws and reaches in and
tries to just pull you back to where it thinks that you're safe so like you get a promotion
you feel guilty, you lose some weight, you gain it back, you get a little money, you waste it and so
on. CPTSD feels uncomfortable when you ascend to a new level now crashes aren't always devastating or
life destroying it's usually more like a period of sleepiness or laziness or resentment or resistance
that's what it feels like in the moment it doesn't look like any big thing necessarily
but you might stop going to work but usually you keep going to work you keep going to the
things you go to but you're totally hiding you're doing covert avoidance right if you're not trying
to do anything big in your life you can do this hiding thing pretty well right in plain sight
but if you're trying to do something big and you there are commitments involved and people are
counting on you and you're crashing, well you could muddle along but you just don't get lift off you
know if if you were...you know trying to work in a new career it just wouldn't take root if you
were crashing the whole time or another thing that happens is you make a start but you can't get it
done or you never start and because it's cyclical, eventually you'll have the...you'll...you'll be able
to get on top of things in some way or you'll get the urge to try a new thing maybe months or
years later when things have been going well for a little while and you've got some momentum going
and then you put yourself out there and here it comes bam, the crash cycle begins again and um so
there are hard crashes and then there are like little crashes which can be just as destructive
to anything real and true that you're trying to create in your life for me it happened when I
wrote my first book and when I made my first film and on both of those things I actually did really
well for a newcomer in both of those areas and people I respected who did who were like advanced
in these fields encouraged me for real like you should keep doing this that was a good start
and um but it was hard work and it involved a lot of putting myself out there and even
getting criticized sometimes in a public way and that made me feel exposed so I remember
after the film that I made a woman friend who had participated at a couple of the shoots as an extra
was talking to me and um this was after the film was made we had had a screening party it was this
you know it was a really good little film it was funny and everybody in it and their families came
to the screening party and the film won an award and I was over the moon with the accomplishment
and this had all been done in my spare time while I held down a day job I was a
admin assistant at a hospital and so anyway this woman friend who was in the movie we
were hanging out and I just said gosh I'm just so excited for the first time in my
life I feel like I was really like using all my skills she goes "oh well you really sucked"
where was she coming from I don't I can only even guess she just she said you were awful everything
that you did you were just you know you were b*****, and you were dictatorial and it and I and
it wasn't just me like everybody thought so that is like the that's the telltale like thing that
bad people do right it's like it's not just me everyone thinks so
so I cried I I sort of melted down there but I had a little bit of strength in me
and that night I like called everybody who had been in the film and I was like
was it so bad you know this person said it was so bad and that I was awful was I mean was I bad and
like everyone said and of course people will sometimes tell you what you want to hear but I
they said it in a way I believe them it was great I actually had a really good time you were fine it
was fine it was actually really fun I would do it again so I knew it was this woman's issue I could
have confronted her I could have ignored her I could have moved on right. So what did I do? I gave
up, I crashed I did I crashed I learned so much from making that first film and instead of taking
all that learning and fun and making another film, I turned against myself and even though like you
know 12 people had told me good feedback this one person's bad feedback I just turned against myself
and I kept just being an admin assistant and instead of writing scripts and setting up shoots
with my friends on weekends I just fell back into watching tv at night and for years this happened
and it happened with my book too the book did well and I started getting all these invitations to
speak and be on radio shows and to write columns this was like I don't know eight years later
or something and um at the time I had a boss who took me aside one day and told me that the
president of the whole organization who was his boss had spoken to him and said that me writing
and publishing was a conflict of interest and that if I wanted to keep my job i'd have to stop
and I remember my heart was just pounding like I couldn't afford to lose my job at all and he said
you know he's so sorry if it were up to him he'd let me do it but the president of the organization
really didn't want me to do it and so you know i'd have to stop for the sake of all of us so
I was very upset but again I had a little bit of strength left and you know what I did
I didn't fold right away I called the president of the organization and i'd never met her before
but you know what you can usually do that and I called her up and I explained who I was and um I
I asked her, "Did you say that I couldn't write and publish that it was a conflict
of interest I just you know I'd like to understand that better." And she's like what
no she didn't know about my book she thought it was fabulous in fact she went on to endorse it
she had never said that and I was so mad I was burning with rage and I wanted to go back to
this boss right, but it was devastating to me to realize that she never said that that it was my
boss and I just couldn't believe that after those years of working together that he would
be so sneaky and dishonest and such an a-hole you know to do that so what did I do? Did I go back to
him and say hey you told me you told me that your boss said I couldn't publish again or I get fired
but that's not true did I say that no, what did I do? I said nothing I crashed I did I crashed
and I kept working for him for years with my mouth shut I was kind of like resentful the whole time
but I never said a word and I still never have maybe he'll watch this
you know who you are I didn't speak up and I didn't write another book for many years not until
now and i'm writing a book now so yay but that was like 1998 when I got silenced it's 2021 that's how
long it took actually I would count my um coming back into being free to write in 2016 that's when
I started Crappy Childhood Fairy and the blog and the Youtube channel, that counts all right
that counts as me being free and expressing myself so so yay all right 18 years I was doing something
else I had some kids I started a business but I was not doing what I knew I was meant to be doing
I felt guilty I felt frustrated every single day until I started that blog and then life opened up
like the heavens it started just feeling really good. So what happened? I learned to modulate my
crashes that means make them not so intense now if you're a person who crashes who falls
off your game from time to time and it's a level that's really taking away from the quality of your
life and your sense of freedom and confidence to pursue what you really want to be doing, I want to
tell you how to modulate your crashes it's very similar to a lot of things that go with CPTSD
and I'll tell you why I think so. Notice that crashing looks a lot like brain dysregulation
and if you know that I make a lot of videos about dysregulation I have a whole playlist about it if
you want to look into it it's um it's something that happens to people who are traumatized
so here are some characteristics that are similar to dysregulation is that crashing gets triggered,
you don't always notice it at first necessarily until it's actually done some damage,
it distorts your perception and makes you really vulnerable to discouragement and criticism,
it comes along with a physiological state and sometimes that feels like agitation but more often
for me anyway it feels like torpor you know what torpor is it's like "uhhh" like a dullness um it's
also full of self-attack and unlike self-criticism that's that's constructive self-attack
does not help, it's not constructive. Another similarity between crashing and dysregulation is
you think that someone's doing this to you, but even when they go along with you on this premise
and they try to fix it it doesn't do anything so that's how you know it's internal and the
reason they're so similar I think is because crashing like dysregulation is a brain state
there is a little well of despair deep down inside everybody who was who was traumatized as a kid
and it's there it's there just vibrating sometimes like a little like a little thing of jello inside
and it colors everything you see it makes you think
when it's activated that your efforts are just all a waste it makes you think your
talent is crap that nobody cares about you or wants to read your book or watch your movie
or eat the dinner you made or be your boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever terrible thought your
mind fills in there when you put yourself out there and get met with discouragement
right jell-o vibration it's so important when you realize that you're in a brain state
like that to stop beating yourself up because you might think that you need to push yourself forward
with self-criticism but actually it only makes it worse right so what you want to do instead is
take actions that help you support your brain so here's how you can do that one is you can
develop routines ken mentioned this that it that he would spend a couple days using sleep food
exercise to bring himself back from a crashing state our brains love routines and they find them
relaxing especially when trauma has made things kind of chaotic and you tend to get dysregulated
routines just feel good you know you're just kind of like in your on the railroad tracks
it feels good it's hard sometimes to stick with routines but you're gonna need to keep accepting
that and embracing the fact that you're making an effort anyway it can take time to get consistent
we're after consistency here so anything that drains your energy is putting you at risk for
a crash if you go long spells without eating like that would never happen to me but if you do
it drains your energy and it puts you at risk for a crash all right you want to stay
consistently nourished do you stay up all night and then sleep all day and then the next day do a
different schedule that's going to set you up for a crash if you tend to lose your temper if you're
a people pleaser if you um tend to get into quick relationships or drink a lot all of those things
can mess up that gentle routine that your brain loves and set you up for a crash now
you don't have to be boring and you don't have to live like a nun it's it's good to live your
life and do new things sometimes but you want overall to keep things within the parameters
so that you don't get drained you don't want to drain all your inner resources out
when you're emotionally or physically exhausted your mind starts to play tricks on you and
cptsd begins to like blossom and out comes the self-sabotage right when things are hard right
when a new job brings a challenge in front of you if you have a well an inner well a resource well
and it's full you can get through these challenges but if you're already drained from a bunch of
crazy stuff happening in your life you're going to want to find an excuse to withdraw you'll have to
you might call in sick or fall into resentment or you know check out in some way or believe that
you're helpless and hopeless and you lash out and you give up and you tell stories about how
this is all being done to you by terrible people and you disappear so who gains who win you know
not you so we don't want those big swings here remember you have cptsd and in a way it's kind of
like having diabetes where yeah you have it but if you take care of it and you follow a way of life
that supports you you can keep it under control and maybe even reverse it and that's similar to
crashing diabetics take insulin in the same way you might need to do the things that keep you
balanced and resilient and able to handle hard things risks criticisms little embarrassments
the things that would keep you balanced are the sleep the decent diet support
from friends don't skimp on that one hardly anything works when you try it in isolation
you can learn to calm the triggers that tend to set off the crash by becoming aware of them and
learning to discharge the fearful and resentful thinking that constitutes a trigger that clouds
your thinking when you're crashing and in fact with the daily practice techniques that I teach
you you can calm those thoughts proactively you don't have to be like having them at the time
you can work on keeping your brain in that nice calm state that works for you
just becoming a little more attentive each day and the free course I teach on how to do that it's
always there i'm always talking about it there are links in the description section down below
and that is the section right under the video you usually have to click a little "more"
link right there you see like some lines of text click more it'll open up a whole bunch
of links and that's where you'll find all my stuff. So if you've got a question for me to
answer in a video keep it short and send it to hello@crappychildhoodfairy.com and put "Ask the
Fairy" in the subject line and if you want to hear more about this topic of staying even keel, you
will want to see this video right here, it's about avoidance and groups and I will see you very soon.