Some people who were abused or neglected in childhood have a tendency to cling
to relationships but other people have the opposite problem they push people away now
if you've ever run away from a good partner who loved you and known that pain maybe you
got overwhelmed and triggered by the intensity or you got fearful about being so close to somebody
and you slipped into avoiding behaviors like disappearing on them giving them the silent
treatment lashing out at them so that they would leave or damaging their trust in you just know
there is a way to change that pattern to stop fleeing and learn to stay happily in
a relationship that you want to be in i'm Anna Runkle also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy
and I teach people who were traumatized as kids to calm their ptsd triggers and grow
into better relationships and I can show you how you can better handle the day-to-day ups and downs
that all relationships go through that can be so triggering for somebody who had trauma in the past
and to get through that without getting emotionally overwhelmed and needing to
make impulsive decisions to leave or lash out now i'm talking about this
today because I got this beautiful letter from a woman i'll call nina and she writes
dear Anna i've only recently come to terms with the truth that my childhood
was mostly void of emotional connection or support my invisible normal she calls it
my parents divorced when I was about 10. She was the oldest of four my father was an active
military officer from the time of my birth until my high school graduation so we moved constantly
between our parents many homes and my father's duty stations every connection was temporary
every attachment equaled some form of eventual sadness and loss in that sort of scenario
as a child and young adult I also dealt with rejection and condemnation at home
and elsewhere for my gender expression and later my sexual orientation that's so hard
in my earliest dating relationships late teens early 20s I would cling idealize and
obsess probably because I was so emotionally and affectionately validation starved as a child and
that starvation really intensified the feelings of early love and of loss in breakups significantly
and at some point a scale was tipped inside me instead of clinging to relationships I started
to mentally emotionally and physically withdraw at any sign that a relationship might become
destabilized they were small unnoticeable ways of detaching at first building slowly to blow-ups of
epic proportion instead of working through often fixable issues subconsciously I would
begin flashing red thinking here comes the pain and suffering this attachment will disappear soon
like all the others you shouldn't have trusted it take cover it's become so intense that i've more
or less sabotaged my last two relationships each were six or seven years long and
sabotage them by combinations of running away emotionally vacating causing conflict myself
in extreme cases and nina says she's a normally passive person and ultimately by having affairs
I believe I did this in order to create a protective emotional distance around myself
and to be in charge to be the controller and the perceived inevitable pain of the
perceived impending loss of the intimate bond the higher the stakes in love the bigger the bomb
it's very embarrassing to admit this it's something i've felt terrible shame and guilt over
i've suffered additional grief over hurting people I cared about along with myself that's
the thing though my subconscious alarm system is driving me out of instinct even though my actions
have gone against my own morals even though I swore to myself I would never do it again
after the first time it happened I was hoping maybe you could give some advice thank you
nina oh nina i'm so sorry you got a bad hand of cards and I don't think anybody could have gotten
through the childhood you're describing where you get completely invalidated for being who you are
and moved around just constantly moved around so that you know a lot of us maybe didn't have
that connection with parents that's common with people with cptsd but if you can't also
have friends that is the double whammy that is it's it's devastating and I can I actually think
you've done amazingly well you've done really well you've had a couple of long-term relationships
you have this incredible self-awareness here uh you you seem to understand very closely how your
mind works what happens in your feelings how it's connected to what happened so all that you're like
you're like right there on the ramp to taking off and getting free so i'm really proud of you
what we're talking about here are attachment wounds and I think you know that attachment wounds
um are the sort of like spiritual psychic and neurological damage that happen to kids when they
they don't have parents paying proper attention to them and giving them that unconditional love
and validation all right you didn't get to have that you didn't get to have that and so
it's understandable it's not your fault that you have difficulty in this area and sometimes I like
to think of these as it's a developmental delay right you've there's so many parts of you that are
mature and wise here but it sounds like there's a little area that got kind of frozen in time and
you didn't get to totally develop that area and so when you've had these longer term relationships
the way things get intense at that point the way you really have to count on somebody
just starts to trigger something all the way over and you know probably i'm going to imagine that
these relationships though they lasted there were signs of your of your avoidant stuff like
all along right am I right so it was probably there all along but these people loved you
and they stuck by you and they kept trying to work it out and then something happened that you just
that it really blew things up and so there's your that's your developmental delay that's the cptsd
get putting up throwing like a wrench in the whole thing and getting in the way of your happy life
and your lifetime attachment that you'd like to have your lifetime partnership and so there's very
good literature out there about attachment wounds and attachment styles and those are
good things to know what you're talking about is being avoidant there's a couple of types of that
you know anxious or secure avoidant and whatever you decide you are that's fine there's ways that
people who have different styles can learn to work together so it's worth knowing and you are
very self-aware if you weren't if you were writing like I don't know what's wrong with me i'd say you
need to tell your story but if you've told your story if you are very familiar with what happened
and you're still finding that your recovery is not moving forward and that's where a lot of us
got you know that's I went to therapy I told my story and very soon I had already told the whole
thing repeating the story wasn't getting me any closer to changing the way that I attached there's
two things that did help me and I want to share them with you and i'll tell you what they are up
front and then i'll go a little deeper into them and one is you have to learn to notice and calm
those triggers when they pop up now they are sneaky those triggers come up and you don't
even know what's happening sometimes you don't even realize that your cptsd came that it's like
a monster you know it just comes in like it just comes in like grabs you by the brain and you don't
even know what hit you and it could be a day and a half later when you're like whoa that whole thing
just happened to me I got disregulated I lost my sensitivity to what was happening my thinking got
distorted I started to say hurtful things I did some damage now i'm filled with remorse i'm out
in some hotel you know doing the same old drill that's happened before that's what it looks like
that's what it looks like when cptsd takes over it can take anywhere from you know 30 minutes to 30
days to sort of calm down out of that heightened state of dysregulation that makes it seem like
you have to leave you've just got to get out and I think a lot of people in this community know
that feeling even when they're the clinging types sometimes sometimes clinging balances itself out
by just like running the heck away it just runs away and it seems very real when it's happening it
seems like it's going to solve something but i'm sure you know so well that feeling of emptiness
and remorse and guilt and shame that come when you're sitting in your car you know an hour away
from home and you did this to somebody again and you know how they're now you remember like you
remember the emotional impact of what you're doing so anyway we understand cptsd does that
the two things that i'm going to suggest you do here they are the healing part is to become aware
of that all right is to become aware of that when you can notice when your triggers are getting set
off now they and they will tell you they give you signs all right for me my nose gets numb
I start having this yucky thought I don't need you I don't need anybody so I know myself now
and I know like if i'm thinking that thought just stop talking right now all that's going to come
out of my mouth when i'm having that thought is something not true and hurtful and I don't want
to do that anymore I want things to get better so I close my mouth and I do the second thing
the second thing that's part of that which is to discharge those negative thoughts and get them
out of my head so that I can sort of come back to and gain perspective now how do you do that
what I do is I use this writing technique I teach it to everybody everybody who will learn it tens
of thousands of people there's always a link below my videos in the description section it's called
the daily practice it's a writing technique um it's very subtle you might be surprised how
helpful it is give it a try it it's done together with some meditation and those two together
can really help calm the triggers so finally and this I think is the most important thing I didn't
used to really know this but i'm sure seeing it now the more I coach people the more I teach
people in courses the more i'm really getting it connection to people it is very very difficult to
do any substantial healing without being connected to other people and I can't totally explain why
that is it's just my observation in my membership program there are people you know everybody takes
all my courses and a lot of the people they never come and do the group things we have these
we have these group coaching calls and daily practice calls we have a secret facebook group
and so there's I don't know about 400 and some people who come and participate in in all of that
and they amaze me with the progress that they make and they I pop in sometimes and I look at what
people are talking about on facebook now they're putting together um peer-led daily practice groups
they're supporting each other they're forming friendships these are people who when they first
came in they were saying that they you know could barely form a friendship and you know especially
in this last year 2020 and 2021 there has been so much isolation and i'm just watching people like
break free and connect and heal and I it's really like changed my understanding of healing that it's
not just something that we do for ourselves it's not just a thing of like getting those fearful
and resentful thoughts out or knowing what's wrong with us that it's so clear to me now
we are born into community and we can't escape as much as we want to there's a lot of people with
cptsd who have kind of liked the lockdown because a lot of pressure came off of them
but the thing is so much of the best of us can only be expressed in relation to other people
and I know a bunch of you will say no that's not true I have my dog
okay fine for those of you who are fine fine you'll be fine but for all of you who want to
have better connections and who want to learn to be able to hang in there with a relationship
without without flipping out every time you're triggered and without ruining the darn thing
i'm telling you this is what you do you learn and understand attachment and the wound that happened
just get your information about that most of you are already there learn to discharge the
fearful and anxious thoughts and and resentful thoughts that would that when you're triggered
activate and cause you to do and say harmful things see if you get triggered and you don't act
on it no harm is done and you have time to recover right you have time to recover and then you can
say something that's more constructive and healing you can you can express if something's bothering
you without blowing up the whole thing I mean wouldn't that have changed everything for you so
finally community being connected to other people I strongly recommend that you have people in your
life who are either mentors or peers or both peers who you can talk to honestly who you can
be totally open with about your feelings about things that you feel ashamed about about things
you aspire to and they can help give you a reality check there's even if they don't say anything
brilliant they don't have to be you know fancy therapists or anything the act of telling another
person and sharing that with them and they listen and maybe you being reciprocal with them for that
it has alchemical properties for the healing that you're already doing in yourself
and I won't try to explain it scientifically some people probably can but I just know it's
my experience so I really encourage you so learn about attachment and what happened to you and what
style that gave you and how other people nurture themselves around that and find a way to fit
together with people with other attachment styles find yourself a method to discharge the fearful
and angry thoughts that normally would come flying out of you when you're triggered so that
you can have a different reaction so that you can delay that reaction and respond in a way that you
choose and this time not destroy everything and finally stay connected have mentors
and peers who can hear you honestly and give you feedback that you can use
to guide your growth and complete that phase of development that got stuck so long ago so
if you have a question for me to answer on youtube send it to me to hello at crappychildhoodfairy.com
and put ask the fairy in the subject line so I know that that's what this is and if you like
this subject about forming attachments and doing it in a better way I think you might like this
video it's about a structured approach to getting together with people and I will see you very soon