You, my audience here on youtube has been asking these amazing questions and starting
right now I want to answer them right here in videos i'll be posting on most Fridays
so that everybody watching can hear your good question and the answer
that I otherwise would be like typing in some little reply box that gets buried under all the
other comments. I'm Anna Runkle by the way i'm also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy and I teach
people techniques and strategies to heal symptoms of childhood PTSD
and these are steps you can take at home, whether or not you have access to professional help or not.
So today i've grouped together several questions about the daily practice, that is something i'm
always talking about and these are twin techniques, a special writing technique, and a super simple
meditation technique that I recommend using twice a day to calm brain dysregulation that
so often goes with childhood PTSD, and to start clearing your mind and clearing the channel
through which, this is if you're like me, you start bringing in the energy and inspiration
to become more true to yourself, more calm, more purposeful, more free, smarter, more beautiful!
More ready to take your next steps. Now in this video, i'm not going to teach the technique, if
you're interested I have a free course, it's called the daily practice, you can find it on my
website there will be a link as always in the description section below and i'll remind you
to check it at the end of this video but I do offer free zoom calls where we do the practice
together and i take questions you might want to check that out people from all over the world
join in and we're sitting there writing we're meditating we're healing our trauma together and
it's beautiful so, I will remind you about all this at the end of the video. But lots of you watching
are already doing the daily practice with me it's like, I don't know more than 20,000 people and you
have questions so here we go! First question, all right this was from a social worker um last week
she says, "You already know I think you're wonderful, yet I feel compelled to add a cautionary note.
As many people as you're able to help this is the same number you can potentially hurt,
I caution you against telling people the daily practice is the primary mandatory intervention
for healing from childhood PTSD." So, uh I was really surprised that this person said that. I thought she
you know she seemed pretty tuned into what I
do, I know for certain that I have never said that it's mandatory or the only way that you can heal CPTSD and in fact i'm really careful not to
say that you can heal CPTSD, CPTSD is a condition that I can't diagnose I don't think anybody can
heal it it's kind of like diabetes where you can treat symptoms, you can calm body systems that are
that are activated by it so you ,there are a lot of things you can do to improve your
wellness around it but there's no claim that I can heal and definitely not that it's mandatory.
This community there are like I don't know, 140,000 people who follow the Fairy subscribed in one piece or another of it and I know a lot of you are in talk therapy, some people are in somatic
healing, some people are doing this entirely spiritually, some people don't have anything,
some people have really been alienated by what's available out there, and i'm here just
talking about two main facets of healing that I got that i've learned, I read books but I also
it's just mostly from my own experience. One is brain dysregulation, that is a something that
was not well understood until fairly recently and we still have so much to learn about it,
but once you understand that brain and nervous system dysregulation is a lot of what's happening
after trauma, it starts to make a lot of sense, it starts to explain why so many other therapies
don't...are so difficult to get results from. Other people get them we don't why? Now maybe you did but
a lot of people, for example in talk therapy people with who had trauma as kids get very
dysregulated by talking about trauma. Now I don't fault anybody, nobody knew! Nobody knew. When I used
to go to therapy I just kept telling my story, we'd talk more and more about it and I really believed
like if I would just talk enough about it or somehow feel the feelings that i'd break through
one day, and it was this huge relief to learn you know there's this brain dysregulation going on and
if i can't get regulated it's really hard for me to do anything else like,
have a coherent conversation or remember what I talked about and I would end up in tears, so
the daily practice that I teach is something that I learned many years ago
way before I knew anything about dysregulation or that what this is is PTSD and a friend showed it
to me. It's a technique to get distressing thoughts out on paper, not spoken but out on paper,
and then to rest my mind in meditation. It's deceptively simple, uh my experience is that
it's very very powerful. Now I know there's people who you know they try it, it doesn't work, it doesn't
help them but I also know thousands of people who are getting results that um are somewhere along
the line of what happened to me. It's calming, it clears your head and there's only one way to find
out what it does for you and that's to give it a try, I teach it free it's a really simple course
it takes about an hour you know to learn it and try it so, you...there's not too terribly much to
lose and you can try it, some people try it and like right away they're just like I hate this,
a lot of people they try it and they're just like ah eureka! This is exactly what I need, some people
have to go a little longer to get a feel for whether it helps them. But the thing I said that
I think she may have been responding to on a call recently was I said "For best results, if you really
want to see if the daily practice is working for you, try to do it as exactly as taught and you can
you can learn exactly how I teach it by taking that course there's a download and some videos,
and do it just like that twice a day like it says for a week for seven days do that and just so you
can deter you can distinguish like what are the benefits that come from doing the daily
practice versus anything any other things that are benefiting you, just for that week really don't, you
know just set aside other things that you're trying whether it's I don't know somatic stuff,
talk therapy, and if that means on your Thursday at one o'clock therapy appointment you go home
and you begin your seven days trying something else and on Thursday you go back that's fine
I don't advocate that you have to quit anything but just it's sort of like an elimination diet
where you would just focus on one thing for a while and just see what it does so that you can
get your full experience. Now a lot of people they can't or don't want to do that and that's fine,
and I would be the first person to say you've got to direct your own healing and make your own best
judgments about what would be good for you, don't listen to anybody on Youtube or anybody and let
them override your good judgment about what's good for you and that includes me. You should... you should
take what I say with a grain of salt just know this is my experience i'm trying to offer it to
you, you can see if you want to use it all right? So I felt like, I was disappointed that this person
um misunderstood what I said so badly and in case anybody else felt that way I just really
wanted to put that out there, it's not mandatory, you will find out what heals you and you should
you should keep trying things until you find out what heals you. Alright second question um
this is one from someone who just started learning the daily practice and she asks, "Why do we want to
get rid of feelings? Don't we want to sit with those feelings?" So that's a really good question.
We're not trying to get rid of feelings, we're trying to express the feelings in written form
and allow them to be worked through that way rather than other ways right? We're not actually,
there's no, you're not forbidden to talk about your feelings or to do anything else you want to
do about them but when you're doing the daily practice what you're doing is you're writing
fearful thoughts and resentful thoughts on paper. Um, so people often ask like "But what about if
i'm sad?" I'm like well you're sad, that's okay you're sad. The daily practice is not about like
never feeling sad, it's about having less fear and less resentment and that's kind of the name we
give to those distressing thoughts that aren't really serving us, they're just spinning around
like hamsters in a wheel, hamster thoughts right? They're just going around you know
fear i'm no good fear i'm too fat fear i'm too this and you know fear nobody likes me
and fear because this happened to me when i was a kid fear i'm doomed for life and i'm resentful
at uh i'm resentful at the mailman because fear my letter didn't come on time and fear they probably
sat on it at the post office. It could be very trivial things, it could be very serious things
we're not really evaluating whether they're true or false we just know that distressing thoughts
are going through our mind about it so we put them on paper and then the second part of it is
to ask for them to be removed and if people like really really are super secular, they don't have
any higher power, they can choose to release the fears and resentments and I always say i'm not
good at that, I have to have a higher power because I can like try to will myself to release fears and
resentments but I can't really do it, i'm too you know i'm too attached to them. So I write this
closing at the end in the forms that I give you on the course, I teach a little bit about
that, how you can adapt that to yourself and the strongest thing that you believe in that is um
that you can appeal to for healing whether that's your higher self or God or something in between,
and then you surrender all the fearful and resentful thoughts, you meditate and at
the end of that 20 minutes of meditation, very simple you don't have to sit a certain way or
breathe a certain way just kind of rest you just kind of see what you do, you just see, you don't
you don't try to think positively you don't try to put anything out of your mind and you don't try to
not feel your feelings but when you have CPTSD especially if you have emotional dysregulation
the emotions are like, they're often like more than you want and they're overblown right?
So putting them on paper is a way to just kind of bring them right sized and if you're stuffing your
feelings, the daily practice, I would venture to say, is probably going to help you just surface and get
more in touch with what's under there. Often you'll be writing and um you go into it feeling fine and
as you're writing and you're just writing what's on your mind right now, but as you go,
tears will come, you start crying, you start crying crying and writing crying and writing
then the tears pass and you keep writing you might laugh so emotions are passing through you there's
no suppression of them but you're just kind of like you're just kind of letting things move
through you by writing them and then asking for them to be removed. So I was always afraid when I
first started if I give up a fear about somebody like taking advantage of me, am I just going to be
a doormat am I just basically consenting for them to take advantage of me and quite the
opposite was true that having less fear made me more clear, like I don't want this, i'm going to
stand up to it i'm going to say no i'm going to stop it right there and just more myself not not
like more compliant with other people just more myself and at the same time more flexibility to
to be considerate of other people because there isn't that urgency of emotion, you know it's all
just kind of getting right sized and then I go well I really don't like what just happened
but i'm going to decide not to say anything about it right now and just kind of move along.
So I hope that helps answer the question oh the question also involves don't we just want to sit
with emotions and I know that that is one school of thought that you should sit with the motion and
sort of attend to it, and then it will pass through you and I would just say, I know some people get
results with that. For me sitting with emotions uh is kind of an invitation for them to overtake me
and i'm just not good with it so I don't teach that, if you do it and it helps you awesome! You
should do what works um but I don't think it's the only way, sitting with emotions is one way
um releasing them and asking for them to be removed is another way, alright. Alright so
the third question here is um, it's from a student who lives in South Korea but this question comes
up from a lot of people and this person asks "Once i've finished writing my fears and resentments,
what should I do with the paper? I've been using a nice journal and I don't really want to throw
that away, plus I may want to read it later and see if I still feel the same way in the future."
So this one's an easy one for me to answer I really recommend that you just use scratch paper
or you know just a cheap notebook. When you're writing the daily practice it's not a journal,
and people often call it that "oh i'm journaling" that technique and I know what you mean, but I
just want to take out the word journal because what a journal is is something where you write
things down that you actually want to record, you might want to look at it later, you might want
to sort of look for patterns in it and um yeah you want to record and analyze it later perhaps
or save it for the future, with daily practice writing you don't want to save it for the future
your whole goal is to like get it out and not have it anymore and so the metaphor I use for
it is like it's like sweeping garbage off the floor and after you've been um you know walking
around a room for a week there's probably like some hair on the floor, a couple fingernails,
some old pieces of paper and when you sweep that up you don't want to keep it.
It's just stuff that you're just taking it out, you're just making a clean space
and like hair and fingernails it's kind of gross sorry but like hair and fingernails
you can throw those away and there will be more, they will keep growing and that's how it is with
fears and resentments. We're human, they always come back, but they come back a little tamer and a
little a little less, a little less every time and it might take years till you're not right having
to write like 10 pages a day, I used to write 10 pages a day it was the best thing I ever did
but I never like made myself, no that's not true I did make myself write I tried to stay consistent
even when I didn't feel like it and just for the record it took me a few years to get consistent, it
was hard for me to commit to doing it twice a day, I felt ashamed about it, the friend who showed me
just kept saying don't worry if you're in enough pain you'll do it and that's what I say to you.
Don't feel ashamed just uh if it helps you when you're in pain, you'll do it and you might just
find one day that instead of you trying to make it happen it's just kind of pulling you in at the
right time every day and that's what happens when you're regular. I do talk about best results and
for best results seriously twice a day and with meditation uh is the way to do it but it if you
can just do it now and then when you're upset, that's fine. Alright so question number four,
a person in my membership program says, "I'm worried that by writing all these fears on paper i'm gonna
make them more real and even risk making them manifest in my life. Could it be maybe better
to write the fear followed with an affirmation or some kind of statement about what is really true?"
And the answer is no, it's not better to do that even though I totally get the intention there and
it's a good intention. It's not necessary to tack on something where you actively try to make the
daily practice to make you feel a certain way and the reason it's not necessary is because
it does a marvelous job all by itself of just helping you get freer of the negative thinking
and what's left when that's gone is a space where genuine positive feelings can come in. So some of
the things that have come to me from getting my fear and resentment on paper, especially over time,
is I get these bursts of feeling naturally grateful, um accepting, kind, all these emotions
that are sometimes it's necessary to sort of push ourselves to feel them and i'm not knocking that,
like making a gratitude list when you're not grateful can be very positive but I would just say
do that outside your daily practice after you're done go ahead and do anything you
want but while you.. when you write and you meditate, just put the fear and resentment and then meditate
so that you can see what that experience really is, and I think you're going to be surprised how
much when the fear and resentment is gone, how much all the positive things start to well up.
And it's good, i'm not knocking you know making yourself feel a positive thing like gratitude,
i've done gratitude lists they're very good, but...but an honest sense of gratitude can come
surging up sometimes when you don't have fear and resentment or forgiveness. Forgiveness is
something that we try to force sometimes, it comes up a lot with CPTSD and I would just say to you
real forgiveness is a naturally occurring blessing that happens that sort of like comes down to you
when you have no more fear and resentment and you can have less fear and resentment by getting it
on paper. So these are some of the most common questions I get asked about the daily practice
and I wanted to make sure that you had my answers to them and you can start grooving into that it'll
empower you more to be working that daily practice whether you can come to my group zoom
calls or you're just doing it on your own, I mean everybody does it on their own almost all the time.
So um something I wanted to announce here, yes i'm posting twice a week these
days and so every Tuesday I post one of my teaching videos about some aspect of CPTSD
and changing your life, and then on Fridays i'll be doing these sort of "Ask the Fairy" sessions, is
that a good name? Should I keep that name? The one exception is on um one day a month, this month it's
going to be January 28th i'll be doing another Q&A live stream on Youtube at 11am Pacific and I
there's a little placeholder there on the channel, so that's the live stream but for these recorded
uh Q&A sessions I would love it if you would email me your questions in advance, you can send them to
anna(a-n-n-a)@crappychildhoodfairy.com and you can put in the subject line, "Ask the Fairy,"
or "question for Youtube" just because I get like literally hundreds of emails a day and
I want to know that yours is for this and I will definitely open it and read it.
So what else did I want to tell you... i'm working on a new way of eating and ever since I learned
that early trauma can make us carb sensitive, I changed my diet and it feels really good.
I have a link to the food sensitivity quiz below, it's from Susan Pierce Thompson and you might want
to check that out if you have what I have, the quiz is going to be very illuminating and they'll send
you some information that you can use it to come and join me in this new way of eating if you like.
I've always got new stuff to share with you about healing your brain and healing your
trauma and changing your life so if you're not subscribed yet I don't know what you're waiting
for subscribe okay? If you want to learn more about how to heal dysregulation from childhood trauma
and learn to re-regulate i'm going to point you to this video right here and I will see you next week!