It is sadly very common that people who grew up neglected and abused by their parents
end up either alone or cycling through one life-damaging relationship after another
and the terrible irony is that when you need love the most you're locked out of it you can try hard
you can read books you can go to therapy you can make promises to yourself and hold high standards
for yourself but you'll keep finding that you're shell-shocked again to have gotten attached to
someone who can't be a good partner to you now either they don't love you they're with someone
else they have an addiction or in some way they can't make a commitment to you or even show up
for you in any kind of consistent loving way and the worst part is because you have an intolerance
for endings and saying goodbye that feeling of abandonment that comes up when things are ending
even when you want to get out you end up stuck in relationships that just drain you of all your joy
and your potential and your choices or they make you so scared to connect with anyone that you
spend years of your life in isolation just hiding from your own life I'm anna runkle also known as
the crappy childhood fairy and I teach people practical strategies to heal abandonment wounds
and other symptoms of childhood ptsd so that you can get out of emotional isolation and maybe
maybe find love now there are two main categories of let's call it maladaptation around love and
one has to do with avoidance and one has to do with the opposite which is rushing into romance
head first with people you don't really know yet and then getting completely entangled and unmeshed
have you done that have you done it more than once right now I'm going to talk about avoidance in my
next video but in this video I want to talk about what happens when you rush in to romance if that's
your pattern what happens it's very common for people who were traumatized as kids and I'm going
to teach you some strategies so you can allow yourself to be a person who has an abandonment
wound but also be a person with an open heart who can open up who can get to know somebody who can
be vulnerable sometimes who can tell the truth you can have both but to have that freedom once you're
in the relationship requires some prep work before you get into the relationship and that guides you
in how you get into that relationship all right that is the secret that's how people with cptsd
can have good relationships but with a little work around and that means despite having an attachment
wound a trauma wound you can fall in love you can have a successful relationship someday
maybe even get married right and and and you can do this without falling down
that trauma-shaped hole that's pulled down every relationship that you've had in the past okay
so what happens let's analyze this by looking at first what happens when you you go pushing
and rushing into a relationship all right now it's really common to go get a quick start and
one reason we do this is because it's incredibly uncomfortable to be in that early stage of
a relationship somebody's paying attention to you you're self-conscious you have a lot
of fear about where it's going and whether you realize it or not you might be pushing to try to
lock it down real fast to try to turn it into a great love affair very quickly so that you can
bypass all that anxious period that would normally be happening during dating right the courtship
process is where you get to know somebody slowly and gradually gradually gradually open up to them
and open your heart to them and let them into your life if you completely jump over that you're
going to have this very creepy feeling that there's a whole bunch of stuff you don't know
that it could blow up in your face and you would be right it could it very well will and so one way
that we bandage over that feeling to sort of cover it up is by just getting in quickly and being like
you know what I think this is love at first sight I think we were meant to be together let's move in
let's run off to Vegas at the very least you know let's sleep together very early alright
so that's what happens that's one way you can cover up that feeling that anxious feeling that
would normally be spread out over a long period of dating to do this often requires a bit of
magical thinking and with cptsd many of us have very strong imaginations we grew up having to
you know having to work with like a really kind of difficult set of circumstances in our lives
and with our great imaginations we were able to see ourselves as something better than that and to
see our circumstances as something that had a ramp out of them and all that is good your imagination
is good but when you haven't healed from your ptsd yet your imagination can work against you
and cause you to draw on magical thinking to try to retrofit to try to crap fit if
you know that term when we fit ourselves to an unacceptable situation so let's say you
meet somebody one day you rush into it decide you're in love you sleep with them that night
and the next morning you're looking around and you see their place and you start to see stuff about
them that you actually don't like so what happens magical thinking kicks in I'm to change them
they are coming from some low station in life and I will raise them to a higher stage of life
or they seem to have all these wounds everywhere they're very broken I notice I can heal them
or magical thinking can be spiritualized of like this is what god wants me to do is be humbled
or we had a past life together and so this is our destiny all of this stuff you have to be very very
careful about magical thinking it's good to be a spiritual person but you don't want to use magical
thinking as a weapon against your own common sense all right it's important when you have cptsd to
have discernment I'm putting my finger right here which I guess is where the third eye would be
discernment like you need to see you need time and emotional space to kind of just take it in like
who is this person what are their intentions here you want to let the information come to you
that's the maladaptation is rushing in rushing out going I don't need that information
I'm gonna make it all okay I'm gonna make up a narrative about this I'm gonna tell all my friends
I'm gonna look at the bright side it's just all that stuff that we do which is how we get
ourselves kind of stuck in there and something that happens when you're crap-fitting like that
and again crap-fitting is when you fit yourself to an unacceptable person or situation we get we are
very good at that as kids it's a really good skill to have when you had to do it you're an adult
now you don't have to do it all right in fact you don't want to do it you want to fit yourself only
only to situations that are good for you so when you catch yourself crap fitting something
that you might find yourself doing is getting into arguments you're like you know uh you're
very broken you're very messy um well somebody you just met gets to be however they want your job is
actually to just take in to just let information come to you what are you know what are they about
what are their cleaning standards like are they actually emotionally available and not to be angry
at the shortcomings in this when you can slow down your attachment these things are nothing to fight
about they're just something to notice and go ah you know I think this is not a relationship for
me it's so much easier to recognize that and pull back from a relationship if you haven't
bonded yet psychologically emotionally sexually alright if you do this if you have a tendency for
this then you know all too well that feeling where you get an idea about somebody they're so great
they're amazing you rush in then you wake up and realize eh you know there's some problems here and
you backpedal you backpedal and try to retrofit your concept of them to fit the person you thought
they were when you met them but they're not that person now you're just being like a controller or
nagging when you try to make somebody be something they're not right if you really love somebody you
you kind of want to love them as who they are so that takes time it takes time to know who they
are and to know if they're somebody you could love now one really difficult aspect of having complex
ptsd is that endings can be really fraught and difficult they can be extremely triggering even
when you don't like somebody even when you're desperate to get out of a relationship and
having to cause the ending or get left will be extremely triggering and you dread it so
much that you stay I mean have you done that how many people have done that how many times have you
done that stayed way longer than you really wanted to be in a relationship because you could not bear
the feelings that were going to come up when you walked out the door right even when you
knew even when you knew or there was something to it but the end came and it's a bad ending
now bad relationship endings really take a toll on you emotionally there's just no way around it
there's no way around it when you get into a lot of relationships and then they keep ending
when this happens too many times the way that you have to toughen up for that to cope with it
is not really a toughness that serves you in trying to find real love and open up to somebody
who really cares about you it's a scar tissue layer that that's not really going to work for
you so if you've got scar tissue that's okay you can start where you are but I'm going to suggest
that you look for ways to not keep adding to that scar tissue by getting into relationships that are
ill-considered that you haven't taken time for that are pretty much doomed to fail because it's
going to take a little chunk out of you every time it's going to put it's going to make this
kind of wall around you every time that's going to be harder and harder to get through
right can you think of somebody who's just had too many bad relationships and that hardness that
comes around them yeah so we don't want that for you if all of this sounds like psychobabble I'm
not into psychobabble I'm into very practical techniques I teach those I teach techniques
to start naming the fears that come up from that emptiness naming them getting them on
paper and getting them out so that there can be a little feeling of comfort and peace for a while
and if you want to learn that it's called the daily practice it's down in the links it's always
there for you but if you're just watching this video for the quick tips I'm just going to say
you need a way to find that calm inside it will always kill relationships the trauma-shaped whole
will always kill relationships nothing but bad comes out of the trauma-shaped hole nothing but
the old behaviors that people once did to you come out of that trauma-shaped hole it's a bad place
so you're going to heal that all right you're going to heal the trauma-shaped hole and you're
going to sort of bring it up to where it's a lovely part of the landscape and you remember
that bad things happen to you you're sensitive to that sometimes you have workarounds around it
but you don't go charging in trying to obliterate it and make it go away by getting
into relationships fast I'm telling you this is the most life-changing change that I ever made
was to go slowly in relationships and allow them to form it was it was so helpful to me to find out
to find out that I actually did I had all the good ingredients of a good person who can love and be
loved it was all in there it's just that that good part of me was getting swept aside by the tidal
wave of emotions and intensity and fears and anger and resentment that would come up just because of
rushing in too fast and the only reason I was doing that was because I found it uncomfortable
to be in that tentative early phase I i just I had this instinct it was a wrong instinct but
it was an instinct that if you can quickly attach and be totally committed then that uncomfortable
feeling will go away and I i had the pleasure of learning by actually getting married to somebody
who loves me that it doesn't end it doesn't end when you get married like that process of getting
closer and closer to somebody it's actually quite challenging for somebody with attachment wounds
and I had the opportunity to keep healing after getting married and find out what that's like
and this is what I found it's a continued healing it's a continued project to keep dealing with the
old wounds handling them as an inside job and showing up a little better for a relationship
and luckily because I'm able to bring good things to my relationship I get good things back
there's a there's like a mutuality there where sometimes if I'm a little bit
rough or edgy or I wake up in an emotional flashback I actually have a little bit of grace
extended to me there's some understanding there because mostly what I'm able to show up is
lucidity and kindness and loyalty and steadiness and good cheer right that's what makes day-to-day
relationships happy and I'm able to do that because the old trauma wounds are largely
healed they're just not like flying out of me all the time you can do this too you can make
progress along these lines and I really encourage you to get started on the journey so maybe now is
the time for you to start to change this and you can start taking first steps I'm a big fan
of don't try to do everything all at once and don't try to do this alone I recommend beginning
with the inside job of learning to notice when you're dysregulated and get re-regulated in your
brain emotions and nervous system that right there is going to make it possible for you to
do relationships very differently and there are many ways that you could choose if you
want to learn my techniques for calming your triggers and getting re-regulated you can take
my daily practice course I also have a dating course if you want to learn my technique for
structured dating I call it structured dating it's how to do it slowly and consciously so all of this
goes a lot more smoothly when you're connected to other people perhaps when you have some mentorship
or some support from peers maybe people who are also working on healing how they do relationships
it helps to have somebody who you can be very honest with and tell them what's going on and
admit a little bit of feedback and of course if you're going to admit feedback from somebody
they need to be somebody you respect and trust I think finding someone to love
is one of the most profound and positive things that can happen in your life I believe it's
possible and I believe it's important for people who had trauma as kids and it can happen at any
age if you've got some healing under your belt and if you're willing to let things
unfold at a pace that your triggers can handle all right if you want to hear more about how to
do that you are going to want to see this video right over here and I will see you very soon.