Hi I'm Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy, for me one of the
biggest burdens of my past was in my relationship to anger because first of
all the adults in my life when I was a kid went way out of control with their
anger. I grew up watching my dad rage at my mom and my mom berate my dad and the
two of them would smash things and get violent and even after they were
divorced when I was 7, anger and rage became the default way that they
communicated about anything. We had a lot of alcoholism in the family and drunk
people make everybody angry and the angry people make the drunk person angry.
I grew up terrified of anger and angry people and I know a lot of you know
exactly what I'm talking about. I remember when I was five or so I was
angry in my own right about something, really angry, and instead of a temper
tantrum I went around the house and I folded a folding chair and laid it on
the floor and I carefully took a vase off the mantel and I put it on the
hearth and that was my way of you know like really tearing up the place,
very gently damaged because I hated violence. I hated the sounds and smells
of drunken people, there was no way around it it just put me on high alert
and this weird kind of tension inside and the sound of breaking glass would
just always make my heart race. So in my teens and 20s I figured I'd solve things
by just avoiding angry people I thought of myself as this very peaceful loving
person and it's not that I wasn't but you know what happens, I had a lot of
anger and I didn't even know it sometimes. I remember before I ever
learned to reregulate my brain, my emotions were confused when I acted
angry, I was actually hurt, when I was depressed, it was because I was angry.
I had BS'd everyone about what I was feeling for so long that I had no idea
what I was feeling. And then at 21 I started therapy and I had a place to
talk about what had happened and when I first started I didn't really have that
strong of emotions about my childhood but the way the therapist kind of drew
it out of me she thought it was terrible it was almost to a fault she wanted me
to talk and talk and talk about it and soon oh yeah I had some serious anger
going and the more I talked to her the angrier I got and I read some books and
I talked to other angry people and soon everywhere I went everyone I hung out
with I was coming off angry. I was a real drag to hang out with in fact and at one
point it was me raging and smashing things which totally upsets me so I
didn't want to do that, I thought I was getting in touch with my feelings but I
was learning to lose control of my feelings and amp them up and there is
nothing healing about that. So here's the thing, think of your feelings like on
this vertical scale and way down here is death or catatonia or something and then
one notch up is depression and obviously there are degrees of depression and it's
a terrible place to get stuck and if something you do or some therapy you try
helps you go from depression up to anger, that's easy to do it's actually pretty
easy to get somebody angry and it feels good at first because it gets you off
the bottom of depression. When you're hovering at the bottom of the emotional
scale, anger and rage are a step in the right direction but it's a mistake to
think that anger is the solution and I think this idea that feeling your
feelings is inherently constructive, it's just not true. There's a time when we
need to get in touch with our feelings and a time to be angry but if anger
isn't transformed pretty quickly into some clarity and some peace and some
action, it'll just take you right back down the vertical scale, isolated,
depressed, and scary for other people to be around. So what to do with anger? For
me, it was the most profound turning point in my life when I was shown how to
put it on paper. I put my fears and resentments about life, the tragedies, the
injustices, the petty little things that bother my mind, it all went on the
paper and then I asked for it to be removed and now if you're not a god
person and you have a reliable higher self, which I don't, you can release it.
You'll be amazed at how much more effective and clear-headed you are with
all of that out of your head and released or removed. Now if you're like I
was when I first started doing this daily practice, I worried that if I lost
my anger I'd have no defense against abuse and pressure from other people and
it's been my experience that the opposite is true. When my mind was
tangled up with anger and resentment and someone was acting negatively toward me,
I'd be paralyzed or confused. I start flailing around trying to fix the
situation without understanding what was going on and when I started releasing
all that fear and resentment, and there is a technique to this it's not just
journaling, but when I was actually getting free of all that icky negative
thinking, I could see. I knew when I was being attacked and I knew when the
disturbance was actually in here, I got clarity and with a clear mind I'm able
to respond appropriately to problems. I can either protect myself or I can get
the hell out of there or I can stay and work things out if that's the right
thing. Things get worked out now, when I'm freaked out I know where to go first and
that's to calm the inner disturbance so that I can be clear what I need to do
and most of the time I don't need to do anything I just carry on. So if you want
to try this technique, it can be calming the first time you do it and it can be a
life-changing if you do it regularly, you'll find a link to the instructions
in the description section below and if you want to go deeper into healing the
past and the trauma in it, you might want to check out my online course: Healing
Childhood PTSD, there's a link to that as well down in the description section. So
if you found this video helpful, please give it a thumbs up and if you haven't
yet please subscribe and I'll see you again soon.