- Just because someone you love had trauma
in the form of abuse or neglect when they were a kid,
doesn't mean that they're entitled to abuse you.
This is one of the most common mistakes
that people come to me with when I'm coaching them,
is believing that, oh, someone has CPTSD
and therefore that explains or even excuses
why they're physically abusive, emotionally abusive,
or just putting the family into
a whole bunch of instability and fear.
I'm Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy,
and I teach people to notice and heal
the symptoms of early childhood trauma.
If you went through trauma as a kid,
you very likely have had experience choosing partners
who had trauma too.
And that's common, these are people who we relate to,
we feel safe with them, but sometimes,
choosing partners who are screwed up,
maybe not as far down the healing journey as we are,
is a form of doing what I call crap-fitting.
That's when we fit ourselves to crap.
We got so good as children
at putting up with intolerable situations
that it's almost like this superpower.
And before we've healed, we can still be under this idea
that's not true, that it's somehow strong,
the way that we're so good at
staying calm in the presence of somebody
who's being abusive, yelling, screaming,
getting drunk, making life crazy.
That's not something you wanna be
good at putting up with at all, actually.
You want to fit yourself to situations that are reciprocal,
and healthy, and life-supporting for yourself.
So along these lines, I wanted to read a letter
from someone named Raymond who wrote to me
for "Ask The Fairy."
He says, "Hi, Anna.
I'm so sorry to bother you."
You're not bothering me! (laughs)
He says, "My wife's CPTSD is spilling over
into our new life together,
absolutely annihilating my relationships
with my family members and also hurting them
and their mental health."
All right, this sounds serious.
"Through a thousand very complicated triggers and scenarios,
she's created cycle after cycle and allowed
so, so many different boundaries to be crossed
because she's a people-pleaser.
Her mother abused and neglected her
and she was taught to ignore her instincts
and just do what people asked her or she'll be abandoned.
But this set up countless situations where
she gave up her power and let people ask things of her
that weren't for her to deal with.
But she couldn't say no
for fear of upsetting anyone or losing me.
The issue I'm running into is she sees all of the hurt
and triggers from my family as bad intentions,
when the reality is that I had a great childhood
and grew up in a loving family who has no concept of abuse.
I'm coming to you today, asking if you could
make a video about how the trauma we face as children
can be the direct cause for the breakdown
of relationships as adults, including, and especially,
with loving people who want to make you
a part of a new family.
The other aspect is that she sees what others did
and is quick to blame, but she has no concept
of taking responsibility for her role in how things went.
The last thing is that my wife gives up all her power
by placing a hundred percent of her emotional state
and self-worth on how people treat her,
what they say and do, et cetera,
and none of it inherently coming from inside.
She's indicated that she'd like to have
healthier relationships with my family members,
but she believes it's on them to go to therapy,
to understand how to communicate with and understand
the workings of trauma and someone who's been abused.
But this puts all of the responsibility on others
when the truth is that it's her trauma
and her healing to do.
It's not my parents' job to learn how to
tiptoe around her, it's healing she needs to do
so people can be themselves around her
and she won't be hurt by triggers.
I feel that you know better than most people
exactly what I'm talking about
and can possibly narrow it down into a topic that I can't.
If you could explain this in a video,
it would be unbelievably helpful.
Thanks, Anna."
Oh, thank you, Raymond.
This is so good.
I feel for you.
This is really tough.
First of all, I'm so happy for you
that your family is basically okay.
And how you ended up married to somebody
with CPTSD this bad is a bit of a mystery.
Something might be going on there.
But this happens sometimes and I sorta have questions
about whether your wife was always like this
or if she sort of tumbled down into it,
because I'm telling you, getting married
and starting a new life with somebody
can be a trigger for CPTSD to show up.
And I would just say it has something to do with,
a person can hold themselves together for a long time
with this idea like, "Someday my prince will come,
I'll be married, it'll all be safe,"
and then when we do get married, if that happens,
we're still us and we still have all of our triggers
and there is no prince coming.
There's just a human being who you're married to.
And so sometimes marriage can bring out the worst
in somebody with trauma, at least at first.
So I'm really hoping, first of all, that we can help you.
And that by helping you, we can help both of you
to get through this.
So, that is a very hard situation.
When you're with somebody,
if they are not treating your family well,
that is a problem so grave that
it definitely has the power to ruin a marriage.
And for a person who's traumatized, it can bring up
this whole loyalty challenge of, like,
"How could you be loyal to the family instead of me?
You need to be loyal to me."
When really, the person in the middle, which is you,
is being put into an impossible situation,
an impossible dilemma.
This is not your trauma.
It's not your reaction to it.
This is between her and other people, technically,
except that you're the one who brought her into the family,
so there you are.
Okay, so I feel for you on that.
Being quick to blame, this is another thing with CPTSD,
and I'm gonna wager that she's had some professional help
from people who were not really that capable
of working with trauma who maybe encourage this.
And I think when people are in early healing,
sometimes they do need to be told
they're perfect, they're great, they're okay,
but the downside is that people who are traumatized,
a lot of the problems today do come from this kind of
acting out, or being difficult, or getting very triggered
by things that people have no idea what's going on,
and ruining Thanksgiving for the family,
and coming between their spouse and their family.
This is something that the person who's doing it,
the person with CPTSD, they do own this.
This is the downside of our own
sovereignty over our healing.
We own our healing.
It's not our fault what happened to us,
it's not your wife's fault what happened to her,
but it is her responsibility now
to figure out how to have relationships
with people who are present right now.
You are very right to be angry about that.
And hopefully you and your family are just
not gonna get into that or try to make it work for her.
The problem that she's having is one that I had
in the past once, and I gotta tell you,
one of the most helpful things that people close to me did
is say, "You know what?
This is your stuff, Anna.
Right now, you're freaking out about something.
I didn't actually do anything.
You're putting a demand on me
to try to fix it, but I can't fix it.
And if you keep asking for it,
I'm gonna have to just walk out of your life."
Boy, that got my attention.
And it was the best thing that anybody ever said
because it did help me understand, "Wow, this is inside me.
People are under no obligation, really,
to keep putting up with it.
I'm being very difficult and I better figure this out."
And it was terrifying because I had no idea
how you were supposed to figure it out.
But here you are, you're on the
Crappy Childhood Fairy channel.
There is a way to start getting improvement with this.
It's free, it's easy, I teach it in a free course.
These are techniques where you can calm those triggers.
Now, very few people are successful
at getting other people to use this daily practice.
I've given up ever trying to push it on people.
I teach it, some of you come to it,
some of you just watch videos,
other people, including people I'm close to in my life,
they're just like, "Blah, I don't want that,
I'm not interested," and I've given up
trying to convince them or trying to drag anybody
into my way of life.
I use these techniques because it helps me,
and even though you didn't have trauma, Raymond, I think
that it could make sense for you to use these techniques
so that you can stay calm when you're in the middle
of this conflict that your wife is creating,
and so that you can kind of stay centered.
And the fact is, you centered, you using techniques
that work is more likely to attract her,
to find a way towards that same state of mind,
perhaps using the very same techniques.
You can find out about that.
When you talk about "she gives up all her power,"
yes, that's exactly happens when we make other people
responsible for making us feel better.
We lose all of our power
and it can really distort a relationship.
If you try to endow a partner
with all the power to make everything better,
it can make them kind of loopy and controlling,
and it really upsets an organic balance,
just a natural way that people in a couple
connect with each other.
We go to our corners sometimes to heal our own wounds.
We come back together and we communicate
about what's going on.
Sometimes there's something we need to ask for
from each other, but I guarantee you,
if your wife is charging at you,
saying, "I'm so upset and effed up,
you must fix me right now.
You made me feel this way, now fix me,"
I'm sure you've noticed that no matter how long you
talk about it and process it, it never goes away.
It never gets better.
It's like a vortex of need, right?
And you become emotionally exhausted,
and resentful, and shut down.
And what happens when people are difficult like that,
like if she's putting that demand on you
and being upset, and putting responsibility on you
to fix something that you cannot fix,
of course you want to, I mean, I'm sure
if you could fix it, you would, but you can't.
Her trauma is not something you can fix.
You can be supportive and understanding,
but you can't fix it.
What needs to happen is an inside job for her
where she learns to recognize that she's going into
an emotional flashback, or a trigger, and then to
follow the steps that work for her to calm the triggers.
And there are ways to do that.
I teach ways, other people teach ways.
It is her option, all right, to go learn these techniques
so that she can calm herself.
And no matter how bad the trauma was in the past,
or how intense the trauma storm is in the moment,
when we calm ourselves, we can come back
and have a conversation about what's bothering us
and get much better results.
And just have a lucid understanding of, like,
"Yes, I'm overreacting."
The concept of an emotional flashback, by the way,
I'll mention it quickly here,
I have whole videos about it.
Pete Walker, the brilliant therapist who wrote the book
"CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving,"
created the concept of an emotional flashback,
and many of us relate to it.
And it's basically an old emotional memory
just comes up out of nowhere.
It can be triggered by an event,
it can come up while you're sleeping,
and this old emotion just takes over,
and it's sort of like wearing a yucky pair of glasses
and everything looks bad.
And for the person having the flashback,
it feels like somebody is doing this to you,
but nobody's doing it to you.
It's coming from an old memory.
It's not even happening anymore.
And what it's like for the people around us is unreasonable.
It feels very unreasonable, demanding, upsetting,
and sometimes even abusive.
I hear often from the partners of people with CPTSD,
that their partner is raging at them,
making unreasonable demands,
sometimes even getting rough or breaking things
around the house, storming out, giving the silent treatment,
sometimes even violence.
All of this stuff is on the spectrum of abuse
and nobody should put up with abuse.
And it does not serve a person with CPTSD
to put up with their abuse.
So I guess you'd call this tough love, but
if you're the person who's crap-fitting
and putting up with this kind of abuse from somebody
and justifying it for them by saying
they had a rough childhood,
I'm gonna encourage you not to do that,
it doesn't serve them.
So finally, I want to talk about this idea
that some people have that because they have triggers,
that other people need to do something about it.
That is the most disempowering approach
that a person who had trauma can expect
from the people who love them.
But a person who has triggers has the responsibility
to calm the triggers and make choices
about where they want to be.
Asking people to tiptoe around triggers
is also a recipe to get other people to gradually
shut down and create a loss of intimacy.
Everybody needs to be able to talk openly.
Everybody needs to be able to be themselves.
We all need to also be diplomatic and measured
about what we say and where we say it.
But for two people to be close to each other, ultimately,
they each need to be able to express themselves, ultimately.
So triggers cannot be an excuse to control another person
and forbid them to express themselves.
It just can't work that way
or communication will stop.
You know what happens when you can't express yourself?
You give up.
You give up on even trying.
And when a person has given up on trying to
express themselves and mention it
when something is bothering them,
their heart's just going (imitates deflating noise)
and there's no more love there.
And that's how relationships end, that's the big thing,
that's the big pattern.
So if you want a good relationship, have boundaries,
be loving, take responsibility for your own triggers,
and do not crap-fit. (laughs)
So Raymond, I hope that helps you.
I realize a lot of people out there are in the same boat,
and at some point before the end of the year,
I hope to make a course for couples
to help deal with when one or both person
has CPTSD with this, but this is your sneak preview.
If you want to hear more about being in a relationship
and dealing with somebody who's triggered,
I have a video right here with concrete tips
that you can use, and I will see you very soon.
(calm music)