your childhood trauma tried to destroy you when you were little and you survived and right now
is the time when you get to decide whether you will rise up onto the path of real healing and
become your full and real self or whether you need to take the road that looks easier from
where you are right now and keep playing small i'm anna runkle also known as the crappy childhood
fairy and i can teach you strategies that make healing doable that make it feel good because
i'm here to tell you from my own experience recovering from abuse and neglect in childhood
that healing is the easy road it sounds scary and hard but the hardest road of all is when
you don't heal your past when you don't find a way of calming those intense triggers and
you have to keep your life very tightly controlled and isolated tiptoeing around
your own reactions because why because you think that if you don't control it life will break you
and i want to show you how to not break how to open up a little at a time to experiences like
friendship and romance and work and trying new things that used to be too much for you
and i want to give you the real tools to make that possible for yourself to get out of small and get
into the big beautiful life you really want okay so to stop instinctively protecting yourself
let's look at what's really going on when you play small right the first thing is
if you're like just about everybody with complex ptsd people are triggering and sometimes they're
so triggering that you end up cutting them off removing yourself from opportunities
just because you're afraid of the reaction that's going to come out of you when you're triggered
so you might not even be aware that there's actually a little sequence
of things that happen right there right so if you have ptsd and you're hanging out at work
and somebody says something they praise somebody else where actually you should have gotten half
the credit let's say something like that that's a common trigger getting overlooked
and a trigger comes up adrenaline starts coming up your brain starts to disregulate in the pattern
that happens to people who went through abuse and neglect when they were kids and your emotions
might just fly out of your mouth completely unregulated and you can cause damage on the job
has that happened to you happened to me a bunch of times and i thought it was just me i thought
that somehow even though i felt like i was a good person i knew how to be considerate i knew how to
be appropriate there were times when something would just set me off and i would just say
things and it made me afraid it made me afraid to ever speak up i learned to keep my mouth shut to
hold my ideas to myself to go ahead and let things that were unfair happen to not ask for a raise
just because i was living afraid of how intense i would get when i expressed myself
and i just want to tell you that's totally normal for cptsd all right if you went through abuse and
neglect as kids that is a normal reaction that sometimes a dysregulated response comes out
and that you end up treating that response instead of healing it by withdrawing from
life so that's a form of playing small all right a second thing that you might be doing that's
going on when you play small is you're staying stuck in blame and i first just want to say like
if you were abused and neglect as a kid that is so 100 not your fault it's not your fault
the people who hurt you they are to blame for hurting you it's there's just no no question there
but right now they cannot do anything about the past even if they wanted to and most families
where there was abuse and neglect nobody's running forward trying to solve the problem so
even if they wanted to the fact is the damage has been done your brain has sustained that injury of
abuse and neglect now it's you who needs to start healing that now it's you who's been suffering
from having a dysregulated nervous system for much of your life it's been affecting your behavior and
your choices so now it's you who can heal that and start to change how this plays out when we
locate the problem in the past we simply give away all power to change the problem and that is why
i encourage you to get out of blaming people who hurt you not because they didn't hurt you
but because you need to get that power back into yourself so you can start using all that energy
for changing your life right now for noticing where cptsd is affecting you and figuring out
a strategy for how you can work around it and still succeed at the things you're trying to do
all right a third thing that might be a factor in you playing small is that you've grown too
foggy mentally and cognitively to take action on things even when you know the right thing to do
this is also really common for people who went through abuse and neglect as kids that brain
fog is something that people so often blame themselves for you might be attacking yourself
as you're stupid you're lazy you have adhd you don't necessarily have that sometimes that is a
misdiagnosis of what is really a symptom of cptsd not always you can consult your doctor about that
so when you're making a plan to improve your life and take action and brain fog comes and
settles down on you it can feel like you're you're like walking through honey or sand sandy honey
it's so thick and awful and it's really hard to see clearly and really hard to move forward and
sometimes just following through on a series of items on a list just feels like so much and you
get one thing done and then uh off into the fog again you know what that's a c ptsd thing and
there are a lot of workarounds that you can do to start improving your mental acuity one of them
has to do with diet and there are many ways that you can eat in a healthy manner but it
usually involves eating lightly and not eating too much sugar and high fast carbohydrate foods
people get very full of debate about what to eat and it's it's really uh there are many ways to
do it but you might want to try what happens if you just cut out sugar just cut it out for
a day and just see what happens to your ability to pay attention there are other things you can
do too i teach a technique for writing fears and resentments followed by meditation that is
the most powerful thing i ever did to get my brain back i'm telling you i felt like i used
to tell people uh you know i used to be really smart i used to be really good at crossword
puzzles i used to be really good at math i used to really be able to write and i thought all of that
was gone and i had some weird idea that it was because of anesthesia or childbirth or something
but what happened is when i got my brain back regulated through using these techniques
of of writing out my fears and resentments and then meditating i think it was about 30 iq points
if you had tested me it was this tremendous boost in mental ability and every day it's my
opportunity to try to regain that and have access to that intelligence that i was born with and you
were born with too this is a terrible way that that childhood trauma limits people and makes
it necessary for them to play small you need your intelligence back and if you're one of the people
like i was where you you know that you you once had better intelligence and somehow it's dimming
and i don't care if you're in your 60s 70s or 80s or 90s there's more mental acuity available to you
by learning to re-regulate from a triggered state of dysregulation that's common for cptsd all right
another reason you might be playing small is out of fear and some for some people playing big
means expressing yourself and expressing yourself might mean expressing ideas that not everybody
approves of that was a process i had to go through in order to start crappy childhood fairy started
as a blog it started out very safe it was a very safe and boring blog that nobody could object to
and gradually i learned that the only thing that really made a difference
in people's lives or made them want to you know read my posts and later videos
is if i told the truth if i told the truth about what my experience was even though it's messy if
i told the truth about what my opinion is even if it's sometimes controversial and it was when
i started doing that that i found my audience and that i found you you might be watching
that because i gradually took those steps of being brave but you know what i was afraid of
i was afraid of getting cancelled all right has that happened to you a little bit it's happened
to me happened to me several times and i keep going anyway so i'll tell you how that works
when you play small you don't say anything that offends people when you begin to show up as your
real self telling the truth having experiences worth telling about having opinions that you're
courageous enough to express having a big enough heart that you can express them truthfully and
kindly you can feel good about what you're doing i do think you're less likely to get cancelled
if you're careful about the truth but there are no guarantees people get cancelled for reasons
completely beyond their control it often has more to do with the people who are getting offended and
calling for cancellation than it has to do with anything that you say the protection for that
is not to just be silent and go quietly under the radar through your life the response to that
is to keep talking and keep expressing yourself and telling the truth i'm a strong believer that
just telling the truth by a person who hasn't really learned how to be a good person yet who
hasn't learned those chops it's not inherently good and so two things work together there we we
learn how to be kind and considerate and truthful and do our research before we say things right
and then we say them and then we say them and the more people are free to tell the truth the less
stigma there will be to say something that everybody doesn't agree with it's only when
so many people are just sort of going under the radar afraid to speak that that one person saying
something that seems obvious to them becomes a target so you can't really make a target out of
thousands of people so don't let yourself play small over that yes there are risks
but it's not as big a risk as shutting yourself down and ceasing to exist
exist or express yourself everyone benefits when we remain open and in robust conversation about
a mixture of points of view that's very powerful and good and how it's meant to be
and finally another reason that you may be stuck playing small is that you've gotten too used to
asking about opportunities how does this affect me and you've forgotten how to ask
how can i bring my unique talents and gifts to the world and make it better
and that can be a really threatening question for people with cptsd especially because
good intentions can get sucked out of you by vampires and because growing up in an abusive or
neglectful household often meant that as a kid you had to take care of yourself and maybe even
other siblings and you ended up in a in a with a big wall around saying yes to responsibility
and unfortunately that's a that may be a great coping strategy for a 12 year old but it's not
for a 30 or 40 or 50 year old it's time to say yes to life and to show up and start using your gifts
that feeling that life is passing you by that feeling of emptiness that's what's going on
is that there's been too much avoidance and not enough standing up to bring it to bring your
gifts into the world where they are desperately needed people desperately need what you have
to offer and how you can be clearer about what is it that you bring because that's part of cptsd2
is being very unclear about that being kind of muddled or not trusting what you think you know
about what you're meant to be doing or being too broke and desperate or stuck in a bad relationship
to pursue it those are some of the things that get in the way so when we heal our trauma
we start to make a space in our lives for these new possibilities to come in and we actually have
a choice to say yes or no to them and noah is a very important choice too that's called a boundary
where you don't you don't say yes to something you say that doesn't suit me right now
and when you say no to something that isn't right for you you've just made a big space
where you can say yes to the thing that is right but it's so important that you find what is right
how you do that is through the gradual day-by-day process of healing your your traumas starting with
learning to re-regulate starting to notice the signs of dysregulation which is a common
physiological nervous system feeling of chaos that often follows abuse and neglect in childhood and
if you're relating to this video or you've seen my videos before you know what i'm talking about
it's almost impossible to pursue a dream it can be even impossible to like walk down the sidewalk
when you're dysregulated many is the time i've tripped on the curb and fallen flat on my face
when i wasn't really in my body when i couldn't feel my face because i was triggered by something
so this approach to healing is all about putting first the task of learning to re-regulate all
right you learn to re-regulate first you notice to you learn to notice when you're dysregulated
and how to calm that down because i'm telling you when you become a jedi of re-regulation and you
master regulation you get dysregulated but you can come back from it and that means you
have absolute freedom to try new things you're not going to succeed at all of them so don't
you know make no mistake you'll fail at many many things but you'll be free to fail because
that the triggered feeling and that that feeling that you've been running from and isolating
from all your life in your trauma that feeling becomes something you actually can handle it's
much smaller and you have tools you have tools to cope with the emotions that come you don't shoot
your mouth off you learn to choose when to speak and what to say it's a life-changing distinction
to not be at the mercy of the dysregulation of your nervous system it also happens to
have really good effects on your financial success in life because you can pay attention you become
much more talented at doing your job when you can pay attention and you have more of your brain at
your disposal and it makes you much easier and enjoyable to hang out with so relationships
improve you have every reason to just put your toe in and try this first stage of healing which is to
learn to re-regulate now if you like this topic about playing small and how to bust out of that
and become your real self i would like to suggest you watch this video about fear that i made
i don't just talk about it i tell you what to do about it check it out and i will see you very soon
you