Hi I'm Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy, now all over my
Youtube channel, all over my blog I'm always talking about my daily practice
and these are the two techniques that I've been doing for 25 years that have
helped to treat my symptoms of childhood PTSD and have helped me learn to go from
dysregulation to reregulation and I'm telling you, when your brain has
reregulated the world is your oyster, so many things become possible. So for
everyone out there who relates to the problem of dysregulation, I not only want
to teach you how to do it but I want to give you a little background on how I
developed this. The daily practice not only helps you build reregulation but it
helps you feel better emotionally, it gives you some calm and relief and it
helps you build an ever more stable and regulated state. So here's a little
background; the first thing that ever helped my daily reregulation practice
was something I learned way back in 1994 when a friend of mine, who happens to be
in Alcoholics Anonymous, noticed that I was basically freaking out, I was in a
lot of panic and pain about my life. I was severely dysregulated but that
concept wasn't really known at the time, I didn't know about it, I was in a dark
place and I was desperate so even though I'm not an alcoholic she offered to show
me her daily practice that kept her sober. I basically would have tried
anything and the first thing she showed me was a way of writing down the fearful
and resentful thoughts in my mind. Now in the 12-step world where she came from,
this is called a personal inventory, most people would never have heard of her
very specific technique even people in the 12-step world but I had the good
fortune to learn from her. Now back then I really didn't know what was wrong with
me, I was just someone who couldn't seem to get over bad things. I tell parts of
this story at the beginning of my course: Healing Childhood PTSD. My mother was
dying of lung cancer, I had just said goodbye to her for the last time, a man I
had dated ended our relationship, and in the middle of this for no apparent
reason I was violently assaulted while I was
walking down the street. And as a result of this trauma, though I didn't have a
name for it then, I was massively dysregulated;
I was crying half the time, I was having outbursts of temper, I was getting lost
on the way home from the grocery store six blocks away,
I was super ADHD-ish and I was too unfocused to even read a short paragraph
and I mean my childhood PTSD was boiling up to the surface like a volcano but not
even the professionals knew what that was then, they knew I had a concussion
but they didn't quite know what this was. So the doctor couldn't help me, my
therapist really tried but I was just melting down in her office three times a
week and secretly I was looking at a fork in the road of either I die or I go
in for hospitalization but I did not see a way to actually feel better. And then,
thank God, my AA friend came along and she saw what was happening and suggested
that I do what she was doing and I didn't have an issue with alcohol but I
had an issue with sanity and survival, so I was like yes please show me and even
that very first time when she showed me, it was like breathing oxygen for the
first time. Every time I wrote it took the edge off and as I kept doing it I
started to feel pretty good actually. I started making new friends and doing
better at work and I started running and I even started going to 12-step programs
that are just for people who grew up with alcoholism in the family, which was
awesome and I still go sometimes. And that's something I want to say, 12-step
programs are really great and I recommend them to anyone who thinks that
they should maybe check them out just check it out.
So the daily practice I was doing was going really well and I kept going first
a year, then five years, then ten years, and it was only after 12 years that I
tried an experiment to see if I still really needed it because to be honest I
wasn't that happy anymore, I wasn't dysregulated all the time but I was
still in a lot of self-defeating behavior. I was choosing bad
relationships, I was having a lot of health problems, my first marriage had
blown up and now I was a single mom struggling with my boss and money and my
neighbors and feeling lonely, so I thought screw it this never worked
and I just quit my whole daily practice and what happened when I stopped is that
I dropped slowly, I didn't realize anything was wrong at first, I dropped
slowly but really severely back into dysregulation and all the old struggles
of poor focus and depression and anxiety and bad judgment and even more insane
relationships including one short one with a guy who killed himself and these
medical problems I was having and the shame and isolation that go with that
and honestly it just about broke me. But in a way I treasure it because things
got bad enough that I tried again to get help, and this time I found out I have
PTSD. And suddenly the jagged crazy pieces of the puzzle came together, I
could see why a lot of stuff like therapy had never worked and why my
daily practice had worked for me because it was treating my PTSD, my dysregulation.
I would have never known that if I hadn't stopped. So I got back into it
again only this time I adapted it for my PTSD and used the parts that actually
regulated me and then I added a few things that helped me structure my life
and I work step by step to stay regulated, stay on track and reach goals
I never thought were possible for me. And that's been the magic formula that's
allowed me to grow into the happy life of love and usefulness that I get to
have today. I've shared this now with hundreds of friends and now thousands of
strangers through my blog and YouTube channel and just people miscellaneous
who hear that I have a technique that can help them and they call me from all
over the world. So what I'm showing you is my own program
adapted from pieces I learned from now several mentors and friends and from my
own reading and research on what works and what doesn't work for healing
childhood PTSD. It doesn't cover everything out there and if I had to
give you scientific evidence for all of it, I couldn't do that. It's based on my
experience and the miracles that have happened for me and that I've witnessed
firsthand in others. The daily practice has helped me to get
my brain back and get my emotions back and prepared me to make the big changes
in my principles and actions so that I could move out of that life full of
problems and grow into this one, full of love and safety and growth and I've had
a couple of medical miracles happen as a result of this daily practice too, and
those are stories I'm still saving for a future boot camp or course, but I want to
say whether or not you believe in miracles or God or the power outside of
ourselves that can help us, the power of this daily practice doesn't change. I
think, like a lot of things really, healing and miracles take place on
multiple levels. They can be psychological, they can also be at the
same time physical, spiritual, and scientific. And that's what this
technique is, I don't want to overthink it or over explain it because your own
experience of it is really the only thing that matters here. For myself I've
sometimes been a science only kind of person and at other times I have been
guided by a strong faith and this daily practice has carried me and worked for
me through all of it, it's for everyone. If you're someone who believes in God
and prays this is for you and if you're an atheist or a Buddhist or nature is
your church or you're a recovering alcoholic or wherever you are on the
spectrum of belief, what I'm going to show you is compatible and it's for you.
The power of the daily practice doesn't depend on what you believe it just
depends on whether or not you do it.