- Hey everybody, it's Anna Runkle here
also known as The Crappy Childhood Fairy.
I wanna paint a scenario for you of what it's like
to heal the symptoms of your childhood PTSD.
And maybe you can't see it yet and you're discouraged,
but I'm going to tell you in this video
why you totally get to have hope
and even excitement about this.
I'm someone who's healed from it
and I'm here to tell you healing is possible.
If you're new to my work,
that's what I talk about here.
The effects on our lives now of abuse
and neglect when we were kids
and how to heal from that.
Things like intense emotional reactions
to things that are a little beyond
what people consider normal.
Depression, anxiety, fears of abandonment,
addictions, health problems that go on and on
with no rhyme or reason.
These are some of the common long-term effects
of early exposure to abuse and neglect.
Or maybe you struggle with relationships
which is really normal for us
and I mean romantic relationships and friendships.
Some of us hang on too hard
and others of us get really stressed out
from dealing with people at all.
And then there's stuff like, you didn't even realize
could be connected to childhood trauma
like being overweight,
or having ADHD,
or having chronic back pain even.
The more research comes out,
the more you start wondering what isn't caused,
or at least made worse, by childhood trauma.
For those of us who have it,
it can be a huge relief to know we're normal.
These are common effects that happen to normal people
exposed to abnormal conditions.
And that's good to know, right?
It's not your fault,
but that's not enough I know
because the real question is how do we recover?
Now, if you have childhood PTSD,
I'm going to bet that you're a good person.
You're intelligent.
You want to change for the better
and not only for yourself,
but for your kids, or your partner,
or your future partner,
or just plain so you can stop feeling so bad.
And I bet you've tried a lot of things already,
maybe therapy, medication,
alternative stuff, spiritual stuff,
physical stuff, books, groups,
classes, exercises, affirmations,
changing your self-talk, supplements
expressing your anger or not expressing your anger.
You could probably add five more things to this list, right?
And if you're like most of us,
none of it worked, not really.
And you're still feeling stuck,
feeling even like you failed somehow,
or like something's wrong with you
because this stuff seems to work for other people,
why not you?
I get it, that's how I felt
and I still feel that way
when I try normal people solutions.
That's what I call them.
They didn't work for me.
They don't help with the thing that I've got
and now we know why.
So the whole reason I make these videos and online courses
is because I found out what the problem is
and I found out what helps.
Actually, not in that order.
First I healed from my childhood PTSD symptoms
and then I set about trying to figure out
what just happened.
Why did that work?
And I got some answers
and I wanna tell everybody the problem I had
and that you might relate to is brain dysregulation.
We now know that abuse and neglect
and chronic stress early in your life causes brain changes.
And what that looks like now, as adults,
if you look at MRI's and brain scans,
it causes irregularities in the way the brain
responds to new stressors.
For one thing, it can make brainwaves
that normally flow in a kind of harmony,
suddenly go out of sync,
kind of like you're listening to someone
play Mozart on the piano
and then a bear just starts jumping around on the keys.
It's something like that in your brain
when your PTSD turns on.
Now, another thing going on in our brains
is that under stress, the left front cortex
when you look at it on an MRI, decreases activity.
That's where our reasoning happens
and at the same time,
it can cause the right front cortex to get overactive.
Do you wanna guess what happens
over there in the right front cortex?
It's where our emotions are regulated or not.
Not enough thinking, right?
Too much feeling.
And this explains so much about why childhood PTSD
can make us unable to recognize a bad choice
when it's staring us right in the face
and why we have such intense overreactions
when we feel threatened or criticized,
or worst case scenario, abandoned.
And it could play a big role
in why we seemingly make the same mistakes
over and over again,
even though we're sure we're never gonna do it again, right?
It's not our fault we got this way, okay?
And it's not our fault that reading about it,
talking about it,
willing ourselves to be different somehow, never worked.
So now we know and here's what we've learned.
Childhood PTSD, it's not in your mind,
it's in your brain.
So how do you heal that?
You know how I told you I healed first
and then I found out what did it?
So I was in a period
with the worst PTSD symptoms I'd ever had
and this is back when I was about 30 years old.
Now, remember, I didn't know it,
but I already had childhood PTSD.
And in this short period of time
I got hit with three giant stressors.
I detail this in the story of my healing
from childhood PTSD in my course.
So I'm not gonna go into the whole story right here,
but you can check that out in the links below.
Well, I was physically and emotionally a wreck
and I had tried all those things
I was listing at the beginning of this video
and I was really hopeless because nothing was working
and I was doing everything and I was feeling worse.
And then an acquaintance of mine
offered to show me a technique she had been using
and I tried it.
And I kept doing it
and within just a couple of weeks, my brain was okay.
My dysregulated brain grew regulated
and it turned out I had to keep using this technique,
or I would just kind of slide back into dysregulation,
but I kept doing it.
And I'm telling you the difference between being regulated
and dysregulated is like night and day.
Now, you are actually familiar with both states
because we all get dysregulated sometimes
and most of us will eventually come back
to a regulated state.
But with childhood PTSD,
we get dysregulated more easily
and it happens more often
and it's harder to come back from it.
So it turns out the most important thing I did
was learned to notice when I'm dysregulated
and right then, use my techniques
to come back to a regulated state.
By doing this, I can spend less time dysregulated
and do less of the things that I do while dysregulated
like shoot my mouth off,
or make bad decisions
and I can spend more time regulated
with full access to my awareness
and clear perception and inner calm.
And from here, real change in life becomes possible
because it is just a fact when you have childhood PTSD,
when you're dysregulated a lot of the time,
a bunch of life problems tend to pile up.
So that's what I teach
and so far, for thousands of people
who've taken my online courses, it's working
and it's working like nothing ever has worked
for these folks before.
And I'm putting a link down below
where you can see some of the things
people have said about my healing childhood PTSD course
and you can get some information
if you think that's something you might benefit from.
But here's what I want you to know,
the good life that you thought was taken away from you.
It is waiting for you.
The real you, the person you were meant to be
is still in there waiting until it's safe.
And when you start healing,
you're gonna start feeling a strength
that you never knew you had
and a joy that you thought you'd never find,
your full human experience.
Yes, it includes pain and loss in your past
and it includes the possibility of something better now.
A feeling inside of being okay,
not being scared all the time,
taking pleasure in the small things
that are already around you,
learning to go slowly
and connect for real with people who you choose,
setting about to learn something new
and actually doing it,
creating opportunities for yourself,
contributing something only you can contribute to this world
because that's where real happiness is.
So just hold this image in your mind
and know that this is possible.
And you might find it hard just to entertain the thought,
all the grief in you will fight back
and say, no, I don't even wanna hope for anything anymore,
but if you can, just let that thought in.
And if that feels like the train that you wanna get on,
I've got some tools on my website
for you to get you started.
That's all down there in the description section
and I'll see you next time.
(ethereal music)