- Hi, I'm Anna Runkle, also known
as The Crappy Childhood Fairy and this is the final video
in my resilience series,
where I've talked about eight big obstacles to healing
and the effects of childhood trauma,
as well as the strengths that we can develop to heal anyway.
Now by obstacles, I mean our own negative tendencies
and there's a pattern with childhood PTSD.
Everyone's a little different
but you see these eight obstacles crop up
over and over again and so the obstacle
that I'm talking about today is a feeling of emptiness.
Do you ever get that?
Everyone feels that sometimes,
but people with childhood PTSD are especially prone to it.
It's one of the classic adult symptoms of early trauma
and like most trauma symptoms,
it has roots in your brain development
and in your psychological development.
If you were hurt or ignored as a baby,
there's an important part of your development,
the connecting part, that may have had a setback,
a neurological delay.
And if you were abused, or laughed at, constantly afraid,
forced to hide your real thoughts and feelings,
there was a whole lot of stuff that wasn't happening
when you were a kid, when you were meant to be developing
into a fully feeling thinking connected person.
What wasn't happening, maybe things like being held
and unconditionally loved or loved enough
or expressing yourself and getting a response,
talking, laughing, making jokes, or doing something
that showed a special talent that you have, right?
We're meant to get that love shining at us
so that we can know, like really know,
that we belong in our family and we belong in this world.
That's the ideal and a lot of us had some funky version
of that, or a really broken version of it,
and I think that's a big source of the empty feeling.
I think it's behind the really common fear
that we're going to end up homeless
and I think it's a big reason people do become homeless,
whether it's from wiring or conditioning,
the connections that are supposed to come
naturally just don't.
Connection is hard and, you know, with the way we grew up,
in many ways we don't actually fit in.
I can tell you that the empty feeling
that used to just seize me up
before my own healing from childhood PTSD
had a lot to do with the feeling of abandonment.
Even when I didn't wanna be connected to somebody,
anything they did that felt like leaving
would set off the terrible state that Pete Walker calls
the abandonment melange, which he describes
as the terrible emotional mix of fear and shame
that coalesces around the death like feelings of depression
that afflict an abandoned child.
For me, feeling abandoned was just like that.
I might not even like someone, but if they said,
oh, you know, I think this isn't working,
it was really just a lot of fear, shame
and death like feelings for me.
So I'm here to give hope.
I'm here to tell you if I can heal
from all of that, so can you.
And I first had to learn to heal my brain
and then I learned to heal my thinking and my behavior
that had gone off track because of my dysregulated brain.
And it took me about 20 years.
And if you're interested, you can go a lot faster
than I did because I put all of what I learned to do
in a course and I walk you step by step through the process
and the link for that is down below
in the description section if you wanna take that course.
So you're gonna hear me say in all my courses
that when we get our brain and emotions more balanced,
we're on a level playing field with people
who never experienced trauma.
But we're also in a position, for the first time perhaps,
to do something extraordinary,
and that is to develop our gifts.
So what do I mean by gifts?
I'm using an understanding that I learned
from a mentor of mine, whose name is Father Michael Sweeney
and some work he did at a place called the Siena Institute.
He did a tremendous job of bringing the idea
of spiritual gifts to people in a religious context.
And I discerned my own gifts with his guidance
and over the years have found that virtually everyone,
religious, spiritual, and atheist,
instinctively understands the basic validity of this idea
that gifts are unusual abilities with which we are endowed
that came to us seemingly out of nowhere.
Now, gifts are not exactly the same thing as talents.
You might have a talent for playing the piano
and you play a certain piece so perfectly
that people listening will say, wow, that was incredible,
you didn't miss a single note.
If a gift is at work,
you'll know not by your technical expertise necessarily.
In fact, if music is your gift for example,
you might not have learned to play anything yet
so you have no way of knowing what your gift is yet.
But when a gift is operating in someone playing the piano,
you'll know it by the effect it has on others.
You may have a room full of listeners
with just tears running down their cheeks,
people will tell you how your work affected them,
they might say I'm so moved by what you played.
And if you're a teacher for example, with a gift,
your students might say you made me wanna learn more,
you made me wanna be a better person.
And have you ever met a doctor or a nurse
who has technical expertise but no gift for healing?
I have.
And likewise, have you encountered someone
who does have that gift of healing?
There is something about them,
beyond their talent and knowledge, that affects you.
Now, that is what we mean by gifts.
Some common gifts that you've probably noticed in others
are healing, teaching, writing, music,
art, wisdom, knowledge, wisdom and knowledge are different,
encouragement, hospitality, leadership,
there are more, but those are just some examples
and everyone has at least one gift, maybe two,
maybe even three sometimes.
And the reason gifts show themselves
in the way we affect others is because they were given to us
for the benefit of others.
Not everything about us is for the benefit of others,
some things are just for survival
or some things are just fun hobbies.
And though your gift might be something enjoyable to you,
that's not necessarily how you find it.
It also doesn't operate in a vacuum,
even when your gift is something
that you only do all by yourself,
it's something that ultimately benefits others
whether you know it or not.
Now, you may not have found your gift yet,
it's not always obvious what it is,
or you may not be very good at it yet but here's the thing;
everyone has a need to use their gifts
in order to feel truly happy.
Doesn't this resonate as something you've always known?
You have gifts and you need to use them.
And you may need to be around people
with complimentary gifts because some gifts
are meant to work in tandem or in groups.
People as a whole have many different gifts
because how it works, it truly takes all kinds
to bring about good in the world.
But I'm talking to you about this in light
of childhood PTSD because I think this is the great tragedy
of child trauma: something gets damaged
and among all the things that this damage will cost
that child throughout her life, perhaps the worst
is that it will suppress her gifts.
And not only will this prevent her
from feeling like herself or purposeful
with all that she's capable of,
but it will deny the rest of us
the gift which she was meant to share with us:
the art or the wisdom, the insight, whatever her gift is
that all people, all the world, were meant to receive.
It's like fabric.
When we're all sharing our gifts, it's like a fabric
but it's still full of holes because of all the people
who can't contribute yet because they're hungry,
they're trapped in trauma, or in some way, they're not free.
So we need a context that lets us develop these gifts.
Now imagine, imagine a world where everybody
becomes fully their real selves and becomes able
to share their gifts with all of us.
And so this is what I believe; we heal from childhood PTSD,
not just for the healing itself,
the purpose of our healing is so that we can develop
our gifts and share them, it's what we were made for.
So we need to heal and when we're healed,
we need to find our gifts and then we need
to help create conditions where other people can heal
and find their gifts.
Now, this is no simple thing but just as one person,
you don't need to make the entire thing happen,
you just need to bring your gifts into the world
and discover the role that you were meant to play
among many people in the unfolding of this wonderful world
where somewhere in your heart you know
is where you've always belonged.
There is darkness out there
but through healing childhood PTSD, we bring light.
We bring the light and we increase the love in the world,
we increase the healing of what happened,
healing towards something good
that never even existed before.
Something new comes through our healing.
So let your love and your healing grow in you.
Let it out, let it spread back in time
to love and heal those who suffered with childhood PTSD
in the generations before us.
Send your protective love and healing into the future,
to all the people who are here now
and all the people yet to come.
There will always be suffering
and there will always be those of us who understand
because of our own suffering.
And so let's be there for them.
The ones who will feel alone, like we sometimes do.
That's why we're here, this is why we heal from the past
for this purpose to now bring love and light
to all living things in this world.
Merry Christmas everybody and Happy Happy Holidays
to each one of you.
I'm so glad you're on this road with me.
(bright music)