In this post, you will learn about re-regulating your nervous system after CPTSD with Crappy Childhood Fairy Anna Runkle.
Emma: Hey, everyone. I’m really excited today to have a special guest, Anna Runkle.
She is also known as Crappy Childhood Fairy. Today, [00:01:00] we are going to be talking with Anna about her new book, Re-Regulated, and how you can learn to re regulate your nerve system after experiencing CPTSD, Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is basically a result of long ongoing childhood abuse or chronic trauma.
Anna, thank you so much for being here. I’m so happy to talk with you today.
Anna Runkle: Me too.
What is CPTSD? How is that different from PTSD?
Emma: Yeah, so we’re going to just jump right in. Can you tell us, first off, what is CPTSD? How is that different from PTSD?
Anna Runkle: CPTSD is complex post traumatic stress disorder, and I think a lot of us are familiar with PTSD. We associate it with combat veterans.
It really could happen to anybody who’s been through an intense acute trauma. Complex PTSD is the name given to a kind of PTSD that develops from chronic ongoing exposure to stress. It could happen over years. It could happen from living through a whole war or very typically growing [00:02:00] up in a family that is full of neglect, abuse, trouble.
It can also be from outside the family bullying at school growing up ostracized, things like that.
Does it impact the brain or mental health?
Emma: Yeah, like an ongoing stressful situation that you can’t really escape. How does that impact people? How does that impact their development or their brain or their mental health?
Anna Runkle: This science is coming out all the time right now.
And I only first learned the term complex PTSD 10 years ago, and it rocked my world because I was affected by it. I didn’t have a name for it. It was very personal. I just thought I, I had these very quirky problems and failures in my life. And I was always trying so hard to fix them. And I did have a tool that helped, but I didn’t know what it was fixing.
But what I’ve noticed is most people have some trauma in their life. And let’s say a person who’s in an abusive marriage could develop complex PTSD, and it would create symptoms of things that happen. It doesn’t, it’s not the same [00:03:00] in everybody, which is part of the mystery of it. Some people don’t get it, some do, and It’s not like a perfect correlation.
So people are often, I had this. Does that mean I’m going to have cancer? It’s never like that. But having more trauma in our lives does put us at risk for a lot of problems with mental health, physical health, cognitive functioning, and the way we relate to people. And when it happens early in childhood, and I always assumed that physical abuse or sexual abuse would have been the worst thing that could happen to a kid.
And they certainly are terrible, but in terms of altering your development, neglect is right up there. It’s right up there. When a young child isn’t getting that close loving attention and eye contact with their mom and dad, when they’re not getting mirrored, then there’s nervous system changes that take place.
And what we know about them, people have long been in touch with some sort of emotional dysregulation because that’s the kind you can see when you’re not the person who’s affected. [00:04:00] Oh, they lash out all the time. They freak out all the time. They fall in love in an instant and then they get horrified and, can’t get over the breakup.
And so that’s emotional dysregulation, but that’s just one little piece of the pie. There’s, there are so many other aspects of neurological dysregulation that affect our hormones, when we go into puberty, how we respond to insulin in our bodies.
Emma: Yeah. I’ve been learning about that lately and that’s fascinating. And I don’t want to steal the show, but I just finished writing a video about how people who experience four or more ACEs in their childhood, and ACEs is an adverse childhood experience, a form of trauma, are significantly more likely to develop diabetes, and that’s because experiencing that trauma changes their cortisol, which changes their blood sugar, which changes their insulin resistance and leads to like diabetes and all these other physical conditions that we’re seeing.
Anna Runkle: Diabetes, all the autoimmune disorders, heart disease, cancer, reproductive disorders [00:05:00] like endometriosis, highly correlated with abuse. And that’s how they figured out the ACE study. You may have read all of this when they, when back in the 90s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda, they were from Kaiser Permanente and the CDC, respectively.
One of them was looking at a clinic for women who had more than one or 200 pounds to lose, what they would call morbidly obese. And they were trying to figure out like, why does this happen? Why did they lose the weight? And then one day snap and they go back to the higher weight. And they were trying to understand it.
And they asked a thousand questions like, what do you eat for breakfast? Did you ever take birth control pills? What were you ever sexually abused? Bing. That was the thing. 80 percent of the morbidly obese women in their clinic had been sexually abused. But what gets me is that then they said they must be trying to avoid sex.
That’s why they gain weight.
Emma: And they thought it was like, yeah, they thought it was a psychological. They just automatically assumed it was a psychological and a behavioral pattern. They thought it was something they were doing subconsciously to sabotage. [00:06:00] And later they found this is biological.
This is a biological shift caused by abuse and trauma.
Anna Runkle: Yeah, it changes your hormones. It changes how your body metabolizes carbs and how your brain interprets when you’re full. And That for myself, I’ve found a way of eating when I don’t eat, when I don’t eat sugar and flour, it really calms my CPTSD triggers and the weight falls off rather easily and really nothing takes weight off easily from me.
It’s always been an issue in my life, food and weight and that sort of calms it down when I can do that. But a lot of things are psychologized. And I just remember being told, I have CPTSD, and I’ll talk about how that happened. But I remember in my early 20s, going to therapy for the first time and talking about things.
And they said, and I said I’m just, I keep getting together with guys who cheat on me and don’t care about me. And they said you’re trying to recreate your childhood. And I remember feeling very hurt by that. But I felt that I was obliged to take it in as truth, and just an unpleasant truth that I had to accept.[00:07:00]
And then, I found out about CPTSD, and then, could retrofit my understanding of all these things I’d been through, the strange repetition of bad behaviors. It’s a malfunction of my brain. When certain kind of stressors come up, my reasoning is not so great. It’s faulty. My emotions are overactive.
And that’s exactly what it feels like. That’s what emotional dysregulation is on the outside. But on the inside, there’s a neurological thing going on. You’re not just deciding to be horrible or difficult or destructive. It’s not, that’s not what’s going on. And even though I’m capable of all those things, I wouldn’t say that I’ve never done destructive things with a what the heck attitude. But there was something else going on and I knew it. And going to therapy for years and trying different therapists and not getting help with that problem gave me this weird internalized sense of shame that I was unfixable, that everybody else would go, therapy is great, I go, I talk about what happened.
I’d go talk about what happened in my childhood and [00:08:00] I would feel terrible afterwards. I’d have to sit in my car and calm down for 45 minutes before I could drive a car. And now I know I was dysregulated. It’s really normal to get dysregulated from talking about traumatic experiences. And, back then, until very recently, that was the idea.
You were supposed to talk about the traumatic experience. And there really was this belief that if you could talk about it enough, it would lift. But it never did for me.
Emma: And for so many people.
Anna Runkle: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Emma: For so many people, talk therapy just simply makes them feel worse with trauma.
Anna Runkle: Yeah. And it’s funny because being a YouTuber, as you are, as I am, you learn a lot about people and their perspective on things from the comments.
I read all of them. Yeah. And a lot of people will say you just didn’t have the right therapist. I had 11 of them in the first years, and then some different ones after that. They were all good. They were really good people. They were well trained and they were very compassionate and there was no problem there.
It’s just that for [00:09:00] me talking about it would disable my ability to stay neurologically regulated.
Emma: Did you, out of those therapists, did any of them use body or nervous system modalities with you?
Anna Runkle: No, I mean because I stopped back before that was really a thing.
Emma: Yeah, this is much, yeah, so the development of somatic based or body based therapies is really just happening in the last 15 years.
Anna Runkle: Yeah, I’ll tell you EMDR worked like a charm for me. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, but only when the practitioner didn’t make me talk about the trauma. You and I have talked before and I think you know I had a partner take his own life and I found him biggest, biggest intense trauma of my adult life.
And it kicked up all my childhood trauma. We still didn’t know what it was. Went in therapy, was just told to talk about it and talk about it. And the doctor said you had to get on medication. You’re going into adrenal fatigue, and I looked on the internet I said, what do I do about PTSD?
I started to think I have PTSD. I was never [00:10:00] like told that’s what it was and also, you know, years earlier, 30 years ago now, my initial turning point in life was when I got attacked on the street. So I’ve had acute PTSD a couple of times, from some very traumatic experiences. And both times they totally dysregulated me for like months and months, and both times I went to the doctor and the therapist, and both times it was talk about it and take these medications.
And I now know those were like the worst things that I could do for PTSD because the talking would make it, make the dysregulation worse, where I just I couldn’t read. I couldn’t use the phone. I was hysterical. People would be like, hey, can you do your dishes? And I’d be like, I’m just freaking out all the time.
Write about it
Anna Runkle: And I tried to describe it to a therapist once. They’re like, how do you feel inside? And I said like this, all the time. And that’s not normal for me. And so for me, what ended up breaking the cycle very quickly was when I learned to write about it.
A [00:11:00] friend came in and showed me a writing technique I could do that she had learned from a very special person in AA who was doing it a special way every day, calling it the daily steps.
And a lot of people have really benefited from that who are alcoholics. It was shown to me, even though I’m not an alcoholic, but within two weeks, like my depression lifted. My lack of focus lifted. The problems with people took real life problem solving over decades to solve. That’s but I finally was in a place where I could solve life problems.
Emma: Instead of just coping or drowning, right? You were like, starting to actually just make a little progress, get on top of regulate during the day. That was the difference. You were regulating day to day, right?
Anna Runkle: Yeah. And it’s funny because I learned all of this 20 years before I had a word for either complex PTSD or dysregulation, I didn’t know what it was.
I used to say I see how you alcoholics are in the AA meeting, and I don’t have a drinking problem, but I’m like you. I have that thing that that’s what it’s like to be an alcoholic [00:12:00] untreated. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And now with my friends and the woman who showed this to me, who’s still my friend, who is in the opening, she’s in the introduction of the book, I tell the story of the night she showed me and saved my life, because I was at the end of my rope, and I did not plan to be on earth the next day, and I told her, and she took me in and showed me what she had done.
And it’s a form of prayer, really. And at the time, I wasn’t receptive to it, to prayer, and which was, and she laughed at me, she’s do you have anything to lose? You’re not even gonna be alive tomorrow. She had this funny way of just being lighthearted with me that was very disarming.
And I was armed, I was so defended and scared. Yeah. And yeah so because she was funny and then because she told me a little bit of her experience, she had lived on the streets. She, by the age of 17, she was drinking so much she couldn’t keep it down anymore. And she got, she was able to get sober in AA, but she was miserable.
And so when this woman came and showed her how to write out her [00:13:00] fearful and resentful thoughts and ask for them to be removed, she had that uplifting, setting free feeling in her heart, like the angst, that thing lifted. And that’s really all that is, is a level playing field with anybody else to be able to start taking on your life.
Life is full of problems. They don’t stop just because you get better or sober or whatever it is. Problems keep coming, but how they affect you can change. So she showed it to me and, I didn’t have a word for it. But when I learned about complex PTSD, I understood that I was dysregulated. I had been dysregulated the whole time.
It hadn’t been too bad really until I got assaulted in 1994. And there’s something about that, that I just couldn’t get it back in the bag. And I was struggling with dysregulation. Part of it is emotional. Part of it is cognitive, like ability to focus, learn, and remember. And part of it is physical, where your hormones are disrupted your sleep is disrupted, your sense of time is disrupted, [00:14:00] and a lot of things that I can’t even see, I just know something is off.
I started getting a lot of migraines and back pain, and that’s what dysregulation was doing to me. And when I learned to re regulate, those things lifted pretty well. I still have a body, it is aging, things happen, but but I’m very healthy. I’ve overcome some pretty serious medical stuff because I know, I can recognize [inaudible] and I’m dysregulated, and I know how to come back from it. Yeah. So I had to write a book. I had to.
Emma: I love it. And I feel like it’s so essential. I love it so much. It’s so essential because there’s so many people who have experienced trauma. I was writing a video on the ACEs.
It was like 64 percent of people have experienced at least one ACE in their child and 16 percent of people have experienced at least four. And four is like one of those points where the chart of like cancer, autoimmune disorders, like obesity, diabetes, just like spike at four. So that’s one in six people.
That’s 50 million Americans. Yeah. So this is really important. So [00:15:00] many people have experienced childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, and they don’t even have words for what they’re experiencing.
Anna Runkle: Yeah. And they don’t always get validation either from clinical professionals. Some know, some don’t.
Many believe they’re trauma informed, but you can claim that even if you just went to one little workshop. And it’s the same term if on the other hand, you’re somebody who’s devoted your whole career to understanding it and treating it. Yeah, so I really encourage people to not just surrender sovereignty of their own healing process and just go, I don’t know.
You’re the expert. Tell me what to do. I’ll do that. This is terrible. I guess I’m unfixable. Don’t settle for that. Keep trying. Keep learning. Keep, if something doesn’t work, don’t do that. Try a thing with that. Your instincts tell you, I think this might help. And that’s how better.
Emma: I would agree. 100%. So I feel like a lot of times people, they hear a diagnosis, they think, oh, this must be permanent. Or they see one doctor who says, here’s the one treatment. Or they see one therapist who’s here is the answer. And they try those things and their life is still not manageable.
500 things to try
Emma:And it’s no, [00:16:00] there’s 500 things to try. Please keep testing and experimenting with your life. Keep hope because there’s probably something that’s going to help you and you’ve got to experiment and try and test and learn until you figure it out.
Anna Runkle: Yeah. Sometimes I think it’s the very act of trying that is what opens the door anyway that even the solutions are imperfect or they don’t last forever.
Sometimes we find a technique or a way of life or something that we go, this is really fixing me now. And then in a couple of years it goes dry and more is required. And I think a lot of growing as a person is like that. You have to stay alive to what you’re being called to next. But I think and this is sometimes where I think the world of mental health falls short is they get so focused, not just on the problems, the pathologies of it, but they get focused on, if we could just get you to feel better, just get you into prenatal care, just that these are all good.
And you do need to feel better. That’s for darn sure. But the goal is to become your full and real self, to be liberated, to be that person [00:17:00] you were created to be, that’s everything. And life feels stifling and frustrating until you’re doing that. You’ll wake up at 3 a. m. thinking, it’s passing me by, I feel like I’m supposed to be doing more, and when honoring that and pursuing that as part of the healing process, I think it’s a lot more fun and rewarding and just not so dependent on any kind of particular system. I just really noticed that the people who don’t recover very quickly tend to think, they put their faith in somebody else to tell them what to do.
And I think we totally need that sometimes in a crisis.
Emma: Yeah.
Anna Runkle: Help! Somebody throw me a lifeline. Part of healing is to start to discern your own answers and to start noticing your own response to things that you try. That’s so much, cause that’s a lot of what childhood trauma does is it dumbs that down.
A lot of, A dysfunctional family life involves lying to kids about what they’re noticing. Be quiet. Mommy’s tired. Mommy’s on drugs right now. And or, get in [00:18:00] the car. It’s perfectly safe. Or go, trust the man. He told you to trust him. And and so your perception and your discernment gets dumbed down. And to recover that, I think it’s really important that we don’t get told what to believe or do or say or follow. I think it’s really important to keep following our own lights and to go within, to hear that voice from within and to be guided by it.
Emma: I love hearing you say that. I love hearing you say that so much because this is how I start my webinars with my membership where we have a live Q& A once a month.
And I always start by saying look, I’m not your therapist. This is not personalized advice. And even if it were, don’t trust anyone on the internet or your therapist greater than you’re deepest sense of what is right, your deepest internal compass that tells you, you have a purpose in this life.
Live that life that we really care about
Emma: There’s something meaningful for you to do here. And the goal of therapy or any kind of treatment is help free us from the stuff that’s interfering [00:19:00] with our ability to live that purposeful and meaningful life. So if our emotions are getting in the way, if we’re so wrapped up in emotions or trying to make our emotions go away, that I can’t like be present for my grandkids, then we need to develop some space here or we need to develop some flexibility with our thinking. So not just we feel good, but so that we are able to live that life that we really care about.
Countervailing forces
Anna Runkle: Yes. Yes. And there are some very strong like countervailing forces in our lives and common themes and stuff. I’ll just pick women as an example.
Cool girl. There’s a nice guy and there’s cool girl. And they get programmed that even if they’re getting cheated on, they’re not getting called back, they’re being treated disrespectfully, but they already have a sexual relationship. They’re supposed to, they use words like hold space for that or something, but it really means dissociate from the horror that they’re feeling, the feeling of shame and injury of what it feels like to sleep with somebody and have them not call you or treat you with respect.
It feels [00:20:00] terrible. It feels intrinsically terrible. And there are a handful of people who will go, oh no, as long as you communicate, it’s great. And if that’s what it’s like, I certainly don’t know that experience and I don’t have, I don’t have anything to help such a person with that. So many people have felt like they had to go along with that idea.
And then that’s how we can re traumatize ourselves is with the coping mechanism, like you need love and it is lonely having childhood trauma wounds. It often results in having few friends and no partner. And so somebody comes along and the attachment, you can just rush right in because there’s an attachment wound there.
So it’s like rush. You’re it. I love you. Rush into a sexual relationship, which then prompts a bond, and the bond is very difficult to break. If you have abandonment wounds, it’ll feel like death I don’t even this guy, but if I leave, I’ll probably, not be able to survive.
That’s what goes on with childhood PTSD, and it’s neurological. It’s not a choice or anything. It’s not a moral failure that you feel [00:21:00] that way. There comes a time if you want to heal, you can make decisions about how you handle life according to your own way, and that’s something I had to do in my life, and that’s what I teach other people.
If they want to heal, if they want to stop having trauma driven partnerships or pseudo situationships, you can go slowly, you can not bond, you can get to know people and let time give you the opportunity to see the red flags before your whole life is invested in them. And that right there, you could really save whole generations of people because that’s where children come from, is such attachments. That’s
Emma: the thing, right? The next generation depends on our sexual attachments.
Anna Runkle: That’s right.
Emma: And our sexual health.
Anna Runkle: That’s right. It’s a beautiful and important powerful thing that can go terribly wrong.
Getting re-regulated
Emma: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So I want to make sure that we talk about getting re-regulated because that’s the title of your book, right? So yeah, I want to hear about CP TSD is inherently [00:22:00] dysregulating. It interferes with how our brain works, it interferes with our hormones, our entire body can be impacted by this, but does that mean it’s hopeless?
What are like, what do you think about this?
Anna Runkle: Yes. The great pleasure of my life is when I learned what dysregulation was, literally I was reading, I think I learned about it in Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score, which was certainly something many people read and were changed by it and I was.
And I had just been going through a really hard time with my now husband, who had to cancel the wedding because I had a huge outburst at him about something just weeks before the wedding. And I was stressed and I got very emotionally dysregulated and lashed out at him in a way that was unacceptable to him.
And he was just like, we can’t go forward. And there was nothing I could do to change his mind. And I looked online and I found Bessel van der Kolk’s book. It had just come out and I read it and I just remember I was standing there and I was like, honey, honey, there’s a name for what’s wrong with me. It’s a thing.
It’s not just [00:23:00] me. His jury was out for a while. He was like I’ll believe it when I see it. And we did end up getting married and happily married. And he now is so deeply supportive of the book and the community and he’s part of it. He works with me and he’s very strong on it. But he, at first he just sounded like some woo nonsense to him.
Emma: Yeah.
Anna Runkle: But for me, I recognized instantly that’s what it was. And I had been doing my daily practice for 20 years at that point. I had given it up at one point, and I learned what it was like to not do it, which was disastrous. And I just said, whatever is wrong with me, it fixes that. I had a name. I’m dysregulated.
I [inaudible], this is one very powerful way for many of us to practice re regulation twice a day. It’s a twice a day practice, my daily practice, and it involves a specific writing technique where you get your fearful and resentful thoughts on paper, and it has a very specific intent from the very beginning to the very end in the way that you sign off at the end to have it [00:24:00] removed.
And I’ll qualify that and say, no, you don’t want all your emotions removed, but it’s safe to put all your emotional thoughts on paper that you’re having at that moment and just say, here, take them from me, or if you are more inclined to believe in your higher self, they can release it. They can intentionally release it.
And so with that intention I just don’t want all this in my head, then you follow it with sitting down in a 20-minute restful meditation. And we call it meditation, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit a certain way. You don’t lie down, but you sit up and you allow your mind to rest. That’s all. Your body and mind take a rest for 20 minutes.
And some people use a more structured meditation approach. Some people just rest. So what I’ve learned is there’s a lot of science for why writing followed by meditation would be effective to help your nervous system do what it already knows how to do that. We all do know how to reregulate inside.
We all get dysregulated. We all know how to reregulate, but with trauma, you’re not that good at [00:25:00] it. That’s all. It’s more of the time you’re just spinning. So you’re slowly developing skill and awareness to notice when you’re feeling freaked out. [inaudible] out and then to bring yourself back and it often doesn’t feel like anything sometimes you’re you do it twice a day. So sometimes when you begin you feel fine and you get done and you feel fine and you feel just are we done yet?
Can I go to work now? So it doesn’t have to feel like anything but it just turns out that over years it is very powerful to just get into the habit of re regulating. And I also teach, though, once you’re re regulated, now you can begin to make the life changes. It’s not enough to be re regulated because it’s still possible to be self destructive and helpless and hurting your life even when you’re re regulated. So once you’re re regulated, you’re in a position to change your life by the methods you choose. Dysregulation is one third of the stool. It’s the way I see trauma. Dysregulation, disconnection. This is almost universal symptom of [00:26:00] people who were traumatized as kids. And it’s just my observation.
So I teach to it. This feeling of no matter what group I join, I don’t belong. No matter what relationship I’m in, it doesn’t feel right. You know, there’ s this feeling of not quite being part of the human race. And I sometimes think like the Genesis story of getting kicked out of Eden is just like the prototypical experience of there’s this good place I’m supposed to be in and I’ve been cast out.
Emma: Yeah.
Anna Runkle: And that’s a lot what the trauma wound is like. And so you keep looking to friends and partners and jobs and things with great enthusiasm, but it’ll always go hollow and the old symptoms come back. So that’s what we begin to heal very deeply and a re regulated person. To heal, you can’t just have a bunch of ideas or read a book.
Healing is going to involve friction with the world. So when you learn to re regulate and people go, what if I just do the daily practice all day? And I’m like, no, you have to spend most of your day going out there and just getting like f’ed up. Oh, my feelings. Oh, the stress. Yeah. [00:27:00] Yeah. And then that friction is what brings to light what’s down in the well there.
What are those pain points inside and as it’s brought up to our awareness through difficulty and stress, we can face it and be rid of it by naming it. You put it into words and put it on paper and release it So I learned this is a 12-step thing But recently I’ve become friends with somebody whose work has always influenced mine James Pennebaker.
Do you know him? He is a professor emeritus of psychology At University of Texas, Austin, and he ended up having 2, 000 peer reviewed studies done on a technique he calls expressive writing. It’s a little similar to what I’m doing, where he invited his grad students, here, try this, write about the worst thing that ever happened to you for 15 minutes, 4 days in a row.
And he measured them before and after, and not only did they feel better, but their blood composition changed, and it stayed changed 30 days later. It was very [00:28:00] effective. There’s something about writing and expressing the pain about something that does help us process it. And then I took this course in the neurobiology of trauma.
It turns out it’s scientifically validated that early trauma injures your ability to process thoughts and feelings. They literally get jammed up in your consciousness.
Emma: Yep. Yep.
Anna Runkle: It’s like a beaver dam in there. There’s like laundry and sticks and mud.
Emma: Yeah. There are physical changes to the hippocampus in the amygdala in children who’ve experienced childhood trauma.
And those are motion processing centers of the brain.
Anna Runkle: Yeah. Yeah. I used to say, I, I used to have all these metaphors of I, I’d say, I feel jammed up. I need to get this stuff rinsed off. I need to release it into the stream. I had this very strong visceral body, mental consciousness experience of having a cluttered log jam of thoughts and feelings loosened up.
And I’ve always used metaphors. It’s WD 40, it just loosens that up. Things can start to move again.
Emma: Yeah. [00:29:00]
Anna Runkle: So one of my metaphors is the fearful, resentful thoughts are like a bunch of wet leaves on the windshield. And you can’t drive with that stuff. And you don’t need to look at every leaf and put it in a book and find out what species it is.
You could just shove it into the street. It’s not anything you need.
Emma: I think that’s true, though. Like we don’t have to analyze every frickin emotion. We don’t have to analyze every childhood memory. We need to have a place to set it so that we can see clearly how to move forward. Yeah. I like that.
Anna Runkle: And some things are significant, but they’ll come into focus when you have less of this clutter, less of this, the mud and the sticks and the noise. And with less of that, you can go, oh wow, I forgot to pay my taxes on time. I really have to do that. And so these I shouldn’t really use paying taxes as a lovely fruit of healing, but it is like just being able to stay on schedule with important things is a fruit of healing.
Emma: Yeah. Yeah. Like just always feeling like overwhelmed, stressed out and backlogged and procrastinating. It’s like, oh, I have a problem. I [00:30:00] face it. I solve it and it’s done. I don’t have to worry about my taxes anymore.
Anna Runkle: Yeah. Always going into a deficit, a debt, an emotional debt, a money debt, a time debt.
Emma: Yeah.
Anna Runkle: Instead, things, this starts to tip over into, you start to have a sort of wealth of things, you have choices. You have loving people in your life. You have a little money in the bank. That is a blessing.
So is your daily practice just simply expressive writing, or is it guided?
Emma: Yeah. So is your daily practice just simply expressive writing, or is it guided?
Can you give us any more details about that? Or should people check out the book for that?
Anna Runkle: The book teaches it in detail, but I’ll tell you as best I can. And I always, I’m always cagey because I’m like, if you do it wrong, it can make you feel worse. Some people, a lot of us have been conditioned, like everything involving healing means go give a litany, just go to give the laundry list of complaints.
If you do that, it will tend to make you feel better. It’s better to be writing these with a specific structure that I show people. And I invite people, like change it up if you want to, but not in the first week. Like really give it a try so you can experience the spirit of the thing.
Emma: Yeah.
Anna Runkle: And it’s a [00:31:00] very important aspect of it for me in my healing was this idea that I could hand it over.
And, that I could surrender it. I was carrying so much. I was so burdened with my worries and my guilt and just confusion about things. And just to say, I just, I don’t know. I don’t know here. You take it. I just can’t. I just can’t right now. And the first time I did it, it was a feeling of relief.
Just relief.
Emma: Yeah.
Anna Runkle: Okay. Okay. It’s going to be okay. I don’t know how it’s going to be okay, but the burden comes off and my life force, I could feel my life force. So expressive writing is Pennebaker’s term for what he was doing and I call it writing fears and resentments and we follow it with a simple meditation.
And I’ve taken care that the meditation I teach is compatible with any faith or none. It doesn’t introduce any kind of deity or belief system. It’s just rest. Just rest. Everybody needs a rest. Surprisingly hard for people to do, to just sit down for 20 minutes sometimes. But see, we’ve all [00:32:00] been told you have to dive into the worst feelings, and then when you’re meditating, you have to cease all thought.
Neither one is possible or fateful.
Emma: Yeah, not for me.
Anna Runkle: Not for me. So it’s just, you take the top layer, there’s a little top layer of dust. Every day, there’s some worries, I’m having a party on Sunday, my niece is coming tonight. So my top layer has a lot to do with, will I be ready for my niece?
Have I changed the sheets for her? What if so and so comes and argues with my other friend and I have these anxieties, they’re just, it’s mostly just like little stuff. But it’s clogging my channel. I can’t be aware, certainly can’t be in my divine purpose with all that stuff going on. So I have a chance to just put it on paper, and when I’m putting it on paper, I sometimes, see I always have it with me, I have two of these little pads, and one is for dumping the fearful, resentful thoughts, and writing the prayer at the end to ask for it to be removed.
One is for little to do items that I just, that come to me in the middle of it all, and then I can really rest my [00:33:00] mind. Sometimes some of the most important insights of my life have come because I had that quiet time after I cleared the windshield. Yeah. Just a little clarity, a little space, a little air, a little time when I can hear my heart speaking to me about what’s important. Sometimes what the voice says is, you have a cold, you need to slow down today. I’d be like, I have a cold? Oh yeah. Sometimes it’s that or one time it was, you must go to grad school and you have to hurry and apply today because it’s probably too late and then I ended up in grad school.
Emma: That’s cool. I have a similar experience with my personal practice of prayer and study. So that, that inspired thoughts come when you give them space.
Anna Runkle: Yeah, good soil to grow in, and just a little space. There’s a lot of competition for that space, and I find it harder now in this age of smart phones.
Emma: Yep. Me too.
Anna Runkle: Fascinating. I just [00:34:00] feel like I should know better by now. But I’ll find myself down the rabbit hole, and I’ll be like, how long have I just been looking at little videos of cow hooves getting cleaned [inaudible]
Emma: Yeah. I’ve seen that guy. Okay. So we have to wrap up. I want to respect your time, but can you speak to anything else you do to help you in addition to your daily practice to help you re regulate your nervous system?
What do you do when you're feeling dysregulated other than your daily practice or in addition to your daily practice?
Emma: Like what do you do when you’re feeling dysregulated other than your daily practice or in addition to your daily practice?
Anna Runkle: I write, and that’s my sort of baseline, but then there’s just immediate moment things that I can do, and one is staying on a schedule, one is how I eat and, I’m not a perfect eater, but I do know that when I crave sugar and carby foods when I’m dysregulated, because it’s just like cigarettes used to be for me. In the short run, it can help you like re center, but within a couple of hours, you feel like crap.
Emma: Yeah. That’s right. You don’t feel good.
Anna Runkle: [00:35:00] Yeah. And so that, and that’s, I think that’s a lot of the attraction of anything that is drug, a drug or drug-like for us is it’s a temporary fix in hell, as my friend said.
Emma: Yeah.
Anna Runkle: You get it. It feels a little better. And I think that rapid romance is such a drug.
Even just having somebody who hugs you can be so calming to a sense of distress and dysregulation. Yet, if that person doesn’t care about you, in the end, there’s this huge price to pay. I have found there are two essential things. You need to have the tools that you find helpful. In hand, ready, in your pocket or purse at all times.
So I always have these little pads of paper. They’re in the car, they’re everywhere. And then, I just don’t think we ever say enough about moving our bodies. It’s the first line of treatment. Just go outside and move around.
Emma: Yep.
Anna Runkle: Do anything.
Emma: Yep. Go sweep your porch. Even just sitting outside, like going for a tiny walk, like it does not have to be crossfit. Like you do not have to be an ultra runner. Actually it’s probably better [00:36:00] if you’re not an ultra runner.
Anna Runkle: I’m seeing this now with great pride. See, I told you, being like exercising a lot, it’s not always good for you.
Emma: Yeah. It’s true though. Yeah.
Anna Runkle: I’m pretending to be high and mighty about it, but actually, moderate exercise is the healthy thing.
Emma: Yeah. That’s right.
Anna Runkle: You can never go wrong. And according to what your body is able to do, everybody has these different levels of ability. And there was a time after I, all my health problems, I was ashamed to go to a little relaxing yoga class because I thought I couldn’t do it.
They were like, that’s okay. You can just lay on the floor, just do what you know, follow along if you can, don’t worry. I was like, thank you.
Emma: Yeah.
Anna Runkle: I couldn’t even lift my legs. I was, I’d had all this surgery.
Emma: Yeah.
Anna Runkle: Whatever your body can do, just move it a little. Move it a little. And that can break the spell, that can get you out of that freeze mode, that nervous system freeze that causes, procrastination, cluttering behaviors.
There are so many behaviors that are fallout from trauma like that, that people haven’t really connected the dots on. By moving around a little bit and [00:37:00] starting to live a little bit more with a rhythm and some principles and some tools, and then the final and critical thing is to be connected to other people, which is a tall order because trauma makes other people so triggering to be around that we instinctively want to withdraw and hold them at arm’s length, or maybe go live as a hermit. Some people do that, but some people do it covertly, hanging out with people but never really connecting. And I do believe that healing, you can only heal so much in that state. After a while, our development depends on how we interact with other people and learn to love them and experience love from them as well as conflict.
Emma: Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. Hey, Anna, can you show us your book? I want to see it.
Anna Runkle: It’s pretty beautiful, I think.
Emma: I love it. Okay.
Anna Runkle: It’s a joyous image. It’s a happy thing. And it’s called Re-Regulated: Set Your Life Free from Childhood PTSD and the Trauma Driven Behaviors that Keep You Stuck. And, oh it’s my life’s work to have put this all [00:38:00] together in one place. And this is where I lay it all out from end to end, and it’s full of journal prompts and checklists, and you can walk through all the lessons in the book, and it’s designed to take you from beginning awareness to progress progress, to a realization.
And I think healing is, it’s a spiral, and I think it’ll take you one time around. And as we age, if we’re so lucky to age and get older, and we keep going around and we learn certain lessons in a new way, in a new light. But this will take you through dysregulation, disconnection, and then self defeating behavior.
We all have some, especially if we had trauma, and then the process of discerning who you really are and what you’re meant to bring to earth here. And this is it echoes what I teach in my deep coaching programs. And that part at the end of my coaching programs, when everybody has done some thought about what their gifts really are, is my favorite thing is to hear what they’ve discovered. It’s a very happy day and that’s what I think trauma [00:39:00] healing should be like, is quite joyous.
Emma: Love it.
Anna Runkle: Yeah.
Emma: That’s awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here today. Really appreciate you. Appreciate your time.
Anna Runkle: Thank you.
Emma: And everyone, you can find her book on Amazon or anywhere else?
Anna Runkle: Yeah, everywhere. Barnes and Noble and around the world and it’s now being translated into a whole bunch of languages. Polish, Portuguese, Dutch. Yeah. Yeah.
Emma: That’s awesome.
Anna Runkle: Yeah.
Emma: Cool. Thank you. Thank you, Anna. I really appreciate it. I hope you have a great rest of your day.
Anna Runkle: You too.
Emma: All right. Take care.
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