‘Crappy Childhood Fairy’ Finds Way To Heal From Complex PTSD

Learn more about Anna Runkle, her book, and her methods for coping with complex PTSD at the Crappy Childhood Fairy website.

TRANSCRIPT

Broken Down In The Middle Of Nowhere

Anna Runkle likens her childhood to a broken down Volkswagen bus her family drove when she was little. At age seven, her parents divorced. To visit her dad they’d drive from Arizona to California in the VW bus. 

All it ever did was break down on the highway in the middle of summer between Arizona and California. Like that's really dangerous. You don't want to be on the side of the road stuck in the middle of nowhere. And I think we went through, I'm not exaggerating, 11 engines in the life of that VW bus … and we'd end up in like Indio or Calexico or something in some Motel 6 without enough money to eat. 

Today she drives a dependable Honda but she still worries about it breaking down.

I just I literally I'm not joking I have PTSD about car trouble … gosh that's so much like the shape of the trauma. It's just like everything's gonna fall apart. And if I get stressed out and angsty, I'm 61 years old, but to this day, that feeling … I think I smell burning rubber, it's not just the car, it's just like everything. I have this fear that everything's gonna fall apart. 

…Like the rug is going to be yanked out from under her. 

So a lot of healing has been for me to become confident. Like, I don't know what's gonna happen, but whatever it is, I'm sure I'll figure out what to do. I'm pretty good at figuring out what to do. 

This is a story about how Anna figured out what to do with what turned out to be complex post traumatic stress disorder. This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Commune Coping

Anna Runkle says her childhood started out fairly normal for Berkeley, California, in the sixties. 

We appeared to have a middle-class lifestyle, but it was full of violence and chaos and all the problems that come along with alcoholism. 

A neighbor told her when she was five, she came and knocked on their door in the middle of the night.

I had come down to their house, good half block at three in the morning and barefoot and in pajamas and said, ‘my dad has my mom locked in the bathroom and he's got a knife can I stay here?’ I remember staying at their house and waking up in the morning and them taking me to school and how stressful that was for me as a little kid. I didn't like being away from my mom. I was always afraid if I looked away, she'd disappear because that kept happening. 

After her parents split up, her mom turned their house into a commune.

There's this idea that communes are all about idealism and principles. But it was really just about drugs, drugs and sex and drinking. It's a lot of broken glass. There were a lot of strangers wandering around the house a lot. The parents were negligent. They were experimenting with the idea that conformity was just a trap and having kids was part of the thing they had to get away from.

She says there was certainly trauma she could point to, but complex PTSD is well, complex.

One thing I think it's important to say about complex PTSD is there's not like a perfect map with lines between this happened and therefore I have this problem. I call it the taxonomy of hurts, where it's almost like a dark room with red strings, like some obsessive person going in there and going, when there's alcoholism in the family, people get very weird on relationships. And you can draw these connections. But I couldn't say exactly, you know, what one thing caused it. I would say I witnessed my mother get beaten up a lot. I witnessed my older brother get beaten up a lot. I was not beaten within the family, but I was neglected so very badly.

Anna had three siblings from various marriages and helped raise her little sister.

They thought she was like such a good baby and they were like, ‘she never cries at night,’ but that's because her older sister was making bottles for her and getting her through the night.

Adults were sexually inappropriate around the kids.

They're doing things out in the open that are normally done privately and talking about it and sort of pressuring you to be cool about it…A friend of the family said she was being sexually abused by her stepdad. And I told my mom and my mom told the other mom, and I got in trouble. I think we all got in trouble. Like you, even these groovy people who were thinking they were bringing about utopia, they couldn't handle the reality of what was happening at all. So we were sort of left to our own devices to cope with what was happening. As children, we didn't feel we could talk so much to each other about it.

Anna says she couldn’t have anyone over to play because their house was always a mess and they didn’t have food, or if they did it was rotten. 

So we were often having to go to other houses in the neighborhood to try to find elegant ways to beg food. 

Anna says their dysfunction was one thing, but it was not being able to talk to anyone about it that was especially hard.

You had to like kind of go underground and you can't help as a child but feel ashamed of yourself and feel like you know I better not get close to people. 9 And that's the part that's hard to express. It wasn't just that they did those things. It's that we were all alone to cope with it. 

Science Experiments

Anna says she did have a few stable adults she could rely on. 

I was popular with other kids' moms. They thought that I was a really great kid. I was a good influence on their kids. ...I was bright, I was cheerful, I was polite to the parents. And it makes sense that I had a survival strategy going on, because I knew where the emergency food was and where there were parents, friends’ mothers, who ended up being better friends of mine than the original friend, who paid for me to go to a knitting class with their daughter or taught me how to bake, just things that I wasn't gonna get at home.

Anna also excelled in school and she had teachers who believed in her. In the third grade one teacher’s husband who was studying physics would come to Anna’s school and teach second and third graders about nuclear fission and the periodic table. And when Anna showed an interest, her teachers encouraged her.

So every Wednesday I would do a science experiment, sort of perform a science experiment in front of everybody. Or I wrote a play and my friends came in and we made our masks. Other teachers helped me understand that I was a good writer and I'm an author today and they encouraged it and gave me extra time and just that kind of collegial respect …even as a child and appreciating my sensitivity, my intelligence that kind of thing I remember it, you know, and I felt it mattered to me.

In middle school Anna did find a group of friends who looked out for each other.

And it turns out like all of us had a parent who was an addict or alcoholic or had lost a parent… So without ever disclosing that, there's a tribe, there's like a …secret handshake that we have that you're, you're safe with me. 

‘Broken’

High school was much tougher. When Anna was 13 she learned her dad had ALS, a fatal neurological disease that destroys nerve cells. 

We were very poor and I had to, started, I used to babysit. I sold flowers on street corners. I did yard work. I delivered newspapers everything that I ever spent for food or clothes I had to come up with through work … I got into this weird jag where for a few weeks I started shoplifting and it was very unlike me. I was a very good girl, but I started shoplifting. My mom, my dad and my stepdad, they had very high moral expectations about things like honesty.

I stole a skirt that I didn't even want. …and I stuffed it in a bag … And they said, ‘excuse me, did you maybe accidentally take a skirt?’ They were aware of what had gone into the dressing room and what had come out. And I just denied it and denied it. They gave me every chance. And when I walked through the door, I was arrested by a policeman and he like kicked my feet apart, read my rights, the whole thing. That was a shocker. And in a way I'm grateful, because I sure turned away from my life of crime real fast. It was a terrible experience, but it put me in a dangerous clinical depression. 

At 14 she fell hard for a boy, thinking a relationship would make everything better.

It would be fair to say I had pretty serious attachment wounds. And so when I got my first boyfriend in ninth grade, I think that I over invested in that relationship. Like I invested everything in it and all of my happiness and all my thoughts and everything were on that. And to some degree that's normal and you know that that's like the stereotype of girls that they're just Twitter-pated over boys all the time and that's all they care about but it actually was like all I cared about. And after a few months my boyfriend broke up with me and started just seeing other girls. I was destroyed. I was just like emotionally destroyed. 

At the same time her dad’s condition worsened along with Anna’s depression. 

It was quite bad and it didn't go away. And by the next summer, my dad was actively dying. I saw him for the last time. And one of the old neighborhood moms from Berkeley included me in summer camp, a family summer camp. And some of the kids like bullied me one night. They like made fun of me and threw food on me when I was sleeping in the lodge. And it kind of like, was, it made me kind of break down. I just went into a dark place. I couldn't talk. I couldn't do anything.

Her aunt and uncle paid for her to see a therapist but he actually made matters worse.

It was a horrible experience. It was some old guy and he was really judgmental and he was like, well, did you have sex? And it was pretty awful. And it kind of pushed me down further. 

From her early teens into her twenties over a period of 17 years, Anna tried 11 different therapists. She was dealing with chronic fatigue syndrome, which she later learned can be triggered by trauma. None of the therapists knew how to deal with what we now know is complex PTSD.

ANNA: There's this idea out there like, you need to go talk to someone. And that was all there was like, what are you supposed to do? … And I would talk about this stuff, but it literally never got better in any way. And we would talk and talk and talk —

LAUREL: Did anything break through for you, like in terms of helping you?

ANNA: No, I would say nothing broke through and it's such a relief to admit it because for the longest time I felt ashamed and broken and like something was wrong with me. And I would feel like I'd have to like tap dance for them so they wouldn't like lock me up or something… They were doing what they were supposed to do. It's just that the method didn't work for me. And the cultural assumption that it's a perfectly good method that works for everybody is wrong. It's just not true. 

1994

In 1994 Anna’s mother had end-stage lung cancer. Reeling from grief and a hard breakup, Anna agreed to go on a first date with someone new. But when they were leaving a coffee shop in Berkeley, they were attacked on the sidewalk.

It was four men punched and kicked me in the head as hard as they could while I was unconscious and broke my jaw and teeth and dislocated my ear and yeah. And then I woke up in the middle of it and screamed and they ran away, thank goodness.

At the hospital the doctor ordered a CAT scan.

So they did the CAT scan and they're like your brain is fine here here take some Xanax go talk about it to the therapist. The therapist said why don't you come in three times a week? I mean I did everything you were supposed to do but I got worse. I didn't have a word for the dysregulation. I would call it, I just get kind of like fritzy. One of the hardest forms of dysregulation is the emotional dysregulation. It's too much. It's like a fire hose of emotion at the wrong times and then perfectly normal. If I tried to cross the street, if there was anything moving in my left field of vision, my knees would give out and I just like fall into the street so I couldn't cross streets. I couldn't focus enough to dial the phone… I would call people and say can I talk and I would be talking to them but I couldn't remember who I was talking to. I mean my mind was glitching out. 

Around this time, Anna was giving a ride to her friend Rachel. 

So I was 30, she was 23 when I got attacked on the street and kind of lost my marbles. She ended up homeless on the street on the tenderloin of San Francisco as a teenager, sort of rebelling against very religious parents. And she was alcoholic. And by the time she was 17, she couldn't keep alcohol down. And so she had to get sober. But she found sobriety to be stifling and miserable. And she was depressed all the time and angry and she met a woman named Sylvia, she's no longer living but she's been a very influential woman for a lot of people. She was one of the founders of Narcotics Anonymous in LA back in the day. And because I was suicidally depressed at the time, and that's why I talked to her, and she knew I felt that way. She was the only person I trusted to say the truth to that that's how I felt, that I had a plan, in fact when I told her I felt like killing myself, she said ‘you want to come in, I'll show you something.’ And she said it like she had told she had heard this a hundred times before, which she had because she lived on the streets.

Rachel taught Anna a practice that would change her life. She showed her how to write down her fears and resentments, much like they do in any 12 step program. But then Anna learned how to meditate to release those grievances. And Rachel was brutally honest with Anna.

ANNA: She's so ballsy. Her tattoos and her swearing and everything…I was, was crushing on somebody who was married and she's like, ‘no, no, we don't do that.’ You know, she wasn't like a therapist going, ‘how do you feel about that?’ …So helpful to me. It was like a revelation. 

LAUREL: And when you finally did find something that worked from Rachel, what was that like for you?

ANNA: At first I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. And probably a lot of people, especially of my generation and especially in Northern California, we were very used to magical solutions presented to us all the time, like if you just visualize this or you just eat this nutrient or if you just follow this guru or whatever, everything will be amazing. 

I was just waiting for that shoe to drop the creepy disappointment feeling and it just never did. It just kept helping me. 

The day that I learned this and I got some experience of what it could do for me is the turning point of my life. It's the fulcrum in the teeter-totter. There was like everything before that and then everything after that. All of my potential became possible then. 

I just don't think I could have gone on anymore with what a hard time I was having. I didn't have hope anymore. I thought I was unfixable, and my plan was to end it all. So it saved my life, and it's given me a tool that's helped me, you know, for decades now. 

But make no mistake, all the problems don't just magically go away one day. There's a lot of life problems that build up around like how you spend money and how you interact with people romantically, you know, the friends you've made and the jobs, better and worse, that you've taken. There's a lot of problems to sort out. And so what I feel like the day when you're re-regulated, you start to develop perception and you can experiment with your life and go, well, I think I'm going to try this job. And then go, no, this isn't the job for me. I quit this job. I course correct onto something else. Those pivots are impossible for a person who's underwater with dysregulation.

It's way more than they can handle. And any kind of risky thing or trying something new where you might fail and feel humiliated feels like an existential threat. Because basically it is. The added stress and the shame of failing at something would make you so dysregulated you can't function. You could end up homeless over such things. And so unconsciously you end up keeping your life very small. And once you have a way to re-regulate you can start allowing your life to gradually expand and live through trial and error towards what really suits you as a person and become your full and real self and start to bring your gifts to bear into the world. That's where happiness really gets going.

In addition to this new practice that Anna did twice a day, she also started going to Al-Anon meetings regularly.

Hearing other people's experience with this and finding out how normal it is, the normal like these are the things that happen. And this is what it feels like. And this is kind of what how it plays out in life is such a tremendous relief. So I think that when the relief comes of just knowing that you have normal symptoms of somebody who grew up like that is a huge part of the healing. 

Anna wound up sponsoring close to 300 women and with each new sponsee she’d show them what Rachel had shown her. 

Feeling like she had gotten some of her issues under control, Anna got married and had two sons. But the marriage didn’t last.

Getting married doesn't suddenly make you whole or anything like all your trauma actually gets kicked up a little bit because the prince came and you're still feeling kind of antsy inside. 

2014

For nine years she was a divorced mom working hard to make ends meet. So in 2006 she’d taken a break from dating.

I had had some real catastrophes right after my first marriage, made some super bad choices. I was in a monastic period of self-reflection and work to change that. I never again wanted to bring stress into my kids’ life.

She was still going to Al-Anon meetings. And that’s where she noticed a great guy, who came early to set up the chairs and introduce the newcomers to the program.

One day I sort of woke up to what a great guy he was. I had sort of seen him around I hadn't really talked to him but I just one day I was just like, ‘oh wow this guy,’ and then I thought about for a couple of months how should I first talk to him.

They took things slow – dated for three years before they got engaged. 

I was engaged to my husband, my now husband, and I had an emotionally dysregulated blowout with him that was too severe for him to continue with our plan to get married in five weeks. He didn't break up with me, but he was like, ‘this has to be dealt with.’ And it was heartbreaking and horrifying. But I took it very seriously. I love him. There was no way I was going to mess it up. And so I just went to Amazon …I wish I could remember what I searched for … I found Bessel van der Kolk's book, ‘The Body Keeps the Score.’ And I bought it. It came the next day and I read it as fast as I could. … And this book just rocked my world. That was the first time I ever heard there's a name for what was going on with me. When I first read this paragraph, I literally just started whooping. I'd been sitting in bed during the day reading the book. And I was just like, I was calling out to my husband, ‘come here, come here, I know what it is, I know what it is!’ He was skeptical at first. What he needed to see was a change in behavior. He doesn't care what I called it. But for me, it was life changing.

LAUREL: What was that like for you to have the words for it, the name for it?

ANNA: Well, this is what I told my husband. I said, ‘it's a thing. What I have is called complex PTSD and it's a thing.’ And that, you know, I just feel like crying when I talk about that. It's like a tremendous weight coming off and you don't even know you were carrying all this weight of shame and self-blame and attack and feeling, you know, well I'm just a different species than everybody else. I just carry around all these problems and they repeat all the time. And then you find out it's a thing and there's an organic basis to it and it was such a relief. 

She was bursting to share it with others so the next day she went to an Al-Anon meeting. 

I told everybody, ‘if you want to come to my house tonight I'll tell you about this book.’ My living room was packed. Everybody there wanted to know, what is this? This was like a huge missing clue to what the heck is going on with so many of us and how we struggle. And so that's how Crappy Childhood Fairy started.

‘Crappy Childhood Fairy’

In 2016 Anna started a blog. She called herself the Crappy Childhood Fairy.

I was a video producer before I was Crappy Childhood Fairy. And I had a lot of jobs. I was a comedian, I was a data analyst, I had a lot of jobs. I have a master's degree in public policy. All of it has ended up being very useful for what I do now, but I didn't think it was going anywhere at the time. But I was a video producer, and I always was a theatrical kid, since doing the science experiments on the stage in the auditorium in the third grade.

So in 2017 she wrote a script, set up the teleprompter and made a video about how to do the writing technique that she does everyday and stuck it on youtube.

ANNA: I don't know, a year and a half later or something…I was doing blog posts and I think I had maybe 60 subscribers to my blog. I thought I was really like, I'd made it, you know? And then one day I went to go put another video on YouTube. You just have to host them somewhere to stream them into a blog. And I had like 2,000 subscribers over there and I was floored. 

LAUREL: And as you started to receive comments on YouTube, I'm wondering what it was like to hear from people who are like, my gosh, this is a revelation.

ANNA: Yeah. It was like going to heaven for the first time I wasn't alone. And they say that, they still say that. They say for the first time I realize I'm not alone. And I reassure them, go, you know, it's because people said that to me, as you just have, that I ever found out I wasn't alone. I just, I didn't know. There's no way to know until you know. And it's when somebody describes your experience.

So I'm sort of like dear Abby of suffering people. And I answer letters… And I've learned so much from just doing that and reading how people respond and what they care about and what they struggle with and where they think I got it wrong. And it's been a profound education for me and people and it's helped me to be so much more attuned and empathic to people in a way that I never was before. I don't know what it is exactly, but now that we understand each other, there's this connection. So people stop me on the street. I get recognized when I walk around and they'll be like, ‘are you? Are you the crappy childhood fairy?’ And I go, yeah. They'll say, ‘can I hug you?’ I say, ‘sure.’ And we hug and they start crying. It just happens again and again because they're living that relief of finding one other person who gets it. (PAUSE)

She just published a book called “Re-Regulated: Set Your Life Free From Childhood PTSD and the Trauma Driven Behaviors That Keep You Stuck.” 

LAUREL: You are upfront about not being a therapist. Have you ever thought about going back and getting your psychology or neurology degree?

ANNA: No, I'm 61 and my active years are limited, you know, of being able to teach this…I'm working on a second book right now that's about the trauma driven loneliness. Some, especially at first, I got criticism. People would say, ‘who the hell do you think you are, Mrs. Runkle?’ But there's a hundred times more people who are, you know, taking my courses. And a lot of my students and paying customers, know, people who buy my courses were referred by their therapist.

Today Anna has 850 videos on YouTube and a million followers. Her book’s been translated into five languages. The Royal College of Psychiatry shares Anna’s work with psychiatrists in the UK as part of their trauma-informed training. About 150,000 people who have taken Anna’s courses are clinical professionals.

Wherever she goes she finds the time and space to continue her daily practice.

I was in New York City last week and I rented a room and a church and 50 people came and we did the daily practice together. So everywhere I go, I was in North Carolina in the flooded area and I did a retreat there.

She wants more than anything for people to know that they are not broken, that there is hope. 

And you can heal and some of the wounds of trauma are like scrapes and there's there's your body knows how to heal if you can if you can just stop like interfering with the healing process by re-traumatizing  yourself. And I often give an analogy of like a scraped arm If you stop getting dirt in it, it can heal your body knows what to do. Even if you've tried a dozen things and you've tried and tried and you feel like the weirdo who can't get better, there is hope. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.