Hi everyone. Today I'm excited to have Anna Runkle
here. She's also known as Crappy Childhood Fairy, and she makes videos on YouTube helping people
figure out how PTSD affects them and what they can do about it. I love her practical and helpful
advice that stems from her own personal experience and also her experience mentoring other people
for the last 20 years. She is awesome. So uh get ready to hear what she has to say. Today we're
going to be talking about dysregulation - how your brain and your nervous system get
dysregulated when you're anxious or when you've experienced trauma
- and what to do about it. Okay. Well, Anna, thank you so much for being
here. Yes, thank you, Emma. Just just to start off, would you mind sharing kind of the short
version of your story? Is that okay? Yeah, I'll try to keep it short, because interestingly, when
I talk about it I can get really dysregulated. For me, sometimes talking about hard things that
happened - even now, even after I've made a career of talking about it and teaching about it - like I
have to be very mindful about how I talk about it because if I just start going down the rabbit hole
of terrible stories, I can start losing, you know, I'll forget what room I'm in what day it is and
that I'm actually like being recorded right now. That's what dysregulation is like. it can really
be like discombobulating. So I'm 58 years old. I grew up in Berkeley California. So that puts me
being born in the 60s in the middle of a very crazy time in California. And my mom was very much
part of the whole hippie, free speech, drugs thing going on. My dad was the complete opposite.
And they used to fight bitterly, violently about stuff. And one one memory I have is when
I was four, we were watching Walter Cronkite, and he it was news of the Vietnam War. And I
turned to my parents, and I said 'What is the Vietnam War? Like what is this about that they're
talking about every night?" And so one of them answered "Well, it's dududu," and then the other
one said "No, it's dududu." Next thing you know, my dad had punched my mom and knocked her
unconscious. And so that was the kind of thing that happened. Otherwise we lived in a nice home,
a nice neighborhood, my dad had his own business, but what was going on with them a lot was
alcoholism; they were both alcoholics. And soon alcoholism took its toll, and we did
not live in a nice house or a nice neighborhood. And for most of my youth, I grew up quite poor and
really neglected. And that's what alcoholism does. I have siblings - one of them died from
a heroin overdose - and my life ended up very populated with other people who had alcohol
and drug problems. And one of the things that really helped me in my healing was when I
found Al Anon at about the age 30, age of 30. The 12-step world was incredibly helpful. It
was free; it was really supportive; it was a place where I could keep talking. Now, back then
i used to be in therapy like three times a week. One of the things that happened about the time
when I had - became aware of my PTSD symptoms was my mom had cancer. She was in the
very last couple of weeks of her life. And right about then I got attacked randomly
on the street. I got beaten unconscious, had my jaw broken, my teeth broken. It was just
it was a random thing. Yeah. And I think what I hear from a lot of people on in my audience now
in my audience is that sometimes childhood trauma, we get it pretty good locked up, and we function,
you know, some people can function really well. Not everybody can function well at every time
in their life, but sometimes an adult trauma comes in and boo! it just sets the whole thing on
fire, and now your PTSD symptoms are everywhere. So my mom died, I was attacked, and somebody
dumped me, all in the same couple of weeks. And it was like this perfect storm for
all this suppressed childhood trauma and all the things that went with it, you
know. I'm giving you the short version, but if anybody out there grew up with
alcoholism, do I need to tell you, you know, there was all kinds of like risk of sexual
abuse every time anybody came to the house and non-supervision. We didn't have enough food.
We nobody was minding whether we um, you know, i never took the SAT - I didn't even know what
it was - to get into college, even though I was like a smart kid. So we had we had all the classic
problems of an alcoholic family. Lots of fighting. But so when my childhood trauma came up, I had
terrible just terrible wounds about it all, and I had a head injury at the same time. I
couldn't read, I couldn't use a phone, like just even focusing enough to use a phone.
I was very very dysregulated. But back then, they didn't have a they didn't know what that
was. And so after after the attack I went to the doctor. They did a CAT scan. They're like
"Your brain is fine. It's not bleeding. Go home." And I was sitting there like "You have to help
me. I can't even, like I can't remember how to use a key in the lock." And they're like "Well,
you don't have brain damage." Well, I did. I had a lifetime of brain injury from the neglect
and the witnessing the violence growing up. And then what happens, as you know so well, is
if you're living dysregulated, you end up with a lot of self-defeating behaviors that come
up. So I would make very bizarre choices about people to hang out with, particularly boyfriends.
Sometimes good choices, but that's the thing about dysregulation. Right when you're in stress,
it can come up and it can just like sabotage everything you're trying to do. So I just kept
ending up in these self-defeating situations. Or I'd get a good job, and then I would say something
completely inappropriate when I was emotionally dysregulated. And so it was very hard for me
to progress in life. In fact, I was really just sort of coming down. The closer, the older
I was getting, the more it was becoming obvious something was really wrong. So I was going to a
therapist three times a week. She's like "Let's talk about it. Let's, you know, tell me what
happened. Tell me about the assault again. Tell me this. Tell me what your parents did." Because
that's what you're supposed to do, or you were then. That was their best understanding of what
to do. Yeah. But every time I talked about it, I would just go into this deep dysregulation where
I couldn't feel my hands, my face would go numb, and it was almost like I was I was
people-pleasing to try to like keep talking and say the things you're supposed
to say out of this act of faith that if I just keep talking, I will feel
better one of these years. But I wasn't; I was feeling worse. And soon I was feeling so
bad that I was hiding from the therapist how bad it was because I was afraid she was going to have
me locked up for being at risk of harming myself. And that's a bad place to be. Right. Yeah. And
then a miracle happened. A miracle happened at that point, the night when I was losing
hope. I had sort of like burned up my last friendship with my constant drama and
neediness from people. Very self-centered, you know. That's what it's like to be in trauma
and dysregulated. It's very hard to pay attention to other people. I always say it's like having
headphones blasting heavy metal in your ears, and you're sitting there trying to pretend to
have a conversation as if that's not happening. So this woman came along. She was an acquaintance;
we had a theater group. I gave her a ride home, and for some reason, I decided to tell her, I said
"I feel like I can't live anymore." Mm-hmm. And I don't know why I knew she was a safe person
to tell. And she just said "Here, come on in. Let's have a cup of tea. i have totally felt that
way." And she told me the story of, she she was an alcoholic from the time, she was 12 the first time
she tasted alcohol. I'm not an alcoholic. There's no explanation for why I act like one sometimes,
but it's dysregulation. She told me her story: she got really into drinking, and by the time
she was 17 she couldn't even keep alcohol down, and so she had to go to AA. And she got sober in
AA, but she was sober and suicidally depressed. And then her miracle happened. And she met
somebody who showed her how to begin to do this writing exercise of writing fears and
resentments. It was - the way she taught it to me, it was as a prayer. Very 12-steppy. You write your
fears and resentments. You ask God to remove them. Well, at the time, I you know, God you
know, I had this I had this real um bad attitude towards spiritual, religious people.
I had what I thought was a socially acceptable view on this. Like I think there's something
out there, but I didn't really think there was a power that could help me. But she said,
"Well, it seems like you might be about to die, so you, how would you feel about just pretending
there's a God and asking God to help you?" I thought "Well, why not." And so I tried
the techniques. And this took place over a couple of weeks where I was trying it, and then
i got to read it to her. And I experimented with this prayer. I had a couple of very experimental
prayers. One was "If you're real, prove it." Nice. How'd that go? I recovered. Like within two
weeks I could read, I could use a phone, and I didn't want to die. Wow. And there it was.
And not only that, I started to have these very strong feelings of coming back to life, kind of.
There was this feeling that - like I used to be a heavy smoker at that time; two packs a day for
years. I was a real heavy smoker. That's how I was self-regulating and handling my my emotions. Yeah.
And I didn't end up giving it up for a few years. A few years into all of this I was able to be
healed of that. But but I used to smoke heavily, and so my lungs were always completely
messed up. I was always coughing. And I had this distinct feeling that the cells
in my lungs were just being like remade and re-healed and made pink again. And and then I
started to feel that like all through my body. And I I wouldn't really swear by that being a
literal thing that was happening, but that was my experience. I just felt like I was just getting
this new life running through me. And I started spending time in nature, and I started running,
and I kind of stopped smoking - not really, but, you know, little little bits of progress at a
time. Yeah. It was years before I solved some of my other problems, but the first problem that was
solved was this feeling that I didn't deserve to be on earth, that nobody wanted me here, and that
I was too damaged to stay another day. And I just had a profound experience of of being real and
wanted and belonging to everything that's alive. And that right there became my new my new floor,
you know, I never went below that. It's like no, I belong here. Like life may be hard today, and
I've made horrible mistakes and I'm ashamed, but I belong here and I want to stay - I want to
stay alive. So that was that was a profound change for me. And that's really when I mark the healing
happening for me. That's awesome. That's so cool. Thank you for sharing your story and
your vulnerability. I appreciate that. Let's just pause for a second. Are you - I should
have asked you before I asked you to share that. Are you doing - are you okay? Yeah, yeah. You
can count on me. I won't go where I can't go. Okay, cool. Well, thank you. Thank you. That's
that's yeah, incredible story. I was soon sponsoring, and I think I sponsored something like
300 women. That's so cool. Yeah. That's so cool. I learned a lot. I mean, I I just
learned so much about how to be a supportive person and how to help somebody
grasp an idea and how to deal with conflict, and and it's been positive. And I still sponsor
a person or two, but mostly now I've taken I've taken my message - I took it out of the
12-step arena because what I'm teaching um is for CPTSD I realized - this was a turning point
for me, and I - while it's a hundred percent true my parents were alcoholic, my brother was an
alcoholic and a heroin addict, there's more alcoholism in my family; I'm very very affected by
it, or was - my core problem is not that anymore. Like it was, and I had so much to share about it,
and it was so helpful to learn the Al Anon ideas and to learn to detach and to get the focus on
myself. And once I really had the focus on myself, I realized that I had something that was a
hundred percent me, and it wasn't alcoholism. I used to say "Oh, I think there must be a kind
of alcoholism that doesn't involve drinking." But then Bessel Van der Kolk's book came
out, and Pete Walker's book came out, The Body Keeps the Score and CPTSD: From Surviving
to Thriving. And when I heard the description of what is CPTSD I was just like "Oh my god, that
is what I have. It's not alcoholism without drinking." Like that was the best construct I had.
Yeah. It's complex PTSD, and I'm a textbook case. And that day was such a relief. It was such a
relief because as much as I had like 20 whatever years of Al Anon and felt good about all that,
like I never really got that the strange way that I behave when I'm dysregulated: the emotional
overreactions, the discombobulation, having to fake it through situations when I'm so flustered
and that I feel like I have headphones on. Yeah. There's a word for that and it's a thing and
I didn't cause it and it's normal. It's a normal reaction to an abnormal set of circumstances. And
it just allowed like this huge wave of forgiveness of myself, as well as the people who hurt me.
Just like okay, we all have this like pattern. We have it. And the fact that I for - well, like
I want to say this differently. I don't know why I'm the one who got to heal and didn't get
killed by it, but the fact that I have survived is such a miracle that I can only have
wonder and awe and gratitude at it. And when when something so wonderful happens, a natural
consequence is that you want to get up on the rooftop and just go "Everyone!" Yeah. And
sometimes people have said "Could you shut up with your yammering about CPTSD?" And I'm
like "Look, if I had a cure for cancer, would you blame me if I just wanted to talk about it
all the time?" Because I have something that big. You know, complex PTSD causes cancer. There's an
extremely elevated risk of cancer for people who had childhood trauma. Also, heart disease,
you know, high blood pressure, depression, learning disabilities, dementia, reproductive
disorders. It affects every part of our lives, and it really - the part that people don't
talk about enough is it is how it impacts our partner relationships, our marriages and romantic
relationships. And when that goes badly, it then sends it right into the next generation. So so I
just felt like if, you know, I just want to talk about this. I don't even know what I'm doing.
I see, you know, I was like out of the gate, but my my life had brought me to that point
where I had the knowledge and the experience come together one day, and I had a word for it. And I
had been feeling this desire ever since I was in Al Anon, like I feel like I should write a book
or I should something about this. And when I had the word for it, then my Crappy Childhood Fairy
thing was born. It started as a blog and it found an audience. And I never expected it to be like
what it is or to be here talking to you today, but it's completely taken over my my career.
I changed careers. Now this is what I do. And what a joy it is to wake up every day like excited
because I feel like I feel like I can do something helpful. Yeah, you've got something to share and
people who want to hear it because it helps them. Yeah. So cool. So I know you know how it is. Yeah,
I do, and I love it. Yeah. What a gift. Yeah. That's awesome. Okay, so let's talk a little bit
more about dysregulation. You keep mentioning it, and you've alluded to it. Tell us what is
dysregulation? And where does it come from? Well, so I'm not a scientist. I'm not a clinician.
I read some books, and I read articles about it. And I first learned about it I think from Pete
Walker and Bessel van der Kolk. I had read other literature about trauma, but other trauma -
various books and authors focus on different aspects of it. But dysregulation is the thing
that unlocked healing for me. So as I've come to understand it, what it is is everybody gets
dysregulated sometimes. You might recognize the feeling as just being flustered, overwhelmed,
just feeling like - to me it also, it's it doesn't just feel like I have headphones on; sometimes
it feels like my hair is in my eyes, and I'm just like - Yes, it's like over-stimulated. Yeah.
Like every sound and noise is overwhelming because your brain can't process stuff, right? Yeah.
Like you can't think because there's too much like - yeah - dinging going on around you, yeah?
Yeah, yeah. And when you don't know what it is, there's a lot of self-attack and hiding and shame
and control. And also, when it's happening like it's very hard to - your perception is wrong, so
everybody else's advice like "follow your heart; trust your gut" - when you're dysregulated,
that's not good advice actually, because when I'm dysregulated and someone hurts my feelings,
my heart says "Tell them the worst thing you can think to say. Destroy this friendship. Run away,"
you know. It's just bad information. So once you are able to identify when you're dysregulated,
it gives you a real opportunity to use that pause we all talk about between the impulse and the
action. Like when I want to say something hurtful, if I know I'm dysregulated I have a rule like
"Don't say it. It never comes to anything good." Yeah. And I teach people like don't drive
when you're dysregulated. Don't try to have an important conversation when you're dysregulated.
Like your thinking is off. It's not the same as being drunk, but it's something like that. You're
not yourself. You're seeing things differently. And so for me, the cues that I'm dysregulated -
it's not always obvious right away - one of the really easy ones is I start to feel numb in my
nose. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I start to go numb. Then my whole hands go numb. I can't really feel
them, and it's really hard for me to hold a pen. That's been going on all my life. And I
just thought it was a quirk of being Anna, but it's dysregulation. What's going on is um our
brains are generating waves, and they have kind of a lovely pattern, like you might see the lines
of a river flowing together. And in dysregulation, they're they're like if you were to measure them
and you had a scan and you could see what they're doing, they're literally kind of just going out
of - they're getting zigzaggy and not in sync, and they're going at the wrong time. And then
also heart rate variability - your heart and respiration, what they are meant to do is,
I take a breath in and my heart will speed up a little bit; I exhale and it slows down
slightly, and those things are going in sync. And what I learned from my reading is that those
things go out of sync. When a person with past trauma feels triggered or intensely stressed,
they go out of sync. Now does it matter to me consciously if my heart and breathing are kind
of ragged? I didn't think so, but it turns out experts think that it's in that dysregulation is
where a lot of the sort of like immune function lapses happen. Your body can't fight what's
happening with viruses or wounds. And a lot of my symptoms, before I healed, I had a lot
of stress-related things, and I knew they were stress-related, and the doctors would write me off
and say "Oh, it's just stress. Go de-stress." Like it wasn't helpful. But I had asthma, I had back
pain, I had knee - all kinds of like strange pain, migraines. And when I get stressed out, I still
get visited by those things, but now I kind of know - I've been practicing now for a long time.
Like I somaticize. It goes into my body, and I can kind of work it back out of my body. And I found
some really helpful resources for doing that. So that's part of it. Also, this daily writing
practice. I follow it with meditation, and those two things together made a big difference in me
being able to tune into my body at least twice a day and be like "Oh, I'm actually really tired or
I'm hungry or I need to get outside. I'm craving sunshine or I'm craving oranges or -" you know, my
body can start like having a little time with me instead of me just like overriding every impulse.
So that's part of it. But dysregulation - so I've touched on the health consequences of it. And
it's not totally understood, but dysregulation does go downstream, and probably trauma is one of
the single - if not the single biggest - causes of terrible chronic health problems there is. Yeah.
And there's a lot of stuff people aren't talking about it about yet. Like the number of unintended
pregnancies a person experiences is closely correlated with the intensity of trauma they had
growing up. Mhmmm. Nobody's talking about that. A lot of things, people have their very comfortable
way of viewing. Like why do people get pregnant, you know, on accident? Right. And everybody
has their little story: "Oh, they just want a baby to love" or "Oh, it's the political party
I don't like," you know, and what they said and did. And I think I think by and large trauma is
driving a great deal of it. I mean - Well, and yeah, totally. I I think so too. And I think
people aren't addressing this in a way that's super helpful because they maybe don't understand,
and most people don't know about this. Like you were looking for help for years, and kind of the
old way of doing therapy was we just talk about a problem over and over and over again and hope
that that desensitizes us. But instead it - for many people, that makes them more upset, and it
reinforces that trauma response in your body and yeah. The experience of abuse or the experience of
neglect creates a nervous system response that can get stuck, right? Like this this sympathetic
response, this fight/flight/freeze response. And you mentioned like with your friends, right,
when you're dysregulated, you will attack someone, and that's like the fight/flight/freeze response,
right? You're gonna fight or you're gonna push someone away to protect yourself. And this is all
part of this like kind of trapped nervous system response to the danger that your body perceived
or was real, the very real danger you experienced as as a child, right? Yeah, and and I've come to
respect it and and love it for that. I love my I love my CPTSD because it saved me. It saved me
from a lot of stuff I couldn't face as a child, and it kind of left me intact and innocent. And
that's what I've sort of uncovered through healing is there's a completely good and innocent person
inside, and I think that's true for everyone. Oh, that's such a beautiful way to frame it, because
people don't understand that these these weird reactions we have with PTSD actually serve a
function. Like your body's trying to protect you. Your brain, your deep wisdom is trying to
keep you safe or trying to help you survive something that seems life-threatening
or is life-threatening, right? Yeah, I I have a funny word for it: I call it crap
fit. We learn - You call it what? Crap fit. Crap. C-r-a-p. Because I'm the Crappy Childhood
Fairy. Yeah, yeah. Crap fit is fitting yourself to crap. And as a kid, you learn it's like it's
like, you know, you know, Mom brought home a terrible boyfriend who I'm scared of; no problem,
I'll be tough as nails. I may be six years old, but I can fight. And I'll have like a piece of
wood under my bed, and I'll figure things out, and I'll handle this. I can handle this. You look
back and it's kind of crazy, but that part of us actually allowed us to handle it
and not internalize it and not, you know, just wither up and die out of neglect.
And then it shows up again in adulthood, and it's completely dysfunctional. So that's one of the
messages I'm always giving people. It's like "Oh, god bless you for going into denial. Thank god
you were able to go into denial about things." Because it's something like a medically induced
coma. You know how they do that to people who have had a terrible like physical trauma; they'll
just like put them into a coma so that there's like no energy required for them to just heal.
And I think that's what some of the adaptations, the maladaptations of complex PTSD are, is it's
self-protection. And then we go through a lot of hardship, usually in the late teens, early
twenties, you know, maybe on and on and on. But there comes a day when you have the
information and you can go Oh, that's what saved me. Now I need to learn the new adaptation, which
is to stop being in denial so that when somebody comes along and asks me out but it turns out
they're a heroin addict - not naming any names of who's done that - I can see it. I need to be able
to see that something's wrong with this picture. Yeah. And I didn't have that. So that was a
consequence of my trauma. And even after a lot of healing, I had this these incredible blind spots
and a really hard time discerning who is a good person in my life. When when I have a conflict how
much of that was my fault, I would always be 100% confused about that and toggle between "It's
all their fault. No, it's all my fault. No, it's all their fault." Yeah. If you have the power of
discernment to kind of work that through and see, you have - the world is your oyster. Now you're
on a level playing field. Like that's what all the normal kids had, is they had a way to think
through life's conflicts and figure out what to do and and not just self-sabotage and burn all their
bridges and run away, you know. That's a very it's a sad way of dealing with it. So a lot of what I
teach people, I teach them first to re-regulate and then to start solving the life problems that
developed in dysregulation. And it's this painful joyous process to start experiencing that, and
there's no way to learn it except to like live your life. Get into a pickle. Get support from
your buddies, you know. In the program I teach, I get, I help people get connected with people
and then continue to keep processing emotions, you know, which you also know the importance of,
to keep processing the emotions that come up, because with PTSD they come up so strongly
that the impulse is there to just give up, just blow everything up. But you
hang in there. You hang in there, and you have a tool to keep - like there's an
exit route. What happens to people like me is there's a lot of either complete overt avoidance
of people or what I call covert avoidance, where people act all extroverted and friendly and have a
job and a marriage or whatever, but they but they never really give themselves to anything. They're
never really present. And it's just something they haven't been able to manage yet. And it ends up
hollowing out life and making it empty. And some of the symptoms are your friends don't really get
you, and they don't even match you because you've never really been yourself in their presence
so that they could decide that you're not for them either. And it's this it's this big, false
life that is one of the more successful-looking outcomes of having trauma, but a lot of the
people who come to me, some of them are, you know, they're having more obvious overt problems that
you would associate. "I'm depressed," you know, "I'm in an abusive relationship." That's common.
But some of it is "I'm just empty, and I find myself pulling away from people all the time. And
I hate it when I get invited to something, and all I want to do is think of how I can get out of it."
And it's not necessarily the same as introversion; it's that people are just so triggering, and
the fear that if we get triggered we're gonna say something damaging becomes crippling. It
just holds you back. So so healing, in my view, involves a combination of learning to
process those emotions, pooping them out so that they don't have the better of you. They're
not like holding you down all the time or have you at the edge of rage. You have something to do with
rage short of expressing it. And and that's one of the challenges for it too. One of the things I
wanted to say about dysregulation - Yeah - is the emotional dysregulation, which is kind of part of
neurological dysregulation but also its own thing, and it's widely recognized as part of other
things like like borderline personality disorder, emotional dysregulation. And I just, I had
started out by saying like everybody gets dysregulated sometimes, and and almost everybody
eventually re-regulates. And my prototype for what that looks like is a newborn baby. I have two
sons. They're big now, but when they were little I would hold - they - I would come to them
when they were crying, and they'd be going - their bodies were rigid and their faces were red
and they were completely flipped out. And I would hold them and maybe feed them and let them be
held and comforted, and very quickly they would just come back into focus and they'd open their
little eyes and smile at me and they would be completely transformed. And we know what that is
is co-regulation. So everybody gets dysregulated sometimes. I just think people with trauma get
dysregulated a little more than the average joe and more often and maybe has a harder time coming
back from it. So so much depends on learning to master re-regulation, and it can be learned. It
can be learned. Yeah, let's talk about that. So you get dysregulated. You recognize it, right? You
might be acting funny or thinking in like unclear ways or not thinking well at all, or you might
feel like those physical symptoms in your body, or you might just know like something's off, or
you feel numb, or you feel buzzy, or whatever, overstimulated. Learning to self-regulate or
re-regulate - how do you learn this? How do you learn this skill? Well, yeah. First step, you've
got to learn to catch it when it's happening. And and I say that like so harshly, but that's it. Can
you can learn to catch it when it's happening? So I talked about some of the physical symptoms
that it's going on. Sometimes it's a thought. I have a couple of thoughts that I just
always take, I just always go on the assumption, "If I'm having this thought, I'm
dysregulated." And one of the thoughts is, "I don't need you. I don't need
anybody." Oh, yeah. I'm in it now. Here we go. That's like a really functional
thought for a six-year-old in an alcoholic family. Yes. But not for someone who's like, you
know, trying to have consistent friendships in relationships. Yeah. Or marriage, you know. "I
don't need you." Every time there's an argument, "I don't need you. I don't need anybody." So
if I'm thinking that thought, the other one, and this is one that often comes with emotional
flashbacks - and emotional flashbacks is one of the best phrases I ever learned; I learned that
from Pete Walker's book - but that's that's an emotional memory that comes up. You don't even
know you're in a memory, but it's driving you to see things in a bad way. And so sometimes I wake
up - this happened to me the other day - I wake up in a very bad mood. That's what I used to call
it, but actually I'm in an emotional flashback. And I - before I've even opened my eyes, I'm
laying in bed going "I have to do everything." And I know all parents feel like that sometimes;
all spouses feel that way. But I get it to this wrong - I have this distorted, exaggerated
feeling that nobody will help me and I have to do everything. And again, it's clearly an
adaptive thought, but it's a maladaptation now, and it causes me to be very difficult to deal
with. My husband can now see it a mile off. He can see it as soon as I open my, you know, he
can feel the energy like rising off of me, the the the stink, right, the stink of dysregulation.
And he just sort of says, "Would you like coffee?" and then he leaves the room. And he leaves me
- like, "You need a minute." Like "You need a minute." "You need a minute." You're like "No, I
don't. No, I don't." "No, I don't. I need to tell you" - so that's another sign, another - "This is
about you." Yeah. "It's about you, and it's urgent that I tell you everything right now that you're
doing wrong." That sense of urgency - I always tell people "if you think it's urgent, go
to halftime. Just slow down. Take a break. If it's urgent that you give somebody a criticism,
it's probably your dysregulation talking. Anything that needs to be said or fixed in your
relationship you can do it in an hour or tomorrow, and it'll be okay." And that huge - I like that.
Yeah, huge amount of self-restraint to just like "Okay, hold on. I'm not gonna do anything about
this right now. I'm furious. I can hardly stand it another minute." But instead, I take it here.
I carry paper with me everywhere, you know, just in case it happens. And I do this twice a
day anyway. And I begin to write my fears. "I am resentful at my husband because I have fear he
won't help me, and fear I have to do everything." That's how my prayer begins, you know. I'm just
admitting like "I have this. I don't have to do anything about it. I don't have to understand it.
I don't even have to communicate it. I write it." I write a thing at the end where I ask for it
to be removed, and then I rest in meditation. And nine times out of ten I can't even remember
that there was an issue. It's past. Sometimes there's stuff we gotta talk about though, and
with less of that thing going on in my head, it's possible for me to have that conversation. It
doesn't happen 100% of the time cleanly, but now I actually have a chance to have a conversation in a
good way that that gets heard, that somebody cares to respond, and it doesn't end up turning into a
big argument. If I have an argument, I'm going to be dysregulated for three days, so I have a huge
incentive to try to solve things peacefully. Yeah, okay. So for the listener out there, the
first step is to come to know your own signs of dysregulation. And you just shared a couple
awesome examples. So that might be a consistent thought you have; it might be something you feel
in your body; it might be just an emotional sense. And maybe for the listener, I mean, I would
recommend as a therapist people write down their red flag signs. Like what like I'm - like
tape this to your wall. Like if I'm feeling this, it might be dysregulated. "If I'm thinking this,
I might be dysregulated." Tape that to your wall, right? Or what do you tell people? Well, I love
taping it to your wall. That's an excellent suggestion. That's more reliable than just
remembering it. Because your memory is altered too when you're dysregulated. Yeah, and then
you say "Slow it down." So decrease the urgency to act on that. Like "Oh, if this is a problem
in the relationship we can talk about it in an hour or when I'm calm." Yeah, and you, and you use
writing to slow yourself down. I like to just like process through things. Yeah. It helps
also to just tell yourself "I'm really dysregulated right now. Oh, I'm dysregulated
right now." To actually like say it to yourself, just acknowledging it, starts to then give
you this part of yourself that is aware of the situation and isn't just getting carried
downstream in wild waters and drowning in it. You - part of you is kind of going "Okay, I'm
still kind of drowning in this river, but I see what's happening; I'm dysregulated." And that's
where you begin to have the option of a pause. Yeah. And you can even tell you can tell people
who it's affecting, you can say "I'm feeling dysregulated right now," and you can also help
them tremendously. Because in dysregulation we can be very aggressive or abandoning, and
now now you're giving somebody else CPTSD. So instead instead you can say "I'm feeling really
dysregulated right now. Would it be okay if I took a break to get my head together, and then we could
come back and keep talking about this, say, at a quarter after the hour? Would that work?" They
say, "Yes." And then show up. And then show up. And you can get tremendous cooperation from a
partner, friend if you can communicate what's happening. Don't blame them; take care of it and
make a date to come back as soon as possible. Because they're in the middle of needing
to work out something that just happened. Yeah. Yes. I love it. I love it. So what else
can people do? So they - the pause is really important. And then come back to the problem. Is
there anything else you mentioned specifically? Writing, pausing, meditation, and like a
prayer, like "May this be removed from me." Is that some of your basic steps to
get re-regulated? Is there something else you'd add to that? Yes, so I have - I'll
tell you some emergency steps to re-regulate, and then I have a free course. If anybody wants
to learn the writing technique, I can share the link with you to share - Yeah, awesome - in the
description. You can learn and try it in less than an hour and just see does it feel helpful to you?
And if you like it, I do free Zoom calls every couple weeks, and you can come ask questions. And
we do use the techniques together. And so that's where everything I teach begins. You learn this
technique. But in a pinch - well, first of all, I do carry this with me everywhere, and whether
I'm in a business meeting or a party and I have to walk into the bathroom - here we are back in the
bathroom. I just keep going there. I don't know. The bathroom is a private place where you
can write if you want when you're having a freak-out in a social situation, so you can
just come back, just come back into yourself and get free of it so you can come back out and
handle it more the way you choose to handle it. Um which by the way isn't always being Mr nice
girl. Right. Yeah. This is not like fostering avoidance and just suppressing and ignoring
emotions. It's like clarity. Right. Yeah. Clarity. And sometimes you need to tell people "Don't ever
put your hands on me again." And you can't do that until you've written because you're too jammed up
with it. But the emergency measures are basically just nervous system techniques to just get back
in your body. And people used to say "I'm out of my body." That - I didn't used to understand
what they were saying, but what they're talking about is "My nervous system is not communicating
awareness of every part of my body right now." And so you can bring yourself back by just sitting
in a chair. Just like I sit down really hard in a chair, and then I just feel my weight in the
chair, I feel my feet on the floor. And a lot of therapists have helped people with this. They
will remind you "Come back. Sit down." You can press your tongue to the back of your teeth.
It's just giving yourself physical sensations. And then then it's left and right. We now know -
like there must have been PTSD for thousands of years, forever, right? How did they deal with it?
Well, who has PTSD? Soldiers, for example. What did they do? They march in formation and say left,
right, left, right, and everybody goes together. And calling out, hearing left, right and moving
left, right like you would in a Zumba class or in marching or in martial arts, hearing it and
doing it is very re-regulating. It just helps you kind of pull it back together. And doing
it in a group, for reasons nobody understands, but when we do this in a group it amplifies the
benefit. Yeah. And there's brain science. There's brain science behind this showing that it's
helping your brain like cross the two hemispheres and re-regulate. I mean, there's a lot of good
science behind this. And I appreciate you teaching this in a practical and understandable way. And if
anyone wants to read Bessel van der Kolk's book or Francine Shapiro's book - I mean, they're like
400 pages long, you know, but they have these techniques. But basically what you're doing is
like teaching this on a very practical level. Yeah. And for people with PTSD, reading
a book is often out of the question. Oh, right. Reading a paragraph is hard to do. You're
going over and over. Trying to process can be triggering. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So. so.
Okay. That's great. So some left, right movements, some like patting your feet, patting your
legs, getting in contact again with your body, contact. Sometimes I just touch my face, you
know. There's this soccer player, Lionel Messi, who's like the hero of soccer. You know
who he is? He is constantly stroking his face during stressful games. And I was like
that is self-soothing. That is what that is. Oh, I'd be terrified if I were a soccer player.
I would just, I would just be frozen up on the field. Yeah. Another one is temperature. You
can use like hot water, cold water to just give yourself a little sort of nervous system, hello,
shock. And I like Wim Hof methods, the the intense breathing and cold showers. I find them incredibly
- like a real shortcut to re-regulation. I took a cold shower this morning. I've been really on my
cold showers lately because I had a dysregulating event a few days ago and it's taken me a while
to come back. And so that's one thing I do. I lose track of time when I'm dysregulated, and so
I try to have a really strong morning routine. So that's - a morning routine is, I think, one of
the foundational things, is to just get started with one two or three things that help you to to
kind of get your brain centered again and be ready be ready to pay attention. But also washing
hands with warm water, that's very - usually you can get to a bathroom sink and wash your
hand with - back in the bathroom, Emma! Yeah. It's a place you can have a little privacy and
have a moment, right? Whereas if you're out in public, it's just too sensory overwhelm, at least
for me sometimes. Yeah. So so washing your hands, nobody knows you're re-regulating. It just
looks like a good, positive thing to do. And the warm water and the soap and just feeling your
hands and going "These are my hands. Here I am." And next thing you know, you're back. And
finally, a hug. And hugs are tricky because sometimes when you're in a bad place, you don't
want to be hugged or touched. That's okay. This is something for friends and couples, is you can
say "Do you want a hug right now?" when you see somebody's dysregulated. But if you can't handle
being hugged or there's no one to hug you, you can back into a corner and squish yourself in there.
And I learned that from Temple Grandin and her her technique for getting into a swing
and twisting yourself around to squeeze yourself. I'm like "Yes, that does feel good."
Yeah, I've seen that with quite a few clients like in residential treatment. When they're
really stressed out, they'll just - yeah, I mean, but you can think about this as a child,
right? You wrap in a blanket, snuggle on a couch, press into your stuffed animals, squeeze into your
bed. Like these are safety, right? This is like restoring your sense of safety. Yeah. I tried a
weighted blanket, but it was heavy. I didn't like it. Some people really love them though, you know.
You just got to find what suits you, right? Isn't it wonderful, though? Like so much of what we
thought was like some sort of psychological, crazy aspect of ourselves, it's like "No, it's just your
left, right hemispheres need to be talking to each other again, and you need some some weight
on you. It's okay." Yeah, there's something, you know, you're not doing anything wrong. I mean,
how many times do people go "I think you just want to recreate your childhood" or, you know, I'd
be like "I don't, I really don't think so, no." And I think there's two ways of looking at
this, right? Like like you're saying like, some people look at this like "This
is pathological. You must be broken." Yeah. And the other way of looking at this is your
nervous system has an inherent ability to heal. Your nervous system has an inherent ability to
reset. And if you listen to it, it will guide you to re-regulate yourself. Yeah. It wants to reset,
just like your skin wants to form a scab and then heal over. You're designed to heal. And you got
to kind of get out of the way sometimes and like let that natural process happen. But it's hard.
It's hard with a head full of competing ideas about how to do it. So. Yeah. Well, that's
awesome. I find this so helpful. Thank you so much for taking time to share your wisdom and
experience with my audience. Really love it. Thanks. Oh, I - we're gonna have to talk
again. I want you to talk to my audience. Yeah, for sure. Yes. And for those of you out
there, I am going to be talking with Anna again, so please check out her channel. She's got tons of
great resources. Even just talking with you today, I'm like "Oh, I can think of three clients right
now who I'm sending a link to your channel to." So yeah, keep an eye out for that. And
for those of you who want to hear the full length conversation - I've cut some
of it down for this video. If you want to hear the full-length conversation,
go check it out on my podcast. Okay, thank you all so much for being here. Thank you,
Anna, for being here, and we'll talk to you later.
