The "Crappy Childhood Fairy": A unique resource for trauma/PTSD self-care and recovery?

[HowToBe]

Partly as a consequence of a friend's struggles, and partly just due to general interest from what I've learned on the forum, I clicked a Youtube video by a channel called "Crappy Childhood Fairy", and was really blown away by this woman, Anna Runkle, and her condensed and encouraging delivery of practical advice and philosophy about trauma.

One difficulty I've noticed in general with the subject of trauma seems to be that, while it's true that healing has its own pace and situations are different and sometimes complex, there seems to be a lot of vagueness when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of what to do to deal with trauma, or even to discover to what degree you might have it. This is made even more difficult by the fact that even the professionals can't seem to agree sometimes, and especially by the fact that such a suspiciously large number of people have had long years of therapy with little progress, or bounced between therapists and counselors who decided their case was not within their ability or something, or -- worst of all -- been outright mishandled, strung along, or even abused by professionals.

It seems to be this lady's personal mission to cut through that confusion. She hopes that with knowledge people can have a shorter road to healing than she had, as a childhood survivor of an alcoholic household and resultant Childhood/Complex PTSD.

Now I'm only just diving into her videos, but the information she delivers seems to be highly practical, condensed yet approachable, and compassionate without pandering.

While I'm actually still watching it, this video seems like a great introduction that I think really to those of us who have read some of the recommended psychology books the degree to which she's "made the journey through Hell and brought back the Dragon's treasure". She really seems to have filled both arms full on the way back, and seems equally determined to put this treasure of knowledge on display for the eyes of as many people as possible who might need it.

So, without further ado, the first video:

In this next video, she lays down a set of techniques simple enough for someone in a dysregulated/dissociated state to possibly be able to remember and use them in the moment. Naturally, we would augment her breathing method with EE's pipe breath, but I see shades of "Healing Developmental Trauma", "The Wim Hof Method" (in the breathing and cold shower ideas), and mindfulness (in the "grounding"/centering/ return-to-body techniques as well as how step-1 is "learn to realize when you're dysregulated/i.e. dissociated").

In the next video she talks in a practical way about how talk therapy doesn't work for some people, while not hating on the therapy profession in general. She presents what seems like a pretty nuanced and balanced view, while also referencing how more recent knowledge about trauma indicates that talking out the emotional events is not always necessary and can be retraumatizing.

This video seems to be a lead-in to what she calls her "daily practice", the core of her coaching and self-care program which apparently consists of a writing exercise and a meditation technique which she claims can be learned in 45 minutes. She frames this as being a way to address what she calls the #1 barrier to trauma healing, which is fear. Sounds about right.

I only found one reference to this lady's work on the forum, so thought it deserved its own thread.

She repeatedly references a book called "The Body Keeps the Score", which sounds like it could use reviewed for potential inclusion in our reading list!

So am I seeing her clearly, or do you think maybe I'm over-impressed??

[Edit: removed double-pasted link.]

 

[Yas]

It seems to be this lady's personal mission to cut through that confusion. She hopes that with knowledge people can have a shorter road to healing than she had, as a childhood survivor of an alcoholic household and resultant Childhood/Complex PTSD.

Now I'm only just diving into her videos, but the information she delivers seems to be highly practical, condensed yet approachable, and compassionate without pandering.

I have watched some of her videos and I think she does a great job!

What I loved about finding this lady is that she really goes practical about how to heal without it being only behavioral, but also looking into the emotional.

She talks about how talk therapy alone isn't necessarily the best thing to do and how sometimes it may even make it worse if, for example, you work on anger by expressing it only, without learning how to self-regulate.

Se focuses a lot on the emotional dysregulation that is caused by trauma and how to self-regulate better:

I also liked her videos about connection vs. isolation:

This one is like a summary which I found really nice:

This one is about how relationships will always be triggering and that it's not that others have to stop being triggering, but we have to learn to manage our triggers little by little:

This one is about being defensive and trying to keep safe by controlling other people, very interesting:

Much of what she says is known by people on this forum, so it isn't necessarily new, but I think she speaks in a very clear way, she seems compassionate and her work has value as a guide for people who are struggling to heal.

She repeatedly references a book called "The Body Keeps the Score", which sounds like it could use reviewed for potential inclusion in our reading list!

This book is very good! Nowadays it is mentioned by many of the people who work with trauma.

 

[Alejo]

Thank you for sharing HowToBe,

I have never watched her videos, but I might start, so that I may have an informed opinion on her.

What I will say about approach to trauma, from what I have learned in a very, very limited capacity, and having never actually been through therapy with a psychologist and the like, is that the approach seems to be as individual as there are people in the world.

Some paths help a lot of people, but not all do, and some of us require very different approaches, very particular or a combination of several different ones at different times.

What I think really makes a difference in whether therapy works, or whether one finds the one path towards recovery or healing, I think is the will of the person, without it no amount of therapy will ever accomplish anything.

So therapy is a tool there to be used and effective is the user is willing to achieve his or her goal. Which brings me to, sometimes, not always, but sometimes diving into so many different aspects or methodologies of therapeutic care can be counter productive, at least in my opinion.

I have found personally that one can avoid actually doing some of the work, if one remains stuck in the defining period of therapy, continuing to look for the dynamics at work and the causal way in which things got to the point they're at today. And jumping from system to system.


What I have found is that every system of cognitive approach to trauma, ends with a question being posited to the person in question: "what now?"

After defining the causes, or possible causes, the methods, the practices, the dynamics and so on, it is ultimately a daily choice to work through trauma.

Just a few thoughts that occurred to me, I will be checking her out.

Thanks again.

 

[HowToBe]

What I think really makes a difference in whether therapy works, or whether one finds the one path towards recovery or healing, I think is the will of the person, without it no amount of therapy will ever accomplish anything.

This is a key point. Funny that it just so turns out that I'm reading "The Willpower Instinct" by Kelly McGonigal. Aaaand, you know what's super fascinating? So far, a lot of what she's recommending for increasing willpower overlaps a lot with the key strategies for living effectively with and healing the effects of trauma in the present.

Deep breathing, meditation, taking some time in nature? Among other things, they increase Heart Rate Variability (HRV). As a deep breathing practice, we know EE certainly should increase HRV, probably someone has tested it for themselves by now, and we know it can assist trauma release and healing.

In the 4th video in my opening post, Anna Runkle talks about fear as the #1 barrier to trauma healing. So, therefore it makes sense the core techniques to her approach (her "daily practice") focus on...
1. Meditation -- restores or strengthens HRV and sympathetic nervous activation, helping to balance/reduce the fight-or-flight response - i.e. it strengthens and calms a person in the face of fear.
2. Writing -- supposedly, research shows it activates different pathways in the brain than those activated by talking about traumatic memories out loud (one reason talk therapy can actually be continually re-traumatizing for some. It sounds like, in part, her writing method is inspired by Pennebaker's "Writing to Heal", but with additional input from other sources and research such as "The Body Keeps The Score", maybe. I won't know until I find a good description of it. I might have to go to her website for that.

I have found personally that one can avoid actually doing some of the work, if one remains stuck in the defining period of therapy, continuing to look for the dynamics at work and the causal way in which things got to the point they're at today. And jumping from system to system.

I'm not sure if it's in the first video I posted, but somewhere Mrs. Runkle addresses exactly your first point here. It might be in her video about why she quit therapy (which she isn't handing out as advice, what she says in that video is much more balanced and practical than that, I'd say).

Her approach seems more like a balanced psycho-neuro-endocrine strategy (to reference Gabor Mate in "When The Body Says No"). It should be noted that she even references the fact that excess dietary carbohydrate, especially sugar, contributes to trauma-related dysregulation, something I forgot to mention in my first post.

What I will say about approach to trauma, from what I have learned in a very, very limited capacity, and having never actually been through therapy with a psychologist and the like, is that the approach seems to be as individual as there are people in the world.

The truth is probably a sort of "yes and no". For instance, almost every physical injury benefits from better nutrition and lowered inflammation, among other factors. It sounds like the central pillars of her approach are focused on creating and maintaining better general conditions for healing. Then in more targeted videos she gets "into the weeds" of more specific details focusing on different parts of one's life, or specific kinds of trauma struggles, such as anger, attachment fears, environment clutter or hoarding, etc.

---

Anyhow, I'll keep looking into it. Certainly, healing trauma is very much about whether a person is ready and willing to make the effort for themselves and others, and the specifics of every injury are different. But it's possible there is enough knowledge "in the air" now that insightful people might be starting to establish some general principles that can help in most cases, and it might be possible to even establish something of a rough "roadmap" to raise the probability that a person's efforts can carry them in the right direction, while marking out the warning signs of the biggest and most common "pits" that people fall into while trying to heal.

 

[3DStudent]

Thanks for the recommendation. I've seen her channel, but don't think I really looked into it. I will give some a watch/listen. They seem to be informative just by the titles alone.

 

[Yas]

I agree with you Alejo, and at least for what I've seen in the Crappy Childhood Fairy, she's all about taking responsibility for one's healing. And also, about working with what seems to impede some people from doing instead of explaining (narrative).

I remember I saw a video in her channel in which she read a letter by a follower asking for advice, but the letter was all about she blaming others, and then Anna (the Crappy Childhood Fairy) basically said the same to the correspondent, that she had to take responsibility and stop blaming others. I'll see if I can find the video.

I think that what I got from her is that sometimes we go to therapies that focus on the narrative (talking) too much and even though we can understand what happened, how and why, we continue to be triggered or repeating some patterns because our nervous system is a bit out of balance, so, if we want to work on that, we need another approach. Kind of like the top-down, bottom-up approaches that were discussed when we were reading the Healing Developmental Trauma book. So narrative and cognitive therapy are top-down for the most part. Neurofeedback, breathing, self-regulation, Peter Levine's work, etc, are more bottom-up, and I suppose that many people need both.

But of course, if the person isn't willing to actually be responsible and change, then there's not much any of these approaches can do for that person.

 

[HowToBe]

Kind of like the top-down, bottom-up approaches that were discussed when we were reading the Healing Developmental Trauma book. So narrative and cognitive therapy are top-down for the most part. Neurofeedback, breathing, self-regulation, Peter Levine's work, etc, are more bottom-up, and I suppose that many people need both.

Yeah. I'm also reading the C's Transcripts books, and at one point the recommended that someone return to their childhood home to release trauma. Someone present assumed it would simply be sufficient to imagine herself there, but the C's insisted she needed to be physically present.

Now, this was back when frank was involved, so there's some possibility something else was coming through trying to set up a "Hungry Ghosts" wild goose hunt. BUT, at the same time, those who have read "The Adaptive Unconscious" and "Thinking: Fast and Slow" (and "Blink") will be aware that a person's memory ability increases if they place themself in the environment in which the memory occurred.

So, FWIW, I agree that there may also be individual caveats for each person. And sometimes special steps.

 

[Oxajil]

I haven't watched the videos of this lady yet, but I'm glad it's helping people! I can see from some of the descriptions that she's using elements from therapies. Some thoughts based on what you wrote:

One difficulty I've noticed in general with the subject of trauma seems to be that, while it's true that healing has its own pace and situations are different and sometimes complex, there seems to be a lot of vagueness when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of what to do to deal with trauma, or even to discover to what degree you might have it.

When determining whether someone is suffering from trauma, psychologists look at whether the person meets the criteria for PTSD through questioning and eventually by using instruments. There are also people who suffer from trauma but don't meet all the criteria, but they can still be treated. Then, the basic treatment plan is EMDR and/or imaginary exposure and afterwards if needed additional therapies such as CBT or exposure to tackle remaining symptoms (depression, anxiety or other). What can make treatment difficult or more complex is when the person also has a personality disorder, a low IQ or low motivation or other. Nonetheless, in most cases this treatment plan is pretty successful. For some it might take years to recover, depending on the complexity and severity.

This is made even more difficult by the fact that even the professionals can't seem to agree sometimes, and especially by the fact that such a suspiciously large number of people have had long years of therapy with little progress, or bounced between therapists and counselors who decided their case was not within their ability or something, or -- worst of all -- been outright mishandled, strung along, or even abused by professionals.

Yeah, very true and sad, people get referred back and forth because their problems are considered to be too complex or are mistreated. I was shocked when I read that a therapist told a young adult with cancer that she has nothing to worry about, because she's going to die soon or something along those lines. Just unbelievable! There are psychos in every field.

how more recent knowledge about trauma indicates that talking out the emotional events is not always necessary and can be retraumatizing.

Talking out? Is she talking about a specific therapy? Which recent knowledge? (Asking out of curiosity!) Trauma therapy can trigger a lot of emotions, but with continuous sessions those strong emotions should subside. For example, I talked to someone who had PTSD (she was abused multiple times in childhood and adulthood) who told me that she almost got angry with her therapist because she didn't like the trauma therapy and that she had to think back to those events, but she stuck with it and is doing much better now and is finishing up her internship and starting work soon.

And just to show, despite symptoms getting worse temporarily for some people undergoing trauma therapy, in the end they still benefited:

Symptom exacerbation (i.e., treatment side effects) has often been neglected in the psychotherapy literature. Although prolonged exposure has gained empirical support for the treatment of chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), some have expressed concem that imaginal exposure, a component of this therapy, may cause symptom exacerbation, leading to inferior outcome or dropout. In the present study, symptom exacerbation was examined in 76 women with chronic PTSD. To define a "reliable" exacerbation, we used a method incorporating the standard deviation and test-retest reliability of each outcome measure. Only a minority of participants exhibited reliable symptom exacerbation. Individuals who reported symptom exacerbation benefited comparably from treatment. Further, symptom exacerbation was unrelated to dropout. Thus, although a minority of individuals experienced a temporary symptom exacerbation, this exacerbation was unrelated to outcome.

Source

There might be other reasons why people drop out of trauma therapy and there are many factors that determine whether therapy will be successful or not.

2. Writing -- supposedly, research shows it activates different pathways in the brain than those activated by talking about traumatic memories out loud (one reason talk therapy can actually be continually re-traumatizing for some.

Does she refer to the research or studies in the videos? It would be interesting to check them out!

 

[loreta]

Thank you! She seems fascinating and serious. Just listen one short video of her that you put, I like her. She looks good. I will follow her to see more about what she teaches!

 

[HowToBe]

Then, the basic treatment plan is EMDR and/or imaginary exposure and afterwards if needed additional therapies such as CBT or exposure to tackle remaining symptoms (depression, anxiety or other). What can make treatment difficult or more complex is when the person also has a personality disorder, a low IQ or low motivation or other. Nonetheless, in most cases this treatment plan is pretty successful.

Very interesting. I really appreciate this condensed overview. Interestingly, Anna says EMDR helped her, in her video about "why she quit therapy", however, she says that the writing exercise she teaches is a much larger part of the process.

Again, for anyone without the time to look into her yourself, I must emphasize she is NOT anti-therapy, even talk therapy, just she was getting nowhere with talk therapy specifically, and then found methods that were powerful for her, and have before and since worked for many others, by the sound of it. She is not against talk therapy, but rather her focus is on giving trauma survivors the tools to help re-regulate themselves when the trauma is taking over their nervous system, due to the very real dangers that can pose for relationships and physical safety (such as when driving or working). Given her age, it seems likely she may have recieved limited initial help due to outdated approaches with limited understanding. May have even just been pure bad luck matching with therapists. I think she wants to cut some of the luck out of the equation.

Here's the timestamp for her comments specifically about EMDR, but also, to understand what she says about talk therapy this is the video to watch:

I was shocked when I read that a therapist told a young adult with cancer that she has nothing to worry about, because she's going to die soon or something along those lines. Just unbelievable! There are psychos in every field.

That's pretty much cheering the cancer on... I hope the victim of their therapy was able to rouse a healthy dose of righteous indignation and defiance at that! Would be a lot more healing than the advice, I'm sure.

Talking out? Is she talking about a specific therapy? Which recent knowledge? (Asking out of curiosity!) Trauma therapy can trigger a lot of emotions, but with continuous sessions those strong emotions should subside.

The above video clarifies the best. But specifically she was finding the talk therapies too dysregulating (about three days of destabilization each time) and was not seeing progress after an extended period of time by the sound of it (years if I'm remembering the video right). Then she found tools that helped her, which can be applied alongside therapy. She doesn't claim a person doesn't need to talk about things either. Recent knowledge refers to "The Body Keeps the Score", and whatever else she has drawn from. It sounds like Pennebaker, EMDR, meditation. Not all of this is new, but gradually a synthesis seems to be becoming possible, it seems, and the possibility of more systematic ways to discover what works for a particular person. Or so it seems.

Does she refer to the research or studies in the videos? It would be interesting to check them out!

Might not bear repeating at this point, but "The Body keeps the Score" is the main reference I've heard her make, though she did mention Pennebaker in one video.

I've tried the writing exercise, and (without spoiling it since it's free on her website), I consists of free-writing (whatever comes to mind, regardless of whether it makes sense), but in a particular format. Essentially you write out the negative emotions and thoughts that are weighing your mind down. For simplicity's sake she divides negative emotions into two categories (to keep the exercise as simple as possible for people who are dysregulated).

1. Fears
2. "Resentments" - this is a catch-all for anger and such emotions that have a target. "I resent _ because I have fear _."
3. Release

At the end of the exercise the fears are "released" by writing out a release phrase reflecting an intent to acknowledge but release these fears and resentments, so one can approach the day more regulated, alert, able to focus, etc. She emphasizes the importance of this release step, saying that without it the exercise may just amount to venting or ranting, which can have the opposite effect.

This is immediately followed by a 20-minute meditation. Part of EE could easily be slotted in for that, and would probably boost the power of the exercise a bit, I'd think.

To try it out, she recommends a person do the full practice twice a day for a week. If 20 minutes of meditation is too long, she says cut it down to 10 or even 5.

If you want the exact instructions, this is the link she provides with her Youtube videos. Instant access after creating an email and password account. The videos describing the technique can be watched in under an hour.

The Daily Practice - The Crappy Childhood Fairy

Powerful techniques to calm CPTSD symptoms, and develop inner calm, mental focus and clear thinking.l earn and try it FREE onlince course: Learn and try it in under an hour.

courses.crappychildhoodfairy.com

 

[Emerald Rob]

Thanks HowToBe and all others for your posts -I plan to take a look at some of Anna R videos tthis weekend .

 

[HowToBe]

Thank you! She seems fascinating and serious. Just listen one short video of her that you put, I like her. She looks good. I will follow her to see more about what she teaches!

Yes. She really reminds me of a feminine Jordan Peterson, in a funny way. Her "network of concepts" is so well constructed, you can just tell after watching a few of her videos. I get the same impression of spontaneity yet high information density from her videos. I don't think her videos are entirely pre-written, if at all, though I imagine, like Peterson, she does prepare, of course.

Would love to see Peterson and her have a talk. That would be a great podcast. 30 years clinical experience meets 30 years experience as a patient.

 

[HowToBe]

Okay, I highly recommend this video. If you want the most condensed introduction to her practical advice, outside the sphere of her "daily practice", watch this. It helps to make clear that she's not just saying "write and meditate and you'll fix yourself".

Just be aware, when she says she wouldn't have "wasted money on therapy", she talking about her own experience for her. She clarifies this in the video I linked above, "Why I Quit Therapy".

The point is, whether therapy helps a person or not, they'd probably benefit from a lot of what's mentioned in this video.

Interesting details:
In addition to "The Body Keeps The Score" by B. E. van der Kolk, in this video she also recommends:
"Complex PTSD" by Pete Walker, so that's another one to look into.

For example, I talked to someone who had PTSD (she was abused multiple times in childhood and adulthood) who told me that she almost got angry with her therapist because she didn't like the trauma therapy and that she had to think back to those events, but she stuck with it and is doing much better now and is finishing up her internship and starting work soon.

And just to show, despite symptoms getting worse temporarily for some people undergoing trauma therapy, in the end they still benefited:

To address this directly, go to 1:53 of the above video. Anna apparently (as mentioned in another vid) gave up her daily practice for a year or two at one or more points, and it always made her slide down hill in a long term way and feel miserable and hopeless. So she doesn't claim for a second that her daily techniques are a magical bullet. They are for gentle healing, daily coping, and creating preconditions that enable more dramatic healing and movement to other steps, it sounds like.

 

[Cleo]

Thank you for sharing the above videos! I found her channel several months ago and the few videos I watched of hers stood out to me. I didn't look further into her work though till recently reading this thread.

I've tried the writing exercise, and (without spoiling it since it's free on her website), I consists of free-writing (whatever comes to mind, regardless of whether it makes sense), but in a particular format. Essentially you write out the negative emotions and thoughts that are weighing your mind down. For simplicity's sake she divides negative emotions into two categories (to keep the exercise as simple as possible for people who are dysregulated).

I started the Daily Practice exercise last Monday. I'm think I'm going to keep at it too, based on the fact that I'm meditating daily now because of the exercise (normally I rarely meditate).

This is immediately followed by a 20-minute meditation. Part of EE could easily be slotted in for that, and would probably boost the power of the exercise a bit, I'd think.

The last couple days, in place of her meditation, I practiced the Prayer of the Soul meditation and the meditation with seed as described in the following C's session. I imagine it's okay to alternate between the two (I think she recommends sticking with one type of meditation for the first 7 days)..

Maybe this exercise can help with setting aside limiting emotions (the C's mentioned setting aside limiting emotions in the latest session).

 

[HowToBe]

I imagine it's okay to alternate between the two (I think she recommends sticking with one type of meditation for the first 7 days)..

I imagine if you already have the EE prayer memorized that's perfectly fine. She just wants to make meditation as accessible as possible to lower the bar for those who will benefit from this, but are drained of willpower and hope.

I think the EE prayer is wonderfully in line with her exercise of letting go of fear. More useful than her conventional Christian "give it over to God" version of the release -- with great deal of respect nonetheless Mrs. Runkle. -- or the "secular" version, which i like slightly better conceptually.

My instinct is there's extra potential for synthesis, with the concept of Faith in the life path, the blend and path between Self and Infinite that's embedded in that meditation... Knowledge is Love. And Faith enables Knowledge's expression in action.

Personally, for the release, despite her advice of sticking to hers for the first week, I'm going with something like this (it changes a bit each time because I'm evolving it, but I'll try to make this a "high potency" version):

"I hereby acknowledge and release these fears and resentments, in Faith in the unlimited learning pathway, so that I may best meet all of my lessons and challenges, see their value, truly Choose, and pursue my Destiny."

Something like that. Seems to give the Divine and the Self each their due. It seems more "open" and to reach deeper for me. But then again I tend to be "hopelessly" philosophical.