How to Rebuild Trust and Connection After Growing Up in Chaos with The Crappy Childhood Fairy Anna Runkle

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So when I got attacked, it was very random. Four
guys jumped out of a car and just started beating
me and my friend and they broke my jaw on
my teeth. I was unconscious and I woke up and
I screamed, and I screamed because even though I didn't
know who I was or where I was, something in
me was just like, hold on, wait, they could kill me,
and I'm not going to let that happen. This is
the greatest story of my life. Everything in my life

(00:20):
is before this one night and after this one night.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
This week, we have Anna Runkle on the podcast. Also
known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy. She helps people heal
from childhood trauma and teaches powerful tools to build real
connection in a world that often feels so disconnected.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
My parents were alcoholics, and when they got divorced when
I was seven, my mom brought in a bunch of
people to live there. They were really into drugs and alcohol,
and so we were neglected, We were hungry. Sometimes we
got very very poor. Talking about trauma isn't always great
for people. It's not always the best thing. And I
read some statistic that about a third of people who
were traumatized, as kids feel worse when they talk about it,

(00:53):
get very disregulated. We all, I think, need to express
who we are, what we've been through, what we hoped for.
And to do that, you can do this with writing.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
I'm Radi Dvlukiah and on my podcast A Really Good Cry,
we embrace the messy and the beautiful, providing a space
for raw and fielded conversations that celebrate vulnerability and allow
you to tune in to learn, connect and find comfort together.
And I thank you so much for being here today.
Thank you so grateful that you're here. I had a
vieawful look and insight into your new book, Connectability, and

(01:24):
honestly I can say I cannot wait to read the
rest like it is such an incredible book. I feel
like you've put so much of your own self into it,
but also so many incredible tools that are useful for
not just people who are struggling, but people who need
it every single day. So thank you so much for
the work that you do, and I'm so excited to
have you here.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Before we get into your book and the work that
you do, I kind of want to scroll all the
way back to the beginning of why you started doing
what you're doing.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
I would love to hear your background story.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
You know, isn't it strange? Who knew?

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Well?

Speaker 1 (01:59):
I grew up in a commune in Berkeley. Okay, it
wasn't always a commune. It started out kind of normal,
and my parents were alcoholics. And when they got divorced
when I was seven, my mom like brought in a
bunch of people to live there, and like a lot,
like fourteen people in our house, and they were really
into drugs and alcohol, and it was like the era
of free love, and a lot of the grown ups

(02:22):
testing out the idea that you know, all this like
family parenting thing was just like the man or something,
and they needed to get free, and they would just
abandon their duties. So sometimes my grandparents swooped in and
took care of us, and sometimes neighbors took us in.

(02:42):
In those days, they didn't report. But my mom was
just like she was just like living a youth that
she didn't get to have. Wow. Yeah, And so we
were neglected. We were hungry. Sometimes we got very very poor,
didn't you know welfare food stamps, but the welfare money
would to cigarettes and alcohol, so we had to be

(03:03):
very resourceful as kids.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
And I know you started a YouTube channel called Crappy Child's.
I was wondering where that name came from, and yeah,
what the context is of that?

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Well, so, okay, people my age will remember this cartoon
called Fractured Fairy Tales. Okay, and there was this in
my memory. She was this stumpy little fairy who she
would come in to introduce each new segment of the cartoon,
and she had a wand and she had this frown
on her face and I thought she had a cigarette

(03:38):
hanging from her lips, but I went and found it
on YouTube. No cigarette, but she would just be sort
of like, there, there's your wish. And so when I
first I had this dream that I had to write
this book from when I first recovered thirty years ago.
And then in twenty sixteen, I went to Brendan Burchard.
I think he's a friend of yours. I went to
his He had this four day seminar that he's now

(03:59):
organized into a modern format, but it was called Experts Academy.
And I just sat there and I was like, just
tell me how to take my story and turn it
into this. And I thought that it would be a book.
It finally is. It turned into a whole lot of
other things in between. But originally I gave it this
very sanitary name called like Your Healing Year, yep, that

(04:22):
I would never want to read a book called that.
I just it had to be more fun. And it
just came to me one day and I was thinking
about this boyfriend. He wasn't even a boyfriend. He was
like a thing. Yeah, yeah, it's a little thing. And
he just like ghosted me one day, and my friend
went to go find out, why haven't you called Anna?
And he said, she thinks she's special to me. She's

(04:42):
one in thirty to me. And at the time it
was like a knife. But by the time I was
writing this book, I was just laughing. I was laughing
so hard, like what a funny thing to say, And
I thought, this needs to be a cartoon, you know,
I can't like telling this story in all seriousness. It's
just like and then do you know what he said?
I couldn't even I was so free already from the

(05:03):
pain of the past that just these adventures, you know,
seemed whimsical to me. So that's when I thought, this
has got to have another name. So I came out
in the living room one day and I said, listen,
I'm getting a lot of views on YouTube, and I'm
going to change the name and it's going to call
it Crappy Childhood Fairy. And my sons, who were in
high school, they were like, no, Mom, you can't be
on YouTube. You can't call you No. YouTube is for

(05:26):
people like us. And I was fifty three when I
started Crappy Childhood Fairy.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
Yeah, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
And if anybody who doesn't know, that's a very successful
YouTube channel where you speak about all your work on there,
and the people that I've read the comments from, they
just seem like you've really helped change and transform their life.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
At what point in your life.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Did you realize that your childhood and what you went
through was affecting your adulthood.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
Kind Of early on, when I was in college, I
went to therapy for the first time, and the therapist
was like, you know, you're an adult child of an
alcoholic and I read the literature. There was like one
book about it then, and I was like, oh, so
I am. But it was a very gloomy sort of
science and prognosis, and I was really having a hard time.
Then I was overfunctioning. I was in so much stress

(06:10):
all the time, my body hurt like one hundred and
seven pounds, which was like skinny like a model but
not healthy, and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day,
trying to cope with my emotions. So I ended up
going to the twelve step program for families of alcoholics,
and it was tremendously helpful. But really what changed my
life was before I did that that it just okay,

(06:34):
Can I back up? This terrible thing happened. I was
sort of handling life up to age thirty. I was
holding it together. I was acting normal. I was doing
outward things that make you look like life is okay.
Then my mom died. I got my heart broken. A
little before that, I was very depressed, and I got
randomly attacked on the street. And that is funny. It

(06:58):
sounds like it's like the first thing that ever happened,
but in a weird way, it was the beginning of
the good thing coming because I had to find something
different and I had not felt good about myself before
that day, and for a while afterwards, I didn't feel
good about myself. But my mom was the sort of

(07:19):
person who would get drunk and say, oh, I should
never have had you, and I knew, even when I
was six, I knew, Like she doesn't mean it, but
it kind of puts a curse on you. It's like
this place that I would go every time the going
got tough, like I'm not really supposed to be here,
and that's a very bad thought. That's like usually what
people are thinking when they're thinking of ending their lives.

(07:39):
And so when I got attacked, it was very random.
Four guys jumped out of a car and just started
beating me and my friend and they broke my jaw
on my teeth. I was unconscious. Then I woke up
and I screamed, and I screamed because even though I
didn't know who I was or where I was, something
in me was just like, hold on, wait, they could
kill me, and I'm not going to let that happen.

(08:00):
I'm not going to let that happen. I'm going to
get through this. And I did. But after that happened,
I had PTSD. And in those days, they didn't think
of PTSD as something that you get from street violence
or something like that. They thought of it as like
a war thing. So I was never diagnosed. I was
the state of California has this generous pot of money

(08:22):
for victims of violent crimes, so I was able to
go to my therapist three times instead of one time,
and I would talk and talk and talk, and she'd go,
come on, let's talk again about what happened, what happened
your mom, the death, the attack. But I would get
so rattled in those sessions. It wasn't take it wasn't
going anywhere. It was just like this opening it up

(08:43):
the wound, you know, getting all messed up about it.
And I'd have to go sit in my car for
forty five minutes before I could drive. I was just
like shaking afterwards. And at the time, you know, I
would just say, I don't know, I just don't think
this is going very well. She say, well, it's going
to get worse before it gets better. You're processing a
lot of deep stuff. And so I went along with that,
but it was getting so bad I just couldn't do

(09:05):
it anymore. And I told the doctor, and the doctor's like, here,
let's put you on Xanax. And so with everything I
know now, because now I've done all my research about
what is complex PTSD, what was going on with me.
I have a lot of answers. I still have questions,
but I have a lot of answers. And what I
know was talking about the trauma and then taking medications.

(09:26):
You know, it was disregulating me. My nervous system was
a wreck from talking about it. I couldn't recover, and
then taking drugs to calm myself when I was in
that state was making it impossible for me to reregulate.
Because I find everybody gets disregulated sometimes and almost everybody
can get reregulated naturally.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
Could you chef anybody who doesn't know what complex PTSD.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
Is, Well, it's the kind of PTSD that can come
from chronic, ongoing intense stress. It could happen in adulthood
from a w or an abusive relationship, but usually it's
from childhood, a lot of abuse and neglect in childhood.
And the word for it only got popularized maybe in
twenty thirteen twenty fourteen, when Bessel vander Kulch's book came out,

(10:13):
The Body Keeps the Score. I happened to buy that
when it came out because I was about to get
married and I had gotten very emotionally disregulated and freaked out.
My fiance and fiance, and I bought the book to
find out why do I do that? Why do I
self sabotage like that? And I learned I read the

(10:34):
symptoms of complex PTSD in for the first time, I
knew exactly what I'd had this whole time.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Did you say some of those symptoms?

Speaker 1 (10:40):
Sure, it's well. The core symptom is that you get disregulated.
Your nervous system is just not quite doing its job
exactly right. And your nervous system is this beautiful part
of your body that governs virtually everything but your spirit.
It's your metabolism, your digestion, your hormones, your immune system,

(11:03):
your movements, your ability to sense temperature and space and
to feel emotions and to feel connected to the world.
So when that's not quite working properly, it can really
throw you off. And once you kind of see what
it is, it's one of those things like you see
it everywhere. You're like, oh, that's why kids can't learn
in school when it's so hard at home. Oh that's
why I had such a hard time, you know, trying

(11:25):
to go on in dates. There's measurable things that happen.
There's a lot that's a mystery. We know that people
who have complex or people who had a rough childhood,
let's put it that way, they are at such a
high risk, much higher risk straight correlation for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity,
reproductive disorders, autoimmune disorders, autoimmune disorders especially. But of course,

(11:50):
and then the things that we've known for a while,
like mental illness, depression, anxiety, difficult relationships, addictions. But it
was just like everything, dementia, learning disabilities, memory problems. You know,
there's almost nothing that isn't made worse by the history
of early trauma. And so to the best they know,

(12:11):
it's because of changes in the nervous system that result
from that chronic stress, that soup of stress hormones. But
also neglect that eye contact and cuddling and you know,
intimacy between parent and child that if your parent couldn't
give you that, it might have put a dent in
your in your neurodevelopment.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
And how does something you mentioned dysregulation and how does
that show up as an adult? What would those what
would that look like for someone?

Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, so you feel I think the number one thing
is you feel discombobulated, a little off. You wake up
in a bad mood. We have all these like sayings
for it. I'm having a scenior moment. I woke up
on the wrong side of the bed. Yeah you know, yeah,
but you do you forget why you walked into the room.
You're sort of spacing out too much. You drive somewhere
and you don't really remember the journey, the one that

(13:02):
other people feel the most and really notice because this
one hurts them and it's emotional dysregulation. Lashing out over
something that doesn't seem to deserve a big lash out,
panicking about something, or rushing into a romance, things like that.
All the emotions, they're just like so big, and we
live in this culture that's always saying all emotions are good.

(13:24):
Feel your feelings, trust your gut. But if you have
complex PTSD, that might be advice for your future, but
not yet. Your gut is not matched reality yet consistently
and under stress. You can see it in the brain.
The left front cortex, where reasoning is supposed to be happening,
is like darkening, and the right front cortex, where emotion

(13:47):
is happening, is lighting up. So it's very emotional, not
very reasonable, And that's how people perceive emotional dysregulation from
the outside, you're being unreasonable.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
And you mentioned obviously we get that sometimes it can
throw you off for a day, but if someone is
experiencing that for a long period of time, yeah, how
do you know the difference between oh, I'm just having
a bad day versus if someone's been going through it
for a while, they'll feel like this is just my normality,
Like this is how do you observe yourself in that way?
Or what are some tools that people can use to

(14:16):
really know what questions they could ask to think, oh,
is this actually happening to me?

Speaker 3 (14:21):
Because I think sometimes you can be numb to it,
can't you.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
Most of us took it personally. We just thought I'm
just some sort of defective person. Right, it gets very
weirded out by things that nobody else does, but it's
not nobody else. The great thing about like sharing my
experience on YouTube was all of a sudden, thousands of
people came back at me and said, oh my god,
you've just described what it's like to be me. I've
never heard that before, And now I know, like I'm

(14:45):
not alone, and now we know, I mean, now that
we know it's normal, we have normal symptoms for something
abnormal that happened. It's normal, and the great news is
it can be healed yeap. But my whole life is
about that. I used to listen to a lot of
Negati messages about like you're just trying to recreate your
childhood or you know, yeah, it's going to be very

(15:06):
hard before it gets better. Yeah, just kind of this
whole like taking on this heavy identity of like, well,
I was abused and I'm one of the abused people,
and without having to deny that or stuff it down
or pretend or wear a mask, I've learned how I
can process that experience and have a nice fresh nervous
system and perspective on my life and be able to

(15:28):
have a new day every day. And what I've been
through in the past makes me wise rather than broken.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
Walk me through that.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
So you said therapy wasn't something that helped you, but
could you give me some tools that did actually help
you get to a place from feeling like you're repeating
that negative feeling over and over again to being someone
who feels empowered by it.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
So therapy, as we know it works for a lot
of people, and talk therapy is sort of like the
gold standard. I think that's shifting right now because finally,
you know the but like me are coming out and
vocalizing and yeah, that didn't work for me. And a
lot there's this resistance to admitting that that talking about
trauma isn't always great for people. It's not always the

(16:12):
best thing. And I read some statistic that about a
third of people who were traumatized as kids feel worse
when they talk about it, get very disregulated. So we all,
I think, need to express who we are, what we've
been through, what we hope for, Like we need to
express ourselves and be our real selves above everything. Like
that's really the goal is to bring our unique gifts

(16:32):
into the world. And to do that sometimes this has
to be talked about and somebody's got to validate you.
But you know how you can do it. You can
do this with writing. Writing is a different neural pathway,
and for many people it's a lot the triggers are
not just standing there waiting to throw you back into
disregulation and get your cortisol and adrenaline going because you

(16:54):
talked about what happened. And so that's this funny thing.
Like I make YouTube videos and sometimes I'm but if
I'm want to talk about something really hard, it's totally
scripted and it's on a prompter. And luckily I'm very
good at it. I don't think I don't barely people
can tell. But I can read a script that I
wrote about what I want to say about my experience
and I'm fine. Yeah. I tried EMDR. That's a form

(17:16):
of therapy eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing.

Speaker 3 (17:19):
What is that?

Speaker 1 (17:19):
It's a technique that was A woman figured it out
walking down the street and she was looking around and
she realized she felt better after being sad. I think
she was a researcher at there. I don't know. She
was in a position to help us understand this, and
it ended up being adopted by the Veterans Association Administration
for the Treatment of Intense PTSD. Like it's clinically validated

(17:42):
to be quite effective for many things. Nothing is ever
like the panacea. But I tried it. I was offered.
I was offered some help from this guy who normally
just treated homeless vets who were addicts in San Francisco.
But I met him at a party. I was going
through a really hard time. I had very bad PTSD
and he said, I have I could help you with this.

(18:05):
I can see by the way your eyes are moving
around you have trauma. And I said, really, yeah, my
partner just died. And he said, well, I'll give you
some sessions of EMDR. And I said, I've always wanted that,
but let me tell you. It's two thousand and eight.
I have no money. You know, everybody was out of
work that year, and I was a single mom. He said,

(18:27):
that's all right, you're a friend of our meditation teacher.
We had the same meditation teacher. It was his birthday,
and so he gave me five sessions and like a
whole bunch of adult trauma, just the assault, very difficult birth,
you know, five things that have been hard for me
were just like all the charge was taken out of
them in five single sessions. So that was amazing. So

(18:48):
then I tried it for like childhood stuff. No go.
That's one of the things that is known about it.
It's less effective for trauma that happened earlier. Because whatever
trauma does to you very early, like before you can speak,
it's of a different nature. You don't have access to
the memory necessarily, but there's some sort of squirrely thing
that goes on inside when it is triggered. And when

(19:09):
I say trigger, I just want to say it, Yeah,
I mean a stimulus that prompts justsregulation.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
Right, And do you think you have to go backwards
to be able to really move forward? Like do you
think if you've gone through trauma, whether it's a veteran,
whether it's someone who's gone through childhood, do you think
someone has to go back and unlock that and look
it over and really, you know, analyze it.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Before they're able to move forward.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
Or do you think there's a way for people to
create new neural pathways in their mind to actually just
look forward rather than letting what's back there affect them.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
I did go to therapy, so I had the chance
to say this stuff. So I hesitate to say you
don't need it, but I never need it again. I'll
tell you that I think there's way too much emphasis
on it. It went on way too long. I went
for seventeen years, and well, I don't think we ever
caught up with Like, yeah, but what can I do
right now to function better and solve some of my

(20:05):
problems and bad habits and the things that I retraumasized
myself with the things that sabotage my relationships, that hold
me back professionally. It was so hard having untreated CPTSD.
I had so much potential. I was smart, you know,
I really cared. I loved people, I was funny, I
had talent, and I you know, everything that I tried

(20:28):
would get cut short because because I would just sort
of collapse emotionally or I would blow up at somebody
and sort of ruin things, and there, you know it was.
It would just always lead to failure. And I had
and I thought it was me. So that's the double whammy.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
Do you think is there any specific type of therapy
that people should be looking for if they have been
through if they're feeling the same way as you are,
specific qualifications and a therapist they could look for, or
the types of therapy that somebody does that could be different.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
Well, there's a whole There are a whole bunch of
schools of therapy now, and I don't I hesitate to
say like, oh, this one's great and this one's not. Different.
Ones work for different people. But I think the ones
that don't acknowledge dysregulation as the core symptom that if
it's going on, no information can be processed. The person's
just going to get very upset and you know, not

(21:21):
learn anything from the discussion that I remember, my therapist
was always astonished. It's like, but last week you said
you were going to I'd be like, really did I
say that? I literally couldn't remember what we talked about.
My brain was off from talking about the trauma. But also,
I feel like culturally we're at this moment, and I
think this is why my channel is popular. I'm tough love.

(21:43):
I'm not a therapist. I don't have to. You know,
I can give advice, you know, I don't treat childhood wounds.
I mean don't. I had a bad childhood, and I
know for a fact I can't change my childhood. And
I can't change the people who hurt me. They're not
even alive anymore. What I can change is the self
defeating behaviors that trauma sort of led me to, you know,

(22:05):
to have, And that is where you know, that's where
I find out. This is where the rubber meets the road.
For my students is like, are you ready? Are you
ready to look at that? Because this is the part
you can change. I think it's so exciting. It's like, oh,
I see something that I've been doing that's messing me up.
Yay that I can change. Yes, And instead of the

(22:27):
it's just a really common narrative, they go, well, I
you know I can't. I can't stop shoplifting. For example,
I'm just trying to think of something that's universally considered
a bad thing. I can't stop shoplifting. You know, my
parents never gave me nice things. It's like, Okay, I'm
sorry about the childhood part, but you got to stop
shoplifting or you're going to get your life into big trouble. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
I feel like the idea of constantly punishing yourself and
constantly feeling like you said when your mom would say
to you, oh I wish you were never born, Like
how that sits in your mind? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (22:59):
But I wonder if people are able to take how.

Speaker 2 (23:03):
Did you take that and then create your new pathway
create that feeling of confidence in yourself, of self worth
in yourself, because I think there's so many steps that
need to be taken for that to happen. How did
you become someone who had self worth?

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Yeah? This is this is the greatest story of my life.
It's so, this is everything in my life is before
this one night and after this one night. So I
had reached the conclusion that I couldn't go on. And
I was in that sad state that people get into
where I was thinking of giving my stuff away. And
I hadn't told anyone, and I didn't want to tell
the therapist. But I really thought. I thought there was

(23:41):
something so wrong with me. I mean, I was really
I had severe PTSD on top of the childhood PTSD.
I was about to get fired at work because I
was shooting my mouth off there and things that I
didn't I was just emotionally dysregulated. If something irked me,
and I would just blast people. So I had already
pushed everybody away in my life, and I thought, this
is I'm helpless and I was in this improv group.

(24:05):
Luckily I had something fun going on in my life.
I wasn't liking it at the time. I hate everybody.
I was suffering with severe disconnections for people, and people
were backing away from me and I was pushing them away.
This is what happens. This is why I had to
write my second book, Connectability. But what happened was I
gave her a ride home from rehearsal and I said,

(24:26):
you know what I think. You know, I have a
plan tomorrow. I don't know why. I told her, like,
if you really are serious, you don't you don't give
somebody a chance to stop you. And obviously I wanted
to be stopped. I wanted to be stopped, and I
instinctively knew she was the person to trust. And she
was this odd person. I was thirty, she was twenty three.
She's covered with tattoos. She was swearing like a sailor,

(24:48):
but also talking about God. And you know, I lived
in Berkeley, so people who talked about God, we were like,
very oh they're just crazy people or something, you know.
And she was just she was just so live and
you could see it. Her eyes were very bright. And
sometimes when the student is ready, you know, the teacher appears.
And she said, do you want ah, you know, I

(25:10):
know that feeling. I've totally been there. Do you want
me to show you what I did when I first
got sober as a teenager. But I found like I
was just angry all the time, and I thought it
wasn't worth staying alive if I couldn't drink, and I
never had a problem with drinking per se. It's still
like really painful for me to talk about, like, I'm
so grateful, I'm so grateful everything turned around. I think

(25:34):
at the time, like so many people who have those thoughts,
you're very out of touch with the reality of all
that is precious in life. And it was a temporary situation.
But how did I know that. I didn't know. I
was doing everything you were supposed to do, and it
was making things worse. So she said, come in. She
made me this cup of tea, and it was this

(25:55):
freezing cold warehouse in Oakland, you know, in the middle
of the night. She was sort of a cool crot girl,
and she showed me something that she had been shown
by a woman from AA and because my friend her
name was Rachel. She she had been living on the
streets of the tenderline in her teens or she'd been
kicked out of the house, so she had been through

(26:16):
a lot. But she she's this lovely person to this day,
she's this incredible person. She has a whole program for
helping people get sober. It's called Sober and Alive. She's great.
She's a success story. But I just instinctively trusted her though,
even though she was so strange. She said, come here,
write God on a piece of paper. Write God. And
I was like, god, oh. And she's like, well, you're

(26:37):
gonna be dead tomorrow. What does it matter? You know?
I thought, okay, so oh God. And she goes, now,
tell God what fears you have? And I said, I
have fear, you know, fear. I'm not going to make
it fear. I'm broken fear. And she got me to
write for like an hour and a half and I
started to feel good and tears were coming, and it
was I was starting to have a connection with this

(26:57):
piece of paper and this pen and her presence and
knowing she was there. She was just doing her thing.
It's like three in the morning. She goes, now, get
to your resentments. And she knew me well enough to
know I was so resentful. I was such a like
feral possum. I was just yay. I was so angry
about things. And you know, when you have trauma, it

(27:19):
makes it very hard to convert upsetting experiences that make
you angry or sad or scared into memories. They just
stay bouncing around full of all the hormones of adrenaline
and cortisol and things.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
Same emotions.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
It's so much. You're just so packed with emotion. Where
are you going to go with it? And it's very
hard to take in new information or to look at
a situation and go, oh, maybe this isn't so bad.
There's just no room. So that's what it's like. That's
what it's like. So she's like, here, yeah, you just
pour it out, just give it to the paper. And
I wrote. I must have written like fifteen pages that
first night, just writing and writing, and it felt good.

(27:53):
And then she showed me how to write a little
prayer at the end to ask for them to be removed.
And then she said, now ask God to you know,
show you what you're supposed to be doing, and give
you the power to do it. So I did that.
I felt good enough, like, okay, fine, I'll do what
you say. She said, Now go home. I got to
go to sleep. It's five in the morning. Call me
when you wake up and read this to me. So
I did that, and when I went home, I went

(28:15):
to sleep. I woke up and I felt delicious. I
just hadn't felt good in so long, and I just
couldn't wait to do it again. I woke up, made
some coffee, did it again, called her. I got to
read what I wrote, and she was She was so
kind and understanding, and we ended up like laughing at
some of the stuff that I was resentful about. It

(28:36):
was funny. It was funny, and she was like, Oh,
everybody's so mean to me. We ended up lighthearted about it,
and it was this amazing feeling of love too. I
just loved her so much for showing up for me
like she did, and she stayed connected to me as
my friend for those early months. We're still friends, but
like those early months, she was really there with me.

(28:58):
And within a few weeks it was two weeks now.
I was never diagnosed with PTSD. They didn't give me
any diagnosis. They were just like, you're very upset. Yeah,
you're a very upset woman. You cry a lot, you're mad,
I don't know, get out of here, take some pills.
But my mind cleared up, the PTSD symptoms cleared up.
It's like something like really reregulated. And it was so remarkable,

(29:21):
and I didn't have the luxury of staying home from work.
At work, suddenly I could not only do my job,
but I could listen. And the day I knew everything
was different was I was sitting in a business meeting
with everybody and it was all it's mostly women, and
they were tuk tuk and ducky talk, you know, like
women do, and it was like popcorn going on, and

(29:42):
I was just listening. And for the first time in
my life, for an hour, I listened to a conversation
and my mind wasn't wandering or you know, thinking about
the future of the past or what I was going
to say. I was just sort of taking in what
everybody was saying, and I go, well, what about And
I said something and it was just like you could
hear a pin drop. Everybody was like, whoa. I said
the most brilliant, insightful thing that was based on listening

(30:04):
to what everybody had said. And it wasn't long before
my career took off. I got into this really fancy
grad school within a year that I you know, I
somehow talked my way into late Within a couple of months,
I didn't have depression anymore, and I felt so happy.
I told my therapist all these three visits a week,

(30:27):
I was like, you know what, I kind of it
kind of brings me down coming here and talking about
bad things, and I feel like I'm ready to stop.
And she was worried because she had seen me before. Yes,
and she said, well, why don't you come a few
more times so I can make sure. She thought maybe
I'd gone nuts, but I just wasn't troubled by the past.
The second thing that Rachel told me to do, she said,

(30:48):
write this sign off, do this twice a day, and
then go to a meditation teacher and learn how to meditate.
I learned Vedic meditation at the time, and was that
transcendental meditation.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
So it was a chanting meditation.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
No chanting, just a silent mantra. Yeah, silent mantra, very
simple MC meditate. Yeah, from the maharishi who taught the Beatles. Yes,
So all these people in AA were doing that. So
I went and did that. And it's like the writing
sort of clears your mind and the meditation rests your mind.

(31:24):
And this is my experience of it, your mind and
nervous system just kind of recompose all of a sudden.
You're just sort of put right again and you're fresh again.
Like a baby who does is not crying anymore, just
like here I am that. That's what the experience was like.
And it was so my body started to heal. I
had a lot of chronic stress related health conditions at
the time, bad knees, bad back, asthma, migrains, common things

(31:50):
for traumatized people. All that just totally cleared up. I
started running, My skin turned rosy and glowed. And still problems,
you know, from habits that I had about I still
smoked cigarettes. I still had this strange attraction to completely
disaster people and stuff that I had to practice more.

(32:14):
And that life is like that, Like when you've lived
just regulated all your life, you end up with these
weird habits to try to make life work and it
takes conscious undoing. And so with mentoring and with practice
and willingness, I was able to completely turn around my life.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Problems I love that you had, Well, it took one
person that changed your whole trajectory, one evening that changed
everything in my life.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
Isn't that such a beauty.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
It's such a beautiful idea that just it takes one
night for you to decide that you want to turn
your life around.

Speaker 3 (32:46):
And honestly, in the book, when I was reading it.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
That was my favorite part, the part where you were sharing,
the writing part where you give them prompts of what
they want to what you want for your life. The
way to write it down, it was so beautiful, which
and I could feel your heart.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
Through the thing.

Speaker 2 (33:01):
I'm glad and now hearing the story behind it. Yeah,
it's so much deeper, Like it's such a beautiful practice
to just give your heart to paper and just let it,
let it do.

Speaker 3 (33:11):
And you're right.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
Sometimes I think speaking to people we fear, even if
it's someone you don't know, even if it's a therapist,
you fear judgment, and you fear you have worried about
what they're.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Going to think about you, or whether they're going to keep.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
It a secret for you, whatever the fears are. But
when you end up writing it down on paper, it's
just you and the paper, like there's nothing to hide behind. Yeah,
no one to be worried about it. It's such a
beautiful practice.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:36):
Place.

Speaker 1 (33:37):
I had a radical spiritual awakening within a few months
of the whole thing where I was given the under
I just I all of a sudden, I'll try it.
I don't want to get very specific about it because
in this millieu. It'll sound thin and cheeseball, but I'll
just say I was shown one afternoon. I just had
an afternoon where my consciousness lifted up and I could
see that there was life in all things and including me,

(34:01):
and there was no way that I was not supposed
to be here. I was absolutely part of this life
and that I belong.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
Wow. And then that leads us onto your book.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
Can actually say, yeah, tell us why you made it
and what juicy things you've written inside of it, because
it's a brilliant book, and who is it made for.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
Well, people who had childhood trauma have an almost universal
symptom that they feel a sense of disconnection. And so
people who are watching right now, I see you. I know,
I know you know. It's a sense of disconnection that
you never quite fit in. You get easily overlooked for
what's good about you. You get talked over, misunderstood, feel

(34:43):
like an outsider everywhere you go, bullied maybe okay, And
sometimes this is happening because people have ostracized us. You know,
people can be quite cruel to each other. Kids can
be cruel to each other, and these things have happened
for people who were traumatized as kids even be like
a neurological injury there in the part of you know,

(35:03):
the mirror neurons, the part of our brain and nervous
system that's designed to allow us to feel connected and
to have intuition and to have intimacy with others, like
emotional intimacy, and that if you have an injury in
the part of you that's for that, it's hard to do. Yeah,
And so you see other people, it's like all the
other you know. An example for me that was very

(35:25):
hard was the other moms. Moms get together and they
chit chat and they bond and they're laughing and they're
drinking wine. And I would always be sort of like,
what's going on here? I don't know, I don't know why,
but I'm not really connecting with everybody. And the stuff
that I think about and make jokes about isn't landing
And I don't fit in and why is it? Like
it's always like that, And I don't always have an answer.

(35:47):
You don't like nobody fits in everywhere. But I think
my trauma symptoms and the stuff that I had been through,
it's just kind of like this little barrier inside and
it's very hard to put your finger on. It's easy
to think it's because they hate me, it's because there's
something no good about me. It's easy to think that.
But because I had my daily practice techniques, I was
always getting in my fears and resentments on paper about

(36:09):
those awful moms, and I was releasing it. I was
asking for it to be removed. I was getting refreshed again.
I would come at at noon. I just kind of saw, well,
I am a little different. The stuff that I think
about and care about is a little different. We like
some of the same TV shows and we can talk
about that. But like I was going through this miserable
divorce and they weren't, and that's significant. And I was

(36:34):
older than they were. I was like an older mom,
and then I was an older mom of little, tiny tuddlers,
and I was struggling, like all the time. And then
I think I was probably seen as like the struggling one.
But I had my tools and I knew what to do.
But it was after I had kids, after I had
been using my daily practice, after I had shown hundreds
of people these techniques, like so much of my life

(36:55):
was already devoted to sharing you know I had found
a way to feel better. I didn't know that I
had complex PTSD. I just thought I was a weirdo.
It's like, if you're weird in the way that I am,
you know, you might want to try this. And I
just you know, lots and lots of people would ask
me to show them. But I realized at this time

(37:16):
I had very few good friends. My friends were just
not that good. And I didn't know. I didn't see
it coming. I thought they were good. I thought they
were fun friends. They were friends who were good for
coming to parties or going for a hike and stuff.
But if you needed meals made and your kids picked
up at school and you needed a ride home from
the hospital, they were not your friend.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
And well, age did you figure that out?

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Well, I guess, So I had this. I had this
four year period, and I guess I was forty one
when it started. When I was divorced, I stopped using
my daily practice. I was so mad. I thought, like, see,
it doesn't work. I didn't get what I wanted. Yeah,
and my first birth was difficult and I was injured
in it, and later they did a surgery to try

(38:00):
to repair that, and that surgery went wrong, and it
led to fourteen major surgeries, like major where you know,
fourteen hour crisis things, muscles transferred, you know, blood transfusions, problems, appliances,
you know. I had this very hard four years and
I was a single mom. It was so hard. I

(38:20):
had to go to the emergency room forty four times.
WHOA and I didn't have help. So I would call
on neighbors. I'd just call on anybody, can you just
help me. It's three in the morning. I need you
to get over here. I have to get to the
emergency room. Something's going on and I have to get there.
And it was just this terrible time. And so even

(38:41):
though I thought I was done with therapy, I went back.
I'm like I need a straight answer, like why is
this happening? Why me? And they were like, well, let's see,
you don't have a mom. My mom had died. You
don't have a dad. My dad had died. You don't
have siblings. They were either you know, addicts or scattered
or you know, not there. And you've lost all your friends.
You know, you have friends, but they're not this kind.

(39:01):
And you don't have a sister like that, that kind
of sister friend. Yeah, somebody who helps you through these
hard times. And she just laid it on me, and
it was it was just this terrible truth to face,
like I just don't have that. And so I thought,
I'm going to have to I'm going to have to
sort this out. I've got to find a way to
break through and have the right kind of friends. And

(39:22):
I guess I had always known. I had always felt
like fundamentally lonely, even in parties, even in relationships, just lonely.
And so I set about to figure it out. And
that was the beginning of two or three years of
what I call my monastic period. Wow.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
You know when I read that in the book, or
I read about the idea of people feeling so lonely,
I thought about I was a dietitian in the hospital,
and so I used to see a lot of patience.
A lot of them would pass away and it would
be so interesting where at the time, when you imagine
anybody and everybody would come to someone's.

Speaker 3 (39:55):
Bedside when they're about to die.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, the amount of people that by themselves was heartbreaking,
Like it was so sad to see. And I was
thinking about, how, you know, my grandma would always talk
about this.

Speaker 3 (40:10):
Idea of when she was in a village where she
would live.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
And how everyone her door would be open and everyone
would come in and their doors would be open, and
the children would go play at that house and they'd
come over here. She'd be feeding maybe sometimes fifteen people
every single night, and everyone was so connected. There was
always someone to help, There was always someone there. They
were always there for other people. And then I thought
about now, and I thought about the hospital, and I

(40:33):
was thinking, wow, even if people have children, sometimes they're
disconnected from them. Even if people have family, you usually think, okay, family,
the basic people that you will have as your family.
But nowadays there's disconnection in family and so so many people.
Whether it's a cultural thing, I definitely saw that there
was a difference between specific cultures, where some cultures people

(40:55):
will show up even if they hate them because it's
the right thing to do, versus in some cultures it
was just not. They would die alone, they were in
the hospital, they had no one to call, and it
made me so sad, and so I think and it
opened my eyes to I grew up in an Indian
house where there was a lot of people around and
everyone was there helping each other. We had a big,

(41:17):
extended family and everyone showed up whether they wanted to
or not. And in other cultures it wasn't the same.
And so I think your book, Like when I read it,
I thought, wow, it is so needed in a world
where you can literally be surrounded by so many people
and walk into a room and feel alone, walk to
a room and feel like you don't belong being a
hospital that have no one coming to visit you. How
did you get to a place from feeling disconnected? Because

(41:39):
I imagine this person who's you know, in hospital at
the end of their life, having no one coming to
see them. I think, how do you stop someone getting
to that point? How do you get how as someone
who doesn't have family members that will show up for you,
how do you you start at the age of forty
building connections with people?

Speaker 3 (41:58):
How did you do that?

Speaker 1 (42:01):
It was a process. I was very confused. I really
had no like cognitive idea why it was going on.
The information about what is complex PTSD wasn't there yet.
What I can tell you now is that my daily
practice all along had been a tool for reregulation, even
though that concept wasn't there. I thought that I was
just temperamental or something. But your nervous system is there

(42:24):
as a connecting organ you know, to people. There's some theories.
I don't know if it's true, but it feels true
that the collective consciousness is really like the network of nervousness.

Speaker 3 (42:34):
I believe it.

Speaker 1 (42:35):
You know, we all feel each other. We are connected.
And when our nervous system can't get cook us to
the Wi Fi like that, there it is, you know,
there it is. You literally can walk into the room
and you can't read the room, you can't feel the people,
they can't know you. Yeah, it's like switched off. And
so for me that was a great relief. It's like, Okay,

(42:57):
so I'm not crazy. There is something going on, and
so learning to reregulate your nervous system is just the
first thing for everything. Suddenly, now you have choices, Now
you can connect, you'll find out. Now you don't even
like everybody, but you know, all kinds of good things
can happen. You can set boundaries, you can communicate what

(43:18):
you really think, you can cope with being sort of
a new person in a group. There's so many things
that can happen if you know how to reregulate, you
can go to therapy, you can remember you know what
happened at therapy, and you can have an instinctive sense
when you've said something that maybe hurt somebody's feelings. You
see that little thing in their eyes that are like ouch,

(43:40):
you see it now, and you can respond to it.
So that's what it is when you are disconnected like that.
This will sound harsh, and I don't mean to be harsh,
but it's just true, like there's an insensitivity there to
other people. And when when you can't show up for
the nuances of connection, Like let's say somebody tells you
I I need to get my knee replaced and it's

(44:03):
coming Tuesday. So if they told me that before, when
I was just regulated, I'd be like, oh wow, that's
really heavy, How's I going to go? You know, blah
blah blah. But I wouldn't remember that the next day.
I wouldn't get in touch right. And so I remembered
that if somebody needs something, you're supposed to offer help,
or you're supposed to bring flowers to a dinner party.
I could remember sort of actions like that, but I
didn't have that connection that was like, you know, oh,

(44:26):
you know, poor Cindy's she must be anxious tonight. Tomorrow's
the day. I think I'll give her a call. Does
she need anything, and just let her know I'm thinking
of her, you know, does she want a visit her tomorrow?
Even if you do nothing, but just to be aware
what other people are going through and the good things. Hey,
guess what. Guess what? I gave a presentation and my
hands weren't shaking this time. You know, I did something.

(44:47):
You can start to feel other people, and this is
the opposite of loneliness, to have these sort of shared
ups and downs with people where you feel it too
and you're going through it together. And I had to
first focus on paying attention to other people. I paid
attention to being honestly loving to other people, and that's

(45:07):
how I ended up loving myself. That's the order it
went in.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Such a big part of what you're saying and what
I'm hearing from that is just presence, like being able
to be present in that moment I've been in. I
was actually just speaking to my friend and she has OCD,
and so when she has an OCD flare up, it
makes it really difficult for her to she disregulates and
she kind of becomes present.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
She's there physically, but her mind.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
Can completely disconnect from the moment, and after which she'll
say to me, I'm so sorry. I know you were talking,
but I just wasn't there. I literally could not participate
in the conversation because I was so in my head.
I could not even hear what you were saying. I
couldn't hear what anybody was saying, which is why and
when people wouldn't know that, they think, why is she
not listening?

Speaker 3 (45:49):
Or she'll ask again, sor what did you say?

Speaker 2 (45:51):
And everyone would think that she's just being ditsy or
just not listening. I've been in situations where, because I've
been so in my head, I would go into a
situation I think, oh, this person feels like they're not
really wanting to connect with me, or they don't feel
like they want to talk to me, or I'd constantly
go into these social situations and think that they didn't
want to connect to me. And then I realized and

(46:12):
then when you talked about the nervous system of everyone
being connected, it made me think about, well, the energy
that I was probably giving off was I'm not actually
present here? Right now, so they could read, whether they
were conscious of it or not. Energetically, they could feel
I'm not actually there to connect. Therefore, they're not going
to invest time into connecting with me.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
I feel abandoned by you.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Yeah, they don't feel like I'm there. I'm not actually listening.
I'm looking around. I'm not focused on you, what you're
saying and exactly what you said. If someone would tell
me something was wrong, my husband would remember and they'd
be like, oh, remember this person's got this, and I thought, oh, yeah,
maybe I should reach out, but my heart wasn't thinking
I should reach out. And then eventually when I realized
that so much of it wasn't them, so much of

(46:54):
it was me and what they were project I was
projecting something onto them and they were just responding. And
so instead of constantly thinking that person didn't like me
or that person wasn't interested in my life, well, they
probably think I'm just stupid because I can't talk about
these things, so they're not connecting me. Whatever stories we
make up in our mind of why that person's doing it, yeah,
you end up realizing, oh, actually, as soon as I

(47:16):
put one hand out, they're reaching back. As soon as
I say something caring, they're wanting to care back. And
so it's so much about reciprocation. But sometimes you have
to start that cycle. Yeah, you have to be the
one to first give something for someone to feel something,
for them to give it back to you. And I
think that's a really difficult realization to have because you realize, oh, crap,
it's me.

Speaker 3 (47:36):
I have to do the work.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
Yeah, but yeah, it's me.

Speaker 3 (47:38):
Oh yeah, it's me exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
And I think you can go through that. You kind
of go through the oh no, it's me, and then
you can go through Okay. That means I have things
I can do, tools I can put into place, and
a way that I can fix this. Yeah, And it's
really beautiful to hear that you did that at forty,
or someone can do it fifty, at sixty, someone can
do it when they're in hospital at seventy and think,
you know, I'm going to become best friends with a
person next to me right now, and I'm going to
hear everything that going through and we're going to make

(48:01):
it through this together.

Speaker 3 (48:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:03):
And it's such a yeah from your friend who did
that for you early on in your life to now
it's just you've realized there are so many little moments
that you have the ability to change.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Yeah. Yeah, well you know who's uh. I think I've
taught this to about a million people via YouTube and
my free course, and I'll share the link with you. Yeah,
please if people are interested in how to do the
techniques that sort of get this ball rolling. It's a
little specific, so when I describe it, I always want
to say it's a little specific and so that you
can get it from the book or the free course
I offer. But so about a million people have learned it,

(48:36):
and then I just sort of sent a survey out
to my students and I'm like, who have you taught
it to? People are teaching it to people who are
dying in hospice, they're teaching it in prisons, they're teaching
it in nursery schools. Kids can do it.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
Please share it with us. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
Yeah, but I think, oh, for people who are dying,
I think I'm very feel that's the most poignant thing
you can do is learn to wake up before you
die and be able to connect with people and not
to die lonely, even if there's not a lot of
people around.

Speaker 3 (49:06):
Or not disconnected, like you're gonna end up.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
I'm sure you can feel like you don't have many people,
but to still feel like you're connected to the world. Yeah,
to anybody and anything around you. I think you're so right,
even if it's just waking up for a glimpse of
a moment before. Yeah, you neve to know that you
have that moment of connection is so important.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Oh yeah, there's so much. There's so many things. I
just I'm so surprised. I'm so surprised by how people are.
First of all, people are lovely. By enlarged people are lovely. Yeah,
and sometimes, especially when I'm right out of meditation, I
used to do my meditation on the bart train. It's
like the subway that goes to San Francisco, go to
work there. When I was first healing and everything was

(49:45):
changing so fast, I stop smoking. I'll get off the
subway and I'd come out and it's just like it's
just like it smells like pea. It's just all garbage.
You know, everybody's asking for money. I would just be like, hello, hello,
I just feeling good, like you're beautiful people off the work,
see you later. I just felt good and I felt connected.

(50:05):
You know, I felt connected to the people who were
around and didn't have so much of that like, well,
not these people. I'm not these But this is one
of the things about connectibility. Like stage one is you awaken.
Stage two is you got to start learning the stuff
that gets in the way. And we have a lot
in the way, especially if we've been living disconnected. We're
sort of like, you know, like the hermit in the
woods in a certain way of just like hey, your kids,

(50:27):
get off the lawn. And so one of the things
is boundaries. If you have good boundaries, you can afford
to get close to people. You've got to know that
you have a way out. So if you're somebody who
just is so people pleasing, that no matter how awful
a situation is, like somebody's driving drunk, for example, will

(50:49):
you get out of the car, Well, we don't want
to offend them, like a boundary would be, I'm going
to get out of the car if somebody's driving drunk,
you know. And so if you have boundaries, you can
get in the car so to speak. If you if
you say, if things get crazy, I know what to do.
And I'm using this as a metaphor I'm not recommending
people get into a car where you have questions, but
just that hanging out with people, going on a date,

(51:11):
making a friend, deciding to spend the holidays with your
family when your family is kind of rough for you
or brings out the worst in you. Let's say that
if you have boundaries and you know, have a plan
b like, if things get weird. I'm not going to argue.
We're not going to talk about politics. I'm going to
help in the kitchen. If anybody tries to like bait

(51:31):
me into a you know, a thing that we've thought
about in the past, I'm just going to say something
really lighthearted. You know. I've learned from some of the
most wonderful people. I've looked at people who are great
at connecting and how they do it, and some people
are just geniuses at this they have. I have an
English husband, yeah, and he's very old school. He's from

(51:51):
the North, you know, he's still like it's he's a
little younger than me, but he feels like he's from
another era, you know. And he he's just like all
about like being courteous, kind, gentle with people. If you
have a criticism, don't say it if you have to
say it, you say like the tiniest little piece of it,
so they understand the nature of the problem, but you

(52:12):
would never ever hurt their self esteem even if you
hate them.

Speaker 3 (52:15):
Yeah. I feel like I learned that from my husband too.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
He's been one of the biggest lessons in what actual
connection to people mean. Like, no matter how busyas is,
like the best friend to people, He's always available, always
there for people in the right way, but still has
his boundaries of how he knows how many people he
can connect to it or like scheduling time to make
sure that he's speaking to the right people when they
need it, and it's just and watching him even in

(52:38):
a room, being so present, it was how I realized.
It's like you said, when you see someone who is
actually so good at connection, it makes you realize, oh,
this is actually what I'm lacking, Like this is how
I this is how you can be, and how do
you figure out the steps towards actually becoming that. It's
so actually beautiful to see someone who will have an
example of that in your life.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
Yes, and to see it and also to be receptive
to learning from it rather than resenting it. So I
used to. I think I used to feel so ashamed
in the presence of people who were kind and generous
that I would just judge them and write them off.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
Yeah, or I think they have superpowers and I'm like, how
did you remember that person's name and I.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
Don't, Or it's because you're rich, or yeah something. Did
you see the story in the book? I think it
was later because a woman I call Evelyn, and which
I think I made it to Evelyn yet Evelyn, well,
she's she's a real she's a real person. She's not
living anymore. But she was dating my first husband's dad.
And my first husband's dad was a pretty rough fellow.
If you did you ever see Austin Powers, Yes, and

(53:35):
you know his dad played by Michael Kre was like
that was like my first father in law. And we
were visiting, and you know, our relationship came together hastily,
and we decided to be together when I was seven
months pregnant with our first kid. We ended up getting married,
We ended up having another kid. But when I met
his family, they had never heard of me before, and

(53:57):
they did their best to be kind, but you know,
they were completely like, what's who is this lady? What
is she she just trying to like get something or
they were distrustful. And I was dressed in these shabby
maternity clothes and we went out for the day to
go to Canterbury Cathedral. I don't remember it very well.
I think it was great, but I was in the
backseat of the car, like eight month regent or something

(54:19):
so big, in this tiny, little English car, and they're
having the men are having a conversation without me, and
then we swing by and we pick up Evelyn, and
Evelyn squeezes into the back with me, and she just
had this incredible quality of instantly making me feel not judged, appreciated,
like we were just chums in on a little joke together.
And I was, what thirty five, she was seventy. Wow,

(54:42):
she was so kind. And then afterwards she goes, why
don't we all go over to my place, we go
play scrabble. We went, we go to her place and
it was like this mansion and then I, you know,
normally I would have thought, oh, here we go the
people that I can't deal with, you know, they're just
like they think they're so great or something. But she
had already she was already my friend. Yeah, and I

(55:03):
never would have guessed. And so I'm there in this
beautiful home, in these dirty overalls with my giant belly.
I think they're like men's overalls, not like maternity.

Speaker 2 (55:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:14):
Yeah, they were from a thrift store. And she just
had this way. I had the best day. And I
just never forgot that. I was like, how did she
learn that? How did she get that? And so I
found out later she's from a very famous family that
is well known, and if you know, the name is
well known, and I didn't know, and she just was outstanding.
She was a great person. And sometimes I've noticed that people.

(55:36):
I don't think this is universally true, but the old
resentment I had that people had to be like from
a really rough pass to be legitimate to me, yeah, silly,
it was silly, and wonderful people. Sometimes the reason people
are so successful is because they're wonderful, you know, definitely,
that's been my experience. How do you feel that energy,
don't you as soon as you meet someone?

Speaker 2 (55:54):
Which is why you can also feel the opposite when
you first meet someone. And how interesting, how how easy
that could shift for you, Like you've gone from not easily,
it was a difficult journey, but there is a possibility
to go from someone who feels inaccessible and cold to
being someone who is exactly like that makes someone feel
warm at the moment that you meet them. Yeah, that's

(56:15):
actually such a beautiful gift to have, and I think
it takes a lot of I think it does take
a lot of getting to know yourself and a lot
of work on yourself to be that kind of person.
For someone like to be able to give that energy
to someone, it takes a lot.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
I think another.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
Word that I owe, another word that I really loved
in your book that you speak about is covert avoidance.
I actually noticed like a few qualities in myself or
that that I've done before. Could you explain a little
bit about it and why do so many of.

Speaker 3 (56:46):
Us do it?

Speaker 1 (56:47):
Well, there's obvious avoidance. Those are the and they talk
people like that are on my YouTube channel. They talk
to me everyday, come at night, they leave a negative
message yes and say start making videos about getting along
with people. People are terrible and I hate them. Okay,
that's a that's an overt avoid And then we talk
about dating and avoidant. You know some of us have

(57:07):
done that before once or twice yeah, and where somebody
you know just never texts back and then they show
up and you're confused all the time and it's aggravating
your stealing of abandonment. But then there's some of us
we're avoidant to ourselves in hidden ways we can't see.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
It was the hidden ones that you made in Yes, yeah,
it's hidden. Could you say some of those examples.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
Yeah, So looking at your phone at dinner, yeah, is avoidant. Yeah,
and it's it's not really hidden, but it's culturally acceptable
in most cases. But sometimes you got to ask yourself,
what am I doing? I'm sitting you know, most I
think most people feel a little fundamentally lonely. They'd like
to feel more connected to people. And the thing is

(57:48):
when your nervous system is all rattled from being online
all day. And I know, I don't know about you,
but you know, I work on YouTube, which has a
lot of little side trips you can take into what
else is going on on YouTube today, and I get
very distracted, and then it can turn very negative. Here's
all the people ranting about stuff, and you agree with
them or you hate them or whatever. You know, it's

(58:09):
just a lot of stuff and you're checking out. You're
just disconnecting from the great nervous system connection that we're
actually enjoying with other people. I like being alone. I
like a certain amount of solitude, but I can feel
alone in a crowd, and I've been to I remember
at the worst of my loneliness, I would go to
a party, come home from the party, and I didn't

(58:29):
have that whoa, that was a party feeling.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
I get that, I've had that before.

Speaker 1 (58:33):
Yeah, like nothing to me, Yes, nothing happened. It was
just I was inert.

Speaker 3 (58:38):
Yeah I was there, but not that.

Speaker 1 (58:40):
Yeah, I was there but not there. And then the
loneliness continues and we go why why. So it's a
lack of making a commitment to people. It's a lack
of being present with them, and so being present, you know,
you have to understand, like the word boundaries used to
sound like psychobabble to me. The word being present really
used to sound like psychobabble to me. If you've never

(59:01):
done it and people go try to be present. It
doesn't translate into anything that you know. It's something that
I think you can think of it like a like
you have an inner power inside an inner well and
it slowly fills. You can deplete it, you can fill it.
And there's certain nourishing ways of being that fill it,
and there are things that deplete it, like having an

(59:21):
argument with your partner or not taking care of yourself
watching Netflix all day when you needed to do something else.
You know, just the ordinary things we do. And it
could be worse, you know, for you know, it could
be much worse. Not apologizing to somebody. You know, you
just hurt. We just disconnect. We disconnect. And when you're

(59:44):
in the habit of being disconnected, and it's not always conscious,
the thing is, if you're just if you're a person
who's just regulated, you have to disconnect. It's just too
stressful to be connected to people if you can't manage
your own nervous system, and so you're always holding yourself
at a certain distance. And how I cracked it. I
figured it out. We'll go every once in a while,

(01:00:04):
I go on a big push. I'm not going to
do it now. I'm going to be like social. I'm
going to join a bunch of groups and I'm going
to volunteer and I'll bring the brownies to the school
and I'll do the thing. And then I'll do like
ten things and within half a day, I'm just.

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
Like I need to sit in a dark room. Can't
hold anyone.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
Yeah, these people are crazy. I can't do it. So
it's really this slow process of letting your well get
full every day, or as you go to take care
of yourself, to fill the well, to use your meditation,
to use your tools to move your body, to eat
good food, just the usual stuff. And you won't even
get it all right every day. You never will, but
you might do a couple of good things and then

(01:00:42):
you start to you can become present a little bit,
but these obstacles will always stop you every time. So
it's avoidance, just straight up avoidance or covert avoidance, holding
people at arm's length. It's not having boundaries. It's having
a life that's populated with mean people or troubled people.
Like if you grew up with trauma and you've been
living disconnected, that's what happens. And so it's always like

(01:01:05):
I hate my job, I hate my partner, I hate
my neighbors. My friends are just like a bunch of gossips.
It's this and you know what, you know, that's actually
who we've allowed into our lives because we're so disconnected
that the people who were connectable, who had connectability, they
weren't available to us. So we end up with these

(01:01:26):
people who just they don't fit us. And then there's
this sad stage when you let those people go. It's
a leap of faith because and everybody I've worked with,
coach so many people on this, They're like, but if
I'm not friends with these gossip being steam, who else
do I have? I'm like, just release, just like, stop
putting energy into it. See what happens. You'd be alone

(01:01:47):
for a while. And this is your special period, your
monastic period. You know, now you will live like a monk,
right like your husband did. But now it's this period
of deep awareness and self reflection where you can begin
to notice where it is, where you're pulling away, where

(01:02:08):
what's hard for you, how can you strengthen yourself? And
then you begin to develop the boundaries, you begin to
develop social grace to all of us are a little
socially awkward. Socially awkwardness is endearing if if it's not
full of self hatred. Cute. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
The two that you mentioned also to do with the
avoidance in the book, was you don't end up you
kind of avoid making solid plans with someone we could
meet up, or you're like, yeah, lady, you never let
them know you.

Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
Live in LA at least, like the worst, yeah, they
do that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
And then the other one was when people message you
and you're like, you know, you see the message, but
you just don't message back at the moment, like you
end up taking a long time to reply back to people.

Speaker 3 (01:02:46):
You just go like.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Or whatever, and actually what's needed is okay, when is
your surgery or you know, And I.

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
Noticed I was doing so much of that, and I
had to consciously so even in the moment when I
was when I was see the message and I'll put
my phone away, I had to bring the practice back
of getting my phone back out and replying there. And
then I'm like, if I don't do this, now I
know I'm not gonna do it, and then setting dates
and times to actually meet people. And because if you
and I remember thinking, especially when I moved to LA
and I was craving community, it was a choice of Okay,

(01:03:17):
I'm just gonna wait for the community to come to me,
and I'm gonna wait for that to happen, which, by
the way, doesn't normally happen or you actually have to
make the conscious effort to create that. And that means
if you want connection, you can't not reply to people,
you can't not set dates to meet people. So there's
there's something about, Okay, my mind is saying I want something,
but are my actions showing that I actually want it?

(01:03:39):
And if the two are disconnected, then it's not going
to happen. So I can desire to have a community,
but what am I What actions.

Speaker 3 (01:03:47):
Am I actually taking?

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
What's my physical body and my mind doing to actually
make that happen? And I think sometimes we can think
that our desires are so strong and so pure, and
you're like, oh, but I really want this, but it's
not happening.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
But you're the one that may not be happening making
it happen.

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
Isn't it true?

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
Yeah? Yeah, but you can really believe it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
It's a sad, sob story in your mind because you
really want it so badly, But the wanting it so
badly has to be matched with action of doing it
so badly.

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
Yeah, it's really easy to go into your head though,
like I don't want to.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):
Yeah, exactly. It's so true.

Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
When I lived in La I I'm from northern California
and we have our own kind of things, you know,
but in England. England is also tricky for me. But
I feel more at home in England than I do.
I do, Yeah, I've always I always have. But they
what I don't understand about English people.

Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
Yeah, please tell me. I'll help you understand us.

Speaker 1 (01:04:42):
Yeah. When they say they're annoyed, oh, annoyed, Yeah, annoyed
here means like saying I'm really annoyed with you. Oh yeah, here,
that just means so what like a little fly sort
of yeah? Way you know.

Speaker 3 (01:04:56):
No, that means I'm pissed.

Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
They're mad, Yeah, yeah, they're They're like they could be
they could be furious with you. Yes, And so I've
had to learn that with my husband too. Some of
the words don't quite mean the language. No, I'm like,
but you only said you were annoyed, and he's like,
and you needed to take it seriously. I'm like, but
it's annoyance.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
What do you what? I would have to hear what
you think the hardest truth from all the people that
you have coached online and that you've helped through. What
do you think has been the hardest truth for people
to actually hear or learn about healing that they don't
want to accept.

Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
Well, it's really good news. Actually, it's like I call
it the epiphany. Yeah, when I when people work with
me long enough to have their epiphany like I did,
there's this day that comes where all of a sudden,
you go, I'm doing this to myself. Yeah, that's the
great moment. And so some people are not ready for
that moment. It feels like in validation, like they're still
dealing with stuff that was done to them and it

(01:05:50):
doesn't feel fair too. They just like, why do I
have to be the one to heal? Why do I
have to look at errors? What was done to me
was so wrong and so terrible. And that's true. And
if you're in that state, it's really hard to do
something like you know, there's this trend right now where
people cut contact with their family. Yeah, and I think
that's an expression of being in that place where the

(01:06:11):
wounds are still have got all your attention now, I'm not,
you know. I think for if a person, if a
person thinks maybe they're ready to move on and they're struggling,
some one question is, well, who's helping you? Are you
listening to people. Do you have friends or a therapist
maybe who's really bought into the idea that everything is
about what was done to you, Because that's true. It happened,

(01:06:33):
and it was terrible and it wasn't your fault. But
thankfully it's not happening anymore. And now you know now
like you still have days a live here to open
your heart, to get some strength in your spirit and
some boundaries to be able to go forward and become
who you are. Think we're too quick to think that

(01:06:54):
healing means, oh I'm not sad anymore, or I stopped
talking to the bad people. But that's that comes with
its own sadness. Healing to me is when you know
all this, all these problems are out of the way sufficiently.
There's always going to be problems, but they don't they
don't rock your boat so much, and all your energy.

(01:07:14):
This is the great thing about being growing older, even
like all your energy can go into the thing that
you were made to do, and everybody knows. You know,
you know that there's something better in there in you
than whatever you have to muck around with right now
or wherever you've got yourself stuck. You know, we've all
had to have the creddy jobs or you know, the

(01:07:35):
bad roommates or difficult you know, heartbreaks and things. We
all go through hard things, but it gets better. It
gets better. And the thing that everybody was waiting for,
the thing that I want to be saying when I'm
at the last day of my life is like, I'm
so glad I learned to love everybody. I'm so glad
I feel loved. Learning to love people is it's like

(01:07:58):
the greatest endeavor. It's the great endeavor, That's what it is.
So when so much focus on how terrible they are,
it's it's not that it's not true, but if it's
all you ever talk about, it's going to take you
away from the thing that will make you the.

Speaker 2 (01:08:10):
Ability to love. I really thank you so much for
this conversation. This was honestly so beautiful. And I really
do think as much as your book is, you know,
focus on people that may have CPTSD or that have
gone through childhood trauma, I actually think it is literally
for every single person, because I think we all could
connect deeper, we can all create better relationships, we can

(01:08:32):
all work on ourselves, and that beautiful practice that you
share in that book. I think it is for every
single person. So as much as we've spoken about childhood
trauma and PTSD, I am genuinely saying that I think
this book is something that we can that will just
help us become better people and better humans for the
collective consciousness and help raise that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:54):
So thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
It's just such a beautiful conversation and I can't wait
to dive deeper into the book us.

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
It's a step by step path, not just a lot
of talk. I definitely know you what to do do this.
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:09:08):
M m m hmmmmmmm

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Host

Radhi Devlukia

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