Susan:
Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Pierce Thompson, and I am so excited to welcome Anna Runkle to the Vlog. Welcome, Anna. So good to have you here.
Anna:
Thank you, Susan. It's such a pleasure to be connected to you as a person and not just as the person who created Bright Line Eating®, which has been a huge part of my life, a huge and positive thing that I first encountered in 2017. So, it's very good to meet you.
Susan:
Oh, sweetheart. We have been in parallel doing work in the world, helping people kind of in related ways, but you don't help people with food. You help people with childhood trauma. Say more about how you got into that and who you are and what you're doing in the world.
Anna:
Well, I grew up in Berkeley in the late 60s and 70s. We might've been friends and run into each other, but you were in San Francisco, I think, and a little younger. My family, my mom turned the house into a commune in 1970 and when my parents got divorced and a lot of crazy people moved in, some of them good people, but it was a lot of drugs, a lot of alcohol, a lot of chaos, and we didn't always have food. And so, that's a little bit of my food origin story starts out with not knowing how to get food. My mom was very far gone in alcoholism, and I was very good at finding neighborhood moms who would help feed us or me. I would just make friends with kids, and I would be like, okay, they have M & Ms. All right they've got to have me over for dinner. And I would calculate how I would get food. I brought my little sister when she was three to school with me. I was six years older and she was allowed to have school lunch and hang out at school with me. We were very feral, and in those days, schools were a lot more flexible about stuff like that, which is nice, and the neighborhood moms. But so, this thing of not having enough food really got in there, and it's been a long journey for me to not feel like I have to have all the cabinets overflowing with cans and stock. I still have my pandemic stockpile of tuna, and I just have all this stuff and the feeling that there's not going to be enough. There were four kids, so we also had that if there was food, you better grab it and eat it. But I'm telling you, I remember one time, my brother and I, the parents just vanished for a few days, and we ate a box of dog biscuits, and we ate some Easter chocolate melted up, and we had some milk to make it into chocolate milk, and that's all we had.
When I encountered Bright Line Eating and was, you were talking a little bit about when I was hearing other people's honest stories about where does my obsession come from. I had so much compassion for myself. Of course, that developed issues for me. Of course it did. I was a slightly overweight little kid. I didn't learn to be self-conscious about it until I was like 12. When puberty came on, I was terrified of it because the people that I was around were not safe to be around. If you started developing sexual features on your body, you were vulnerable. I remember I was just so afraid of that. So, I learned how to be tough. I learned how to be shut down, but I put on a lot of weight in my teens and there was a sad day there. My real dad, we moved away from the Bay Area when my mom remarried when I was nine, and he died not that long. Later afterward, he had a ALS. He was the parent who really loved me, and my mom just kept going into the disease of alcoholism. I got into dieting. I just got really into dieting. I got into?what all did I do? All of them.
Susan:
Yeah, all the things.
Anna:
Drinking man's diet, the precursors to things we know now. I did Weight Watchers. I did this medically supervised thing where I'd ride my bike 10 miles every day in the Arizona heat and get these vitamin injections, and then they give you a 500 calorie a day diet. I was like 18. It was insane. It was so bad for me. Interestingly enough, after a little bit of weight loss, I just gained so much weight. It was one of those diets that just made your whole body just go nuts. So, that didn't work. Eventually I got thin by smoking a lot of cigarettes. And that was a plan my friends had of, hey, if you smoke heavily, and I didn't smoke, I mean everybody in my house smoked and I didn't, but if you smoke heavily, you eat half your food and then you donate the rest. I was able to slim down and everyone's perception of me changed. People literally would say to me stuff, "I used to think you were a dumb bimbo, but now I see that you're as beautiful on the outside as you are on the inside," or backwards. Just I learned about that weird way that you get stigmatized around weight. I mean, it just ran so deep. What I love about women today is there's so much more permission to be different and not to have to all be, this was the late 70s and early 80s. It was a very thin ideal. When you find out later what everybody was doing to achieve that weight, it's just like, oh, thank goodness. Thank goodness. It didn't quite work out for me. That's a little bit about how food got weird for me. Then gradually balancing it out and later, much later finding Bright Line Eating, which is the one way of eating that ever gave me any peace. But what I learned, and so I have this thing called Crappy Childhood Fairy. I'm a YouTuber now, and I teach people how I overcame my trauma symptoms. I'm somebody talk therapy ended up being very dysregulating for me. And back 30 years ago when I was doing a lot of it, they didn't know about PTSD and CPTSD and people like me. It was always like, "You need to talk more about your trauma." So, I was going three times a week and then it wasn't working. I was put on medication for a while, and that made it even worse.
I ended up, I bumped into a girl who, and I say girl, she was 23. She had been living on the streets in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. Her alcoholism was so advanced, she couldn't keep it down. She had to get sober at 17, and she had been sober, I think four years. But her experience of being sober was, she was so unhappy her head would just get to her. This very wise older woman happened to show her this thing that she could do this sort of 12-step related thing. It was 12-step, but hardly anybody in it does this, but of getting your fears and resentments on paper and asking God to remove them and doing this twice a day and following it by meditation with meditation. To this day, there's hundreds of people who have long-term sobriety doing this, but it's a very intensive every day. They called it the Daily Steps. I happened to run into her when I was hitting bottom with my own PTSD symptoms, feeling so depressed, I didn't think I could go on. She showed me how to do this. I basically changed overnight. Within two weeks. I didn't have depression anymore. I didn't have PTSD symptoms. I should mention that what brought me to the bottom at that time was I was attacked on the street. I was violently assaulted and had broken bones and teeth and everything. I don't know if you'd say I had TBI. It wasn't traumatic brain injury, but it was definitely post-concussion syndrome and PTSD. It was a devastating traumatic experience.
A lot of people who have a devastating traumatic experience, it made me feel quite dark, quite bad and not functional. I couldn't talk to people properly. I was pushing everybody away. So, when my friend showed me this thing that actually quickly made me feel better, it was a fricking miracle. It was like the biggest thing that ever happened in my life, and I couldn't believe it. I had been trying so hard to feel better for so long. And for me, the problem was never alcohol and drugs. It was certainly, like, I was affected by all the people in my family like that. But I had a lot of the things that kids of alcoholics have. Just a lot of trouble in relationships and anger and having a lot of difficulty connecting with people for real. I would have friends, I could date guys, but things would almost always go south because I could be very self-centered, very angry, abrupt, get very emotionally dysregulated sometimes. All this began to change. That encounter with this woman from the Tenderloin who was getting her fears and resentments down on paper twice a day and then giving them to the care of her higher power and asking for them to be removed, the freedom that she found, she taught you how to find it. This morphed into the work that you do with people through Crappy Childhood Fairy.
I was in a 12-step program for families of alcoholics for a long time. I was very, very active. I sponsored hundreds of women over the years, so I learned a lot. I healed, and I just want to say my PTSD was healed and my depression was healed, but boy did I have a lot of life lessons to learn that did not heal overnight. That was a lot of practice. But once I had a, well, they didn't have the word for it then. But what changed in me when I began to do this, it's followed by meditation, by the way. I went and learned transcendental meditation. So, it was writing, meditation twice a day, and it's a prayerful act. Plus, I would read it to her sometimes and she would be encouraging of me, and we'd have relatedness, which is so powerful, isn't it? When we're healing, when something, I know that feeling so well, and you go, you do. I'm not the only one. I'm not a freak. It gave me a foundation that I could start to look at other problems like the way I was with money, the way I was with men, the way I was with food. I just had the usual set of problems that a child of an alcoholic has, but they were insurmountable for me when my nervous system was dysregulated. That's what was going on. That's what it was. I believe treating, and now there's a lot of scientific reasons to understand why what's called expressive writing in James Pennebaker's work. It's very therapeutic. It has measurable changes, not just in people's mood and ability to focus, but their blood changes and those changes are still visible a month after they did the writing exercise, it turns out it's a magic thing, just very small.
Susan:
I've read those studies. It's incredible. Immune function, well-being, so many things change from writing.
Anna:
I stopped smoking, I popped out of asthma, back pain, knee pain, migraines, all that stuff cleared up from having this very simple thing I could do that was free. What also changed for me is because I wasn't doing the talk therapy anymore, I wasn't focusing on what happened to me. I used to be, I think that's so important is a part of healing. But I don't think doing it on and on and on and on eventually gets you somewhere that it's not the entire solution. The entire solution is this transformation that happens. I think the spiritual word for it is metanoia, where your whole perspective just goes through a big shift like, "Oh, reality is like this." One thing that showed up in my heart through that transformation for me was my life is extraordinarily precious. I would never want to throw it away. And I'm loved. I'm loved just as I am. I have a lot to work on, but I'm supposed to be here. It was a very foundational shift in my perspective from commune kid, just like, "Oh, I'm such a nuisance. My mom wishes she never had me." All the residue of that. And to start living on a spiritual basis and to feel that spiritual healing coming towards me, it's everything to me. It started to make me different than other people too. That was something to contend with. I would date a guy and he would be bothered by how much I talked about God, and I just couldn't last long. I would try to abandon that part of my life to please the guy, but then I would become impossible.
I finally settled into what my path really was. From sponsoring, I ended up when I learned what CPTSD was and what dysregulation was, and I learned that in 2014 when Bessel can der Kolk's book came out, and it just wasn't like a book that these were not concepts that were well known before that popularized it. I read it because I had had a very bad argument with my husband, and he was like, I can't deal with the way you flip out when you're angry. And so, I looked on Amazon, and I got this book, and I read it and I was just like, "Oh my God, there's a word for what I have and it's 'complex PTSD'." Later I talked to a therapist who's like, "Yeah, I would say that's what it is." There's still a lot of vagueness about what that is. It's not in the DSM manual yet, but it's the way that we're affected by early trauma has a very distinctive cluster of symptoms that show up. It was so good to know this. I mean, just knowing it's a thing. One of the core symptoms is neurological dysregulation. Not just emotional, but neurological. It changes. What does that mean? How would someone know if they have neurological dysregulation? Well, there's a tip of the iceberg that you can feel. There's a lot that you can't feel. But what I've learned, and I know you know this, but what I've learned that just blew my mind is that our nervous systems are this beautiful system inside our bodies. They govern almost everything. I think there are parts of us, maybe our soul is not governed by the nervous system. We'll see one day, I guess inquiring minds want to know, yeah, I want to know, but I didn't realize your nervous system. It's not just this thing that my dad died of ALS, that's a nervous system disorder. So, I thought of it as this thing that just goes bad or you get paralyzed or something. But when it's visualized in scientific literature, it looks like a lit up angel inside your body. I kind of started to relate to it that way. There's this beautiful angel of nervous system function inside me, and I'm healing it now. I'm healing it now. Your nervous system is talking to all the systems within your body and helping them have your capillaries have the right amount of blood at your fingertips at all times. And if you cut yourself, there will be extra to clean out the wound. It's got this incredible intelligence. It senses connection, it senses danger, it talks to other people's nervous system. My proof of that is I was in New York City looking out of a hotel window once from the 50th floor, and I would look down on the street and there were taxi cabs everywhere, and they were going like this. And I thought, how are they not scraped all up and down the sides? I realized, because we're all like when we're driving together, even in a hectic traffic situation, our nervous systems are actually in nonverbal communication with each other. It's beautiful. It's extraordinary. And that is the essence of my book Connectability, is that this aspect of nervous system function that lets us feel connected, that very hurt, especially by neglect in childhood, but also by being ostracized, bullied, left out, judged, criticized, targeted for racism, exclusion, what have you. It hurts your nervous system. And of course, abuse does. And sickness can, and injuries can, but neglect. Neglect is a very powerful changer. It disrupts nervous system function. So, it changes when you go into puberty. It changes how well you can resist some inner tendency. You may have to slip into an autoimmune disorder. Some people, some people can sort of resist it. It doesn't come on. They have the same genes. Other people, it does come on. They used to always call this stress. Stress brings this on. It's very high stress and stress is accurate, but stress that dysregulates the nervous system is even worse. And you've probably heard of the ACE study. This was in the 90s.
Susan:
Yeah, explain. So, ACE, for people out there who don't know, is "Adverse Childhood Experiences." There's a quiz you can take. You get a score from one to 10, and a higher score means you had a childhood with more abuse, abandonment, neglect, hard, horrible things happening. There's a whole body of research about the things that high ACE scores are correlated with including addiction. Go on Anna.
Ann::
Yes, yes. And obesity. In fact, morbid obesity was the thing that prompted these doctors to figure it out, that there was a much bigger correlation between early trauma and later health outcomes than they ever imagined. It was so pervasive. And so the index of the ACE survey, it's flimsy, it's crude, it doesn't even mention things like if somebody dies or if you're a refugee. There's so many things you could be traumatized by. But still, nonetheless, it just showed that almost everything, bad heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, autoimmune disorders, reproductive disorders, depression, anxiety, those are the ones everybody knew about difficult relationships. But dementia is very linked with it. There's almost nothing bad. The behavioral things, certainly addiction, incarceration, trauma just plays this huge role in what happens later. But why? Because it disrupts your nervous system. That's the best they can tell. It stands to reason, if I could reregulate my nervous system, could I have better outcomes than my situation made possible? This little bad road opened up in my future when I was a child, and how can I take the better road? How can I protect myself? How can I keep my nervous system that beautiful angel inside just feeling good, responding to reality? That's what I think it's like to be reregulated is you're attuned to reality, including yourself and out here, other people. You can respond in a good way, in a rational saying way and not in a self-sabotaging way, not in a shutdown way, not in a compulsive way. That's where for me, I think compulsive eating very much comes from, is being dysregulated and sort of grasping at straws of trying to reregulate. We all do things to do.
Susan:
You have a new book out, it's called, Connectability. I'm excited about this book because in my Bright Line Eating community, a story that we hear all the time, all the time, all the time is some version of, "I came into Bright Line Eating. It worked for me for a while, but then life got lifey. I fell off track, and then I struggled for a long time to get bright again. I never really plugged into the support that was available, the human connection, the buddy, the Mastermind Group, the Gideon Games team. And then finally after enough pain, I surrendered. I got willing to connect up with support, and now my mind is blown. My world has expanded. I'm Bright, my weight is coming off, or maybe I'm already in Maintenance. And I have met and connected up with people that I know will be my best friends forever. Never, never. I feel so connected. I had no idea that connection was the missing key." But I know that for every one of those stories we hear there's 10 people out there who are still disconnected in Bright Line Eating and afraid or not willing to connect up or just really don't think it's for them. Them don't think it's for them.
I'm finishing up my next book right now as well. I was looking up some research for it. I was looking for the study that I'd come across 20 years ago that said something like, when introverts and extroverts schedule lunch with a friend once a week into their calendar, they both get an equal uplift in well-being. It's massive, showing that both introverts and extroverts have room in their life on average for more connection and will both benefit from it. I couldn't find the study. Instead, what I found was a massive study that looked at well-being and poor mental health outcomes as a function of how loved, supported and connected someone feels in the world. What it actually showed was that introverts suffer more than extroverts when they're isolated, when they're lonely and disconnected. Introverts have higher risk for depression, anxiety, and poor, flourishing, poor mental health, poor well-being when they feel disconnected than extroverts, which kind of blew my mind. I'm curious, Anna, what your book, how it can inform someone who is not well connected and maybe doesn't even think that it's on their agenda or to-do list to get better connected? How does your book help inform their journey?
Anna:
Well, the thing about being dysregulated is that being around people can be very triggering. And when I say triggering, I mean it triggers dysregulation. A dysregulated state feels like this kind of flustered, maybe a little bit like out of your body, handwriting changes, forgetting things, very irritable, maybe emotionally dysregulated, where something makes you angry and you lash out, hurt a relationship. It can be like that. Sometimes it's more subtle. Here in the San Francisco Bay area, if you drive to San Francisco, I don't know if you ever had this happen, but you drive across the bridge and you're like, that's weird. I don't even remember driving across the bridge, but here I am coming to the other side and it's like this autopilot, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but with dysregulation, there's just a lot of that. You're sort of getting very dissociated in situations where maybe it would be better if you were conscious. And so, dysregulation feels, it feels "expensive." If you were to go to a party and you feel very triggered around people and cliques and what everybody's wearing, and do I look nice enough? And anyway, I don't belong here? That feeling of not belonging can be so strong that it feels like self-care to not go to the party. I'm just going to stay home and take care of myself. But what happens to a lot of us with dysregulation is we end up, it becomes a go-to thing to just stay away from triggers that make us dysregulated. After all, we have to work in the morning, and it's better if I don't see people and have coffee today, then I'll be all dragged out tomorrow.
A lot of people have not really quite heard this before, but the pleasure of having a YouTube channel, as I put this out there, I go, I don't know about you, but I was in total isolation thinking I was taking care of myself. Then when I was in a crisis and needed help from people, all I had were a bunch of acquaintances. I had no real friends and I couldn't understand why. And so, I set about, this sort of crisis, happened well into my healing journey, but it was 18 years ago, and I set about for how to, what is it that makes people so good at connecting with other people? This was hard for me when I joined Bright Line Eating, I was like, no, I don't want to do Masterminds and have a buddy. But I did it and I succeeded and it worked, and then I tried doing it without that. It is hard for me actually to be in a sustained group. People get personalities or things happen. And so, I had many Masterminds over the years, and I had some great buddies. My first buddy who was so awesome, had something very traumatic happen in her life in our time. And what happened is I left the program. It was very triggering for me when she had a terrible trauma happen in her life. And hearing about it, it matched a trauma I had had less than 10 years before. I ended up just eating and not going back. In my mind, I was like, well, anyway, I don't belong there in any way. All those people are like this, but I'm like this. Anyway, it's so rigid. Anyway, I just had all these reasons not to do it. I had had this beautiful release of 40 pounds that changed my life within a couple years. I had it back. Then it was the pandemic. The one thing about the pandemic is a lot of people started doing this. A lot of us came out of the pandemic more triggered by people than we were before the pandemic for a variety of reasons. But a lot of people relate to that.
What my book teaches is this very practical path to get reregulated so that you can start to handle people. You have an alternative. You don't have to isolate in order to manage this feeling of discombobulation and stress that comes up around people. You can get reregulated and enjoy people. I recommend people go slowly. You don't have to do everything at once. Go change everything. Go join a club and be the cheerleader and just one thing at a time, a little small thing. Then there's a lot of things that I learned in my life of what makes it possible to be close to people. You got to have things like who knew boundaries. You can't really be close to people if you don't have boundaries that say, if everything gets out of hand, I know how I'm going to leave and when I'll leave, and I have a graceful way to do it. If you just get stuck in situations all the time, you better avoid the party. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Boundaries. And then something that often happens to people who had a rough past, and I'd say a lot of my friends I met in Bright Line Eating did. In fact, in Crappy Childhood Fairy, we have a lot of peer-led calls where people do the techniques I told you about. We have one dedicated to people doing BLE because we find, yeah, for years, and there's a lot of people who do Bright Line Eating, we find that the way of eating really helps stay regulated. It takes care of a lot of that dysregulation off the bat, just not eating flour and sugar. And having a little more structure is very supportive of living more regulated, which is powerful. That's life changing that. We also find that while it can be hard sometimes to stick to the plan when we're doing our daily practice and getting stuff out on paper and meditating, it supports us in sticking to the plan. So, they go together very nicely. And that's why I was very excited. I emailed you. I'm like, I got to tell you something that's happening over here in my community. Our people love your people, and many of them are active in your membership as well. So, they're oftentimes the same people.
Susan:
Yeah, it's sweet, the overlap.
Anna:
But just as I remember, I learned about Bright Line Eating, and when I was trying it, I did become more outgoing and I was able to start Crappy Childhood Fairy within a year of, when I started Bright Line Eating, I was sort of liberated from being so afraid of people or afraid of being on camera.
Susan:
That's what we want Bright Line Eating to be about, is to free up people to bring their gifts to the world. Look at you! A perfect case study of that.
Anna:
I never think anything like that.
Susan:
Yeah.
Anna:
It was so powerful. And then also, I was very scared of, who am I to say this? I'm not a therapist, but I have all this experience I want to share. And I looked at how you did the Boot Camp and the videos, and I was like, okay, that's kind of how you do it. I'm going to follow that structure. I did that and it worked.
Susan:
Nice.
Anna:
It's just been wonderful.
Susan:
I love that.
Anna:
I've often shared when you have a new Boot Camp launching, I like to tell all my people about it. They want to hear. Not everybody in my community wants it or needs it, but there's so much overlap. I think that the food sensitivity quiz is one of the first clues that I had about the way that food interacts with trauma. I've told you this before, but you had said in your book Bright Line Eating about the studies where some rats had a food sensitivity where they would just eat themselves to death if they were given sugar. Others. And some of them were born with it, and some of them converted to it if conditions were terrible enough. I'm like, I think that's what happened. That's why in my audience, I'd say my audience is mostly women, and I've done a survey before. 80% of them struggle with food and weight.
Susan:
There you go. There you go. For people listening, if they want to learn more about how you can support them with their childhood trauma with becoming more connected, how should they reach out to you?
Anna:
Well, they can come to Crappy Childhood Fairy YouTube channel or the website with the same name, Crappy Childhood Fairy.
Susan:
Great.
Anna:
It's a memorable name. You can tell it's not therapy by the name.
Susan:
And it's not a crappy fairy. It's a Crappy Childhood Fairy.
Anna:
That is correct. Very crappy childhood.
Susan:
The fairy. Yeah. So sweet.
Anna:
We have a membership there where people connect. I have courses, I have webinars, I do retreats, but we have a membership there that is intentional. It's a community like yours where people are connecting and getting practice connecting. Like I had with you, connectability. The thing that I want to say about being able to connect is it can feel like being alone is healing, and it is at first, but after a while, there's simply no way to fulfill your whole potential without dealing with people. You're born into community and sadly, you can't escape. It's through the wound of trauma is relational, and the healing is going to be very much relational as well, where we start to have positive relationships with other people, and we learn how to navigate the not so positive ones too. That's a really important part. And it's like I always feel like we have a delayed development that happened there where we weren't quite nurtured through those lessons. We get to learn them now, and the growth can be quite fast. So, you can find me there and you can find my books online. Connectability. And Reregulated is my first book. And people happen to love the audio book versions of my books quite a lot. If you're not a reader and you like to listen, it's there. It's my voice. You're a Hay House author like me, so I know that they adore you.
Susan:
Yeah. And back at you! They adore you too. I love it. I love it. It sounds like Connectability, and what you offer is really gentle, that you're not pushing into people into connection before they're ready or in huge doses. But the reality is, the research is very strong. There are no happy hermits. There really aren't. We've got to stretch ourselves a bit like you said, to get reconnected. It sounds like your path is really supportive and gentle and understanding of where the resistance to connection comes from and how real it is.
Anna:
Yeah, very self-paced, which is important.
Susan:
Anna Runkel, it's wonderful to have you on the vlog. Finally. I love your work. For everyone who is thinking about the role that trauma has played in their past, I really encourage you to check out Anna's work, CrappyChildhoodFairy.com. Thanks for coming on the vlog, Anna.
Anna:
Thank you, Susan.
Susan:
All right, bye everyone.
