people who were neglected in childhood often grow up with a false sense of identity that they were pressured into developing by parents who couldn't see who they were at all and this is a pattern I've come to recognize in hundreds of letters I've received there's almost like you could almost call it a developmental delay in forming a sense of self of knowing you know what are your preferences what makes you happy what do you long for and some people people they just imprint on another person a boyfriend or a girlfriend and other people they'll just
burn out they burn themselves out by trying and trying to somehow make the vision for them that their parents put on them feel good and make them happy but it doesn't work and so they're enraged which is not a good frame of mind and it doesn't lead to a good life so my letter today is from a woman I'll call Mercy and she writes hi Anna I am a nurse in my early 20s and I've been doing this work for 3 years and it's pushed me to the point that I feel I cannot go on
all right she's saying other words that are quite desperate and I don't want to say them on YouTube but I think you know where she's coming from she says I lashed out at my parents who are nicer now but still don't fully comprehend that I'm a person and the things they did impacted me forever all right so there's the identity wound I've got the fairy pencil here I'm going to circle things I want to come back to on a second reading but let's see what Mercy can describe for us here she says I isolate in
my real life I stay mentally stuck on people who are not good for me and I can't handle dealing with family conflict because it sends me into female rage female rage huh I I think I know what she means but I'm not sure now I only have my one best friend who now lives several states away we were new graduate nurses together and we don't see each other very often my little sister doesn't talk to me after I told her I didn't have the emotional capacity to deal with her new relationship problems right after she
ended a yearslong relationship with a toxic man who was also close to our family H I'm going to circle that I might want to come back to that a major abandonment in my life was at when I was 16 after going to school in one country for 6 years I was told I was doing the SATs in a week had to take it without a proper preparation and my parents didn't let me eat before this exam or take snacks to the exam and then they made me get on a plane at age 16 to go
start nursing school back in the United States yeah it's pretty extreme I had been away from the United States since I was seven and when I tried to change my major they cut me off financially I had to stay with this major or drop out and be on the streets one wow I have zero empathy for people who remind me of my father I feel rage when I meet someone who acts like my mother despite me often repeating the same patterns and behaviors as them my little sister physically fought our mother as a teenager but
I'm still labeled the problem child for lashing out emotionally I know it's not right and I'm trying to stop altogether but I can't tell if I'm just cutting off my family for good if that would be the easiest thing for me to live my life peacefully I'm so extremely messed up and disregulated and isolated and I use my sports to release some emotion and feel happy again I just still feel so much rage toward my parents and younger sister we moved to three continents as I grew up and went from stable to well-off to dirt
poor in the span of 4 years my family was dealing with their own mental issues but these were my important developmental years I was completely abandoned they got angry when I cried shamed for anything I did or tried to do they made fun of my eyebrows my figure me being fat which I wasn't my endless skin problems which turned out to be an autoimmune skin disorder that required 6 months of Accutane and dietary changes as a teenager to control they constantly compared me to my excellent older sister and bullied me for my body shape and
weight and consequent eating problems um and the bullying came from my mom and younger sister who still to this day can't understand why I can't eat normally not to mention we happen to be part of a very specific and extreme denomination of Christianity that combined with the African immigrant culture it was a cult-like environment for years upon years okay that's a lot the only constant I had was drawing and reading because I could carry that from continent to continent I was always the new kid and a lot of others didn't like me I just wanted
to be normal and I thought I was but now looking back normal adults must have easily seen I was not an okay kid a lot of people I love have tried to end their lives so if this is like really strong triggering for you just skip over the next minute here and I will say that Mercy had a lot of this she says I stopped my older sister from doing it on the way to school when I was 13 my close friend from age 11 to 14 actually did do it successfully when we were 14
and I stopped my mother she says who was diagnosed with bipolar borderline personality disorder and depression she stopped her mother from doing it when she was just 12 gosh this has been a constant theme in my family and it always seems it has been my job to stop it all right this we're going to circle I feel like this is a significant thing in what's going on for for you my dad constantly cheated had children outside the marriage and clearly used my mother to socially climb when they first got together I have zero respect for
him and I'm I'm exhausted by every conversation we have leaning toward why he needs to start a business nursing makes everything worse I do not want to endlessly pour myself into patients who constantly shout at me belittle me make false accusations I would never take any emotion out on my patients but it catches me off guard when a patient and I connect over many days of me taking care of them and then we relate in a way that I wished my mother and I could have when they leave they often Express gratitude and it warms
my heart to see them heal and get discharged and go home but I just cry afterwards wow and I can't fully figure out why I'd rather have the latter group of patients the ones who connect than the first but both of them destabilize me emotionally as much as the other all right that's a key right there my anti- anxiety medication dose is already maxed out which I've had to increase with every year of me being a nurse all right there's another indicator when I get to these levels of anxiety I can't eat I can't eat
and it affects my sports I think I've been using Sports as a somatic therapy from a young age because I wasn't allowed to cry mhm good plan I feel like I'm limiting Myself by being unable to connect with other people my family is so scattered I have only made one good friend since becoming a nurse because I'm otherwise emotionally and physically exhausted I do not trust men even when they're good because of my dad being a wolf and sheep's clothing well but I crave a healthy romantic relationship with a man I can lean on and
I feel overwhelmed when someone shows signs of wanting to connect mainly women because I'm so tired out I haven't started unpacking connection with men yet oh boy I'm limiting Myself by remaining in financial disarray that resembles my upbringing but keeps me in this career that makes me want to walk in front of a train every day oh goodness I'm limiting Myself by not moving on romantically I'm limiting Myself by letting the past control every aspect of my now life how can I move forward from this Mercy okay Mercy I'm so sorry this is a very
hard letter to read and um I first just kind of want to gather all the love and all the care of all the people who are listening to this letter around and would you please put into the comments some love for this young woman because she's going through a really hard time and she's very alone and um but we're your witness now Mercy we heard you we heard you you uh I'm so glad you're here your life is so important and your job is so not worse the loss of anything and um I'm so I'm
so glad you allowed us to come and intervene right now and befriend you and support you in making whatever changes you need to to have more peace in your life and to be safe so first of all I'm going to address what came up at the end where you listed all these things where you say I'm limiting myself because I can't connect I'm limiting myself because um I'm letting the past control me I'm limiting myself because I'm in financial disarray and I hope you know Mercy that everything that you say you're doing to yourself is
actually a symptom of early trauma it's a symptom you're not actually doing it to yourself it was done to you and I totally understand that now that the damage has been done it's you who has to make the changes in your life and we're going to talk about that but I just want to start off by saying you are not limiting yourself you're actually doing amazing things of showing up for this job you got this education even though you didn't choose it you got sent away at 16 to a foreign country I mean this sounds
incredibly brutal to me but you did it you are surviving you're here you're able to do the job and also what you described on the job and I'm not trying to say that you should necessarily stay in the job at all but just that you have made a difference in a lot of patients lives they connect with you and I know it's emotionally overwhelming and maybe even my saying this to you is going to overwhelm you too what I'm hearing is a woman this is you I'm hearing a person who all emotions are overwhelming that
you if you have cptsd and I don't see how you couldn't you sure are showing the signs the what happened to you is severe enough that most people would develop it so that's normal I mean some people they can just live through anything and they just go forward like nothing happened but I'm not one of those people and I don't think you are either and that's that's okay what's reacting to all of this is the is the beautiful alive sensitive parts of oursel that we're never really cut out to be unloved and not seen and
forced and you know that's that was never your destiny but that's what you got you got you got a bad hand of cards and um yeah it's tempting to try to compare yours and say well at least it wasn't that but it's worse than that it's just you know we each get our hand of cards and we deal with what we have now you're in your early 20s and I sometimes think that's one of the hardest ages to be with trauma because the the past is still coming at you like a tide that won't go
out you know the waves just keep coming in you're still at the effect of your parents you're still thinking that somehow if you perform well enough or tolerate what they told you to do well enough that they will suddenly turn nice but what you told me about them is like well your mom she has you know some serious mental health problems and they are problems that normally Drive apart marriages and families under the best of circumstances so yeah I'm just going to throw out there if you're not familiar with borderline personality disorder I encourage you
to look it up not because I think you have it but when you tell me your mom had it along with depression and bipolar that is so much and um there's a TV show I love called the and in season 2 you get to meet the mother who I believe is meant to it's a dramatization of what it's like when a mother has borderline personality disorder and it's Christmas and it's an episode not to miss if you want if you are strong and you want to see what another family looks like under that with that
kind of person and see if you relate and it's not very scientific watching a TV show but for me it was really helpful I have somebody in my past who I think had it and when I saw that it really like I was like there it is yes that's what it was I see that so I think they I think the writers of that show knew what it was like you are still sitting there trying to live up to the expectations of somebody who has a completely unstable reality who alternately says I love you You're
great and then blames you for every problem on Earth and that's what I hear they they made you into the black sheep even though your sister would hit it's interesting that you got to be the black sheep and I don't know what you know I was the black sheep too and my my misbehavior was nothing compared to like my older brother you who stole all the drugs in the house and got violent and created huge scenes every holiday and I was like why me and I used to battle against it too and just be like
can't you see I'm I'm a good kid I'm not so terribly bad I made a couple mistakes and fun the the the family members who have survived I'm a lot older than you but the family members who have survived gradually did come around know we never talked about it the way they kind of thought I wasn't so great or used to exclude me we just didn't talk about it because whatever they used to think isn't isn't true and I don't even want to entertain it I'm just really glad like we can have friendly relationships right
now and maybe maybe you'll have that one day but you don't have to Mercy you know some people you asked me in the beginning of the letter actually uh Mercy put a question at the beginning that I didn't read and it was like do I cut my family off and here's what I say about that anybody can cut their family off one day at a time uh to decide to do it forever is a is an is an other decision that you may want to get to too but you can try it from one day
at a time and you don't even have to make a big announcement about it you can just do it you can just do it and not get back to them and I think what what may I I don't know you didn't specify are you financially free and clear now that you're a nurse do you have your own money even though it sounds to me like you need to get out of this career or at least this job I know that like some nursing jobs like hospital nursing jobs can be much more stressful than certain other
Nur nursing jobs a friend of mine works in a private practice doctor's office as a nurse and that's a lot more livable than working in a hospital was I don't know how you're going to work it out maybe you'll change your career maybe you'll you'll use your knowledge in a lower pressure thing that's more meaningful to you we'll find out time will tell I encourage you to go ahead and take small actions on that and one small action might be to take some time without contact with your family they used to control you with money
like you can't change Majors or we or you end up out on the street and when I first read that I kind of missed the part I had to read it a second time to go you were 16 because at first I was like well you were an adult so if they don't want to find your education go get a job and you're okay but I get it 16 I don't know I don't even know who is looking after you I can totally understand why that was a survival move for you so you know what
good you survived you did what you had to do to get through that period of time and now that you're in your early 20s you can stand on your own feet and even if you never do a nursing job another day in your life you can go wait tables you can go um deliver stuff for Amazon you know there's there's jobs that you can do to to get by until you find your career again that is Meaningful and pays a fair and adequate amount of money for you to live on which don't forget it's important
to have enough money people don't talk about that enough with trauma I think sometimes the professionals who function as experts to help people with trauma like forget like being really poor totally limits your choices how many of us have had to stay in terrible relationships because we couldn't afford to move out right so we always want to have that flexibility to be able to make choices in our lives about what we do we don't need to be wealthy but it's good to have choices enough money to have choices also I think work can be a
really powerful way of um path of self-growth of self- knowledge of empowerment of yourself and I've always you know I haven't liked every job I've had but overall I've really liked working in my life my husband and I were talking about like the the future and you know when would we retire and right now I can't really imagine it because for me work has finally become just kind of what I like to do I think I would work less than I do right now but I'd still do what I do and um I'd like a
little more time to to smell the roses and you know maybe the day will come when we can afford to do that goof off a little more but but I really love my work and so my work energizes me and I totally know what it's like I have been in jobs before where you come home and you are just so exhausted emotionally and physically you can't possibly deal with people and that's got to go Mercy that's not a good way to live that's an emergency measure sometimes like like let's say where you work has just
been through a a a fire or something I us still work in healthcare and we had that we had um you know clinics burned down and we all had to like get to that clinic and help them kind of create a temporary setup and deal with the patience and um things like that and it would be exhausting and I I I still have photos of everybody sitting there going everybody was so wiped out at the end of the night that's an emergency that's not a way to live now here's what I know about nurses because
I did used to work in healthcare and because I was in the hospital off and on for four years with a whole bunch of surgeries I had I had a medical complication that needed a lot of surgery I've talked about it a little in other videos but oh my gosh I met a lot of nurses over those times um you know cumulative many months in the hospital and the night shift and the day shift kind of have a different personality and a few nurses I mean they're just like Angels they come up and they talk
to you or they put a hand on you and like you just sit there you're just healing and it's so powerful and they they should be nurses and they are very important there's a few nurses who are just vicious and awful and I wonder if they got forced into the job not saying you're vicious and awful but it's not everybody everybody who does it doesn't have like a gift of healing I'll tell you that now some people they have a gift more of clinical measurement or management or or things so you may find a gift
within this this career that you've already developed maybe you will but you have my permission to just let go like you don't have to drive so hard I know you need to like make the rent and um you know come up with enough money to pay the bills and I know you can I just can hear in your letter that you your anger is very it's it's a lot of energy that anger is a lot of energy and the terrible thing about anger it's kind of like heating up your house to 80° and leaving the
front door open it's just it's just spilling out all over you can't use that energy for what you need and so anger anger is often a way that we're kind of unconsciously coming up from depression and I'm hearing all this anxiety and depression and I relate to you so much my early 20s were full of that too I was just so torn up with anxiety and depression and I was also doing you know really good accomplishments but I I can say for myself and this may be true for you I had a lot of childhood
trauma that there was no room process I didn't really have um an environment where I could do that or a knowledge framework where I could do that I tried therapy a little bit and we would talk about my mom but I just kept experiencing it as very upsetting and disruptive to do that and I didn't I was 30 before I found something that actually helped me like the minute I used it to to actually get comforted and grounded so getting grounded getting calmer having relief emotionally from intense feeling feelings this is gold when you're in
that state of anxiety now I'm not a doctor but I'm going to encourage you to talk to your doctor or get a second opinion about being maxed out on anxiety drugs and feeling as bad as you do that sounds to me like you were given a temporary solution that is not holding up as a permanent solution and there may be a way to change how you're doing that whether it's to reduce or change medication or get off of them now if you got interested in how to re-regulate your nervous system to become emotionally regulated which
is good for all kinds of people but especially for traumatized people then it would might be in your best interest to be less medicated but it's one of those things when you're prescribed that kind of drugs you can't just go Wing It freelance and change your dose it has to be done with a doctor's supervision so I encourage you to check that out and if your doctor isn't supportive of you exploring that do get a second opinion many doctors are supportive of that kind of thing lots of people can't live on maximum dose anti-anxiety the
thing about anything mind-altering is that you know we all get disregulated sometimes all people not just traumatized people and eventually Mo almost all of us will re-regulate there's a few exceptions of people who can never get re-regulated but I don't think that's you I think you can get re-regulated and you probably do do it but the more you get ground down and demoralized and the more your mind is altered on substances and stress and grief the harder it is to re-regulate and you start to kind of lose that ability and it starts to feel normal
to be totally like disregulated all the time discombobulated numb feeling emotions too strongly in a context having to suppress yourself and I have seen in people who use drugs daily like weed daily there will will often be a huge buildup of anger like anger is really never getting processed like it gets out it's expressed like I'm so angry but it doesn't go away so processing feelings isn't just expressing them it's actually turning them into memories of the feeling of that that it's active for a while and then it shifts to a new phase so when
we get traumatized as kids we get an injury to that function within our nervous system that does that that does that service for for us where it takes emotions and thoughts that come up woo they come up strong and it takes them helps them think about them and then they get moved into a different part of our of our mind and nervous system which is memory active experiences that's like what gives you adrenaline makes your heartbeat cortisol you know keeps you up at night that's like something you're going through right now if you can't process
your thoughts and feelings they just feel like they're all going on right now and it gets to be so noisy so something new happens a new piece of information good or bad a new relationship a new opportunity comes along and there's barely any any bandwidth to deal with it you know to respond to it so it's hard we lose opportunities we struggle to connect and I'm not surprised at all that you're isolating from people to try to cope with it you are in a state of overwhelm all the time and I just want to tell
you you are just like so many of us it is normal you're having normal symptoms for somebody who went through what you went through with your dad being dishonest and cheating and your mom being mentally ill like that oh that's a lot that is so much and then there was you and your sister you trying to trying to do enough that they would like oh you know what Mercy you're a good girl you're a good girl and I'm proud of you and I you may have never gotten that so here you are you're saying I
have zero empathy for people who remind me of my father that's a problem you know projecting your father's Behavior onto people who act like him that's isolating you I think somewhere in there is a red flag detector that's good but it's just kind of blanket pushing people away and you feel rage when you meet someone who acts like your mother which doesn't surprise me but again you know between your mother and your father you're going to see a lot of kind of energy of that around you and you don't want to live in reaction to
that this is your precious life force this is the energy that you will use to create your life the one that you want the relationships that you want possibly a family a place to live that makes you happy that feels cozy and safe friendships that are a joy for you with people who get you like these are not crazy things to want to have and you deserve them but they're very hard to get when what the whole surface of you is projecting is anger enraged and I know you know that and I know that's why
you're writing you had asked should you cut off your parents and sometimes well I think yes I think temporarily that might be okay to do and again it doesn't have to be forever you don't have to put an end date on it you can take it one day at a time and that way it's not a major decision and you can first experience what's that like for me because you know what happens is when people are going through a lot of pain and I know you are you feel like you're on the brink making a
huge decision like that when you've already been abandoned in your life can trigger abandonment mange and that can make you even more vulnerable and put you in more like emotional danger of not being able to deal with it and so so right now feeling grounded and stable should be top priority everything that makes you feel safe and stable so you have this one friend and I know she's far away but I encourage you to make some time to get on Zoom and talk to her and um stay connected to her and maybe one of you
takes a vacation very soon to go spend some time with the other and be with your friend now more friends are needed we need more than one and one thing that you definitely qualify for is um a program like uh ACA adult children of Alcoholics and other dysfunctional families and this program is terrific because basically everyone who watches this channel qualifies to go there and they work specifically on um practical tools to heal trauma some of it is similar to what I do in my program some of it's different and not stuff that has been
personally helpful to me it doesn't matter you get in and you're around real people face to face and they are working on changing their lives too they've gone through things that are parallel or similar to what you've gone through they understand they don't freak out when you tell the truth about what you've lived through and there may be other people who you know had African immigrant parents there may be other people who are in the nursing profession there may be other people who relate to what you went through and you can hear their story and
how they are dealing with it and sometimes just hearing somebody talk about it is all you need to stop judging yourself and saying I'm screwing every what was the words you you kept saying here I'm limiting myself yeah no the limiting was done for you you're working to expand yourself right now so don't get down on yourself this is incredible people who write a letter to me to read on YouTube like that's huge you're not limiting yourself at all you're just like because you know what happens is there's always a few bozos who write completely
cruel and stupid things in the comments and I can't get them out fast enough and you'll see them and they'll criticize you but whatever you do don't listen to those people and any of you who are watching you are here by deputized if you see somebody say something hateful to my letter writers pile on you tell them what a jerk they are and when when me or my team get there in the morning we will take that person out we don't want the haters but every once in a while we see their comments I see
them it's so funny they're so funny somebody criticized me today and said I didn't know anything about trauma like it it would be better if I had ever experienced it and I was just like O come on now I get mad but what's the point there's no point you don't engage with the haters point is you are so courageous because you wrote this letter here to get some help and help is here so 12-step meetings are where there's face-to-face people and um you know for anybody who thinks you might qualify for there's a lot of
ones for that are for substance substance abuse I went to one that was for families of Alcoholics ACA is for families of any kind of dysfunction it's really powerful to be in a room with people who are all trying to get better from a similar thing and I wouldn't be here without it spent like 25 years in those rooms very helpful to me but another thing you can do and another thing you can do is come into my program we have a membership program it doesn't cost terribly much you get all my courses you get
to come to our webinars every month for free um you get to join our secret Facebook group and come to my group coaching calls and in the Facebook group there's a lot of camaraderie and friendship and you get to meet people with similar things and it's a lovely it's kind it kind of surprised me it surprises me because a lot of there's a lot of people in there active and by and large they are so kind and thoughtful and helpful to each other and then we do this thing called The Daily practice and I I'm
going to really like if you do one thing that I'm talking to you about try these daily practice techniques it's a it's a very specific writing technique follow by a simple form of meditation that anybody can do that can help bring that that calm that emotional relief in and we do it twice a day I needed it so bad I was very I was in a place similar to where you are now when I stumbled into it and that was 30 years ago and it's like my whole life now I've got my book re-regulated coming
out in a few months it's all about what happened what I learn to do and um by the way there's always a link where you can pre-order that book or if it's after October 2024 when you watch this video you can order the book but if you're a pre-order person you get a free course with it called inner power so you might want to check that out that link is always down below in the description section but I'm pointing you Mercy to the the daily practice techniques they're so important to Healing because whatever else you're
doing if you're doing therapy if you're doing um exercise I love that you do sports that's so important that's one of the most important things you can do to heal these trauma symptoms so you have good instincts about what is needed here there are a number of things you can do so processing the thoughts and feelings consciously cognitively with this technique that I teach the daily practice can be another thing that you do and I we have calls every week for anybody who wants to come for free who's learned the daily practice on Zoom hundreds
of people come I lead um two of them a month my team leads um two more every month so every week we're there but in the membership program there's um about a, people and 20 something of them are are leading purel daily practice calls so there's multiple calls every day where 10 20 sometimes 30 people get together and do the techniques together and often become friendly with each other and good things come from connecting with people who are working on healing just like you so a link to membership is also Down Below in the description
section if anybody doesn't know what a description section is underneath every video you start to see a little bit of writing and it'll say more and you click on that and it opens and like a lot of YouTubers I have a whole bunch of information and links there for you so check that out a lot of good things there that you can learn and when and doubt come to my website crappy childhood fairy.com connect connect with people and resources that are helpful like I hear you trying to do everything all by yourself my dear all
by yourself and that's hard that's really hard and I'm proud of you for being so self-sufficient and and I hope that you will let people like my community or 12ep or your friends let them in a little bit to become your helpers it it it's exhausting trying to do everything by yourself I hear how tired you are and I hope that with our care and our concern and love for you that it gives you a little more energy back for you to take these next steps so if you're watching this everybody you want to try
that daily practice I'm leaving you with a link to the free course you can learn it and try it in about an hour that's right there and I will see you very soon [Music] [Music]
