The benefits -- and pitfalls of turning to the Crappy Childhood Fairy

The keyboard instead of the couch -
the new posture of seeking help

She calls herself and her YouTube channel, "The Crappy Childhood Fairy," though her real name is Anna Runkle. In this time of unaffordable or inaccessible professional therapy, her deft media presentation skills and openness about her life's story have made hers one of the top go-to names in the burgeoning realm of online alternatives to seeing a therapist.

"I’m not a doctor or therapist," Runkle's Crappy Childhood Fairy website says. "I’m someone who grew up in a rough family that was deeply affected by addiction and all the problems that tend to go with that – poverty, violence, neglect, and shame."

As a child, she sometimes had to shop for food and cook, as the household's adults were not around. And Runkle has said she experienced sexual molestation in the home.

Today, with a persona that blends likability and real world wisdom, Runkle brings insights to hundreds of thousands seeking healing, connection or just some online diversion while perusing YouTube channels.

Her credentials are varied -- she earned a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, and has been a professional comedian, a customer experience consultant and a video director -- but when it comes to psychotherapy, the Fairy's qualifications are school of hard knocks.

From her recent past in those jobs, Runkle freely shares with her viewers recollections of her occasional failures to be focused and reliable to colleagues, something to which many of us in the creative fields can give a reluctant nod of recognition.

The Fairy, or CCF has become a big enterprise with paid levels of use and free services, all of which are energized with user posts, which of course make for algorithm assets.

I applaud Anna Runkle's emphasis on healing and accepting responsibility, rather than being mired in past pain.

"The wounds of past trauma really can be healed. It might take a lot of focus and self mastery, but when you can face the part of the problem that you internalized, this is a great day," Runkle said on a 2023 Crappy Childhood Fairy video. "(It's) not your parents, not their failure to ever recognize what they did or apologize to you. It's not anything in the past -- It's you, right now. That is the part where there is potential for change." 

I also like her focus on some simple hands-on healing methods, like the benefits of de-cluttering. "You take back your power from whatever happened to you and you start to change the things that are right in front of you."

There are downsides to Anna Runkle's channel, however. 

In her criticisms of therapy per se, she is sometimes preachy and overgeneralized, treating her own bad experiences as universal.

Runkle once characterized those who criticize her over her negative view of therapy as personally hateful.

Though many of them undoubtedly have been, there is a lack of nuance in this. Conflating all criticisms of her with vitriolic personal attacks can be a tactic to play on sentimentality over reason (this method is sometimes referred to as "outrage bait") and it seemed to have that effect.

Legions who posted in the comments rallied around her as a friend under siege, never asking: were there also criticisms that were not mean or personal?

In the wider YouTube world, there is a problem of impetuous self-diagnosing by viewers. It's bad enough when the online work of a genuine therapist or psychiatrist sparks an "I suddenly realize I've got that" bandwagon. But when a non-professional prompts those inevitable comment thread reactions, it's a worse problem.

Though a YouTuber such as Anna Runkle shouldn't be held  responsible for every viewer's statements, she should set aside her disdain for the therapy profession long enough to tell those who self-diagnose they certainly should consider seeing a qualified healer first.

A particularly bad example came on a thread about the dangers of the toxic trait called people pleasing.

A viewer posted: "Thanks. I realized that my niceness is a mental illness, what a revelation...." And this comment wasn't the satire those words may sound like; it continued in a serious vein.

Whoa! To start with, niceness is not people pleasing. People pleasing is not a mental illness, but a habit. And this viewer was thanking someone not qualified to define a toxic habit in them, much less a mental illness.

As of this writing, eight months after that comment was posted, there has been no cautionary response posted by the Crappy Childhood Fairy or her staff. The "niceness as mental illness" equation is allowed a free pass.

It's no secret that big YouTube operations generally do resort to click bait from time to time to keep the views coming during the ebb periods. But a tactic the media-savvy Runkle used in 2021 was click bait in overdrive, and I saw it as blatant manipulation. 

In a YouTube video headlined "Is This A Healing Miracle? You Decide," she spends several minutes discussing in detail the fate of a loved one who was said by a doctor who examined him in an emergency situation to be weeks away from certain death.

That patient was her ex-husband but still good friend, who was afflicted with cancer. Well, days later he was declared out of immediate danger, and was improving so robustly he was back at his office. The cancer was now called treatable.

It sounded for all the world that this CCF YouTube was raising the possibility that a miracle gave the man his life back.

Well, twelve minutes and some seconds into the video, Runkle says, "That's not actually what happened. What happened was, we had a wrong diagnosis.... There wasn't really a miracle."

But the m-word isn't done on this YouTube. The fact that she and her ex-husband's other loved ones were so relieved that he was not dying after all makes his cancer seem less brutal than if the false diagnosis had never come down.

That has given the group a new appreciation of life. That's the miracle.

Without question, the new outlook is reason to be pleased, and happy for them. But the sequence of this story played with viewers' emotions by suggesting for more than a dozen minutes that the topic was something divine or metaphysical, then letting us know it's a far more relatable use of "miracle."

I don't know that Anna Runkle intended to deceive, but the video's timeline conformed to a standard method of extending YouTube watch times; getting viewers to stay through a certain length of a YouTube -- 15 minutes, I believe -- is generally needed to receive a desired amount of ad revenue.

And seeing the comment thread fire up with religious fervor from commenters -- including lots of mid-sentence capital H for "his" and "him" -- was all I could take. It was another grim reminder of how many people don't notice bait and switch, or don't care that they are being manipulated by it as long as they feel uplifted by a good story.

   Did this video manipulate Anna Runkle's viewers? You Decide:

The video left me demoralized after months of using the Crappy Childhood Fairy channel to some real personal avail.

I posted my problems with her tossing the word "miracle" around so loosely, and unsubscribed -- wiser about the cut throat economics that rule YouTube.

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Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA

My First Ever Weird Experience -- It's Called Retirement

I have been retired for two days and it is weird. Really weird.

I've never known this situation, nor have I ever had a loved one cross into it during my conscious life; my wonderful mother - who was my sole parent - died at 59. My grandparents were retired going back to my earliest memories of them. Transitioning from full-time work to fully retired is all new to me. And disorienting. 

I keep feeling tugs within me to get ready to go back to work as usual, as my two days off are done for the week -- get my food ready for tomorrow, make sure I have bus fare and line up the workplace ID badge, keys and wallet so I can make a quick exit tomorrow morning. And don't drink tea after 4 pm so I'll be rested enough to make that departure. That's how it has been for decades, but suddenly those are needless procedures.

I've made it all the way here - Wow

I don't have to go to work -- and I still get to eat. Nobody can fire me. This goes against our socialization, which holds that if you don't work, it means you are lazy. And you don't deserve to have a roof over your head.

But I'll continue to have my meals, and that roof atop my one-bedroom apartment. That's because of course the rules are different for retirees. They are people who have done their duty and are now rewarded with leisure. Besides, retirees are too weak and frail to do work. And they walk so slowly and never notice their turn signals are flashing, so it's better for everyone if they stay at home all day.

Notice I'm calling retires "they" and "them." That's because I can't fathom that I am in fact a retired person. Yes, I know they -- that is we don't really walk inordinately slowly, and most of us can lift anything a normal daily routine calls for a person to lift. And we notice our turn signals.

Beyond the fact that "retiree" doesn't mean slow and out of it per se, there's also my personal non-standard situation -- no boast intended, but I look about two decades younger than my 65 years and I lost 80 pounds a dozen years ago have kept it off. I'm 6-foot-1 and weigh 177 pounds.

To say I can still do lifting doesn't tell the whole story. Today, at age 65, I can lift and climb stairs much more easily than I could 30 years ago.

Okay, I'm not meaning to sound like Jack Lalanne. In fact, let me tell you that the fine state of health I find myself in today followed young adult and middle years of poor condition and a long list of health troubles. In my mid 20s through my early 50s, I chose a bad diet and experienced frequent overweight, heart palpitations, and periodic bouts with paralyzing agoraphobia (a malady you don't want).

Is it? Or have I found
 my just reward?

So my age progression has sort of been reversed, making retirement even more weird. I'm greeting it more like the day you got your driver's license. A second youth. For the last couple of days, I've been in a gentle euphoria.

Of course, I'll have to see how well my retirement pay, modest savings and Social Security hold up. My expenses are considerably less because I live as a minimalist; for 10 years, I happily have not owned a car or any kind of television.

Nonetheless I may be back to working in a few months, but perhaps in need of only 50 or 60 bucks a week, which could be attained through online writing, an avocation that is usually pure fun for me.

For the moment, however, and perhaps for the long term, this is otherworldly. Things look different. My mood is freed from so much baggage. I feel like I'm in a strangely unfamiliar place without leaving home.

Those observations may sound like the description of someone's positive LSD trip -- at least from what I've heard. I've never used illicit drugs, nor consumed even so much as a whole can of beer. During my teens and college years, I preferred reading world almanacs and encyclopedias and poring over maps to going to rock concerts and parties.

No, I just never kept company with my generation's many iterations of weird. And though retirement would seem to represent the closing of the life stage marked by bold exploration, it seems to be opening up just such a time for me. 

                ______________________________________________

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA, where had careers as an independent journalist, statistical clerk for the U.S. Census Bureau, public relations person for social service and social justice organizations, and pizza delivery person.