They Want Me Gone

California Put Me Through a Brutal Two-Day Hearing to Shut Me Down. Here's What Happened

The following is a lightly edited transcript from my recent YouTube video covering the story.

About five months ago, I sat through a two-day hearing in which the California Board of Psychology tried to prove to an administrative court judge that my work as Crappy Childhood Fairy should be shut down.

It was one of the most abusive and humiliating experiences of my life. And that’s saying a lot.

I walked in there sure that if I could just talk to the Board, I’d finally understand what this was about — this claim that I was practicing psychology without a license, which I thought I could easily disprove. But I didn’t get to talk. I was allowed to answer their questions, briefly, but I couldn’t ask any of my own. They did all the talking. And what they said was careless, confusing, dishonest, and vicious — dozens of wild accusations that had almost nothing to do with what I actually do.

It didn’t matter. In April, despite all the evidence I gave them and the total lack of evidence against me, they ruled against me. They want me to pay a fine. They want me to shut down.

So I’m suing them now, in federal court. And finally, I’m free to tell you what happened.

How it started

Almost two years ago, a certified letter arrived from the Board of Psychology. It ordered me to “stop practicing psychology without a license,” demanded $2,500, and warned that if I didn’t comply, I could go to prison.

Prison!

I honestly thought it was a scam. Everybody knows I don’t do therapy. I say it constantly.

Months earlier, a different California department had asked me questions about my business. A friendly investigator came to my house, sat in my living room, and listened while I explained exactly what I do. At the end she told me, “Everything sounds fine. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble.” So when nine months passed in silence, I assumed it was resolved.

Then the certified letter came, in October 2024. It had been photocopied so many generations that it was crooked and fuzzy and didn’t look official at all. That’s part of why I didn’t believe it. I sat on it for about a week. Then it started nagging at me, and I finally asked Google whether this could possibly be real. Ugh. It said yes.

The part almost no one knows about administrative court

What you have to do about it is hire a lawyer, which is expensive. My administrative lawyer told me these things were usually simple. I attended an informal hearing on Zoom, where I was advised to stay quiet. I answered questions. I couldn’t ask any. We never got to the one thing I actually wanted to know: what is this about? A week later came a letter saying I’d lost, and that they wanted me out of business.

So I requested a formal hearing. It took a year to get one.

The whole time, my lawyers told me not to talk about it publicly. Don’t complicate the case. And I didn’t want to unnecessarily frighten my students. But I still had no real idea what I was accused of. The Board said I was “diagnosing and providing treatment plans” — I definitely don’t do that. They said I claimed to “cure PTSD” — I don’t, and you could search my entire website forever and never find it, because it’s not something I would ever say.

Here’s the thing I couldn’t believe was even legal: in administrative court, you don’t have the due process rights you’d have in a normal courtroom. They don’t have to tell you exactly what you did. They don’t have to give you a chance to explain yourself. And you don’t even have the right to know the judge’s decision. The Board gets to know, but then it can do whatever it likes anyway.

For a person like me — someone with Complex PTSD, who grew up in a chaotic and violent home, without protection or much of a voice, learning to survive anyway — I recognized this for what it is. It’s psychological abuse, whose purpose is not public safety, but destruction of an individual. It wasn’t fair or logical, and it didn’t follow any laws.

And to be clear: I haven’t broken any. I’m an author and YouTuber who also offers free and paid online courses, and paid webinars, workshops, and group coaching programs where people can learn and apply the practical techniques and principles I teach in my books and videos, with an opportunity for questions and discussion with the group and me.

All of these activities are legal, but the Board treated all of it as a crime. It wasn’t until their final decision against me that they even conceded that my YouTube channel and my books are protected speech -- like all Americans I can say what I like (barring very specific language such as encouraging crime). But for the rest of that hearing, they buried me in accusations, all built on three assumptions — that I have no idea what I’m doing, that I only want to take advantage of people, and that my work only causes harm.

Two days of being trashed by strangers

Imagine sitting on a Zoom call while six people — all men, except the court reporter, who never spoke — take turns making things up about you. That was the hearing.

The evidence against me came down to two things. One, that a single person felt triggered on a free Zoom call I’d led more than three years earlier, and complained that I’d been mean. Two, that the Board hired an expert witness to look at my work.

I could tell from what that expert found that they’d barely looked at anything. They had five video titles. I don’t think they even watched the videos. Part of their complaint was a thumbnail that reads, “Do you have CPTSD? Here are 12 signs.”

Well, here’s some news: it’s okay to say that. It isn’t a diagnosis. My quiz on this says right at the top that it is not a diagnostic tool — it’s a list of signs you can reflect on to decide whether you want to get help. Around 100,000 people have taken it, and the feedback I get is that finally learning the signs of CPTSD helped them enormously. That information wasn’t out there before. Many report this is what finally prompted them to get a therapist.

The expert witness looked at all this and declared, flatly, that I’m a fraud. No real explanation. The reasons offered were that I talk about CPTSD — “a dangerous psychiatric condition” — and that I speak with authority.

Yes, I speak with authority. I’m 63 years old. I’ve been teaching this for 32 years. I’ve lived it, and I’ve recovered from it. And I’ve found that it’s the practical things that can really help you get your life together. That’s what you hear in my voice.

And I am careful with language. I spent years creating medical education for physicians and surgeons at institutions like UCSF, the University of Chicago, and Kaiser Permanente. I know how to use clinical terms responsibly. I don’t make audacious, snake-oil claims. What I say is: you can heal your PTSD symptoms (emphsis on YOU and CAN) and I can show you how I did it. Those are claims I can stand behind.

The expert witness disputed even that. How dare you say people can heal.

I wasn’t allowed to respond in the room. So let me respond now: How dare you say we can’t, or that we haven’t. How dare you receive insurance dollars and public health dollars while holding, at your core, the belief that we can’t do it.

My lawyer pushed back, “Do you believe that only YOU can heal people?” The expert witness mumbled, maybe not.

“Do you think people can heal themselves?,” my lawyer asked. More mumbling. A weak “Maybe.”

“Do you think Ms. Runkle might be helping people to heal themelves?” Mumbling. Something about me being dangerous.

“Do you think think it would be better if people could not choose help from non-licensed people?”

And here is the ugliest thing.

The expert witness said very somberly (and again I must paraphrase because I was not allowed to record the proceedings) “Yes, I think it’s better that people receive NO help at all, than to get help from a non-licensed person.”

I’ll just let that sit there for a moment.

Then my lawyer pointed out that this same expert witness has a popular Ted Talk on YouTube where he advocates that that because of provider shortages, there should be more community support for traumatized people. “Is that just true elsewhere?” my lawyer asked, “Or just for Anna Runkle?”

For one bright second I thought, maybe now the judge will get it. This is peer support. It’s a good thing. It’s what humans do, what humans have always done. And to take it away from humans, to say we’re not allowed to, that we go to jail if we try — I mean, come on. Follow that logic all the way to where it leads.

Expert witnesses get paid thousands of dollars, and I suspect a lot of them say whatever the people paying them want to hear. The Board wanted someone to call me dangerous. So they built a case out of the fact that I write titles like “Do you have CPTSD?”, that I charge money, that I speak with authority, that I call myself a coach — and that I talk about Complex PTSD at all.

I think that last one is what really stuck in their craw -- But I do talk about CPTSD. I was among the first people online to share in depth about what it is and what it’s like. I didn’t invent it — I learned it more than a decade ago from books by licensed professionals like Bessel van der Kolk and Pete Walker.

The questions the Board never answered

They called me a danger to society. But if I was truly dangerous, why let this drag out for three years? Why not intervene immediately? I don’t think they believed it.

And they could never say, specifically, what I’d done wrong. They didn’t even know I had two recent books published, or that I have an online community. They didn’t seem to understand the nature of YouTube -- that viewers are not “therapy clients,” that they are all over the globe, and I have no way of knowing who they are.

The accusations were things like— you said the word PTSD, (which is true). Or false claims I’d promised a cure. They said I spoke with too much authority, while others said I was just “one of those ladies on social media who believe in crystal” (I couldn’t record the hearing, so I’m giving you all of this from memory.) I was burning with anger.

When my lawyer pushed the Board to define CPTSD themselves, they couldn’t. But because of the nature of my work — two books, 1,400 videos, seven online courses — I can. It’s absurd to claim I’m too stupid to understand my own field, and therefore dangerous.

They couldn’t name a single rule I broke. There was no real complaint with any weight to it.

But in administrative court, there doesn’t have to be. They don’t have to tell you what you did, don’t have to let you speak, don’t have to reveal what the judge decided. Even if the judge had ruled in my favor, I will never know. In California, it isn’t my right to know.

And I knew in that hearing that even if the judge said, in the strongest words possible, that they shouldn’t move forward with shutting me down, they were going to do it.

I knew they were because of the willingness to say audacious and dishonest things about me. You have to have a level of integrity that’s pretty stretchy to do that to a human being.

There was so much they obviously didn’t know. They didn’t know I had two significant books published in the last two years. They didn’t know I had a worldwide online community for whom my work is a lifeline.

The thing that really helped me lighten up came near the end of the hearing. I’m sure they didn’t even believe it. They accused me of telling the public that I’m a mythological creature. A fairy. And this lawyer very seriously said — I’m paraphrasing, but it’s hard not to laugh — “I’ve done research about what is a fairy. Oh, it’s somebody who has magical powers.” As if you could wave a magic wand and cure people.

My lawyer had warned me: don’t roll your eyes, keep a serious face, this is a court of law. But I could hardly keep my jaw put together. What? I claimed to be a fairy, and that was dangerous for people? So that kind of helped me go, oh, I see. You’re going to say anything here. You’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall. And so that did help.

What it cost, and what it gave back

But there was residue. My husband and I knew the hearing was coming, and that it would be rough for me, so afterward we took a week off together to relax by the water. It was really great. I didn’t do any work. I just rested, and I wrote.

When you get attacked that viciously, it reaches all the way down — touching every old wound, every hard thing you’ve been through in your life. It’s been a lot. In the two years since this began, my health has been seriously damaged with what the medical world calls “ME/CFS/Long Covid” that has come with upper motor neuron problems whose source has yet to be definitively diagnosed. Every time the Board contacts me, the stress is so intense my energy level drops to barely functioning. I can’t think.

Thankfully the formidalbe Pacific Legal Foundation has taken my case, free of charge, and is suing the Board on my behalf. On Wednesday there will be a hearing where they’ll ask the federal judge for a preliminary injunction on enforcement of of the board’s citation while my federal suit proceedds, which would allow me to work again, and pay the bills, and salvage the community I have built before irreparable harm is done to them. The Board will be there, arguing to keep me shut down. I may not learn the judge’s decision for a while. In the meantime I will be resting and healing with friends in a green and friendly place, far from California.

I need to be strong now for all the work I have left to do in my life. Running a business, being a YouTuber, having a marriage, and being a person with living in the world — there’s already enough stress. The Daily Practice techniques that saved my life 32 years ago are saving me now to face the problem and move the stress down the line, and out of my body. I am a person on a mission to share these very techniques with all who need them. I’ve already taught it to a million people and now, no matter what the Board does to me, they can’t stop people healing themselves.

It gives me strength to tell the truth about it. It feels like a miracle how much energy has come back to me by finally being free to tell the truth about what they are doing to me.

I’ll probably be subpoenaed and asked to give testimony. But this time I’ll have some of the best lawyers in the country at my side. I’ll only ever have to do is keep telling the truth. The truth is good. It’s good enough. The truth is true.

I thought, at first, that this was a great big interruption to my path, and I resented it. But now I see it differently. This IS the path. It always was the path. There are things that were going on in my life back in my 20s that I now see were almost like preparation for what I have to do right now. Things are coming together. I trust what’s happening. I trust the outcome will be good, even though I don’t know the exact shape of it or the timing.

Why this matters beyond me

One of the hardest parts is how much this case has cost me and my husband — so much money, time, energy, opportunit and momentum lost. There’s no compensation for that; even if I prevail, the Board is immune from liability for the harm they are doing to me.

But if I prevail -- and I do think I will — I’ll be securing the right of all Americans who charge money for their time helping others in a non-licensed capacity. The rights of licensed people were just affirmed ta few months ago in Chiles v. Salazar. Now I’m the unlicensed person standing in for all the unlicensed people who help others, saying: you can’t just shut people down. There has to be due process, and cause, and all of those things.

If you want to come along on the journey and find out how it unfolds, I invite you to add your name to my Case Insider list —I’ll put the link is down below in the description, along with the press release about my case and my first video explaining what the case is all about for me. A lot of people have become interested in it, and I hope you will too.

I also realize some of you are paying attention because you’d like to see me taken down. I know you’re out there. I know you’re watching right now, and I’ve read your ugly putdowns. I don’t like it, but you are good job exposing the holes in your industry.

My hope is that one day nobody, anywhere in the world, has to go through a terrible hearing meant to take them out like that, with no accountability, punching down at people recklessly who cannot speak for themselves.

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Here’s my Substack article on the case.

Here’s my YouTube video about it. (To learn about public sentiment, read the comments)

Here’s the Pacific Legal Foundation press release.

Here’s an excellent article about the case by Sarah Ozol Shore, from a mental health professional’s perspective.

If you want to follow the case, I invite you to join my “case insider” mailing list.