AnnaLynne McCord

What is up, Daddy Gang? It is your founding father, Alex Cooper. We call her Daddy Gang. Hello, hello, hello Daddy Gang.

It is a beautiful, beautiful day. We're back at it again for another episode of Call Her Daddy. So, when I was 16 years old in high school living in Pennsylvania, I remember watching the show 90210. Okay, there's a lot of fucking shows, Gossip Girl, The Hills, The OC, all the day.

90210 was one of my favorite shows. And I remember in those shows, everybody knows, every show you watch, I guess they probably fucking do it on purpose. But it's like, you're drawn to a specific character. You either relate or you're obsessed with or you're drawn to them or you love, you hate them, whatever.

And I remember with 90210, I was so drawn to the character Naomi. She was a goddamn alpha of Vixen. She ran the shit in the fucking 90210 and I was obsessed. And the person that played that character, her name, is Annalyn McCord.

I was a huge fan back then of Naomi and now today I'm sitting here on this podcast and even bigger fan today of Annalyn. Two weeks ago, I sat down with Annalyn McCord and in this episode, she recounts the life events that led to her diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. And before we get started, I need to say this, this entire episode may be triggering for those who have suffered from sexual abuse or would be triggered from discussion of self-harm. This is a trigger warning.

Daddy Gang, this interview that you are about to hear is powerful. Annalyn takes us through her diagnosis and the intense work in therapy she did that led to her uncovering and remembering the sexual abuse that she endured years prior as a young girl. It is not easy coming on. It's not even, it's not easy talking about it.

So it is not easy coming on this podcast and telling millions of people the trauma you've experienced and endured. So hopefully Daddy Gang, Annalyn's story as painful as it is, can help someone listening today. Even if it's one person, I'm assuming it's going to be a lot more but hopefully it can help today and know you are not alone. Daddy Gang, without further ado, Annalyn McCord.

Hello, hello, hello. You look beautiful. Same. As always though.

Um, Daddy Gang, we are sitting in my back house. I'm honored that you're sitting here with me right now. Annalyn was a star on Nip Talk. American Harris, 902 and I was obviously what I know you from.

Like I was the biggest fan. You were everything I wanted to be and more unbelievable. Started modeling at 15, mental health advocate and advocate for childhood sexual trauma survivors. Reading your story and your journey.

I'm inspired and also so excited to have you on today because there are so many young women that listen to my show. And you coming on here and just like being open as you've been about your career. Thank you for like being so open in your recent journey of mental health and being an advocate. I kind of love to start early, early life.

I'm always like, let's go back. I'm always like everything stands for childhood. Exactly. If someone is listening to this that isn't familiar with you, can you kind of walk me through like your early childhood days and like what that back story is to you.

Absolutely. So it's interesting because it's a little piece milled in the sense that I can walk you through it now. But if you'd asked me this question two and a half years ago, I would have told you a totally different story because I didn't have my childhood memories of what was the most defining element of my life. I think but I'll throw in all the details, but I'll give it to you first.

The way I knew it, which was I was a kid from a trailer park. I had a pipe dream to be an actress at nine years old. I was going to I was like, this is what I'm doing with the rest of my life and also grew up moving place to place like we pack that trailer up and we rolled it down the freeway. In how many siblings?

Two sisters. I left home two months after I turned 15. Like was fully financially completely independent. And were your sister still there?

My older sister had run away at age 16 and my younger sister was still there, but she was there with my mom. My parents got divorced at that point and I kind of like slipped out the back door. I graduated from high school so no one could say that I did an adventure in my education. I did like summer school.

That's the cool thing about homeschool is if you are motivated, I was a very self-motivated kid because I love learning. I just like I was like, let's go. Let's go. I'm going to make this life happen because everybody's telling me it's not in fucking motherfuckers.

Honestly, it's how like motivating sometimes when people are like, you can't. Oh, watch me bitch. Oh, that was me. That was it was all watching me bitch for a long time in my life.

So you left? I left there. I moved to, well technically moved to Miami for a little bit. Staved up money modeling.

I was in a situation where I had saved up my birthday and Christmas money for all these years and I had a grand total of $1,200 to my name I think. And I went into my agency and I was like, I am running out of money and I am not going to be able to stay, but I also can't go home. Like I was like, that was not an option to me. Like what I didn't know at that time was what I would then go on to remember two and a half years ago, which was that I had also experienced childhood sexual abuse.

And that was completely, those memories were fully blocked out. So I had this really panicked energy when I told them I can't go home because I didn't want to be in the vicinity of the person because that was someone in the community. And like if I was going to be there, it was going to, you know, it was an energy that I would have to be faced with. And so they picked up on the energy.

The agency just took me under their wing by allowing me to work in the office. Were you lonely? Like do you remember where you were? Well, you see.

I did not have time for feelings. Those were things that we did not do. We did a lot of things, but we did not do feelings. Hustling, hustling, it was like I did not believe in partnership, like relationships.

I was like, you know, you make your mark on the world. That is what you are here for. If you end up liking a dude, cool, but like make that a super low key thing. And now what I know about that is that when I got my diagnosis for disassociative identity disorder, which I know we'll get into.

I was splitting. I was splitting with everybody. I was splitting in every situation in order to cope and creating little antilins everywhere. Like the antilins, the models apartment and the antilins, the handling, the handling that's accounting and the antilins that's a model.

And you also understand like I'm sitting every day. I'm working as consistently as a model. And I'm showing up and I'm doing Sears catalog for children, for teenagers. And there's moms with their teenage children.

I'm by myself. So you can imagine like there's the eyes that are kind of curious and judging and probably concerned, but also judging, but also concerned. And then there's the makeup and hair chair where shit goes down. If you know anything about my industry, if you know anything about obviously for you, any kind of press, here's any of the makeup hair chair for an hour and a half, two hours.

A lot of things are discussed. The first question is where are your parents? And so I had this tailor made story of like, well, lying a lot. There was a lot of lying that went on pathological lying action.

And you're still modeling. You haven't gotten into acting yet. So at this point I have gotten into acting. I've had a few auditions.

So I moved to LA at 18. I get out. Niptuck was the kind of the hit helmet where I was on the scene finally. It was such an industry watch show.

But 90210 came and I was having a little bit of a meltdown. I was like, I don't want to be an actress anymore. I had reached this level of success where everyone was telling me, oh my God, you made it. You did it.

All the people that were, you know, saying you're never going to do it. Now I prove my point, but what did I have to prove now? Now my feelings and emotions were catching up with me. I was doing suddenly the anxiety, the depression.

I'm putting a smile on for everybody else while I'm going home and wanting to kill myself, cutting out my arms, self-harming, all this shit. And still not consciously aware at all, like not looking at any of it. So I wanted out, I thought, okay, it's because I decided to be in this egotistical world of acting where everything's narcissistic and up your own ass and like, I don't want to be here. And so I go to Cambodia.

I think I'm going to, like, literally in my mind, I'm going to help these sweet little children and be a good person in the night. They changed my life. Like they turned my world upside down. I realized from former slaves how enslaved I was because in my mind, I was a slave, I was a total prisoner to my mind.

I was so rigid. I mean, I had all these standards of perfection. I was so abusive to myself. I literally, I started doing a college tour a few years back and I would ask people, raise your hands.

If you would be friends with a voice inside your head, that was an actual person. Nobody raises their hands. And I'm like, come on, guys, nobody, nobody. It's because that voice inside our mind is an asshole, man.

Asshole. Asshole. If it was a person in the room, you'd be like, go fuck yourself. Or you would leave or you would do whatever your cognizant is to deal with bullies.

But when you can't see the bully, when it's an invisible bully hanging out in your head, you just think it's truth. Were you self-harming before you had this? And it started out here, but it was then I ended up in a dynamic that was a very sexual relationship and it went on for a while. We went into every kind of BDSM like exploration you can imagine.

And I was opening up Pandora's box sexually without consciously knowing why I might like these things, why they might turn me on the way they did because our beautiful brains that put pain and pleasure together to try to help us ended up keeping me in a body that would go on to abuse herself for a very long time. And when he and I would have fall out, it was like we were at the peak of the high is because you dope amine and oxytocin like high high levels of chemical endorphins with him and then when the drop off would happen, the fallout was massive and I started cutting. And it wasn't his fault. He thought he got so freaked out and it was interesting because I was cutting to feel anything at all.

I was so numb and a big part of BDSM for me was just trying to feel anything in my body at all cut to a decade plus later when I'm in treatment for PTSD and I'm doing EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization of reprocessing which is repressed from an extra disorder. My doctor literally put buzzers in my hand and I was like, okay, turn it up, turn up the intensity, you determine the intensity and speed. And she's like, okay, I was like, okay, you can turn up the intensity more, okay, more, okay, more. It doesn't go anymore.

This is the highest level. She said in all of her years of practice, she has never had someone whose skin sensitivity was so low. My, the level of torture that I went through when I was a child that I now remember was so horrific that my brain said no, like she can't feel. So we're going to shut off feeling to and feeling is experienced in the brain, not in the body.

The brain signals down the nervous system to the body to feel pain and I just stopped feeling pain. And my, in my sense, as we're so dull that to get to a level of having pain and people laugh and say, oh, I have a high tolerance for pain, you should ask yourself why? Because that's not a good thing. We have pain for a reason.

It is to let us know that something's wrong. And that is not, you don't win awards for having a high tolerance to pain. That's unkindness to your body. And I am now very kind to my body, but I was very, very unkind for a long time.

And the self-harmian started just because I couldn't feel anything. It was like, I was stuck in this pressure cooker that was also on this really like slow motion speed where it was like, it was just like so confusing because it was terrifying, but nothing was actually happening. And it was, yeah. I want to ask you because you've been so open about mental health and I obviously did research because I want to be as respectful as possible.

You can ask me anything, girl. No, thank you. You being so open about dissociative identity disorder, which has been very wrongly portrayed, I think, in film and media to the point where the DSM changed the name from multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder. Can you explain from your perspective and your experience like what is that?

Someone's never heard of dissociative identity disorder, like what is it to you? Absolutely. And I appreciate that you brought up the DSM because the diagnostic statistics manual refuses though even neuroscientists and doctor friends of mine and doctors who have decades combined in the field. They have refused the American Psychiatric Association that controls the printing of the DSM, refuses to put trauma in the DSM.

And yet this is what the psychiatrists are required to purchase and use as their manual to tell you that you're crazy. They won't put trauma in the fucking book, right? So it's infuriating. It's infuriating, especially for doctors who have the data to prove that you are diagnosing them.

I was a doctor. I then had my brain scan by Dr. Ayman, which was when the DID diagnosis came out. Yes, he said you don't have a bipolar brain, I've scanned 50,000 of them.

Also because we'll get to that. How long did you live with that diagnosis until it was? Like my whole family, I believe that I was bipolar forever. Like, I mean, it was crazy.

And then I went on treatment for it. You know, I was taking medication for bipolar. I am grateful that I did my own research and I went on a mood stabilizer, which actually did help me because I had all the symptoms of bipolar and they weren't necessarily wrong to diagnosing bipolar, but they're wrong to leave trauma out of the question as if it's the issue because once I healed most of my trauma, suddenly my bipolar symptoms started to disappear. So I've been diagnosed with DID.

Okay. And that was a conversation more than a, you are diagnosed with doctors so amazing. I love her so much, but she is a specialist in EMDR. So EMDR is the number one treatment for PTSD.

And while undergoing that treatment, she told me pretty much everyone who's been through what you've been through has some form of disassociation. We all actually all humans have every one. So she's on some level. Yes.

Well, disassociation is a CEO of the brain mechanism to protect you. Absolutely. We have to survive. It doesn't care what your quality of life is.

So surviving in quality of life are two very different things and we don't take that into account. Always. The, the DID diagnosis essentially means, and again, I appreciate you bringing it out, bringing it up that it is not multiple personality disorder. The name hasn't changed for a reason.

Yes. The, you are not multiple personalities when you experience disassociation identity disorder. You are fragmented versions of yourself. Your identity, I explain it like this, if your beautiful mirror hair, if God forbid someone took a hammer and smashed it.

I hope you're not superstition, let me listen to that. Mention me. But if someone took a hammer in the middle and smashed that mirror, the mirror itself was one whole being, right? One whole piece.

You can now see your reflection 900 different times. You're still one, but now you're all. It's a little confusing, right? Now, for me, the way I describe my healing integration process is I didn't have the glue to put myself back together for a long time.

Now I have an overwhelming overflowing amount of glue because glue is love. And I love myself enough to be able to see one image when I look in your beautiful mirror. Not the hammer shattered, fragmented multiple images of myself. And so you would see me over here, and the reason that the brain splits in this regard.

It's always a protective mechanism. So what you'll notice if you track backwards, if you are in a situation, you can ask yourself this. Am I ever in a situation where I feel like I have to be a certain way and I can't be any other way in that situation, or it's dangerous, or I'm going to disapprove of me, or whatever, whatever your level of danger is. It's all relative, right?

So for me, if I'm on a red carpet, I have to say everything just right. That was one of the alters that I had. But my nervous system was so overwhelmed by people, humans around me. I had social anxiety at a level that was insane, but then I was severely numb so I couldn't detect the anxiety.

So I just felt really uncomfortable in my body and then at some point I would no longer be at the event and no one would know where I went. I would find myself at home. So something would occur and I was gone. So that overwhelming experience my brain would take over and put me into my little autopilot.

So we would definitely not do this interview back then. I would have been like, oh thank you so much for having me here. Well, yes, you know, everyone's so I'm grateful for my experience. Nice to see you.

All the best to you and everyone listening. I would say a whole bunch of nothing because I'd say everything without saying anything at all. You would never get a real clear answer out of me. Like I was the perfect media trained little starlet.

Right. What was interesting was the fact that the anxiety would cause all of this to be just a big blur for me. So I wouldn't fully black out like some people lose time when they're in their other alters. I could remember things, but it's my life in a lot of ways as a blur because I was splitting so much in order to cope.

When I would be faced with men, oh my gosh, I would go into baby talk. My little Anna would pop up when so what this one of the things, right? That is a hallmark of sexual abuse is grooming. So perpetrators groom children to utilize the own child psychology against them.

It's really fucked up. Basically, it's don't you want to be a special big girl? Don't you want to be my special girl? Like, you know, what little child?

What human doesn't want to feel special? No, I don't want to be special. Right. So everything is this luring, this lure, lure, lure, lure where the child then becomes the adult that takes ownership and fault for all of their traumas because they walked into it willingly at six.

Oh, okay, I'm sorry. Yeah, come on. So for me, I had this mechanism with men where I thought I had to be really small. So, and it wasn't a conscious thought.

It was a brain protection thought where bad things happened if I wasn't good little girl that was the special girl that did the things that she was supposed to do. And so it was like immediately, there was always so much sex driven everything, but I didn't know why I had to just give my body to people. I didn't know why I had to just give my body to people. And, and I didn't realize that I was doing it because I was hoping that I got some love back.

And I was so desperate to be loved because I did feel so alone. And I was so alone for so long. When you would go into that baby talk phase, like, was it when you were in, like, conflict with your partner, like they'd be yelling at you and you would go, like, when would it be that you would utilize that version of yourself? It was, that's a beautiful question, by the way.

Thank you very much for asking it because it is, it's always, it's always triggered by some kind of uprising in some way, shape or form. For me, I would notice it in a few different ways. And one, it was one really big way was I could not, for the life of me. And I think maybe I learned on Monday how to do this.

I could not express my needs. Meets were really hard for me to admit that I had. It was like admitting weakness. It was just like horrible thing to say that I needed something.

And I think that there, I think that there are unconscious memories that I have impressions of, but I don't have full memories. I have impressions of being made to feel like I would get in trouble for saying something hurt. Like, like, it was worse if I said a need, like, I needed water or I was, you know, scared or I was hurting. Yeah.

So, so there's, because the, I mean, the anxiety, like the abstract fear that it would bring up for me to think about considering contemplating ever talking about a need was so far beyond anything that would be considered neurotypical or normal. So one aspect would be that I would, when I needed something, I'd be like, well, you're stupid because I needed to do this thing and you wouldn't do it. And that's dumb. And it was really cute and endearing.

Like, like everyone's like, you're so funny. Like, I didn't think of it as like this. Like, she's terrified. It was just like, I was being cute.

Oh, you're being cute. Okay. Meanwhile, yes, being triggered by your unable to even ask for it. You have to go to that place.

You have to go that place on. Tera can bring it out for me. Someone getting into an argument with me did not bring that out. Oh, that brought out the villains I played on television.

I was ice cold and I could be a real cunt. There was a moment and we saw it in my treatment when I was confronting my 13 year old's health was terrifying to me. I was like, you're very scary. And I do need to talk to you in my own mind.

This conversation is happening, right? Like, you're looking at me in my mind and I am melting. Like, you're like making me melt. Like my 13 year old self.

It was, it was like, she had had enough and she became the thing that had terrified her. You know how we, and I did. I became a bully. I became, I became very, I could be very emotionally psychologically abusive.

Like, I could be very, in as much as I had the biggest heart in the world, I would give you the shirt off my back. I was, I would go into a different, I would go into an altar that was just ice cold and impossible to get through to. And, and it was, I thank her now. I have so much gratitude to her.

She saved my life in many ways. But I had to make amends for some of the things she's done. And, and it was, when I was especially with Dom, I remember really, like he, he and I, so Dominic Purcell. Yeah, just for listeners, Mr.

President, right, man. But he, he's a man. Like, I had never experienced a real man before in my whole life. Like, he's a man.

Sexual, hot man. I'm just a man. Oh my God. But so I, I had never experienced a man, like a real masculine energy before.

And what's so beautiful about the masculine energy? And I hate when it's shut on because real masculine doesn't harm. It's protects. It's loyal.

It's beautiful. It's so yummy and just delicious. And I'm like, oh, look it up. So Dom, Dom does not accept a woman that bows up to him in this masculine way.

He, and he showed me, he taught me, we teach people how to treat us, right? He, I was crying when I was exhausted. I think I worked 90 hour work week and I was so dead tired and I was probably PMSing all the things and I just, it culminated into upset versus my cold hard altered, you know, literally altered ego. And I was like, I can't take it down.

Like, he literally, I can see it in my mind. I right now in my house in Marina Del Rey. Like, he, he's looking down. He grabs my shoulder.

So protective. And he goes, Anna, you like, literally shakes me. He's so passionate. He's like, when you are soft like this, I would do anything in the whole world for you.

When you get into my face like that ice cold bitch that you can become, I just want to fucking bob your head off. So like get in my truck and I drive away so I don't put you in the hospital or worse. And I was like, oh, how do you really feel? I'm like, wow, hey, oh my God, tell me more.

This is kind of sexy. Wait, also what? You're going to be coming. Oh my God.

But I never experienced this before, right? Did he know, obviously he knew about your, your diagnosis with DID, but like, well, I didn't have my diagnosis at that point. Right. So he and I, when I was 23, I was still in 92 and I was very young.

He's been a dad. Like he knew them. He, we talk about it now where the little Anna, obviously I explained to him once my doctor talked about this. I'm like, you know, how I would talk to you with that little voice.

He goes, I know a little Anna. And he was the one who named her little Anna. He's like, oh, little Anna's here today. And it was always this fatherly kind of energy that he was bringing to it.

It was very nurturing. Okay. And I was like, is it a little creepy that like our dynamic has so many like different art types to it? And he said, it's what you needed.

I was just being what you needed. And when did you get your diagnosis? August 16th, 2018. Like, I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was having blackout panic attacks where I was losing time. Oh, wow. And then I went into a depression that I could not get myself out of. And I had always been able to jumpstart my like mania, which, you know, my form of mania and get myself out of depressions up until this point by using one of my hyper sexuality or hypersunding or like any of these different traits that I had that coincided with a bipolar disorder diagnosis, but ultimately would come to prove to be trauma related.

And I was in a six month long depression. And what started to happen was that I started to panic that I was never going to get out of it. And that also was activating the like, it was a lot was deteriorating. I was also reaching an age where a lot of these things happened.

But it also coincides with the period of your life where you've lived for a decade as a technical adult. You've started to see things come full circle and now you're realizing, okay, yeah, I can calm down a little bit. This is going to work itself out or, you know, I've seen this before. Right.

Right. So at that point, a lot of people who have latent memories, it starts to stay well resurfaced. Yeah. So, and are you working on?

I know what you want at this point? At this point, I have been wrapped from the show for five years. So I've been off the show for a while at this point. And you did talk about one experience.

Yeah. So I was also sexually assaulted when I was a teenager here in LA, like a quote unquote friend. I attributed a lot of the things I couldn't necessarily put words to or connect dots on. I attribute a lot of it to that incident and was like trying to chalk it up in my mind with the pieces.

That's why I'm so fucked up. Like, okay, you know, and it was obviously it proceeded that but I, my mind was protecting me and didn't want me to dig. So it didn't let me. It gave me the story and something that people should know, because so many survivors reach out to me and share with me that they're going to believe them or their ostracized for telling me, you know, you know, what's the story.

And something that people should know, because so many survivors reach out to me and share with me that they're going to believe them or their ostracized for telling me, you ruined the family. Like, oh, yeah, I got myself raped as a child and I ruined my family. What? I'm so sorry.

I'm so confused by your logic. It's mind-boggling. But one thing I will say is do not listen to authoritarians who have no authority on a subject because they have no education and no evidentiary findings to show to you to prove that what they're saying actually has any proof whatsoever. Speak to people who are educated on the topic, who have lived the experience or both.

Otherwise, thank you so much for your opinion. Let me know when you get raped as a child and I hope you never do, but let me know when you do and then we'll have a conversation about your feelings about what the fuck happened to me. Because that is, and it, again, it's people are all coming from their pain. I get it, whatever, but like shut the fuck up.

No, actually shut the fuck up. So the memories of a trauma survivor are fragmented. They come in pieces, they come in waves, they come in impressions, they come in sounds, they come in smells, they come in all these different imagery, whatever. There are no two experiences alike because the brain is just grabbing.

Like it's someone drowning. It's a person drowning in the ocean. They are scrambling for anything to grab onto. When did you remember August 16th, 2018, what literally only three years ago, I told my doctor, I said, you know, I'm all worried about my sex life.

Like it's all I care about. I'm just like, I'm worried about my sex life. So here's the thing, like when dude sleep over, like my legs get like super frozen and I just don't sleep to the whole night. And if I want to sleep at all, like I kind of just like take his annex and pass out and completely black out fully in order to sleep at all.

So this is a little weird, right? And she's like, that is not normal. My legs will go completely numb, painfully numb. Like the whole night I would later and stay on and rotate my ankles just to alleviate the intensity of the numbness.

It was so horrible. Never occurred to me that this might be probably related to something true fuck drama. Yes. So she's like, okay, we can look at that.

But it's very hard to start this treatment process because she knew what was going to happen. She already, the second I started talking to her, she knew what she was doing. Yeah, she knew Pandora's box was going to be a lot of look open. But she was being so gracious and kind and she was like, it's hard to get into these things if we just do a body sensation.

So we should look at something in the mind and use that as the pathway in. And she was right. So we went to the third memory on the list. And this was this person and this incident and it just cuts off and it blocks out.

And I was like, it's also kind of weird because like the memory, I'm like 17 feet or so away from my body. And she was like, so you just associate it from your body. And I was like, yeah, sure, whatever. What is that?

Like, huh? I could see myself in profile. And in that moment, as a child, my image that was frozen in time, and it looked like not like a memory plays out like a movie, you know, it was like a frozen image like jam, like like it got stuck in a glitch. And it would pop up throughout my life.

It was a memory that would pop up randomly at random times I thought I was clearly being triggered. And that was flashing. But it was like, it was like a glitch in the matrix. And it was just a stagnant image and then a really icky, yucky, gross feeling.

And this kind of, I was worried about like who was around, like those were things in my awareness about the memory. And then that was it. And then go to black. My whole life changed forever.

I walked from Santa Monica to Marina Del Rey. I walked all the way home, like literally like however many miles, just like completely like in a trance. Like I was, I was, I was not in this dimension. Like, I just was like, no, like this didn't happen.

What? No, like, because if you understand, like I told a story about my life for 31 years, I had that story that I told in the makeup and hair chair. And I had a story I told on my life for 31 years. And then in 90 minutes in a treatment session, I'm a different person with a different story.

My whole life is a lie. So which one was I? Am I the story? I asked this question all the time.

Which one am I? The one who lived 31 years of a story or the one who had 90 minutes of information that altered that story entirely? And I am neither. I'm both.

I get to write that story every day. I'm the author of my story now. Every moment, this moment with you, I'm so grateful for it with you guys listening. I'm so grateful for all of you.

Because I get to write a new aniline every day. She's not the aniline that all of this happened to. I tell the story for context, but this is not my life anymore. It's anyone listening that has had one of those sessions.

I'm trying to think of like, what did you what were your next steps to make sure you were okay? And like, did you reach out to anyone? I called them. We weren't talking.

We weren't we weren't not talking. We just weren't we had in so many six months. And I said, I need you. And he got in a truck from wherever he was and drove straight to my house and stayed with me through the night.

And he saw like all of the triggers happening. Like my body just spas me. So just everyone understands. I was experiencing like physical relive.

So my body would relive the act that was perpetrated onto me involuntarily. Including asphyxiation moments where my own throat would shut itself down as if a rope was around my neck tightening and shutting off oxygen. So like these were the this was the level of like flashback memories that I experienced. So he came he witnessed that and he literally that night he said, Anna, you know that cutthroat Anna that I hate so much.

You need to be her right now. You need to remember her. You need to remember how strong you are. Did you ever tell your family?

I initially I was not going to tell my mother because I was like, I am not going to do that to her. That's insane. Ironically, I had a six a.m. flight home the next morning that was previously scheduled.

So I actually was going back to Atlanta the next day anyway. And I was terrified about coming back because my older sister had planned to pick up in the airport. She's so excited to see me. And I was like, Oh my God, like she's going to immediately know something's wrong.

And I was like, I the reason that Don had said that about Don't Forget Who You Are was I was a fragile like shell of a person like I was shaky. I felt like I was smaller in size than I am like literally in my body. I felt like I was the size of a small child, but I was in an adult body. I felt like someone was holding me up height wise because I felt really little in the whole world.

That was the energy of the feeling of what this was like. It's really hard to explain. But I can't even imagine like you've had trauma your entire life. You felt your coping mechanisms, but you're unsure of even why you do these things.

And then now all of a sudden to go back to where I'm assuming it happened in Atlanta the next day after your yeah geographically. I was going to be like based with you know, like area smells sounds voices, you know, like the obviously the southern even is just like all of it. So I still go home. I get in the car angel second.

I get in the car with my older sister. She's like, what is wrong with you? Something's wrong with you. What happened?

What's going on? Like, and I was like, I was like, I'm not bringing her down this like dark place. I was like, listen, you know, like it's okay. Like my voice was not like everything was like just fragmented.

I was that shattered mirror on the wall. But my aunt is she has a master's in psychology to social worker for years and years and years. And so I was like, can I just wait until I get to Antlin's house? That's smart.

So we I got back to my aunt's house and that's kind of when it all happened and I had the weekend there with my aunt and uncle and that was actually a beautiful gift. So it ended up being like nurturing. It ended up being nurturing and a very good thing. I got back.

I was still not going to tell my mom. So I didn't want to ruin her life. And then I was like, you know what? Actually, I need my fucking mom.

Yeah. She got on a plane the second. I called her and when people questioned me like, how did you know? I didn't know.

It happened to me. For years, I didn't remember. You know, she came out and she was incredible. Like she she held space for me in this incredible way.

When I was going through the convulsions at one point, I was crawling. So I have to say it like this because it was an involuntary response. Like a war veterans will like grab a gun that's not there and start shooting on a battlefield that doesn't exist. Right.

You know, when they're dealing with PTSD from war. So my body was doing that with this like trying to escape what was happening to me. And at this one moment, I was like, I felt like slip kind of slid off of my went into the episode, slid off my couch is just quite low to the ground. My body involuntary flipped itself and I was scraping into my floor, screaming at the top of my lungs.

Like, like, can you imagine being the mother sitting there watching your 31 year old child? Like, sound like she's your baby girl. And she doesn't know where she is. What's happening?

And she I was I was ripping through rug material with my nails. I was ripping through it, clawing for to save my life. So that was about 10 days after I now had known my life story. But I knew that I needed to go to Cambodia.

So I got I just booked a one way flight to Cambodia with like, I'll come back when I'm ready. I called the founder of my organization there who's a survivor of human trafficking has rescued over 7000 girls. She is my hero. But I called her and I'm not coming as president of the organization.

I'm not coming as the ambassador. I'm coming as a girl that you need to save because I am messed up right now. And she said, okay, come. It was life altering to be able to have this community of other survivors.

And my doctor was like, you did this backwards. You build a whole community of people that you would need and then you put yourself in a situation to remember your memories. How incredible. And and I really that was a major shift, a major healing point for me.

And I stopped involuntarily splitting. It was a crazy thing. I don't know what they did. Like we were sitting there one night.

I woke up to the seizing convulsing situation. They come and they get that we all sit in the bed together cross legged and some all he says, looking to Ratana. So Ratana is a survivor. She was raped by her father, got pregnant.

Like forced to lose the baby like a horrible situation. Her father. She he died in prison in Cambodia. It was like a if you don't rectified something before someone dies.

Like the shame goes to the child. She wrote a letter to asking him saying that she forgave him whatever he wrote a letter back saying that it was all her fault and killed himself to leave the shame on her. It was just like she and she's this light. She's this beautiful light.

It's so happy and so joyful and wants to and helps all of our girls in such amazing way. And as an hilarious and depumor and you would never know that this horrible pain was her story. And she I don't know what Somali did, but she had the girls she had Ratana to my left, nor standing across me. As my mom is on my right.

They're all sitting there and she's looking to Ratana's eyes. None of them spoke. Ratana stared into my eyes and showed me all of her pain. All of her darkness and all of her healing and all her light.

And then Nora, she said, now look at Nora and Nora showed me it was like I could see her life in her eyes and then I could see how she got through it. I don't know how to explain this to you. This is the power of human connection, right? Like I didn't sweat again.

Like I in the sense of like involuntarily like it couldn't control. I would have convulsions in these things, but I wasn't I was dealing with not being able to like get my voice back and not being able to get my like it was it was a takeover of my body from my younger self and that never happened again after that night. Wow. Yeah.

So it was a journey and it was it was interesting because getting to a place where I've gone from my little self was inside me and I would see her and she disappeared to the black and I talked to my doctor. I'm like, why is little Anna disappearing on me? And she was like, she doesn't trust you yet. She doesn't trust you yet.

The house she lived in was a little scary for a long time and I made it scary for her. I put myself in these sexual situations to be abused. I am dismantling the dungeon that I have in my home for a very long time. Yeah.

I'm like, honestly, in awe of you and your story, I like can't even begin to thank you so many women right into my show and the theme of shame is it is so heartbreaking because you did nothing wrong. Yeah. How do you tackle shame? Like what if you have any?

I love that question. Yes, I do. For me, it's I will preface this by saying that a doctor that I love, Dr. David Hawkins, may he rest in peace.

He studied kinesiology and he put together a list of emotions, human emotions that he calibrated just above death is the calibration of shame. You are a dead person walking when you are living in shame and we are in a dangerous time in our society culture where we are promoting shame at a level that is absolutely obscene and we're calling it cancellation. First of all, accountability culture. That's what you're looking for and you just named it the wrong thing, everybody.

Accountability culture gives room for redemption. Shame culture does not cancel culture does not and cancel culture is just a nice way of saying shame culture because if you're not, you're not. If you try to cancel someone, you've just canceled yourself. Have you have you never done something wrong?

Not once in your life that you're going to cancel someone else. It takes a very strong person to have compassion and that is what we're lacking when we go only in for cancellation. Where is the solution? Where is the solution in cancel culture?

What are you solving and have you seen any solution actually come as a result of your cancellations? Has anything been solved? Healing sounds great to me. That's a solution.

I'd be into it. Show me where shame heals anything. Show me where canceling someone heals anything. Do you feel better now that you canceled someone?

Did what they did to you go away? No, honey, they didn't. It didn't. But I will tell you what does make everything go away.

Compassion. Compassion, compassion, compassion. But again, not for the week. You can't be weak and be compassionate.

I have a practice. So I do a meditation anytime you want a free meditation. I will lead you guys to end. I will do it.

I'll come out here by your beautiful pole and relax you now. I'm ready. But I wanted one of the practices that changed my entire life and it was in this journey from 2018 to now that I discovered the metamatitation. And it's a Buddhist practice in its origin.

But it doesn't matter what you believe. Hopefully what you believe in is that compassion is not a bad thing. Yes. We can all agree on that.

We all agree that compassion is not a bad thing. So if you agree with that, the metamatitation goes like this. I'll drop you in and do the breath and like get you settled in. But then I ask you to offer to yourself, may I be at peace?

May I be free from suffering? May I be happy? May I be happy? May I be at peace?

May I be free from suffering? I have you asked just offer that to yourself. Just graciously offer that to yourself a couple of times because we have to love ourselves first. We can't give what we don't have.

No one teaches us to build a relationship with the person we spend the most time with, with ourselves. I have a friendship with myself now. That abusive, loud, nasty voice that I used to have in there has turned into girl. Look and fly today.

Just to be able to show up for my little Anna, the way I would have if I could have been a woman there in her life early on. I'm the woman that she needed. I became the woman she needed. That's what my doctor told me.

You became the woman that your little self needed. And I want to honor her. I want to honor her ability to survive. Anna Lynn, you are so unbelievable.

I'm inspired and honestly in awe of how open and vulnerable you are. And I think that this is going to really shine through in this episode. And people are going to be thankful and grateful to you for what you just gave them. Because I know I am.

I'll just say and respond to that to all of you listening. I am so honored to be even a small part of your journey. Thank you for obviously having me on here to be able to do that because I'm allowed to sit here with you and share my story. And because you are listening guys and you're taking this and maybe it is adding hopefully some value to your life, this means that everything that happened to me was okay now.

It's okay now. Of course we would take someone out of it in real time, but I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful. I can't tell you because it means I matter.

Okay. Hi Daddy Yang. It is your dad. Thank you guys so much for listening to this week's episode.

I know that this was a heavy one, but definitely an inspiring one. Again, thank you so much to Anna Lynn. If you guys can go DM her again. She's so fucking brave for coming on and sharing the details that she did.

And I know she was doing it also because she knows if this helps one person listening. That's all we can ask for. Also, Anna Lynn now does have a podcast with a former 902 and 0 co-host. It is called unzipped and they also released on Wednesdays.

I'm pretty sure. So if you guys want another listen, go listen to Anna Lynn and her former colleague, Shanay. It's called unzipped. I really hope that this episode helps someone.

If you by chance are feeling triggered though from this episode, whether you want to go take a walk, if you're at work, go take a walk, take time for yourself, call someone. If you don't have someone to call and you are feeling extremely triggered though guys, I want to give you guys assistance and help. You can call a 24 hour crisis hotline. The number is 800-273-8255.

You can call that 24 hours. There is also a text line that has 24 seven crisis counseling. You would text home to 741741. Again, if you don't want to get on the phone with someone, you can text the word home to 741741, which is for Canada and the United States.

I'm also going to post on Instagram the 24 seven help numbers that you can call in other countries because I know we have international data. So go on Instagram and I will post a picture for you of all the phone numbers and all the contact information if you are feeling like you need help. Bottom line guys, please take care of yourself today because as Anna Lynn put it so beautifully, you matter. We all fucking matter whenever you're going through.

You are not alone. I love you guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will see you guys. I'll see you fuckers.

Try and keep it. I will see you guys next one.