The Crappy Childhood Fairy Podcast with Anna Runkle

There’s an almost universal symptom that people who grew up with trauma will tend to exhibit - and it’s a sense of disconnection. And even though you crave social connection, trauma often comes with "people triggers" that make interactions stressful and dysregulating for you. When you're feeling triggered by people, shutting them out feels like it's the right, best, most self-caring thing you can...

There is a huge connection between abuse and neglect – especially emotional neglect in childhood – and a painful pattern in adulthood of pouring all the love in your heart into the IDEA of someone you can’t have. The word for this is limerence. And as much as this is a painful and lonely maladaptation of our very human need for love – there’s something tender and beautiful about this too. I used t...

Not every obsessive relationship is a romance. Sometimes it’s a friendship that gets through the cracks of the neglect you grew up with in childhood, and it becomes HUGE In your mind. You think about them, you want them to approve of you, you want them to unconditionally love and support you in all circumstances, all the time – (which is a clue, by the way, this is an unmet need from your childhoo...

For those of us with childhood trauma, this is what can hurt relationships the most: We get overwhelmed and emotionally dysregulated, and with anger growing more and more intense, we explode. That’s lashing out. There’s another way to release the intensity, without abandoning your true feelings. In this video, I teach you what's going on when that happens, along with strategies you can use *in the...

One way you can get deeply hurt in a relationship is when you SEE the red flags in your partner's behavior, but instead of confronting them, you gaslight yourself: This means going into denial, justifying your partner's mistreatment of you, or distorting the truth of the situation. Why do we do this In this 4-video compilation I share four of my most popular videos from people I've called-out for...

There are SOME people, some situations, that shut down your common sense. You can be going along doing pretty well, you’re seeing life clearly, you’re moving forward, your judgment is good. And then that ONE person comes along and it’s like they cast a spell on you. They make you crazy with weird signs that something’s not right. And instead of thinking clearly, your mind stops working, and you go...

When you grew up neglected, abandoned, and with none of your needs met – you may be likely to fall in love with people who are unable to provide the solid, caring love that you need and crave. And at the same time, the wounds of neglect drive you to cling to them, even after it's clear they're unstable, emotionally unavailable, or not safe to be near you. This is the critical juncture where trauma...

A “People Pleaser” is someone who abandons their authentic response to other people during their interactions – who abandons their own choices of what to do, what to say, and what to BE, opting instead to try to guess what other people want. It's a leftover symptom of early trauma, but can block your healing. Do you know someone like this, or do you find yourself people-pleasing others? In this vi...

To avoid responsibility for their own actions, abusive parents sometimes make one child into a scapegoat, and siblings follow suit. The person scapegoated suffers horribly, but getting pushed out of the family sometimes means they demonstrate more strength and success in life than those who we kept in the family fold. In this 4-video compilation, I respond to letters from people working to heal th...

Participating in a recovery program is a powerful way to get support and change your life. In any group -- in person or online -- there's always some risk that someone will be inappropriate or cross boundaries, especially when everyone in the group is there *because* they struggle. It's not uncommon in meetings that one person takes a romantic interest in someone they meet there, and sometimes the...

Some people are deeply confused about what’s appropriate to say and do around their kids. When parents are unboundaried like that, walking around undressed, raging, getting emotional, talking about exploits, it makes kids feel scared again and again, putting them at risk to develop Complex PTSD, and robbing them of a sense of safety in the world. In this video, I respond to a letter from a woman w...

If your life energy is strongly concentrated on another person and their dysfunctional behavior... and you believe you'd be happy if you could just make them change...and they haven't changed... and you fight about it -- *you* have a problem. Maybe they have a problem too, but *your* problem is that you’ve surrendered all your power to a person who is actually not acceptable to you. That is what c...

Many people affected by early trauma work HARD to heal, but don't get results. If you're ready to move forward and you're prepared to make changes that make healing easier, you'll want to hear this 4-video compilation where I share my best trauma healing tips. Heal Trauma in Just One Year?: FREE PDF Download: https://bit.ly/3JrPdvx 🟢 Order My New Book, RE-REGULATED: https://bit.ly/4dtGVze Take my...

Limerence is an addiction-level romantic obsession with someone you can’t have. It can get so bad that you're checking out of reality, isolating and fantasizing that the person you love loves you back. It’s common in people who were emotionally neglected as kids, and it can rob you of any chance of truly loving someone and being loved in your life, because limerence takes up that space where anyon...

Hardly anyone understands this, but when you spend your life pursuing people who aren’t into you and won’t commit to you – guess who’s the avoidant? You are. Even though you’re devastated when they reject you and you pine away for them after it’s over, there’s something about the way you *know* it can never work out that sets you free to love without reservation. You can love deeply, but keep your...

So many people are walking through life WANTING to solve problems of connection, and purpose and productivity and TRYING to do it. And they don’t even realize they’re doing this! But they’re holding their lives – and especially the PEOPLE in their lives – at arm's length. This is what I call “covert avoidance.” You LOOK like you’re engaged deeply with your life, but really? You’re distracted, you’...

If you want a loving, committed relationship, you may be undermining that by having no-love, no-commitment FWB relationships. You may have been conditioned to believe that filling your time with meaningless s*x was OK, until magically, the love of your life comes along -- that you could just ditch the empty relationship at that time, and happiness would follow. In this 4-video compilation, I share...

It doesn’t matter what your avoidant partner tells you: If they are giving you the silent treatment – storming out, going AWOL for days or weeks at a time with no explanation, they are emotionally abusing you. And if you’re left feeling obsessed and frantic for little crumbs of communicaiton, I’m sending you a lifeline, to tell you – your trauma wounds have been activated, and from here on out, it...

A pathological narcissist makes you feel like the most special person in the world, and then the next day, will discard you for the tiniest of reasons – and then they blame you. If you grew up with parents who sometimes cared for you and sometimes forgot about you – or blamed you, you may be especially vulnerable to this dizzy cycle with partners who idealize you, become emotionally abusive, and t...

People talk a lot about being "trauma bonded" but most don't know what it means. They mistakenly think it’s when two traumatized people form a bond because they have that shared experience of trauma. And that happens, but that’s not what it means to be “trauma bonded.” In fact, the truth is much worse. Is this happening to you? In this video, I explain how trauma bonds develop, what the signs are...

Here’s the hard truth about trauma: Some of the things you didn’t get as a child, can’t be fixed directly. We can’t go back in time. We can’t be children again to receive the proper love and care we needed then. And we can’t save people we lost. But those of us with CPTSD CAN learn to fill our lives with love and support NOW, and start working on the triggers, and the distorted thinking, and the s...

You’ve probably heard this: The most common phobia in the world is public speaking. An estimated 75% of people experience anxiety when they have to speak in front of people. When you add a history of trauma into the mix, well – if you watch this channel, you’ve probably experienced it yourself. Speaking in front of groups can be paralyzing. My letter today is from a woman whose fear of public spea...

Getting closure after a breakup is a real thing. But too often, people in the grips of heartbreak use the word to justify attempts to reconnect, so they can get another chance to try again to be loved. But the reason they won't just say "I want another chance" is they want “plausible deniability" – they need cover for the fact that they are so obsessed they will tolerate rejection or worse, just t...

Of all the red flags I’ve learned to detect, there’s one that really makes my “danger” radar go off, and that’s when a grown man or woman says they NEVER want to grow up. What does that mean? In the people I’ve known, it means they don’t have their shit together – and they’re pretending that there’s this FUN reason why. In this video, I teach the signs that childhood trauma has kept aspects of you...

Your Childhood PTSD symptoms have likely created a lifetime of problems in relationships choosing unavailable people, clinging to bad relationships or avoiding intimacy altogether. But the reason you long for real love -- a "great love" even -- is because you were born to love and be loved. How does a person move past the hurts of the past and learn, at last, to love? How To Prepare For a Great Re...