The Crappy Childhood Fairy Podcast with Anna Runkle

It can be HARD to find the right person and form a deep and lasting romantic relationship -- especially if you've had trauma in your past, or you come from a dysfunctional family. If you want to attract real love, then it's time for YOU to get ready! In this video, I cover 20 signs that YOU are "partner material." This means you're happy, you're able to give love, and your life is not complicated...

Abuse and neglect in childhood can set in motion lifelong trauma symptoms. The people who hurt you are 100% responsible for this harm... it's NOT your fault. It's also true that in adulthood, many of us continue to retraumatize ourselves with what I call "self-defeating behaviors." These are the habits and tendencies that can suck you right back down into dysregulation and lead you into MORE traum...

If your attachment style is so anxious and insecure that when your partner pushes you away, and says “I don’t want to be with you anymore,” – YOU hold on tighter than ever – you are stuck in distorted thinking. If you’ve ever done this – and I have – you know on some level that you’re wrong. It’s your fear of abandonment driving you to beg and humiliate yourself. And then what do you do? Rationali...

Your partner is not your child, so if you're doing everything for them (when they could do these things for themselves), you are overfunctioning. If you grew up with trauma, you may have been “programmed” to pick up all the slack, which might work for a little bit, but eventually it breeds resentment and breakdown of the relationship. Overfunctioning doesn't change by itself when the relationship...

Having more than your share of conflict with other people is a common adult symptom of growing up with neglect and abuse. Fighting, arguing, and falling out with people can feel normal when your nervous system is always dysregulated. It can feel like the world is doing this to you. But if it keeps happening, the common factor may be you, and the good news is, you can heal this trauma-driven behavi...

Attachment wounds stem from your primary relationship with parents when you were a child, and affect who you fall in love with, and how you behave in relationships. In this 4-video compilation, I share four of my most popular videos in which I answer letters from people struggling with attachment styles -- disorganized, avoidant, and anxious -- and the triggers this generates in their relationship...

It’s so hard to know if you should stay in a safe relationship even though it’s dull, or break up with that person so you can try for something more romantic and wild? If you grew up with trauma, you may see these as the only two options. And chances are, until you heal, no new relationship will bring the fulfillment and love you hope for. In this video I respond to a letter from a woman who is de...

People with CPTSD often end up with a harsh "edge" to their personalities, especially when they feel vulnerable. It's no surprise that after a childhood of emotional neglect and deprivation, without protection from bullies or abusers, some of us would have "fighting energy," even when we're trying to flirt or go on dates. You can develop a distorted idea of the qualities people are looking for in...

Unfortunately, it can be very easy to take advantage of people who were traumatized as kids, and make them think that some uncomfortable or painful or exploitative situation will lead to being loved. When you haven’t been loved properly, almost everyone becomes vulnerable to manipulation, because love and being included is something we all want so much. We need it! And one way that manipulative pe...

One sign that childhood trauma is still affecting you is that you probably have at least one of these common triggers -- things that set off dysregulation in your nervous system, and make it hard for you to function at your best. These include hurrying, socializing, abandonment and feeling left out. Do you have these? In this 4-video compilation I share some of my most popular videos about these f...

It’s every traumatized kids’ dream, that one day, your parents will finally see how much their abusive behavior hurt you, and they’ll change, and say they’re sorry – even if you had to cut them out of your life for a long time – and do everything that’s needed to set things right. But really, what COULD set things right? And even if they really had changed, would you be able to handle picking up t...

In life, there are people who are going to try to treat you badly. Your gut is going to tell you that what they’re doing is NOT OK, and your gut KNOWS you need to get out of there. But if you were abused or neglected as a kid? There’s something a lot stronger than what you know to be true, and that’s the fear of leaving someone you’ve formed an attachment with. It will make you doubt what you see...

The most powerful thing you can do to have meaningful connection with people is to make them feel like you hear them. People love this, and doing it is an art. But very few people get trained how to do this, especially those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families. In this video, I'll teach you how to overcome ten common conversation stoppers that push people away, and how to make people feel...

Growing up abused and neglected has an almost universal effect of draining people of their innate POWER. You lose the sense that you have agency to make anything good happen. It takes will, resilience and luck to recover enough to remember who you are, to stay connected to your potential, and to know it's worth trying to become MORE than you are right now. In this 4-video compilation I teach about...

Being avoidant in relationships isn’t just the obvious stuff – they won’t commit, they blow hot and cold, they ghost you when you try to talk about commitment. You might not realize this, but if you have a PATTERN of falling for people like this, YOU are avoiding intimacy just as much, but in your own way. In this video I respond to a letter from a woman who is navigating a relationship where two...

Nothing good can come from relationships built on lies. You can tell yourself that you lie because you don’t want to hurt the other person. You can tell yourself you lie because something bad happened to you when you were a kid. And you can put all kinds of psychological jargon on it. But if you keep doing it, it will wreck everything in your life, and seriously harm others around you. So the ques...

The core symptom of early trauma is neurological dysregulation, and it drives almost every other CPTSD symptom (or makes it worse). In this video, I explain what dysregulation is, what it feels like, and how you can support trauma healing powerfully by learning to re-regulate quickly, and stay regulated more of the time. Doing this can help you feel calmer and more focused, and increase your succe...

Work and career are important to success and happiness. But trauma from your childhood can trigger behaviors that block your advancement and ruin opportunities. In this 4-video compilation, I teach how common trauma-driven behaviors can hurt your work life, and how you can stop the self-sabotage, manage your symptoms and thrive in your career. Do you have CPTSD? Take the QUIZ: FREE PDF Download: h...

People who were traumatized in the past can be easy targets for people seeking CONTROL. Has this happened to you? If your sense of self is not yet strong, it's easy to fall under the spell of someone who will TELL you who you are. They’ll what you should do and if you push back, they will punish you. This is narcissistic abuse. It’s emotional manipulation. And it's how people can be "brainwashed"...

When someone is wounded by trauma in childhood, it can SEEM to them that other people should be able to make them feel better. They may believe that if only you cared enough, or validated their feelings enough, their loneliness and hurt would go away. This is a lot of pressure, and a projection that you can't actually fix for them. It's hard to be compassionate with someone who is hurting, and yet...

Complex PTSD (CPTSD) is a cluster of symptoms that can result from chronic, intense, ongoing trauma, usually during childhood. The symptoms include poor mental focus and procrastination, emotional dysregulation, chronic health problems and a haunting sense of disconnection from other people. It can be a huge relief to discover these symptoms have a name. And once you know the signs, you can get to...

Most people won't tolerate mistreatment from friends. But if you grew up with abusive or neglectful parents, you may have been conditioned to hang on for life to toxic friends, no matter what. In this four-video compilation of some of my most popular videos, I respond to letters from people whose connection wounds are keeping them trapped in toxic friendships. Instead of leaving, they are giving i...

If you were betrayed in childhood by the adults you trusted, your self-esteem and boundaries can be so wounded, that you become “betrayal blind.” You can SEE you’re getting SO much LESS than you need and deserve in a relationship, but because you can’t face ending things, you UNSEE it. This is self-deception, and we are motivated to disbelieve what we see because the need for love is SO strong, an...

When you were a child you needed the attention of parents – not just for food and shelter, but for your emotions. You need them to recognize and see when you were struggling, and help you navigate relationships, stand up for yourself, and set boundaries. That's what parenting IS. In this video, I respond to a letter from a woman who was raised by dismissive parents, who invalidated her needs and p...

Being around people, especially if you grew up with trauma, can feel stressful, trigger-y, and dysregulating. People can be mean, they judge you and they make you feel left out, like you don’t belong. For many of us, this started when we were in our own families when we were small. Did this happen to you? The coping mechanism you might have used was Self-Suppression -- playing small and trying to...