The Crappy Childhood Fairy Podcast with Anna Runkle
I’m Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy, and I teach people to recognize and heal the symptoms of Childhood PTSD. Welcome to my podcast!I’m not a doctor or therapist; I know about childhood trauma because I lived it, and I discovered a radical approach to healing that focuses first on calming neurological dysregulation, which is common in people who grew up with abuse and neglect. In my podcasts, I teach about dysregulation – how to know if you have it, what it can do to your body, your thinking and your relationships, and what to do to master re-regulation. When I learned this, everything in my life got suddenly easier. I’ll also be teaching you to heal the life problems that so often develop after years of living dysregulated – feeling tired, isolated and unfocused, finding yourself always drawn to unavailable and inappropriate partners, and falling WAY short of your professional potential, for example. The thing about me is, traditional therapies never seemed to help me. When I found techniques that did work, my whole life changed. Only in the past few years has the trauma research caught up to explain why – why the techniques I use worked, why therapy didn’t, and why my healing journey was so unnecessarily long. I’ve been teaching what I learned for more than 20 years now. It started with friends who had noticed the quick and dramatic change in me, and gradually grew by word of mouth. In 2016, I had so many people seeking instruction that I made my first online video, and then an online course, and this is how Crappy Childhood Fairy was born. My techniques and principles are practical yet powerful – an approach anyone can use, whether or not you have access to professional help. In this podcast, I’ll be talking about the master of self-regulation, and teach the tough-love life-lessons that you may not have learned at home – like how to date so that stable love finds you, how to get ahead at work, and how to calm the negative hamster-wheel thoughts that block your ability to connect with other people. Today, almost half a million people follow my work and participate in my training and coaching programs. My mission is to change the paradigm of what’s possible for people like us, and to help you free yourself from the oppression of trauma wounds, and to become your full, happy and real self. I’m glad you’re here! Watch new videos on my YouTube channel every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and access my videos, courses and free tools at crappychildhoodfairy.com.
- Update frequency
- every 2 days
- Average duration
- 34 minutes
- Episodes
- 498
- Years Active
- 2022 - 2025
Abuse, Neglect, and the Suppression of Intelligence
Early trauma can do tremendous damage to your ability to think, learn and remember, and one reason is the neurological dysregulation that often results from abuse and neglect in childhood. There is a…
Either Way, Fixating on Changing Your Partner Hurts You Both
One way that childhood trauma hurts your ability to have a healthy relationship is by halting your emotional development. When your parents threaten and ignore you, you have only your child’s mind to…
What to Do When They Push Their Views On You
Opinion bullies have been running around, enjoying a new sense of unlimited power for several years now, trashing good and decent people, shunning things like discussion, inquiry and debate. It’s sho…
Childhood Bonds With Parents Drives You Now (4-Video Compilation)
When you weren’t loved properly as a child, your brain will tell you that the first person who is kind to you is the ONE, and you have to be with them, and you have to be with them NOW. CPTSD and att…
Boyfriend’s Insensitive Comment May Not Be the Problem
One thing that hurts relationships is comparing your partner to others. But something that ALSO hurts relationships is discarding them when they make a mistake. In this video, I respond to a letter f…
Their Life Is a Mess and THEY BLAME YOU
Even if you survived the trauma of abusive or neglectful parents, it’s very likely that your brother or sister or someone else in the family absorbed the chaos, and their trauma-driven behaviors end …
10 Ways Past Trauma Suppresses Income (How to Change This Now)
One thing trauma experts don’t talk about enough is the connection between growing up with trauma – and UNDER-EARNING. This is a huge problem for so many of us with CPTSD. And when you’re underearnin…
Why Your Productivity is a Roller Coaster (4-video compilation)
If you're rebuilding your life after trauma, you may have experienced "Productivity Crashes" -- my term for when you emotionally collapse (and often physically retreat) after big, courageous accompli…
The Abusers Are Gone, But The Hurt Still Needs Healing
It’s human nature to require justice. Somehow we NEED to know in our bones that the kind of harm that was done to us as children is NOT RIGHT, and should not have happened, and someone should have co…
Why You Shouldn’t Wait for an Apology
Living through a rough childhood, it’s hard not to hope that ONE day, the parents who neglected you and made life chaotic will SEE – they’ll come around and admit what they did, and how they didn’t t…
Why Malignant Narcissists Love CANCEL CULTURE
Abuse and violence are crimes, but having your own opinion is an essential part of trauma healing. Those who grew up with narcissistic abuse were forced to conform, comply. People who "cancel" others…
CPTSD & The Feeling You Can't Connect (4-video compilation)
People who were abused or neglected as children long to feel a sense of belonging. But it's an almost universal symptom of CPTSD to feel like you can't connect with others. You may feel like you don'…
There's Something Appealing About Partners Who Disappoint
Trauma in your childhood gives you a blind spot that makes it easy to become attached to people who are AVOIDANT – they pull away when you try to pull close, they don’t GET it about being present for…
How to End Limerence Before You Destroy Everything Good
Once in a while, I get a letter seeking my advice that’s so serious I’m not sure if I should read it on YouTube. Usually I decline, but in the case of a letter I received just a few days ago, I could…
What to Tell MDs Who Just Don’t Get It About CPTSD
For a lot of people who were abused or neglected in childhood, going to the doctor is a huge trigger. The questions they ask, the fact that they need to TOUCH you, and the control they have over whet…
Childhood Trauma and Damaged Perception (4-Video Compilation)
As a child you developed the ability to use "magical thinking" to cope with abuse and neglect, but NOW, as an adult, it just might be blocking you from ever escaping troubled relationships, finding i…
Here’s How You Know It’s Time to Tell Him You’re Into Him
You have a friend you’re secretly in love with. You thought you had to act like just a friend, to keep them as a friend, because you were sure they would never have feelings for you. That could be tr…
How Trauma Makes It Hard to Recognize What’s Really Happening
When traumatized people date, it’s easy to detach from reality, and create elaborate constructs that explain why other people do what they do, and why we feel hurt by it – without having to actually …
You May Be Signalling to Others That You Feel “Less-Than”
Even if you're good at acting confident, you may be giving off signs that you feel "less than" other people. Low self-esteem can have the effect of pushing good people away from you, and this in turn…
They're Not Into You, So You Love Them MORE (4-Video Compilation)
People neglected as children sometimes spend their WHOLE life longing for love – chasing it, fighting for it, and never having it, all because of an attraction to unavailable people. This includes pe…