Creating True Connectability With Anna Runkle

Live Happy Now

Live Happy LLC

Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Health & Fitness:mental Health

4.7 • 522 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the most universal struggles today is a feeling of disconnection, so this week host Paula Felps talks with Anna Runkle — better known as the “Crappy Childhood Fairy” — about her new book Connectability: Heal the Hidden Ways You Isolate, Find Your People and Feel (At Last) Like You Belong. Anna shares how her own journey from childhood trauma to building genuine, sustaining friendships shaped the practices she now teaches to thousands. With humor and heartfelt insight, she explains why connection is essential yet elusive — and how we can all start creating it for ourselves. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why disconnection is often a hidden symptom of early trauma and how it affects our ability to build relationships. Practical, non-therapy tools from Connectability to regulate your nervous system and begin forming authentic bonds. How letting go of unhealthy relationships and practicing new social skills can help you “find your people” at any age or stage of life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for joining us for episode 540 of Live Happy Now.
0:08.0	We all crave connections.
0:10.0	So what do we do when we find ourselves disconnected and alone?
0:14.1	I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with Anna Runkle, better known as the crappy childhood fairy,
0:19.9	to talk about her new book, Connectability.
0:23.4	As you're about to discover, Anna is an expert in helping people heal their trauma symptoms,
0:28.5	and one of the biggest challenges for many is creating connections. So she's here to talk about
0:33.8	why connecting is so essential, but also so difficult, how trauma affects our
0:38.4	connections, and how you can find your people. Let's have a listen.
0:43.2	Anna, thank you so much for being with me here today.
0:45.7	Thank you, Paula.
0:46.9	The first thing that I would love to hear from you, because this is the thing about you
0:50.9	that completely won me over, is tell our listeners how you came to
0:55.9	be known as the crappy childhood fairy. I started out with a very serious and clinical sounding
1:02.5	name. It started as a blog and I started writing a couple of blog posts and within two blog posts
1:08.5	without even I hadn't even published them yet. I was boring myself to
1:11.8	death. Honestly, the sort of thing that I would want to read or watch or listen to on a podcast,
1:18.7	there's got to be like a few laughs in it. And with my friends who I had been healing with up to that
1:24.3	date, the best form of how you know you your healing is you're having a laugh with your
1:28.8	friends. There's nothing better. So, yeah. I love that. And it is. That's so very true. We talk
1:34.9	about that on the show about the importance of humor and being able to just how good it is for us
1:40.4	to be able to laugh. And even if you're using darker gallows humor, I know Dr. Robin Henley-Defo has talked about that a bit about how gallows humor, it's still healing for us. We use it and it's a form of resilience and recovery that we tap into. Yeah, yeah. You know, I do end up teaching about some very hard things. And together with my audience, sometimes we're facing some
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