Healing the Connection Wound with Crappy Childhood Fairy, Anna Runkle

Everything is the Best

Dear Media, Pia Baroncini

Pia, Everything, Best, Media, Society & Culture, Baroncini, Dear, Education

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Everything Is the Best, I sit down with Crappy Childhood Fairy—aka Anna Runkle—to talk about practical recovery for adults who grew up with chaos, neglect, or inconsistency. We get specific about how trauma shows up in daily life (overreacting, shutdowns, people-pleasing, money and relationship spirals) and how to interrupt those patterns with simple, repeatable tools.

Anna—an Oakland resident and Berkeley native—has shown people how to heal symptoms of childhood trauma for nearly thirty years. Known to more than a million followers across platforms (including ~929K YouTube subscribers and 78M+ views), she’s a survivor herself, and her methods are changing lives every day.

We also dive into her forthcoming book, CONNECTABILITY: Heal the Hidden Ways You Isolate, Find Your People, and Feel (At Last) Like You Belong (Hay House; October 7, 2025). Anna explains why a haunting sense of disconnection is an almost universal adult symptom of childhood trauma (and increasingly common even for those with “normal” childhoods), and how to rebuild connection with clear, doable practices.

You’ll learn:

A plain-language framework for nervous system dysregulation—and how to come back online

The two-part daily practice (brief writing + short meditation) to reduce reactivity in under 20 minutes

How to spot “trauma time,” respond to triggers (yes, even unanswered texts), and choose self-compassion over withdrawal

Scripts and boundaries to rebuild trust, navigate conflict, and “read the room” without shame

Why consistency—not perfection—creates the conditions for real connection

About the book:

In Connectability, Anna offers research-backed lessons, self-reflection prompts, and daily connection plans to help you: notice early signs of dysregulation, lean into healthy vulnerability, set confident boundaries, master the art of apologizing, and build the kind of close, reliable relationships that support lifelong well-being. It’s a hopeful, practical path for anyone who struggles with people—whether you have a trauma history or simply carry old connection wounds in a lonely era.

Produced by Dear Media

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The following podcast is a Dear Media production.
0:15.6	Hello, my darlings.
0:17.7	So this week on everything the best, I sit down with the crappy childhood fairy, otherwise
0:23.8	known as Anna Runkle.
0:25.2	We talk about practical recovery for adults who grew up with chaos, neglect, or inconsistency.
0:31.1	It's something that we haven't really done a deep dive on in this podcast, and I couldn't imagine anybody better to do it with Anna's unbelievable.
0:41.8	So we talk about her childhood trauma.
0:45.6	She grew up on a cults and, you know, the process of which she came into doing what she's doing now, which is, you know, she's almost a million
0:55.0	YouTube subscribers and over 78 million views on YouTube, talking about being a survivor,
1:00.3	her methods, and how she's changing lives every day. So we also do a really amazing deep dive
1:05.5	into her forthcoming book, Connectability, Heal the Hidden Ways You Isolate, Find Your People,
1:10.0	and Feel Like You Belong, which just came out on October 7th. And it explains what connectability, heal the hidden ways you isolate, find your people, and feel like you belong,
1:11.5	which just came out on October 7th. And it explains why a haunting sense of disconnection is an
1:18.0	almost universal adult symptom of childhood trauma and honestly becoming increasingly more common
1:24.4	and how to rebuild connection with very clear doable practices. So we talk
1:28.6	about nervous system dysregulation, the two-part daily practice that she uses every day,
1:34.8	kind of all day long, had to spot trauma time, how to rebuild trust. The book is really amazing.
1:39.3	I brought it home and like kind of like opened it up to this like I love when you do this with books I
1:46.6	opened it up to all the signs of dysregulation it was like the first page I opened it to and like
1:52.0	went through it with Davy Day and we were both like whoa like so many of these things are
1:58.0	you know symptoms that we experience so often and And so to have a practical book, you know, for somebody who, like, I'm in therapy constantly, but like, that's not, you know, Davida is not a big therapy guy. So, and neither is Anna. It didn't work for her. So I've been able to like do this with Davida. We've been like actively doing the practice at home since we recorded this podcast a few weeks
2:19.7	ago.
	...

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