Anna Runkle
speaker
240 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 19 Nov
Anna Runkle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 5.
Appearances
Next thing you know, you're looking at all their social media and they're like, oh, they like that song. And the lyrics are about really loving somebody that you can't tell. So your mind just starts to find love where there is no love, which is what you learned to do as a kid when you weren't getting loved.
Mm-hmm. Anxiety and despair. And then just like, la-la, you know, overjoyed. You know, you've got that little bit of like maybe from them.
It was legit.
It, it might've been. How did you feel? I mean, what was your gut check?
It wasn't about you. It wasn't really something you did. She was reacting to something that was completely in her mind or her heart about it, some memory or some projection. You didn't do that.
Yeah. Yeah. Chasing the good feeling. And everybody wants that good feeling. We need love. We need to feel connected to people. But people can get limerent even when they're married, obviously. They can be limerent when they're surrounded by options, just obsessed on one person.
And it's not just because of modern times either, because there's a lot of examples in literature like Dante and Beatrice and Heathcliff and Cathy, maybe mutually limerent at different times, but not the same time, from Wuthering Heights. So it's been around. Yeah, yeah. I know. See, we love that book because it's like, see, that's what it's like. It's like that. So it's been around.
It's something that people have in their nature. And I don't think it's always because of trauma. I think kids show signs of it early. And I can't speak for everybody, but I just have an amazing sample of people who write me letters and they tell me about their life. It's like a little wheel of possibility personality types of things that happen to you and how you come out.
And I don't like to believe like every cause equals the same effect. But there's a really common denominator with people who are stuck on somebody and can't get over it with a lack of enough attention when they were kids. They didn't get seen as a person. They didn't get their personality kind of appreciated and validated like, oh, yeah, you love karate. Yeah. And that didn't happen.
And that may have affected things to do with neurological development. That's one of the most important discoveries about what's the problem with trauma in childhood is neurological development. There can be some holes there. And so there's just this weird thing. And sometimes, did you ever hear about this? It was a research experiment a long time ago and I learned about it in school.
You're younger than me, but there was a wire monkey and they tested whether a baby monkey separated from its mother would prefer to go to the fake fur covered wire monkey mother or just the wire frame that had a bottle in it. And the baby would starve to death to hold on to the furry wire model. Okay. I don't even know if that's true. Like nowadays we found out all that kind of stuff is bullshit.
Just the need for love is so great that we will die for it. And I think that's what happens is that natural instinct to fall in love and have a mate is just sitting there going along like an engine without the right person in front of it.
Yeah, I don't think it's even conscious, mostly, right? Not at all. It may match very closely. We're designed to have that primary relationship with our moms to sort of imprint us with how to fall in love. And let's say that she was high all the time or gone or just troubled, had to work all the time, crying, depressed, mentally ill, running off with a boyfriend.
Whatever it was, then the abandoning relationship can feel, you know, it's just the thing that activates you and you can't help it. And I made up a word for that. It's the erotization of abandonment. Like it only turns you on if you're getting kind of left.
I've done my share of it. And I'm an intelligent person. And it makes no sense.
It's caused me no end of suffering. And just sort of some attachment wound kind of just pushing me along. And that's a lot of what my career is, is I teach people a more structured way to date. So that you can override that problem. You can't necessarily undo the problem because it's sort of imprinted on you, but you can override it by dating in a structured way where you don't let that happen.
You stay with your reason without bonding with somebody so that it's even possible to see the red flags.
But what we're doing when we're going down the rabbit hole of the red flag man, the bad boy, is we stop talking to people. We don't want to tell anybody about it. We know they'll disapprove and we want to keep the little fantasy intact.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I can think of times when, I don't know, the problem person was so inappropriate that I didn't want to tell them. The CV was pathetic. You couldn't take them anywhere. This one guy, he didn't even have a pair of pants that weren't just cut off and frayed around the calves somewhere and covered with stains. And I was working for some nonprofit.
I'd be like, I want you to have a pair of pants so you can come with me. And he was like, I don't want to come with you.
Showing 61–80 of 240 · page 4 of 12
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