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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 5.
Appearances
Yeah, it's weird, huh? I think there's a kind of privilege that nobody talks about. I'm a kid who grew up with a heroin addict mom, very poor on welfare, and when people talk about my privilege, I'm like, you know. not necessarily in every way there, but I think there's this incredible privilege of people who are loved properly all their lives.
And so they have an innate sense of like when somebody talks to them in an, in an abusive manner, they're out of there. They're just like, I don't, I don't tolerate this. They feel it, they see it, they leave and they know they can like, they have people to return to so that they're not all alone.
But if you're all alone in the world and a lot of people really are, and there's been times I, I just didn't have people to go to and, You know, there's a lot of incentive to just trying to have words for everything. I call it crap fitting. You fit yourself to crap. You just need you need somebody to hang out with so bad that you will tolerate unacceptable people and just intolerable conditions.
And then you get so good at it. You don't want to be good at crap fitting. And it'll keep a roof over your head sometimes, you know, and you stay in something. But sometimes you have to take the bold step and get out. And that's like when we see somebody who's an abused partner and they just don't leave and they keep going back. It's very hard to make that break because...
Staying grinds down your confidence. It grinds down your realistic vision that, yes, I might have to couch surf or live in a shelter or have some crappy little apartment for a little bit, and I'll have to find a job, and I don't know how I'm going to do it, but there's no other way, and I will find a way. That's what freedom is, like actual healing and freedom.
It's not like controlling other people and stopping them from triggering you or anything. The freedom is just knowing whatever happens, I'll figure it out. I'll figure out what to do. Like that's confidence and freedom.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you've been through some hard times, and many people have, I think that's something that we don't always realize about everybody. And part of my work is getting hundreds of letters from people who are going through a really hard time. It's really opened my heart. I'm a lot less scornful of people who are screwing up. I get it. I get it. And I've been there.
And it was a miracle that I got through a lot of the stuff I got through.
Yeah, yeah. But I mean, a real loving relationship is a bit of a validation. It's a healing. There's that fundamental loneliness of being human. Marriage doesn't fix everything, but a good marriage is a healing of sorts. And so it's natural to want that. One of my analogies is it's like plastic fruit. My nana, she was from Brooklyn, and she was an immigrant. Her family was from Norway.
And she liked to have this Baroque living room, and there was fake chandeliers. And there was this crystal bowl of plastic fruit. And as a kid, me and my cousins, we couldn't resist it. We were always just like, oh, those grapes, they just look so good. And we would bite into them, and they were like... That's what it's like. That's what limerence is like.
You're just like, oh, that person is the most beautiful thing. You know, it's weird. I'm sure you get this. Once you're on YouTube, it's a little bit like being a television star or something in our small way. And then people get it for me. And they think my videos were about them. That would be an extreme case. Or they just think... They just think I understand them as nobody else can.
And they're surprised when they meet me in person that I'm very friendly. And I look people in the eye and I'll give them a hug and listen and stuff. But I actually don't know them. I don't know their name or anything. And that comes as a surprise.
And you'd almost have to wonder if there was some payoff in it, right? And I've got a book coming out in October about that. I call it covert avoidance. That if you are continuously getting obsessed with or into a relationship with somebody who can't love you back, you're avoidant. You're avoidant. And no one who's doing that perceives themselves as avoidant. They're hungry. They're chasing.
They're trying. They're begging and hoping. But it's avoidance.
Oh, that's so good.
Yeah, I do.
That's exactly right. You've outsourced it and now you can perceive yourself as the good one and, um, And put the power, the locus of control in the other person.
Yeah, yeah. And I don't think anybody does it consciously, but I think a lot of avoidance is like that. There's so many forms that we are avoiding. We're avoiding our lives. We're avoiding true connection with other people. And... I just finished my manuscript. Congratulations. Thank you. I've been thinking a lot about it. My last book was re-regulated about nervous system.
And I talk about the disconnection there, but now I've gone for the deep dive to the disconnection, which is basically where the devil gets in. That's just... Without genuine connection, we get weirder and weirder and people get, they feel offended when I say that. So I'll speak for myself. When I'm isolated, I get weird and not in a good way. I get cranky.
Well, when we're hanging out with other people in real life, we get socialized. And we all saw during lockdown, for example, what were we like when we didn't get to hang out with people very much. And I remember sitting in a cafe for the first time where other people were in the cafe and we weren't acknowledging each other or anything, but they were there. And I was just like, this is great.
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