Have you ever had one of those moments where you catch yourself in the middle of a reaction, maybe are snapping at someone you love or shutting down completely when you most need to stay present and you think where did that even come from?
Because here's what most of us don't realize until it's cost us a lot.
A significant part of how we move through the world, it isn't a choice we're consciously making.
It's this old survival code wired into us long before we had words for any of it, still quietly running in the background of our adult lives.
And the work of actually changing that, not just understanding it intellectually, but shifting it for real.
That's what today's conversation is all about.
My guest is Dr Nicole Lepera, a psychologist trained at Cornell and the New School for Social Research, creator of the self healers movement and the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do the Work and her newest book.
Reparenting the Inner Child.
We get into what's actually happening when you feel hijacked by your own reactions, why you actually don't need to excavate your childhood to begin healing, and how real change happens not through willpower but through your nervous system.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
Thank you.
You write about this story of you as a kid, kind of launching off the staircase railing into a beanbag chair.
Your family jokes about it, you know, oh, Nicole bounced off the wall.
Funny haha.
You know like comments like that all the time when you're in a family and you're a kid.
But looking back now, what was really going on there?
What was really going on was a lot of energy.
I've since learned that anxiety is indeed an energy that lacked an outlet.
It lacked support.
It lacked attunement.
As most of us will do in childhood, we become very attuned to the environment around us.
What's possible, right?
I had all these crazy things that I could fling myself off of.
My family let me turn my living room into a playpen.
So I did those things because that's what all of us as children will do.
We'll adapt to the Find channels for our energy.
We will create whatever version of safety or belonging is possible.
And that's what I hope to always speak to in my work now.
Beautiful adaptations created in childhood.
For me, learning how to channel my energy into achievement and performance and perfectionism helped for a while was socially validated, even though took me to the point in my journey where I think many of us fail.
Meat work like this.
It no longer works.
So understanding that allowed me to understand what wasn't happening for me, that lack of emotional safety and gave me not only some new, more compassionate language, but some new tools which, quite literally, have helped me transform my relationship with my own energy and my body and my nervous system, but to create change for all of us.
Yeah.
I mean you use the word attunement in there early on what you were sharing, which I think is a really interesting word that we don't hear a lot.
Pardon the pun.
Something about it really resonated with me.
Love it.
Take me deeper into what you actually mean by that.
Yeah, so attunement right is.
If I'm simplifying things, which I often do, it's the awareness of, in this case, what we're talking about attuning to right is another individual in childhood attuning to a child.
So it's awareness of someone else, their emotional states, and the ability to then assure.
Beautifully kind of bringing up the word resonate with, right?
Stand next to, be in support of, kind of enter into that energetic space of another.
It is very much though a skill.
That we have to literally learn, often in childhood, that learning either happens or it doesn't, which leaves a lot of us in adulthood without the ability, despite sometimes very much well-intentioned desires, to see and know the loved ones around us, especially if they're the children that we're in care of.
But it is a capacity that lives in our body that again can be created at any time.
But I think a lot of us are beginning this journey from not having had the attunement that we needed to then maybe translate that same sort of attunement in our adult relationships.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like also the way you're describing it, attunement can be – I'm thinking to myself is it a good thing, or is it a bad thing?
Is it just a thing?
And, as you're speaking, I was reflecting on research I read years back on what they described as emotional contagion, where –.
They would take someone, expose them to some horrific images so they were in just a really negative state bring them back into a group of people and within a matter of minutes everybody in that group was largely infected by this person who was sort of like a person of perceived authority in the group.
Then they did the exact opposite.
I think it was like puppies or kittens or something like that.
They came back into the group bouncing and same thing.
When we talk about attunement, when we talk about sort of almost like changing our nervous system and emotional state to reflect that of people around us, This is, I would imagine, sometimes a good thing, sometimes a harmful thing, and oftentimes we have no idea it's happening.
Right.
And this is really speaking to the underlying unconscious, I think is a better word process at our nervous system, our body, kind of that scanning feeling, sensing of the energy of another person, right?
This is all happening non-verbally.
Of course, when we're talking about attunement in childhood, our whole life is non-verbal.
But I think the most common example.
Like you're describing the research, i think many of us meet this in our daily life right when we walk into a room and perhaps two people were in the room and they were in an argument nothing is said right, but you can feel the heaviness, the stress, the tension in their energy.
So not only is our nervous system doing that at any time, of course this is a function that's aimed at survival, right available or existing in the environment.
Then we're so quickly that's the process of neuroception that I just described.
Our body then is quickly able to deal with, to mitigate, to fight or to flee the threat.
We have another kind of system that gets involved in the conversation about how emotions travel and emotional contagion, and whether it's good or bad.
Is we all have in our brain something that's called mirror neurons, right?
Which fire when we not only see someone doing an action, but when we see someone having an emotional impact.
So right, you're watching someone on television and they're maybe going through the loss or grief around something that a person that they lost, and they become emotional.
And right, we can become emotional and maybe find ourself crying because we're mirroring.
Their emotional state.
So all of this is happening behind the scenes, outside of our awareness unless, of course, we choose to pay attention to it.
But all of that is then going to drive change.
We are communicating that without even words.
Yeah, and these shifts, it sounds like they can really be kind of downloaded into us at Very early ages in ways we're not even aware of.
I mean, you described another situation.
And you're like four years old.
Your mom is a couple minutes late picking you up from preschool.
Your immediate thought is not, oh, she must be stuck in traffic.
It's something very different.
Right.
It's not even, oh, I have four extra minutes to play.
Right.
Immediately it went to what I think some of us commonly know and maybe experience as the worst case scenario.
And specifically for me it was like something happened to mom, because that was really representative of the stress and the overall emotional state in my home.
But all of us, regardless of the home and the players that were present or not, the parents that were there and what they were capable of, We are all again attuned to our environment in early childhood.
We don't have language, insight, maturity.
We can't zoom out and understand things with words and have things communicated to us in that very logical way.
However, we are still mature.
Implicit emotional memories, okay.
Right.
So these things that again, for some of us in adulthood, we can't give words to what's happening, but our heart is racing, but we're bracing because again, before language, everything that we've experienced, including the relationships that we were relying on for our physiological survival.
Everything was encoded in our body as sensations and then as survival-driven responses, which is why some of us wake up in adulthood right.
And we logically know things.
We know we're safe.
We know we're worthy, yet we still feel uncomfortable.
Anxious, overwhelmed and unworthy, because that's the lived experience then, of these old imprints that are coming alive again, well after the date or time, or even relational status, of our childhood.
Yeah, and I think so many of us trip into that.
Sometimes, oftentimes brought to our knees.
I mean, you mentioned just earlier in our conversation, this is something else you write about this.
You kind of hit your 20s and 30s as someone who From the outside looking in, it looks like you have it all together.
And so many people can probably relate to this.
They'll have their own version of this, whether it's advanced degrees or the relationship you always wanted, or the money in the bank account, the status, the apartment, all the yada yada right.
But you hit this moment where you're like, this isn't me.
Before I even questioned whether it was me or not what I felt, earning accolade after accolade, degree after degree, success after success even, relationship after relationship, what I felt first was empty.
And if I have to admit, I did feel a bit shameful.
Like, who am I to, quote, unquote, have everything?
In a lot of ways I was even reminded of how easy things for me in childhood were, because I seemingly excelled academically and athletically.
And I then had a string of failures.
Good things, things I've achieved.
Yet internally it wasn't mapping on to how I felt about my life, because how I felt about my life was very detached, very unfulfilled.
And so what I've come to learn all of that anxious energy in childhood, from a very attuned stance, became very channeled into this.
The things that I saw earned me attention and praise from my caregivers, my mom in particular.
So I became the very prototypical, overworking, overachieving, overstriving.
Person who, while I was getting everything right, it didn't really land, and that to me right once I kind of understood that, or questioned, I should say, what was driving me in action, then I got to the question that you're very wisely posing, which was
Well, who am I if I'm not all of this, right?
If I'm not everything I'm doing, right?
Who am I kind of behind all of it?
Yeah, and I think that's a question that, if we're fortunate or if we're really intentional about it, we stumble into at some point.
But I want to drop into something.
You described so many of these patterns.
They're set in motion fairly early in life and Often in a relational way, in relation to people who are perceived caregivers or people who are people of status in our lives, people who we want to be seen by and loved by and protected and who we want to develop loving relationships with, which really drops us into this world of attachment theory.
Yeah.
And you know attachment theory has become almost kind of like it's pretty mainstream at this point.
People can name their attachment styles.
You can go take probably 10 different quizzes online.
You were trained by some of the DOG researchers in this field Miriam and Howard Steele at New School.
Jeffrey Young Schema Therapy.
What do you think?
The popular conversation gets right about attachment, and what does it really miss?
So what?
I was even kind of laboring over and I'm writing a book about inner child healing, yet I can't not talk or even ground this conversation in relationships or attachment.
Why?
Because they are so foundational to who we come to be and ultimately, who we know ourselves and, for some of us, the identities that we continue to repeat even if you're like me they're not creating fulfillment, or even they're creating outright dysfunction or suffering in our life.
And the reason why I had to begin a book on individual development, so to speak, with a relational stance, was because, as children, we are, if not the only perhaps, I think we are the only Right.
From that point of need, survival need.
We are so attuned to the environment around us and we adapt based on one particular question right.
What happens?
Is someone available for me to meet my needs and when I need comfort or connection?
What happens when I reach for that?
And so, to simplify, what attachment theory and our attachment dynamics and labels really are saying is, if care was consistent, if someone was physically present, though also emotionally attuned and present, to help support us through stressful moments, big moments, our body right will learn that closeness is safe.
We'll become, I've yet to really meet very many people that are securely attached, right?
But that will become our blueprint then, so to speak, for relating to others.
I think the larger category that most of us fall in, myself included, is if that care was inconsistent or overwhelming right, my body is going to learn a completely different message.
It's going to learn to cling to the little possible connection that was there.
Oh, performance creates connection, so I'm going to cling to performance.
And then any version of negative feedback is going to feel so overwhelming, even if it's mild, helpful criticism, because I only know myself in this one way.
Or, right, we'll brace, we'll pull away the prototypical avoidant, right?
If care was overwhelming or not present.
Some of us are like, oh okay, if no one's going to be there for me, I'm safer away.
Right.
So all of these attachment styles, I think what's important is we got that part right.
We need relationships.
We needed them in childhood.
We need them well throughout our adulthood, our entire life.
The way we learn to relate in childhood is something we carry with us as this kind of like relational blueprint.
It impacts how we show up in relationships.
What I hope to add to attachment theory is attachment, the neurophysiological, biological imprint of attachment.
That makes some of us very versed in what our attachment style is, but still unable to create the secure attachments that we want and deserve.
I want to drop into that, um, in a meaningful way, but use the phrase inner child.
And I can't.
We need to tease that out a little bit, because we've all heard this phrase um at some point, if not in conversation.
You've heard it on TV.
Um, a lot of people will hear the phrase inner child and they'll start rolling their eyes.
They're like, Oh, I must be watching an LA sitcom or something like that.
Um, What are we actually talking about when we're talking, when we use the phrase inner child?
What are we talking about and why is it?
Why does this matter to understand?
Admittedly, I would have been a person that you know Didn't understand what it was when I read the limited literature on it, because I'm not the first person to speak of inner child, of course.
It seemed to me right that it was like this visualization, this kind of like talking to this more amorphous, you know, aspect of ourself.
And for me, the scientist at heart, it just simply didn't land.
So I didn't really understand.
Even though I was clear that childhood did impact us.
It took me to be well into my career to begin to explore working with clients who were kind of feeling stuck, despite having incredible insight awareness, even commitment to their healing.
To again understand that to build that bridge from insight into action, we actually need to create new choices.
And our body is so foundationally involved in those choices.
So if I were to simplify what inner child is.
And I hope the takeaway is for anyone that is listening or chooses to buy my new book is that it's a part of us that we all have.
No matter how long ago childhood was, no matter how difficult it was, and we don't want to think about it, it is still literally wired into us as implicit emotional memories.
And it impacts, right, because this part early in life did a lot of learning.
Just like I said, it learned how to stay connected when security or attention was scarce or inconsistent.
It also learned how to handle unpredictability.
It learned how to handle conflict, disconnection, unmet needs.
And so those then – that learning is what most of us meet sometime in our adulthood, when we seemingly instinctually feel driven to certain emotions or reactions or even roles in our relationship.
Despite wanting to change, knowing that they don't serve us because again, they are so wired into our body.
So it takes us not only understanding maybe more compassionately why.
Right.
Maybe us staying quiet now in an argument where we could speak up at one time that maybe helped prevent conflict in childhood, so we can see that part more compassionately.
But at the same time.
We can now show up differently.
We can teach our body that it's safe to speak our mind or to express our needs to someone else.
Or for me, the overachiever.
I can understand that.
I learned that that's how connection and worthiness was created for me in childhood.
Right.
But I can understand now that I can be worthy in other moments.
I can be worthy in a moment of rest even because that's what we want to do.
Right.
We don't just want to understand why we're struggling.
Most of us want to change and limit or decrease the amount of struggle that we're having.
Yeah.
I mean, I think everyone raises their hand to that.
So I want to make sure I'm really wrapping my head around this.
Would it be correct to then say something like the inner child is a set of patterns that are instilled at some earlier age that largely show up in the way that we behave and interact with the world.
That's a beautiful definition.
I would say they shape our habits, our relational patterns, our personality traits, even our preferences.
And it's confusing, because we've repeated them for so long, outside of our awareness, that some of us are – they even feel like – they're who we are right.
We feel like we're just choosing to be independent, especially if you grew up in a Western society, right?
Where independence and individualism is celebrated to some extent, but it can feel to some extent.
Oh, I'm just choosing to be this.
But for some of us it developed out of protection, Because relying on others at one time meant hurt or disappointment or sensitivity, right.
We've practiced being so hypervigilant to the environment for so long that we just feel like we're a highly sensitive person.
It's just who we are in temperament.
But in reality that was a very adaptive hypervigilance or scanning for danger in unpredictable environments.
Ending it with my own example, right?
Drive can feel like ambition.
It's celebrated by society.
But again, that was the only way at one time that I could secure attention and therefore safety and connection when I needed it most.
Yeah, I mean, that makes so much sense.
And it would make sense then also to say well, part of these patterns and behaviors would be functional or helpful to the way that we live, and part of them are also going to be dysfunctional or unhelpful.
But I think part of what I'm hearing underneath all of this is that, even if we think this is almost like an identity level, DNA level thing, that in truth, the vast majority of this is really learned.
And if it can be learned, then we can either unlearn it or change the associations we have.
100%.
I'm happy, Jonathan, that you're highlighting, right?
Because a lot of these adaptations are aspects of ourself that we don't just want to throw away because they were an early adaptation right.
Drive can absolutely be harnessed in moments where I also give myself rest.
I don't have to be So I think it's important to and where I get to in my book is that the goal of all of this isn't to erase our childhood or become someone different.
It's to expand to allow all aspects of who we had to be, but also who we want to become.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's funny.
I remember a friend of mine telling me that his therapist at one point told him to load an image of his six-year-old cell phone to his phone so he could reconnect with his inner child, because there were aspects, there were patterns and behaviors That were actually wonderful and joyful and playful and light, that he had become just fiercely disconnected with.
And it was almost, you know, so it's not all bad.
You know, it's like it's the full suite of everything and sort of like our job is to figure out.
Where are the different patterns?
How are they showing up in our lives and how do we want to relate to them, keep them, change them?
You introduced something along the way you call the individual development model.
So what is this and how does it – why does this matter?
How does it expand beyond the traditional sort of frameworks that we're talking about here?
So the individual development model is kind of my way of thinking of the answer to, I think, a question that maybe all of us ask, which is why am I who I am?
How did I become me?
Who is me?
And there's many different theorists who theorize or came up with their idea of how we became who we are.
And what I saw lacking in those models was kind of back to what I was saying earlier, which was the impact and role of our environment, relationships included, and how it impacts.
Our neurophysiological development.
So the individual developmental model is kind of five different spheres that all of us as a developing human kind of go through, so to speak, based on kind of core needs at certain times, beginning with our body right.
Being back to this idea of we're completely dependent.
We can't even feel safe, contrary to what was even...
Popular parenting wisdom up until recently, a child can't soothe themselves on their own, right?
They need a calm, grounded caregiver to show up when they're upset crying dysregulated hungry, tired or whatever, to be soothed their nervous system.
So, with safety and security being the first kind of foundational area again that is so greatly impacted by who, if anyone, was around when we needed them.
And then, more so, how safe.
They were right as a person, to calm us down, where they regulated enough to actually send those signals to our body through co-regulation of our nervous system.
To calm us down when we needed it.
And then we kind of progress through development right once safety and security happens.
And the next thing we do those of us who have any interaction with toddlers maybe have our own right.
The next thing is we separate from that home base that's safe and secure to go individuate.
We go, we explore, we need boundaries, we need limits, we need discipline to be told when we're crossing boundaries and limits.
And come back to safety.
And again, we're learning in all of these areas based on who or what is happening around us.
And then we kind of progress from there into a more emotional space where we become attuned right to other people emotionally.
We kind of interact.
We develop agency.
We see that choices that we make have impact in the world around us, specifically other people and how they feel.
Then, right, the learning that we do is we become ourselves after we've Nowhere do we find safety.
We know how to kind of go out and explore ourselves.
We start to learn our emotional world.
Then we can be authentic, so to speak.
And then finally, kind of the last kind of sphere, is trust, almost returning to the deepest sense of belonging right.
The sense that, in my opinion at least, we are all connected to something, someone greater than ourselves.
But also you spoke to something earlier very wisely.
It's also returning to our inherent joy, our creativity, our purpose, and our passion.
So, of course right, there's kind of very generally speaking, that's kind of areas of development that we evolve through.
And, of course, maybe listeners are like, well, I didn't have safety and security.
What do you mean boundaries, limits?
My goal then, is to present a framework of what I call reparenting, or simply stepping in, creating new habits and patterns, maybe being the steady calming, nurturing caregiver that we didn't have, maybe creating limits or boundaries where we didn't have them.
Maybe for the first time, learning how to reconnect with our own emotions so that we can be emotionally connected, intimate with other people, maybe taking off the masks of identity, not being our authentic self, instead being the overachiever or the caregiver, so that we can express who we really are, then allowing us to be purposeful and passionate, and joyful and creative.
And again, all of these things that I think we inherently are, but again, based on what was happening or not happening around us, including the people and relationships, a lot of us kind of haven't developed the security that we needed.
To be those things.
Though again, through reparenting, we can create that now.
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
The journey you described, my brain is translating it as we started in complete dependence.
We then moved to largely complete independence.
And then we kind of moved back to the middle of interdependence.
Does that land?
It's landing so much.
I have chills.
And of course so I'm very generally speaking, but as you'll see in the book I even map this on to development of certain brain areas, right from our nervous system's ability to regulate, to create the safety and security some of us are lacking, to our limbic systems, our mirror neurons.
And so...
I'm mapping again the body foundationally because it's nice to know and understand what I just said, but my goal is to give the tools to do some relearning in the areas where we haven't developed the security that we always needed.
I want to get into some of the tools.
I'm curious about something else here.
A lot of our audience are navigating the middle years of their lives and there's something that often happens in midlife that you speak to.
It's this idea that you know, the pace of life finally kind of slows down.
Enough for the quote old material to start to surface.
And a lot of folks in the 40s or the 50s.
They describe this experience of Kind of like suddenly being confronted by feelings they thought they had already dealt with.
What's actually happening there, from an awareness, from a nervous system perspective that we can key in on.
That'll be really helpful.
I think that things come to the surface when our attention shifts.
So the more time space, the more familiar we are with life and patterns and the more attention kind of goes into – becomes available.
Let me word it that way the more than we are so quickly able to pay attention to the things that we've been distracted from or even that we've been very, even physiologically protected against allowing to come.
So I think, for physiological changes that happen as we age, I think lifestyle and life circumstance changes that happens as we age that attention to some extent is freed up.
That will then allow us sometimes, you know, even despite wanting that to be the case, to then be met with stuff from long ago, stuff that we think we were already beyond, and it can be very challenging, i think, especially when it happens in our later years Because, you know, we have this idea that oh, I thought we got over that.
It feels like we're backtracking, backsliding.
We can even then begin to shame ourself because of the reemergence.
And so I can even make a case that this happens in any healing journey.
The more we become present and less protected Counterintuitively, the more we feel uncomfortable, which is what often then sends us right back into using those old protective mechanisms and not looking at it at all.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like when I'm a longtime meditator and I remember one of my early teachers telling me like this actually isn't going to fix anything.
But what will happen if you stay with the practice?
Over time you'll just start to see more clearly what's really within you and around you.
It's not going to resolve it.
Like that work is still going to be there for you to say yes to, but it'll just help.
You know, like he described it, as muddy waters will start to clear and you'll see what's actually underneath them.
And it feels similar to the process you're describing.
You know, And when that happens and this is again something that you write to and speak about it's not like we're just remembering these things that are causing us strife.
We're literally reliving them.
We're reliving them.
And I think, again, those moments, whether it's just the natural shift right into awareness.
Nowhere often do we relive them more than in moments where we are in a reaction, right?
In a stressed, driven state.
For some of us it looks like an overreaction, where we're screaming and yelling and saying and doing things that are out of character.
For others it looks like a kind of distracted reaction where we're leaving a hard conversation that we know we need to have.
We're running from relationship to relationship or job to job.
And for others it looks like an underreaction, where we're not removing ourselves from something that's unsafe whether it's a relational dynamic or a physical experience or we're shut down.
And so in those moments –
It's so important.
I always want us to understand it's coming from a physiological place.
And what is happening is we're becoming emotionally flooded because those are the confusing moments, right where we have all the no and we know that these habits, and we don't want to be saying or doing these things or we want to stay connected because this person is important to us.
Yet our body goes into a stress-driven autopilot, so to speak, where we tune in somewhere down the line, right.
Sometimes hours later, sometimes days later, right?
And it's like, oh gosh.
And we carry then shame based on the reactions that we've had.
So my hope is always to not only give the why in those moments.
You can't just calm down, like maybe a very well-meaning loved one is telling you to do, because you are so flooded and brought back in time and your body can't calm down unless you teach your body how to calm down.
Yeah.
Talk to me about this phrase, emotional flooding.
What is the actual lived experience or feeling of emotional flooding, so we can kind of better understand if and when it's happening to us?
So, beginning in the body, as I often suggest we do, it feels very much like a stress response which impacts three major systems that we can give our self-awareness of by focusing our attention on our heart rate, our breathing and the tension in our muscles.
So for a lot of us right, a moment of emotional flooding and I'll just briefly talk about the over and under is when our heart starts racing.
Our breath quickens, our muscles become tense, we might clench our jaw or even our fist.
Right.
We're flooded with energy.
I want to also give justice though, to those of us that kind of shift into a more shut down state where, instead of all of that amplified energy, we might feel numb, feel cold in one second.
Our heart rate.
We can't even feel our heart in our chest and we're holding our breath, and our muscles might well feel like putty.
We want to get up and run, but we don't even feel like we can summon the energy to.
So that's what's happening in our body. right?
This immediate, we don't have to think about it.
Our body is already shifting into that action or reaction.
In our mind what's mapping onto that stress response, because that's what we're talking about here, whether you're in the fight or flight with that amplified energy or the kind of shut down state the other end of that spectrum.
In our mind, And I'm sure some of us very much relate to this.
It looks like urgent, overwhelming, all or nothing, black and white.
You're always, you're never type thinking.
Those are really great markers.
Again, when the reaction is immediate, urgent, all or nothing in body and in mind.
We don't feel like we can even stop, right, our body's reaction in those moments.
Those are great cues that what's happening is emotional flooding, and even tying it back to the concept of our inner child is reacting in that moment, which is why
Oftentimes the reaction we're having outwardly the screaming yelling saying something we don't want, taking our toys and going to our own sandbox or not speaking, giving the silent treatment feels a bit I mean this developmentally immature.
Because, quite literally, it was formed at a time where the only thing we could do was lash out before someone else struck us.
The only thing we could do was...
Run away from the situation or flee in our mind through imagination.
The only thing we could do is shut down and not say anything trying to make us invisible.
Because in that flooded moment, again, neurologically or physiologically speaking...
The chemicals, the stress response is reacting and then the habit is often grounded at an earlier time where we didn't have different capacities, which is my goal.
Right is to tune into those moments beginning in our body, so that we can learn how to regulate our stress response, not only through daily habits but practices in the moment.
So that we can regain choice because in those moments we become locked and loaded.
Our body and those old habits are going to dictate what happens next, not our mature, rational mind.
Yeah.
I mean, if it's not coming from your mature, rational mind to start with, it's like really embodied.
It's physiological.
It's really hard to sort of like think your way out of it.
What you're describing, the sense of flooding, I think.
So many of us have felt it and will feel it, but we don't translate it.
Oh, this is really this phenomenon you're describing.
We sometimes use the word, this is just my life.
Sometimes we just think I feel it.
So often I feel like I'm just kind of always in survival mode.
But this is the way it's always been.
This is the way everybody around me has always been.
This is the way my family and family culture have always been, you know.
And this is something you speak to like this notion that survival isn't the same as living, even if we think that this is just the way it is, you know.
For someone who has been high functioning in survival mode 20 years, 30 years, maybe 40 years.
They're joining us and they're now realizing oh, this is what's going on.
And wow, has there been a cost to this?
Where do they even start to begin?
So I often get asked some version of this question, especially for listeners maybe who are not able, much like myself, to even recall what happened in childhood, to even map onto.
Right.
Why am I?
What happened to create this very familiar way that I am, that it feels like it's almost just how I've always been and how I meant to be forever.
Right.
Because if you've ever heard me share, I can recollect very little of my childhood.
I'm intentionally using that word, because the memory of my childhood lived in this very neurotic, very kind of achievement driven person.
So to change, we don't necessarily need to know what created it, or even believe, so to speak, that it's not who we always are and are meant to be.
But we can begin now by noticing our daily habits, our relational patterns, how our body feels, by taking moments throughout our day to pause, to shift our attention from wherever else it may be focused on, whomever else it might be focused on, and to even just as simply explore what am I feeling?
Again, checking in with those three areas.
How's my breath?
Am I holding my breath?
Is it very quick?
If I'm holding my breath, can I kind of release that tension and allow myself to breathe?
Our body is naturally breathing.
If it's quick, can I slow it down?
That's going to impact the rate of our heart.
Can I notice the tension in my muscles?
And if I'm feeling a lot of tension, can I release it?
Or if I'm feeling on that numb kind of end of the spectrum where I don't even feel like I have muscles or energy.
Can I stimulate my body's energy system?
So we can start now at any time.
But quickly I just want to speak to.
It is very confusing because a lot of us do see these patterns, myself included.
I would have said, right, I am anxious.
Why?
Because my whole family is right.
It's just genetically passed on to us.
So what I hope is a takeaway is not, regardless of what we know happened in childhood or not, understanding that you know family from the early family environment to even
Ancestral environments that are passed on epigenetically to us, or how our body stress system functions, can often then be the answer to why these all just seem like and this was a running motto in my family.
This is how we are as leperas.
We're always like this.
And so my hope is to counter not only with the possibility of change in any moment, to maybe even wonder if maybe we've just become who we needed to be, maybe to question that running narrative that it might not just be because genetically we're all just like this.
It might be because we've shared the same environment or we've came from the same ancestors, whose stress systems had to adapt in the same way, becoming so hyper vigilant because they were under overwhelming stress or trauma.
And now we all share the same coping mechanism.
I mean, that lands so powerfully.
And I think so many of us have probably heard some version of this is just the way, like look, your mother was like this, your father was like this, your grandfather was like this.
It's just, this is us.
This is our family.
This is the way we roll.
We've always been like this.
It's in our genes.
But what's really interesting when you dig down and I know this is something you speak to also is this notion of.
I remember reading the research on this maybe five years ago, when we started to see that we're looking at genes and in this word, epigenetics starts to enter the conversation.
What is switched on or switched off?
And we start to learn that well, maybe certain things were expressed three generations ago because it had to be expressed for survival purpose, right?
But that the not just the genes themselves, but and tell me if I'm getting this wrong the epigenetic state, whether it's switched on or off, is actually heritable.
That that state can be like passed on for generations, right?
And then we think, well, this is just in our genes.
But in fact, it's just whether that sort of state is switched on or off.
And that is something that we have control over.
Epigenetics, kind of shifting science into that awareness that we are beyond just the DNA, that doesn't control us.
The entirety of our experience, but it's again how those genes are expressed or not.
And so, through different mechanisms like methylation, certain genes, particularly around our stress response system, can again really simply turn on or off and impact us.
So I'll use an example that I actually used in the book to maybe visualize this.
There was a very fascinating study.
It happened in the Netherlands some years ago, when a community of people were experiencing such a severe famine that they, at times, were relying on literally sawdust to make bread.
They had no nutrients, no calories.
And they studied women who were pregnant at this time and realized What they found was that even once so this person's body, to understand the science behind it.
When food was unpredictable or scarce, they were in a famine, so they didn't know when they were going to get the next dose of food or if there was going to be any nutrients in it.
The beautiful thing that a body does is it will change certain systems.
Again, I'm going to simplify it.
It will hold on to fat, right?
It'll use energy in a different way because it will be preparing for the expectation of continued food insecurity, uncertainty or scarcity.
So what they found was that women who were pregnant at that time of famine, even though the famine thankfully went away, food went back to quote unquote normal, so to speak.
When these children were born, what they saw in their epigenome, their DNA didn't change at all.
But their same signals that turned on and off, to hold on to fat, to use energy differently, again simplifying were the same as if they were present during the famine.
Because think about it.
Logically, that is beautifully smart from a body experience.
If assumedly, the offspring are going to be born up in the same environment, our body always wants to predict what's going to happen next, so we can sustain survival through what's going to happen next.
So if what's going to happen next is we don't know when food's going to come next, then it makes sense that I'm prepared in this epigenetic way in case if and when that happens again.
So that again simple example, which is why some of us have in our ancestral lineages food insecurity, financial insecurity, are the scarcity that is quite literally wired into us, giving us a hyper reactive stress response around certain environments or stimuli or fears or worries that were beautifully adaptive, assuming that we were born into the exact same environment.
But what's happened for most of us right is our environments change, our resources have changed, our relationships have changed.
Some of us are living on the complete other side of the world.
Then the body that we were wired or then the environment that our body was wired to exist in.
So epigenetics again, how the genes are expressed, impact everything from inflammation, stress regulation, our immune response, our physical, our emotional health.
But they're coming again from a beautiful adaptation at one time where that worked perfectly, was necessary in the environment.
And this is what my hope is for all of us not only to have some compassion for why we are stuck and our body is reacting to environments that maybe we're not living in living in, but to give us the physiological tools to, when we say break cycles, we're not just talking about showing up differently and creating a little impact in terms of behaviorally.
We're actually talking about changing the way not only our genes are turning on and off, but the way our offspring's genes, if we choose to have them, are turning on and off, quite literally breaking cycles.
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
Yeah, I mean it's really powerful because you're describing not just changing behavior, but literally shifting your neurophysiological state, which also is how so many people relate to us.
Like you described earlier in our conversation.
You walk into a room and two people have just had a fight.
You're not there when a word has been uttered, but you feel it because they are radiating something right um, and we bring that that, that state, into every interaction and we also bring it into like, the interactions we have ourselves.
You know um, When we tune into this, one of the things that you also.
I don't want to skip over this because it's really important.
You mentioned.
We don't necessarily need to pinpoint what the thing was that set the pattern in motion when we were younger.
We just need to understand how it's showing up in our lives now to start to do the work to change.
That's so powerful to me because I think so many of us do feel like I can't quote fix this until I know what started it.
And you're kind of saying, maybe not.
And I'm saying that because I'm speaking to again me who, very early on and it was a running joke for a little bit of time when it became aware to me
You know, when I started to have friends in high school and stuff, and everyone would be like oh, every now and again, share a little story about their childhood.
And mine was blank.
It even translated to being out with those said friends.
And a couple weeks later they're saying hey, do you remember when we went there, said and did this
And I'm like, no, I don't. really remember that.
And so what I'd come to understand is that my inability to recall was actually an example of everything we've been talking about today.
When I lacked the safety and security in childhood.
The most protective thing for my body to do is to pay less attention to me and what's happening around me, to disconnect or to dissociate my awareness.
We actually now have a ton of research that shows the impact of cortisol, one of our main stress hormones.
How much again?
Our brain?
While I'm going to localize memory to one system, the hippocampus, there's a lot of different systems involved in the way our brain works.
But, so to speak, cortisol Very much impacts our hippocampus, the ability to kind of hold and recall memories.
Right.
But I've come to realize and this goes for listeners if we understand, if we have access to information or not about the details, if we have a sense of how stressed our mother was when we were developing in their body.
Right.
We can get some sense into how stressed our in utero environment was.
And what I come to.
This was actually told to me at my mother's funeral, and it was told in a kind of seemingly joking way.
One of my aunts came up to me and my mom and her were very close, especially when I was born.
My mom was 42 at the time.
And because she had already had two children, my older siblings were 15 and 18 years older than me.
They were not trying to get pregnant.
When my mom started to have pretty consistent morning sickness symptoms.
Very much because there was a lot of health-related issues in my family, with my older sister in particular.
So there was a lot of when something happened, right?
And I was a little girl who assumed something happened bad to mom.
It was because often what was bad happening in my family was health.
So my mom's mind immediately went to, I'm having morning sickness.
I'm sick.
I must have stomach cancer.
So she confided in this aunt looking for support.
You know that she thought shared her belief that she was likely coming down or had stomach cancer.
And my aunt, you know, very much urged her to go to the doctor to get a diagnosis.
And the diagnosis was me.
So I now think, right how much cortisol was washing through my mom's body, because not only were they living in a stressed environment in a city with, you know, dangerous things happening outside, the door to health related things happening inside, with her child included.
Now she's having these symptoms that she thinks is cancer.
Right.
Right.
All of this cortisol washing through the placenta and impacting my neurological development.
So again, the lack of memory.
I kind of have a new awareness and it all maps on to what we're talking about here, which is chronic stress, whether it's in our ancestors or our environments, in utero or not, will impact the way our brain wires and fires.
Many of us are going to be then born with a amygdala, that emotional center that's always scanning for danger, that's overreactive, constantly scanning for danger.
With a prefrontal cortex, right, that's not as online as we would like it to be.
And we, quite literally, in a way, we become, we are born wired for the threat that we might not even actually have physically experienced or may never experience in the environment that we're living in.
I mean, that's wild.
Our brains are strange little beasties.
So somebody's joining us for this conversation, right?
And they're nodding along.
And you talked to, I asked you a little earlier, like, what's the first step in?
If we zoom the lens even out a little bit from there, and then kind of think, okay.
There are things about the way that I'm showing up in my life that I'm even looking at that and saying wait, what?
Where is that coming from?
Either I'm getting enough space in my life where it's starting to really be reflected back at me and I can't turn away anymore, or maybe
And maybe it's causing enough strife that I need to actually finally do something about it.
I need to figure it out.
Talk to me about sort of a toolbox or a set of tools or a frame that we can start to bring to this moment.
So kind of going back to the foundational place where change happens, we cannot...
Create make, even think about, remember even this conversation, with maybe all the new tools I'll share with you now, unless our body is feeling safe,
So kind of back to those building in consistent check-ins, setting alerts on our phone, post-it notes, kind of connecting this new check-in habit with something you already do every day brushing your teeth, drinking coffee.
Building those moments of refocusing our attention to our body's signals of stress are so foundationally important for two reasons.
So that A, we can create some new lifestyle habits, generally speaking.
Right.
Noticing what time we go to bed, what time we wake up, how rested we feel, how do we feel after we eat certain foods?
Obviously, trying to give our body the foods, the energy, the nutrients that it needs.
Seeing how much we move in a given day.
Right.
Making movement as a part of our day if we're able to, if we don't yet move regularly.
Or slowing down, right?
If we are moving all day long and there's never any moments of rest outside of those kind of daily lifestyle type habits, right?
Tuning in in the moment, as my breath is starting to elevate or quicken, as my muscles are starting to tense, knowing that My body will get to the point of no return, as I call it, where it's too stressed.
It's going to rely on old choices, old habits, I should say, not being able to make new choices.
And in those moments, right as we notice, maybe our breath is getting faster and our voice is getting faster and louder, beginning to Slow all that down.
Right.
Beginning to maybe refocus on all of the support that is around us.
Our feet on the floor, my back against this chair, maybe even just tuning into right, as we kind of acknowledge.
I go back in time.
I become a little kid.
Tuning into the current environment, right?
Doing the quick like naming of neutral things in our environment to remind us that I'm here, I'm present and even maybe whispering to ourself I'm safe.
Because with safety right now, we can shift from reaction into a new response, right?
Say the thing that we want to say.
Stay instead of disconnecting.
And then kind of from the other practical steps.
We all have a voice of criticism beliefs in our head again formed in our earliest environment.
They do not just go away with a magic wand.
Similarly, I always like to break down change into two steps, where I become aware of what my stress signals are.
I make a new choice.
I create safety where there isn't.
I become aware of my critical voice or the beliefs in my mind, right, the new choice I can make.
When you're down the rabbit hole of criticism or where you're coloring your current experiences with past beliefs, reminding yourself of how unworthy you are in this moment.
And this person's lack of text response is an example of how unworthy.
That's all going to happen in our mind because that's what we've learned and practiced.
What we can do, once we become aware of how much our mind is coloring our current reactions, is we can refocus our attention away from that mind.
Again back to our breath, back to our body and time and space, back to the movement of the tasks that we're engaging in.
So I think those are kind of really foundational, helpful habits.
And, of course, whatever else we're noticing and seeing with awareness.
We can then individualize our journey right.
Create the opportunity for change, move toward connection.
Tell ourself and our body.
Create safety in our body if connection wasn't always available so it feels unfamiliar.
Separate from connection, if maybe we came from too enmeshed of a household and we make everyone else's problems our own problems, right?
If we notice that habit.
Now we can start to create boundaries or separation, right?
Acknowledging that we are different.
We can feel for someone, right?
Attune like we began the conversation, but we don't maybe have to take over responsibility, right?
Like a lot of us people pleasers, appeasers and caretakers immediately do.
So with awareness right, that's a brain area where we're not super stressed, where old reactions and identities and roles are going to take over.
Again, we're noticing that that also happens in our mind.
We're narrating our life.
We're kind of inserting old beliefs in new circumstances even where they don't apply.
And then we can make those new choices, whether it's simply just refocusing our attention away from something that's unhelpful in our mind.
Or again, refocusing our attention to our body, asking our body what we need in that moment and then making those choices, shifting how we're then relating to someone else.
I love that.
So it's sort of, I mean, it feels like first we notice our physiological state.
Then we notice our behavioral response or even our thought response.
Then we say, okay, what can I do to kind of downregulate the system to go from 78 to 45 to 33?
I'm old.
Um, and then we kind of ask ourselves um, What is the response or the behavior or what's the move right now?
That would give me the feeling that I actually want to feel.
And maybe not even just in this moment, but moving forward.
And what a powerful question for those of us who never were considered, were asked, who maybe had very well-intentioned parents who wanted to give us what we needed, but
We don't yet know.
So I want to kind of make it clear here, two things that you very wisely said, age aside.
We don't go from 100 to zero.
It really is a smaller kind of movement, right?
We don't go from completely overwhelmed to peace and zen, right?
We shift slowly.
We downshift through small, consistent actions.
Mm-hmm.
As frustrating as is the pathway, the change is best made with small, consistent steps that we're able to maintain, which is why, in all of my work, I try to break down these habits, new habits, into the smallest choice that we can make and maintain, because that's how change is only possible.
We have to stay within a window.
We don't become so overwhelmed, even though it's completely natural.
So in that moment, many of us are reparenting.
If we didn't have a parent who showed us how to care for our physical or emotional body.
Now we're creating some new habits that are so much more supportive.
And then to the next question of what do I need?
Right now I'd want to speak to us who might not know right away.
Right,
So I really want to normalize as you begin this journey.
You might not know.
I still don't know what I'm feeling in any given moment and what I need in any given moment.
For some of us, myself included, this kind of awareness happens once my body has calmed down, and then I could explore now and get curious and say okay well, That reaction didn't work, right.
What can I try now to soothe the energy that I'm still experiencing in my body?
Because again, for many of us, as we begin this reparenting journey, That is healing.
Even just asking the question of what do you need?
What would feel supportive right now?
But again, I want to normalize.
You might not know and that's okay because what you've done is you've broken a habit.
You've paused enough to give yourself space to ask, and And now you can get curious and experiment and explore.
And for your inner child, that might be the first time ever someone you are showing up in service of your own best interest or your own needs.
Circling back to your inner child.
You dedicate the book to little Nicole, who was always enough, exactly as she was.
What would you want to say to somebody else who's joining us right now, who's just beginning to realize that the patterns they've carried for decades aren't who they actually are?
Not recommendations, not signs, but just human to human.
It's got a little emotional hearing that, because there's still a part of me that doesn't fully believe that right.
That only sees worthiness in action.
So I want to reiterate all of you listeners are inherently worthy, you know, for just being who you are.
And I also want to you know, normalize any resistance, any difficulty in believing that.
Maybe even any emotionality that you might notice come out when someone, like myself, suggests that, because that's a beautiful moment where you've met that inner child right.
Mine was alive right now, kind of hearing that, hearing that reflected back to me to some extent believing it, but to Another extent not fully.
And that just really illustrates the complexity of this human experience and you know what it means to be human.
And I think the final thing that I would end with is you know, I think so many of us, and one of the reasons why I've shifted my focus from individual work into a community based setting online include it.
I think so many of us really truly believe we're alone.
We're the only ones who feel this way.
We're the only ones who do this.
I can't tell anyone that this is what I'm struggling with.
So I want to say that that is so not true.
And the reason why I so readily share my own self is in hopes that you can kind of break down that.
That wall of feeling alone because we are all so much more similar than we are dissimilar.
And again, we are all so worthy for just being who we are, in all of our messiness, the things we're good at, the things we're not good at, our joy, our sorrow and everything in between.
Hmm.
Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well.
So, in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
To live a life that's yours is what comes up, right?
Because we all even have different ideas of what good is.
I think our journey here is to find ourselves, find our way back home, get curious, explore that beautiful creature of worthiness, and to And to create, you know, space in our environments and our relationships, to live that expression.
So I think that that is the ultimate goodness in life is to live a life that's yours.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hey, before you go, be sure to tune in next week for our conversation with John Acuff about why procrastination is not actually your problem and the surprising permission shift that happens when you finally finish what matters most.
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This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields.
Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young.
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