Know Thyself - E186 - Nicole LePera: What Your Childhood Home Did to Your Nervous System

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Dr. Nicole LePera joins me to explore how our childhood experiences shape the nervous system, emotional patterns, and identities we carry into adulthood. We unpack how many of the reactions, habits, and relationship dynamics that feel automatic today were once adaptations we developed to maintain connection and safety early in life. Nicole explains how emotional attunement in childhood forms the internal “home base” we return to, often recreating familiar patterns even when they no longer serve us.In this conversation, we explore attachment styles, people-pleasing, parentification, and the unconscious roles we adopt in order to belong. Nicole also introduces the practice of reparenting—learning how to meet our own emotional needs through awareness, nervous system regulation, and body-based practices. This episode offers a grounded path toward understanding where our patterns come from and how we can begin to create a deeper sense of safety and home within ourselves.Try LMNT & get a free sample pack https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfMUDWTR - Up to 43% off sitewide (and a free frother!)https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself[Code: KNOWTHYSELF]André's Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________00:00 Intro03:30 Unearthing What We Buried to Survive09:12 The Childhood Roots of Our Coping Strategies15:59 The Importance of Emotional Attunement19:52 Understanding Attachment Styles28:33 Ad: LMNT30:35 From Seeking Love to Finding Home Within34:54 Meeting Needs With Compassion41:06 Ad: Mudwtr42:29 The Impact of Status-Oriented Parenting51:34 The Body as the Foundation of Healing1:04:19 Simple Practices for Nervous System Regulation1:12:07 Growing When Your Partner Isn't1:26:07 Vulnerability as the Path to Connection1:42:15 Healing the Need to Be Perfect1:50:55 The Power of Inner Child Awareness___________Episode Resources: https://www.instagram.com/the.holistic.psychologisthttps://theholisticpsychologist.com/https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

I think a lot of us avoid our bodies because what is stored in there is a lifetime of very overwhelming emotions that we don't have the capacity to deal with. So a lot of times we'll see mirrored in what happened in childhood in our adult relationships, or maybe we see the opposite. What is reparenting? It begins with presence and another really practical tool, because when we enter the sensory world is when we reconnect with that inner child. Because the more aware I am of what's happening behind the scenes, the more than I give myself the opportunity to change patterns or habits that aren't working for me. Many of our parents and our grandparents

didn't have access to this information. And what I came to understand was, so much of change happens through the body, not just through insight alone. I think the cataclysmic moment was, I get lit up when I say as I have chills now. We have a greater ability to contribute to changing the entire world as far as I'm concerned.

Let's go. Yeah, let's do it. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Know Theyself podcast. Our guest today is a clinical psychologist and founder of the holistic psychologist, which is a global platform with millions of individuals committed to self-healing and mental wellness. She is a New York Times best-selling author, and her new latest work all about reparenting the inner child is focused on the old science of our oldest wounds and, more importantly,

how to actually heal them. We're going to be doing a deep dive today on all things childhood nervous systems, the patterns that are running our life without us really realizing it. And so much more, Dr. Nicola Perra, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me, Andre. I'm honored. You start your new book with this understanding of how often our life was really chosen for us before we were old enough to really choose it. And I'm curious to start off, what is the cost of an unexamined childhood? Yeah, I think that the cost is the cycles, the patterns, those points where so many of us remain stuck, even with incredible amounts of insight and awareness, whether it's moments where we're emotionally overreacting or underreacting, not speaking up when we need to, whether it's when we become so identified with the roles we play that they become so much part of who we are that we can't imagine being anyone other than something that's. someone perhaps has chosen for us to be. I mean, really the consequences even go into emotional

symptoms that so many of us are struggling with, whether it's depression, anxiety, physical symptoms. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, the stress of living by someone else's rules, beliefs, habits, patterns, things that we had to do at one time in our childhood, literally to survive, causes a physiological stress on the body that I think that there are numerous physical health conditions that really are the byproduct. So I think that there are so many costs that so many of us are living, especially as now we live in an age where there is so much information that we can get our hands on, yet we continue to struggle to, I think, create the change that we want. Again, because so many of the habits and patterns were grounded in what we needed to do at one point

or who we needed to become to survive. And while our mind might have updated in some ways, our body remains stuck in that past. I think you're right ever increasingly. There's more information about attachment systems and the nervous system, and it's great that we have more and more access across social media. I would love for this episode and this conversation today to feel super alive, talk about our personal experiences, and make it really accessible for people to tune in and to leave this episode with tools that can really support them finding home within themselves.

I think so often we're seeking for something outside of us to subdue that feeling of not being okay within. There's this quote which I loved when I read in your book. For many of us, the longing to find ourselves is really the desire to unearth what we buried to survive. I want to share more on that. Yeah, I mean, I think I have chills, you know, hearing this and this idea of home even that you're referencing. I've been thinking a lot about it because I think we are endlessly seeking, right, whether it's a feeling internally or a particular way that we believe that our life should look, like this idea of home.

We're trying to find it. And so many of us, I think we wake up at some point. And I know for me, it was when I was entering in my 30s where while I had a home, I was, you know, landed developing a career. And I was near my family, which was very important to me at that time. I had a partner. I had relationships, yet I had no, I had felt so alone in a crowded room. I didn't have a stable sense of groundedness.

So I really dove into trying to understand, like, what is home? Is it something, is it a physical creation? Is a certain way that our life would need to look? Is it a feeling? And why do so many of us exhaust ourselves to some extent or continue to engage in dysfunctional homes or patterns when we really do want and deserve other? otherwise. And I continue to find kind of the answer lives and lands in our childhood, in what our earliest home, not what it looked like, because I'm one of those people who from the outside,

my home looked steady, stable, secure. I had a father who was very committed to supporting me and my older siblings financially. I had a mother who was very committed to staying home and raising each of us. So for a long time, I couldn't understand why I felt so empty inside, why I continue to seek substances to numb myself, to seek achievements to get a internal feeling of fulfillment. And what I came to understand was home is a feeling. Home is a sense of safety and security. And the reality, I think for most of us that we're waking up to is we didn't have that internally. So we continue then to seek it through actions, through patterns, again, through reactive moments where we're trying to regain stable, stability, security, safety that we never had.

I know you've been doing this work for a while, but was there a specific moment for you when you realized this, there was a personal journey here that something felt wrong, that you needed to do more of this work yourself? What was the personal access point for you doing this work? I want to say it was like a cataclysmic moment per se. I think it was a lifetime of moments that were stacking on top of each other. And so again, very driven by achievement in my family. That's what I had been told would get me financial security, would get me emotionalness security, again, in a family where conversations about emotions were largely absent. So I continue to achieve. And I did that. I got letters after my name. Again, I had a successful relationship, yet I continue

to feel very alone, very disconnected. Throughout my 20s, I would cycle through partners, always convinced that it was them not showing up, not being able to emotionally connect with me or to support me. So it took me a while to understand the role that I was playing. And it really took, I think the cataclysmic moment was a little bit of me feeling disempowered, having been in therapy myself, having had clients now consistently coming into my office, week after week, month after month, year after year, and continuing to feel just like they would report to me, really frustrated, really disempowered, continuing to feel. like the insight that we were coming to in our sessions wasn't enough to create change. And

on top of that, I had some physical kind of symptoms that were starting to kind of bust through. I was feeling exhausted all of the time for a period of time seemingly out of nowhere. I ended up fainting on two occasions, which were really scary. And in those moments, I did think what a lot of us do. I went online and I was like, what is wrong with me? I think a lot of the journey to create or help others change begins with ourselves. and that kind of spiraling of worst-case scenario, I was very convinced that something was probably wrong with my brain, why else would I be fainting?

Thankfully, I met a whole bunch of literature and research that wasn't taught to me in my training program about the nervous system, about the body, and I started to begin to make sense of what I was experiencing as a lack of emotional bandwidth, a lack of emotional resilience, and again, the result then of a lifetime of not having those secure emotional connections,

and then understanding that allowed me to, I think, see the clients similarly. And tracing then back the symptoms that were bringing people into my office, whether they were an individual struggling with depression or anxiety or maybe families and couples that I worked with a lot, was the same kind of through line. The symptoms in adulthood usually trace back to childhood experiences where our body adapted in the best way that it could. I find it really fascinating how the expression our coping and behavioral adaptations take differently

and can vary quite widely. If for whatever reason, you know, a few individuals, and you give this example of, you know, they all have an unmet need and they find a solution to that. One becomes a schizophrenic. One becomes addicted to drugs. Another one becomes a high-performing overachiever. And I think that societally, we really celebrate and reward celebrity, successful individuals, people in positions of power,

which often, in more cases than not, frankly, are actually being motivated by some sort of wounded childhood that they're trying to externally create semblance and safety for outside of themselves. I'm curious what you think about that paradox, because we do celebrate a lot what is really internally kind of an empty feeling. 100%. I mean, I think society in a lot of ways does celebrate childhood adaptations, right? A lot of times drive, right, is seen and celebrated as motivation as an individual who's seeking to achieve and then who does achieve. And right, I make a case that, or I am of the belief that a lot of times the continuous action or seeking comes from a childhood where love was conditional, where we learned that we had to go and do and acquire certain things or present. ourselves in certain ways to maintain the connection and the belonging that we need it. I think society also in some ways celebrates other behaviors as well, right? The behaviors of being shut down and easygoing to some extent for some of us, right,

are celebrated as opposed to on the other side sometimes moments where we're being passionate and explosive, right? Those two also can be celebrated. So I think that there's a lot of aspects of society where certain parts or identities or habits are seen and looked at, you know, in a more positive light when really they're grounded, again, in our best attempt to maintain secure connections. Because in childhood, we need to be connected to the world around us. It's the only way that we can care or be cared for. So by being attuned to what's happening around us, including society's messaging and those

of us that kind of continue on that path do, I think it's celebrated in some ways. It's so fascinating once you start to see this all around you, but primarily in yourself, like the motivating forces for ambition, even spirituality, which can be a big one for a lot of people. I know parts it perhaps was for me as well, where the path of meditation or just the seeking of solace in any form can be driven from this place of dysregulation. and of course it's not always the case but I'm curious to examine this you speak about childhood being the place

where we created our emotional home base and for many of us we're living life in what seems to be like a normal personality and what we're used to not realizing we're playing only a certain octave on the keys of the piano and we have a lot more range available to us if we do some digging and explore it a bit

And so could you set the framework for how that emotional home base is created in childhood? Yeah, so in childhood, again, when we are completely dependent, not only for our physical needs, but for our emotional needs, we're incredibly adaptive. We will change ourselves because we can't change the environment around us. And even locating emotional needs in childhood is a newer shift, even in the clinical psychology world. And that really came when we understood the development of our nervous system, the fact that a child can, not calm oneself down on its own. We need a safe adult to come and to soothe or to down regulate when a child is crying or upset or in a state of need. So then depending on the consistency or the inconsistency, so even just putting my childhood into this conversation, it wasn't

necessarily a matter that I did have two parents who were physically present. What impacted me was the lack of emotional attunement. So without that we will modify parts of ourself, will only show the parts that are accepted or aren't shamed or even yelled at. We will become, again, who we need to be to maintain the bonds that are closest to us or that are most important to us. And then, because our nervous system will always prefer the familiar, this is why we get so stuck in patterns, even if we know they're dysfunctional and they might be betraying us or we might be neglecting ourselves. or maybe hurting those around us because our nervous system will prefer those predictable patterns

because it knows what comes next. Even if what comes next is something we want to avoid, it feels safer to us than the unknown. So that is for some of us why we continue to no matter how much insider awareness we might have, right, we might know that we're in a safe relationship yet we can't help those instinctional reactions that our body elicits, the moment that someone appears upset with us, or the moment that someone isn't as communicative with us as we would like them to be, right? We spiral into panic because maybe our body remembers a time where we didn't have secure connection, where distance met rejection or met abandonment. So we memorize to some extent the emotional climate and the reality,

again, for most of us adults, because we were raised by humans who were raised by humans, And if we think back to past generations, many of our parents and our grandparents didn't have access to this information. Like I just even acknowledge, this nervous system science is new information. And some of us didn't have access to resources to financials. So for all of those reasons, more often than not, we didn't have the safety and the emotional attunement that we needed in childhood. So the home base that we keep returning to isn't a grounded, safe, secure one. And though, while that is the case, we can create that at any time. So through all of my work, I hope to empower.

I like to explain why some things are the way they are at this current moment, but it's not to say that that's how they will always be. Because we now know that our body and our mind is incapable of incredible change through neuroplasticity, through practicing small new choices each and every day. We can actually change that climate that we're trying to return to at all times. Yeah, I love that you're in many ways. You're a harbinger of good news because it's like it's not that something's wrong with you that you're broken and now you're that way. But rather there are all these tools for you to be able to connect to that place, regulate yourself, and take control of your path in a sense that, and largely we were living unconscious before.

You spoke to this distinction about attunement. You know, some of us might be listening and say, although probably rare for a lot of us, that like if you look on page, paper, it was all okay. If you look at the actions in terms of the environment, maybe it was okay. But the distinction between somebody being physically present and emotionally attuned are two very different things. It reflects on not just what happened, but what did it feel like to be in your body as a seven-year-old. And so I get that visual of like, you know, a parent holding their child scrolling on their phone or the many different ways in where the present isn't really felt. Again, I love how you brought so much compassion into the fact that our parents are

humans because I think early on we like view them as these perfect archetypes and we don't realize that they too had had parents that had unmet needs and so the cycle continues. So there's lots of compassion which we can bring in here for that but and nonetheless doesn't negate the fact that we didn't have emotional attunement for many of us. And so anything you want to share again on the attunement side of things and how important that is for developing the individuation process. Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community.

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we don't have insight awareness. Like you're saying, we can't zoom out and have all of these high-level conversations with all of these, you know, details that we can integrate. All we have is how we feel. And if we don't have someone that we feel is present to us that can share in our our excitement can be aware of our vulnerability and can be there in presence, not in fixing, not in shaming, but just in sharing space. And I reference both of those things. It's very natural when a parent doesn't have the capacity to be in their own discomfort to immediately want to solve

the problem that the child is upset about, right? Because that quickly then moves the parent and the child out of that discomfort. And that's actually what our nervous system and our body is wired to do. We want to cope with something as quick as possible, meaning we want to move to from discomfort to something that's more tolerable as quickly as possible. So that attunement is so important because sometimes even well-intentioned, right, even the parent who knows in their childhood, they didn't have attuned parents themselves. So now they're going to be overly committed to their kid, right? They're going to become what we could call a helicopter parent, always present, always asking,

always trying to, right, tend to the child so that they don't have to feel the absence, the abandonment, maybe the upset that they felt in their own childhood, right? Yet those moments of overattunement, right, are removing to some extent the child away from the feeling that they're having. Because I think we all have that experience in adulthood. We share a problem with someone and they say, oh, we'll just do this, that or the other thing. And that's not really what we want in that moment. We just want someone to sit next to us and say, wow, right? that feels hard. I feel how hard that feels for you. And for some of us, that relaxes us enough to maybe

then see our way into a practical solution that we can then engage in. But that is attunement and that is absent in so, so very many of us. So without that then, right, we begin to modify ourselves, push or suppress certain emotions down or we explode outward with emotions. We don't have any buffer between how I feel and what I do. Yeah. So then how does that differ to the various different attachment styles, which in your work you go deeper and go beyond? But to set that framework, which a lot of us have heard of,

but why does somebody become avoidant versus anxious and so on? So if in childhood, if connection and compassion and safety were inconsistent, we didn't know when they would be available. And again, I'm going to really generalize this, the safest thing that we could do is become hyper-aware or hyper-vigilant to any shift or change that might indicate that that attention, that connection, that safety will move away. So we become hyper-vigilant and oftentimes, right, we end up pursuing as we do or we see in an anxious attachment style, right? And avoid an attachment style might look like a childhood

where we didn't have that attunement. So emotions were so big, the safest thing to do, was to suppress them, to shove them down or to disconnect from them as I lived the majority of my life in a state of dissociation or a disconnected state where I lived in my mind. I was always thinking, analyzing, no surprise, I became a psychologist, of course, living on my spaceship, as I called it. So a lot of times that disconnected feeling or that kind of way of being that we see in and avoid it, right, comes from an absence of connection. Because when I don't have someone to be safe, with me in childhood, I am left alone with my emotion. So sometimes the safest thing I can do, right, is to avoid them, to disconnect from them.

And then we see that pattern play out when I'm relating to others, wait, where I keep myself far away from any connection that is possible, even if now in adulthood, that connection is safe. So that's avoided. So that would be avoided is the absence of connection. And again, I'm simplifying in childhood looks like those distancing, those pulling away, behaviors. It's the person who almost feels like they have a wall up. They're present and showing up for the relationship, but you don't really have a sense of kind of how they're thinking or what they're

feeling and or they move away, right? They leave a relationship before intimacy deepens or they hyper focus on flaws in someone else to, you know, be the reason why this relationship won't work to prevent closeness entirely, where if we want to say like the opposite, so to speak, the anxious, right, will be the person who's pursuing hypervigilant. sensing any shift in tone, worried if you're upset with me or not, and trying to pursue to maintain that connection because they are in contrast to the avoidant who never had the connection, right? And anxious attachment had parts of it in certain moments.

So that's what we then become vigilant to, right? Any indication that the connection that might be available might leave. How much would you say, and it's probably really hard to give an accurate percentage, but like of people that are actually secure and then disorganized, right? So disorganized to kind of wrap that one in there. That would be when the parent, right, this person who we need safety and security from, when they are the source of our abuse or our neglect. So then we have kind of mixed messaging, right?

The person that I'm quite literally wired to connect to is also the person that's abusing me or that's like neglectful of me. So that then is a bit of a, we could think about as a combination, in a sense of the avoidant versus the anxious attachment where it's kind of like we desperately want closeness, but we're desperately afraid of it at the same time. And honestly, I think secure attachment is few and far between. I think there are fewer adults than you would see in those other attachment styles that are securely attached, again, because few of us in our lineages, right, had parents,

grandparents that had these tools and skills themselves. But again, I want to be clear, secure attachment can be created through new safe, secure relationships and, of course, through us changing and learning how to be safe and securely attached ourselves. What does being a securely attached individual feel like for you? Yeah. So it feels like a sense of calmness, a sense of groundedness. But it also feels like moments to be clear of being triggered, of being activated. Though the difference is, right, we can return to a sense of calm.

groundedness, we can engage in a process of repair right after conflict. So to be clear, it's not just a matter of never feeling upset, never feeling stress. It's a matter of learning, right, in a responsible way, how to navigate difficult feelings, different perspectives in relationships. And this is, of course, contrasting by the many of us who are seeking, right, passionate relationships with highs, with lows, or maybe we're hyper-independent, like a lot of avoidance tend to be, right, where we pride ourselves on not needing anyone for anything. So it's learning how to be collaborative and connective with someone and understanding that with

that means moments of conflict, moments of disagreement, and then learning the skills if we don't yet have them to repair or really simply reconnect to come back together after a moment of disconnection. So then how do you build on it with your individual development model? once you understand and you start to explore these different attachment styles, you can start to pinpoint how you typically relate to love and the way that we, especially how it shows up in romantic dynamics, I think it becomes pretty obvious what we're attracted to, the person who's emotionally unavailable, for example, and we see that pattern come up over and over again, start to have some insight into this. Then how do you build on on top of attachment systems with your model? I think all change happens with the awareness that we continue to speak of, right? Learning how to be present to ourselves and our lives, learning to understand what habits we are

carrying into our relationships in particular, maybe what beliefs or identities are driving those habits, right? For a lot of us, we become the caretaker in an adult relationship because, again, there was safety in worrying about or appeasing other people in childhood. So all change happens when we first see ourselves. right, from that grounded state of presence, not from a child who couldn't, right, zoom out and understand context and change, but from an adult who has that capacity. But to, again, acknowledge that oftentimes we don't yet have the tools to do or shift our actions in the moment,

right? So the awareness that I'm speaking of means throughout consistent moments in our day, dropping into our body, determining how I feel in the physical sense. Of course, in addition, to what I'm thinking and emotionally, right, what emotions I might be having in that moment, but it begins with presence, right? Because the more aware I am of what's happening behind the scenes, the more than I give myself the opportunity to change patterns or habits that aren't working for me. But again, for a lot of us, we become locked and loaded, especially if these patterns are all we've known ourselves to be, if they're wrapped around identities, again, if our nervous system is dysregulated.

A lot of times, right, in the moment where instead of screaming or yelling or disconnecting, we want to do something different, we're not going to have that capacity unless we begin to reconnect with our body to begin with, to learn when our body is under stress and to learn then how to calm our body down because so much of change happens through the body, not just through insight alone. Just to tie a bow on that, when you think about how often we are trying to get a need met, only way we know how. What are some of the most common patterns you see in your clinical practice as this shows up over and over again? I think a really common way that we go to get our need met

is we don't communicate it. We just enact it. We do the thing that we once learn to do, whether it's the most, I think, common pattern that I also identify with myself is where we are the people pleaser, the appeaser, right, where we remove ourselves from the equation, thinking that the way to meet our needs is by caring for or by appeasing or allowing someone else to be okay before we are okay for ourselves. So I think that is a really, really common one that I see very often, which is where we learn to focus externally and we continue then to focus externally on the world around us, on other people, on what they might want or need, and we forget to factor ourselves into the equation.

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and so you don't even have to send it back. That's so confident they are that you'll love it. That's drinklm-N-T-com slash no-l-l-l-l-l-scription. As always, back to the show. To me, this is like a really, it's one of the most important things to reflect on as somebody who's an adult or is, is growing through the childish, you know, parts of themselves to become an integrated, individuated adult, to see all the different ways in which I am looking externally to extract

love, to meet a need. And to me, it's a painful realization at first because you realize how often you're actually not meeting the relationships and the opportunities in life from a centered place, rather what that thing can be for you, ergo, removing. a lot of the intimacy that could be available in that connection. And I think we're trained societally to like view relationships a bit more transactionally, conditioned societally to fundamentally see that our ideal life is going to be had solely from arranging our external circumstances in a certain way. So going back to that note of like finding home within yourself, so much of us,

crave that home feeling and find it in many different ways through partnerships and our purpose and all these different things. But to be able to have the experience of sitting by yourself and feeling good. Like that's quite a big hurdle for a lot of people, sadly. But there's good news. And that means it's available to us. So yeah, do you want to share anything? I was just smiling because I was thinking of the decades that I could not. and would not sit, be, do anything by myself. Because, and again, this was the period of time where I was living in New York City

where thankfully I didn't have to, ever. And it really took, again, a practice of carving out time, space, to be with myself, to be with my emotions, feeling the discomfort inherent in that to begin with. Because, again, what I learned in childhood was that distance was abandonment. Because when I didn't feel my mom attuned or present to me, I was left feeling alone.

So I had to teach myself a version of safety in absence of someone else. Can I be okay? And it quite literally took, I remember the first time I ever took a trip alone, I was probably in my early 30s, and I went from Philadelphia to New York City. And this is not, you don't have to let go and be alone to do this, but I remember just carving out space and it was for a talk I was giving, and I wrote the train up, and I remember how foreign it felt to just be alone.

to, and I had a partner at home. She could have come, but just spending time and space away, determining my day, what I wanted to eat, you know, kind of how I wanted to go about. I was so unfamiliar with all of it because I was so practiced in always being by someone else and always asking what they wanted to eat for dinner, that those moments felt so foreign. And now here I am. I'm here alone. I love it. So with practice, we can learn how to. But again, I really want to emphasize. The reason why we struggle to be alone is because alone has taken on a meeting. It's not that we're not an adult who can't do something on our own. It's because that child, like part of us remembers when alone meant rejection or meant shame or meant something was wrong

with us. And again, the influences I want to be clear, or even just beyond our family, into our peers and school and those of us who didn't feel accepted in really traditional school systems or with our peer groups for whatever reason, right? A loneness for so many comes so weighted. It comes as a reminder of how unworthy we once believed ourselves to be. So understanding what our current relationship with alone is, maybe carving out small moments. And it doesn't even have to be like alone in the physical proximity.

It might even be like deciding individually what I want that might in a moment differ from what someone else wants, like what's for dinner? I mean, these sound, I think, for a lot of us, like, so simple, so silly, like actions that aren't actually going to do anything in the long run. But again, if you're someone who alone, separate individual ideas and preferences didn't have space for that in childhood, then these small moments where we're saying, I'm separate from you. You want pizza for dinner? I want sushi. And that's okay. Those go such a greater distance because what it's teaching us is distance is okay separation. A difference in opinion doesn't mean that we're not matched well,

we're not meant to be. We can still be in a very safe, secure, happy relationship, but I can be alone in that sense too. But again, for so many of us, alone has so much meaning that's so connected to how unworthy we are, that we avoid alone at all costs, like we were saying earlier, sometimes keeping ourselves busy and achieving or in relationship after a relationship to avoid reminding ourselves with how unworthy you once felt. It feels like there's such a big difference when somebody has like a physical,

like they're an amputee or they have some sort of disability that you can see obviously. The psyche is invisible to each other. Obviously there's the manifestations with our actions and whatnot externally, but they're harder to pick up. And I think it's so easy

to get caught into the defensiveness of trying to get our needs met, like you said, how we're familiar with and what we're used to. And I think the more that we do this work, the more you are attuned to what the needs are of other people as well, and that we can meet those needs with compassion and understanding, not that we're going to be a perfect being and never get triggered, right? But we have more of a capacity to actually see what's being asked of in a moment, not just the words that are being said, but the need that's being asked to be met.

And to me, that's like, that's a really beautiful place to live from because your presence gets to be, sort of liberating in many different ways. You get to be a force for helping people find home within themselves as well. 100%. I think, again, that capacity that we lacked the ability to do in childhood, like we said, zoom out, understand context and scenario, and the fact that your partner who's maybe yelling in a moment and saying unsavory things is feeling unsafe.

And that might have been someone who in childhood maybe striking first was the safest thing for them to do, right? That moment gives you more capacity now to, perhaps tolerate, understand, see differently, right, something that might have just felt hurtful. But I want to be clear, whether it's our partners or our parents, right, that doesn't negate the impact, right? We can have understanding for someone and awareness, ourself, include it, right, and still say, and this is hurtful, and this is crossing a boundary. And I'm emphasizing this in particular because I am someone who's my learned habit was to not factor myself in,

to not take that second step and say, I understand you. I got very good at that. Again, I became a clinical psychologist for that reason. I never took that second step and said, and still, this isn't okay, or this is what I need, or this is how I feel in this moment. So I really want to emphasize that because for some of us, we've learned to protect ourselves by just making everything okay. And sometimes we don't, again, without the capacity to cope in a moment, sometimes our nervous

system shuts us down to even be able to speak up for ourselves. So I want to be clear that with that capacity to understand context doesn't then negate the reality that sometimes we have to learn to speak up for ourselves or to draw a limit or to say, hey, or just remove ourselves from an unsafe situation until maybe our very loving partner calms down enough to speak to us more respectfully. I think it can be quite hard to like sometimes just be a, alone by yourself in a room and think about and put together the environment, you know, the memories that may or may not be there accessible to your childhood. As to like, what really was the environment, you know, that I grew up in?

I think one supporting thing is to think about to what degree was our parents emotionally immature. And you give a list of a few different ones that I'm sure people can relate to. So I'd love for you to just quickly go through those if you remember. I have them open here as well. But I think that gives some good insight to see, you know, what was the environment that I grew up in? Yeah. And so emotional maturity, just to define that really quickly, is the inability, right, to remain calm and grounded during emotional moments. And again, very few of our parents have had that because they didn't have the attumment that they needed to be with their emotions.

So they could become, if I paraphrase some of them, right, a parent who becomes outwardly explosive, right? Where emotions they become, they become almost a dangerous type of experience with, again, could cause us to shut down, to become hypervigilant to any shift or change in those emotions. Other side of that, we might have a shutdown parent who, because of all of the overwhelming emotions that they have experienced, right, they aren't able to be present at all. This very much looked like my mom, who was physically there, though kind of emotionally, right, was a million miles away. We have parents then, too, who project, right, their emotional needs onto physical actions, right, where they require us to show up in a more conditional way, to perform in certain ways,

to care for them in certain ways. Again, a lot of parents who blur boundaries like to become what I call like a peer-like parent, right, where they want to be your best friend. Maybe it becomes very well-intentioned because they had a very distant relationship with their parents. So now they want to be your best friends, blurring the boundaries, coming to you for advice, sharing things with you that are developmentally inappropriate. Again, this is because they haven't learned boundaries and kind of what maturity is needed in terms of what a child can hold space for emotionally or not. So again, there's a lot of iterations, I think, of emotional immaturity. So like in that example, what would that create in the experience? If you have like a peer like

parent, what would that create as a childhoods development? So a peer like parent, right, who blurs boundaries doesn't say, hey, this is a mature adult conversation that you can't, you know, kind of deal with or doesn't create physical space boundaries, then translates to, lack of boundaries that we then have. We cross people's boundaries. We feel that only like that type of a meshed closeness is the only thing that feels like a relationship. We struggle, right, with separation, like I was talking about earlier, understanding that two different adults have two different spaces, right, two different ideas, opinions. So a lot of times we'll see mirrored in what happened in childhood in our adult relationships, or maybe we see the opposite, right? So that

child equally could say, wow, that parent was a lot. And so now I'm going to put up such a strong boundary. I'm going to prevent anyone, right, from coming into my space because that felt so uncomfortable and intrusive to some extent, then now I create kind of a wall between even safe relationships. Great. Let's go through a couple more and to see what would, from the perspective of the developing child, what coping mechanisms, does that create? What behavioral adaptation does that create? For example, you have like a status-oriented parent. So a status-oriented parent, right? Again, is looking to external, usually, right? Looking to a child to gain. And again, sometimes this is grounded in. For instance, my family had a bit of this because

success and achievement, right, from my parents who were immigrant to this country and believed that that was the pathway to financial security. Right. And again, this was in a world where, emotions weren't even factored into a conversation about raising kids at all. The goal was to raise a child who could stand on their own two feet financially, right, hypothetically leave the home. And so for really understandable reasons, the status-oriented parent pushes a child to excel, right, to get the degrees, to achieve in some way. But then what happens in childhood is we begin to define our worth on those, around those achievements, even our identity. Right. If I'm not someone who is a high performer, then who am I at all?

Hmm. I could imagine everybody listening right now, I mean, especially with immigrant parents, I know it's very common in Middle Eastern and Indian households. It's like you're a doctor, you're a lawyer, or you're a failure. Yeah. You know, it's like, and of course, it's well intention. It's like they want the best for their children. They want to be financially sound because they weren't.

They want them to be able to have the means to create a life of security because they did not. And then that, again, like can merge our ideas. identity with our worth being tied up in performance. So I could just hear a lot of people resonating to each of these different parents, according to their own household, the critical parent. Yeah, the critical parent, again, is a parent who is hyper, you know, shaming, sometimes even abusive around, whatever they don't like, you know, whatever it is that is making them uncomfortable, you know, becomes very hypercritical. And that child then, right, takes those cues, hears those moments,

again of critical, of internalizes and the shame, begins to diminish those aspects of whatever it is that they're being criticized and gain safety by showing those parts less, by developing their own internal critic that keeps them in line. So criticism in childhood, I think, very much results then in hypercritical internal voices in adulthood, a lot of internal shame, and then a lot of acting from that shame where we hide, where we lie, where we feel like any sort of even natural human, right, imperfection is something that's to avoid it because, again, that tape is always playing, right? If somewhere to see or hear, my true self, what my true thought is, right, I open myself up

to criticism. So instead, I don't share it. I shrink. I kind of go back to the back of the crowd. I don't like to be seen. Why? Because being seen might open myself. up to criticism.

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frother and free shipping. That's M-U-D-W-T-R.com slash know thyself. I hope you enjoy as much as I do. Back to the show. It's so fascinating how across the board and all these examples, this becomes like our voice of reason. It's our default mode of self-talk. If we were criticized, that's what we think it means to be loving to ourself in a sense. It's like by being critical, I get my need met. By being a high achiever, I find my worth. Like across the board, we can keep going.

You know, there's a couple more with the over-permissive parent, the uninvolved parent, the helicopter parent we talked about, the authoritarian parent. And this kind of leaves into parentification. So what is that? Yeah, so parenthification is a role reversal that happens where a child is whether through kind of daily practices of literally caring for the home, caring for siblings. A lot of times we do see this in immigrant families where the child is responsible for translating. We talked a little bit about kind of learning English in the second language, right?

So for a lot of immigrant families, right, they rely on a child for actually strong. running of a household. And then there's also the emotional parentification where a parent is relying on a child for support, for companionship, for understanding, right, the parent who vents to the child. So again, it's a child who's made to be or play a role that developmentally is inappropriate for them. It's a mismatch from what they actually need. And that oftentimes is like we're talking about reward it, right? That child might hear from a very loving, you know, celebrated perspective of you're so mature for your age, right? And then you become the mature functioning, over-functioning adult who's doing the same thing, right? Running your current household,

never uncomfortable asking anyone else for help or support, again, because you have that belief that that's the only way that you are valued or you matter in a relationship is to be the one holding it all together, whether it's, again, emotionally or practice. I would love to get your perspective on how, like, it's really important to understand these different versions, see what applied to you in your own story of development. There's so much freedom to be found on this inner excavation journey and inner healing journey, and it can also go too far in the aspect where we're continuing to reinforce the narrative that something's broken or wrong with us.

And so how do you know which side you're on when you're doing this work and you're in, inter-examining, I guess, how does someone discern whether this is beneficial to them and they're making progress versus they're stuck in this pattern of continually trying to find what was wrong with me? And that obviously has its own faults. I will make a global suggestion here, which is to shift from any version of thinking or questioning what is wrong with anyone. Because I believe, again, all of the symptoms, the stuck points, the pattern sometimes, generational cycles that we're repeating were brilliant survival adaptations, right? They were what we or someone before us now that we understand epigenetics, which is actually

the kind of physiological passing on of certain traits, if you will, to survive. So I think we are all a beautiful adaptation to whether it's our earliest circumstances or our ancestors' earliest circumstances. So I think a more helpful question than to explore, right, is, what am I needing? What am I needing now? What did I once need that I didn't get? Because again, I don't think that anything is wrong. And I think when we're in that action of being aware and questioning, right, then we give ourselves the opportunity to say, okay, these things are still aligned, these habits, these beliefs, these patterns, they're working, so to speak. And we also

then give ourselves the opportunity to shift, right, to say, okay, this isn't working for me as much anymore so I can begin to leave some of those old beliefs behind, maybe create some newer beliefs in action. Okay, so we start to gain awareness, you know, like so much of this journey is awareness and integration, awareness and integration. As you start to gain insights to the needs that were unmet, that feel like they're currently unmet, what is reparenting? How would you describe what that is? And what does it actually look like on a Tuesday afternoon when no one's watching. So reparenting is the kind of daily actions that we can begin to take to show up as the loving,

compassionate, supportive being, the being who is interested in what we might need in a moment and then who can begin to take action in those directions. So reparenting is going to look different for each and every one of us and, of course, for everyone listening, though, it begins with awareness. It begins with setting aside time in your day, maybe setting alerts on your phone to check in with yourself. And to begin those check-ins, not from our mind, right, not to analyze or, you know, kind of break down what's happening, but to feel in our body, right? It's a daily practice of like we've been talking about throughout, right, of rebuilding a home or connection to self.

So it means dropping in, whether it's in the morning, the afternoon or the evening, and exploring our body, how do I feel? Is there tension in my muscles? Am I at ease? How is my heart rate? How is my breathing? How is my energy? Do I have energy to do the things that are important for me to do within any given day? And then to begin to again create safety where there was stress, right? Release tension where we're holding and gripping and clenching. Slow our breathing down when our body is

beginning to get stressed up and quicken our breath. Slow our heart rate down. Slow our movements down, right? It's beginning with the body is a sense of caretaking, right? Understanding that our body is going to be playing a role in how we're thinking and then ultimately what it is that we're doing. So let's dive deeper here into the somatic side of things because like traditional psychotherapy can fall short and the somatic working with the body can pick up where a lot of these programs are, they have an emotional basis in the body that we can work with that can be obviously a quicker access point in most cases than just working with the on the level of the story. of the mind. So how important is it to look at it from the body's perspective? And then we can go

into some practices and how these different emotions are stored subconsciously, different organs and different parts of our body. So I'd love for you to set the stage of it there. I think the body is foundational. And I think a lot of us avoid our bodies because what is stored in there is a lifetime of very overwhelming emotions that we don't have the capacity to deal with. So it is really rebuilding that connective point where we remember we have a body, we remember to check in with the body, and then we learn how to tolerate more and more discomfort in the body, again, through small choices, shifts, changes that we can make somatically or in what our body's doing and how we're holding our body, right, and how we're moving our body that can begin to then shift

the signals that our body is sending to our mind. Because for a very long time, my field would, and it doesn't mean that our mind isn't powerful. Our mind. Our mind is, mind is incredibly powerful. We know that when we imagine something and we feel as if it's happening in any given moment, but just as much as our mind is sending signals down, our instructions, so to speak, to our body, our body is sending even more, right, signals to our mind. And that's when a stressed body translates to racing, overwhelming thoughts. So sometimes, right, it's a difference between noticing my body is stressed, right, learning how to release tension in certain areas, learning how to slow breath, slow movement, how to downregulate the stress to then finally begin

to see a shift in the speed or the overwhelmingness of our thoughts. So as far as I'm concerned, it is the body that is the foundation of any change because if we don't feel safe in our body, changing, walking into that unknown, like I spoke of earlier, from our nervous system's perspective, is not anything that we're going to risk if we already are, you know, without capacity, if we're already overwhelmed and stressed, those are the moments where no matter how much insight, awareness, even commitment to change that we might have, our body is going to rely on those old habits in that moment because it's beyond capacity. So the most unsafe thing for it to do is to walk into the unknown where there could be something even more overwhelming. So it is really

learning to expand our body's capacity to deal with stress and uncomfortable emotions so that we can even set ourselves up for the possibility to make new choices or create change. Sounds like even the mere act of giving attention to and presencing to what's happening inside is healing in and of itself. Like awareness itself is a great solvent in that aspect. But to take it a step further, what are your go-to practices to work with the body to help support processing that. When we look at the nervous system, I know you have many different tools and share a lot on social media with the millions of people who follow you and tune in and resonate

with your messages. What have you found is like kind of your go-toes? So I like to talk about kind of two different categories of go-toes because the first are the habits, right? Just even exploring what your eating habits are, what your sleeping habits are, what your kind of daily habits are in terms of How connected are you to your body? Do you move it? Do you sit in a desk? Do you go out in nature? And again, this is something as you're talking about earlier. Society, modern life is really kind of disconnected from what our body needs. We're putting in, we're eating food that's not just whole foods that has a bunch of preservatives and chemicals that's stressing our body. We're living under blue lights. We're getting very little sleep. We're not moving our bodies because we're sitting at

desks all day. We're so disconnected from nature. We never go outside. We don't get sun. So these are daily habits that, again, with awareness, not judging what are our habits currently, but looking, right? Can I go to bed a bit earlier, right? Can I eat a bit differently? Can I move maybe if I have absence of movement in my life? Can I make daily commitments in small ways to take care of my body? Because all of those actions from food to sleep to movement to sunlight and nature, all of those help naturally regulate our nervous system. And then, of course, there's a kind of in the moment, pocket tools that we also need to know those moments where in real time, right, I'm starting to feel my body gets stressed. I'm starting to feel those old instincts, right, where I'm going to

scream, yell, or avoid, or leave the room or whatever coming online, right? Those are the moments then I need to learn how to slow my breath, right? Lengthen my exhale. And I like to even focus on things that I can do with other people around. They don't have to know I'm doing it. notice if I'm clenching my jaw or my hands and releasing, notice if I'm starting to talk quicker or louder. And as I like to do when I'm stressed, I get loud, I get quick. Right. So slowing the volume, lower, slowing the speed, lowering the volume, take getting up,

walking around, shaking things out, like shaking our legs, getting some energy out, maybe even pausing a conversation, right, leaving the room and coming back when I'm at a grounded point later, right? All of these are in real time ways we can kind of downregulate our stress again, because when we're in a stressed state, more often than not, we're going to rely on the old habits that created safety, which are simply the quickest way to get to a state of a lessened discomfort, which aren't always the healthiest things that we want to do in those moments. Yeah, that's great. It also is super accessible, even just the lengthening of the exhale. Any other quick hacks for the Vegas nerve and things that you've picked up?

I'm just curious if there's anything else that comes to mind. Vegas nerve, you know, a lot of times too, gargling, anything kind of where we can manually stimulate singing, those of us who just naturally are inclined to sing, those can be really, really helpful. I think what's important here is to find something that is accessible to you, the individual, right? Because I could give a million different suggestions, but if it's not something that feels, approachable to you, feels possible in any given moment. That's why I really urge all of us to kind of explore the things that feel feasible, that don't feel scary or weird to do to begin with, because starting somewhere is what is important. And then as we expand our capacity,

then we can explore other things. But I think anything that, you know, feels like a safe thing to try, maybe even in a private moment before we want to unveil something more publicly, I think it's just the practice of doing something new in moments that often does need practice before we're actually able to execute the new thing in the moment that we really want to. And I emphasize this because nowhere do we feel more shameful than when we're self-aware, when we know what we want to avoid doing, and whether we're hovering in real time, or we're kind of watching ourselves as the thing is spinning out of our mouth that we don't want to say or do, or somewhere after the fact we're feeling so shameful, right?

I think those, that's kind of the grace that I want to offer all of us is that those moments will continue to happen because those moments are dictated by our body, not by intention, not by heart, not by desire. They are really going to be driven by what our body is capable of doing, which is again why those habits are just as equally as important. Because if I see this in myself, if I go for a long time not eating well, not sleeping well, even if I have exciting stress in my life, it's still red. registering in my body is stressful. Right? So those then are the moments where, admittedly, I fall back into old habits, right? I do things that I already know I don't want to do.

I know they don't get the outcomes that I want, but they are driven, again, by my body that I have allowed to go beyond its capacity. I feel like in my life, I've really noticed the moment that comes up, there is some sort of tension somewhere in the body always coupled with that. And then also a change in abnormality in the breath

shortness of breath, holding a breath. I was just holding my breath right now. So there you go. Just like stop breathing all the side. As if you're bracing yourself. Yeah. Because you are, right?

Yeah, you are. And that's exactly too a lot. So for me, when I became aware of the SOAS muscle, so it's kind of the major muscle that kind of wraps around all of our major organs here. It's known as the fight or flight muscle

because when we are stressed and our body goes into that instinctive cycle of fighting or flaying, right? Just think about it. If I were to fight or, fight, right? I need all of these muscles to be tent and ready to throw the punch or to run away.

So a body that lives in survival mode, meaning one that's always registering stress, whether it's real or imagined, is going to have so much tightness and constriction that like we're describing, naturally then holding the breath is something then that body does because we're racing for the next shoe to drop

or the next bad thing to happen. And for me, it looks like mobility issues, constricted movement. So one of the daily habits that I really lean on and have been is stretching, having kind of massage, bodyworking professionals, actually getting into the fascia, that kind of web-like material that surrounds all of our organs that very much registers our emotion and constricts when we're stressed out. So for me, a daily habit of not only, I'm not a marathon runner. I don't do anything strenuous, but slow movements, gentle stretching has helped release my tight so as, because again, we can instinctually tell ourselves to calm down all we want.

But if our body is bracing and we're not releasing that tension, then we can continue to tell ourselves to calm down until we're blowing the face because we're not going to be or think or act calmly because our body actually isn't calm. Yeah, like awareness is one thing, but that active repatterning within our body is another. I think there's a growing body of field of study with the, link between emotional dysregulation and physiological disease and illness that shows up. Is there anything interesting in the research or the findings that you found of how connected they are? Because, I mean, this goes back millennia through various different Eastern medicinal

practices and understanding of organs and how they're tied with each emotion and the newer studies that are coming out. I'm curious if anything comes to mind there. Yeah. I mean, what comes to mind, and I reference it in the book, is the Aces study. and without kind of going into the more details of the human body, really generally speaking. So the ACEs is a questionnaire. It was developed some plus years ago, and the intention was to survey or to assess traditional, more traditional, but often relational-based traumas in childhood. So having a parent who was incarcerated, abused substances, with abusive, etc. It was about, I don't know, 12 questions, 15 questions.

And they would assess kind of what happened in childhood based on the scale. You would get a number, the amount of kind of trauma. so to speak that you experienced, and then they would follow these individuals well into adulthood, and they would see or assess whether or not they had psychological or emotional diagnoses or issues and or physical. And this study was hugely groundbreaking in the field because it connected what happened in childhood to actual emotional and physical outcomes in adulthood. And what it saw over and over again is the higher the amount of trauma in childhood, the more cardiovascular disease, the more cancer, the more cancer, the more.

more diabetes kind of diseases or diagnoses were happening in adulthood. And now, obviously, there's a ton of research that continues to verify that, but also talks about the toll of repressing emotions. There's a ton of research on what happens in our body physically and the physical illnesses and sicknesses that come. Autoimmune disease is a huge one, as far as I'm concerned, that all come, again, from a body that's dysregulated. but that ACE's scale was groundbreaking again

because it connected childhood to adult outcomes and it was such an expansive study that it really kind of showed the pattern and it connected again, not just to emotionally how it is then from what happened but physically. I love how simple you can bring this to the everyday person as well because I saw this funny skit online the other day

of like, I don't know about you, but is everybody else also doing the sauna and the coal plunge and the H-Bod and the beef liver on a plant-based diet? and all the things, you know. It's like healing becomes a task on another list just to continue to add to your mountain of to-does that becomes another means to exhaust and deplete your nervous system. And so like those simple tools that don't cost money that are available to us in every moment,

one awareness where this tension and the breath and whatnot, I saw you do one thing online with like, what is this? Yeah. What is point? So in our ear, you know, pulling down a little bit. it helps all of our vagus nerve, right? It kind of cut all of our nerves, really, but they all, a lot of them come up around our neck,

up in here. So even sometimes, too, right, putting our ear, our finger in our ear, pulling down gently again. So with anything, right, it's not about a million different activities, diving into the deep end of a cold plunge, right? Some of us, it's tipping a toe in

or turning the shower a little cooler, right? I'm not going to rip my ear down, but, right, there's a lot of points kind of around that we can play with a butterfly tap, a lot of things that we can do. I talk about in the book, and of course I put on my social media that are small little shifts that we can make.

But in terms of that extreme, that is something else to be aware of, right? Because we do have access to a lot of information, a lot of extreme protocols now, a lot of new tools and gadgets. But for some of us, that is just a continuation, right, of a seeking, as we've been talking about, right? I don't feel enough.

So now I've become the project, and it feels healthy, right? because this is health-related projects, but really it's grounded in. I don't feel enough. I feel like I need to rely on all of these tools. If you ever ask me and you're ever working with me, whenever I'm working with a professional, I'll put it this way. I always say, like, I want you not have to rely on you, right? Get me to a place where I love support for now, but my goal would be, right, help me help my body along so that I need less intervention, right? It's not to say that support and, you know, that services aren't helpful, but my goal is let me equip my body with the ability to kind of maybe do what you're doing for me somewhere down the line

on its own. And I do think some of us, again, continue to over-rely even in areas where it feels like we're doing so for health or wellness. But again, we're just continuing to seek something from outside of ourselves that we could perhaps give from within. I love, I mean, as you're the holistic psychologist, trademark, I love how holistic, literally, the approach is because if we, like, are tending to a garden and we want a plant, you know, to blossom to its full potential, we have to think of all the elements that contribute to that, right? So it's like we work on the level of the mind. We work on the level of the body and semantics and the energy. So much of what are perceived problems and inadequacies could be largely diffused by a good night of sense. sleep, you know? And so I think we often make these huge, big spiritual ambitions and goals of what we need to do to feel okay with ourselves, which could be actually really simple if we take care of

our body and what our fundamental needs are, health-wise, sunlight, food, nutrition, water sleep, all these things. And then these additional little tools that can really help us. I'm curious when you think about like the ancestral ties to these conditionings and the bloodline that we carry and the conditioning that we have the opportunity to break those chains that are so ingrained in our family line. I'm curious what your thoughts are there because it really does shift us into thinking like what a great opportunity it is to stop the pattern that has run so many people throughout our whole generation and family line. Before we talk about opportunity, I do want to acknowledge how for some of us it's infuriating. It's frustrating. We feel helpless,

We say, why, right? Is this now the situation? Why do I have to be the one to do this? So I do want to honor, right, the grief, the anger, all the natural emotions that come up when maybe you hear someone like me or you read about epigenetics and you do really understand that this isn't theory anymore, right? Epigenetics really talks about how environments impact, not our genetics, our DNA, but how those DNA are expressed. And nothing is more impactful than stress. So if we think back, you know, those of us who have details about our ancestors, and if we know, right, how stressful their environments were, right, what needs they weren't met,

what scarcity or trauma, geopolitical or whatever it is that they have dealt with, right? Now we can maybe understand why certain adaptations, right, were inserted, so to speak, into our family lines. But again, like I said earlier, that doesn't then remove the impact that it has on. us because a lot of us and we're born and whether we have that information or we don't, we're still operating as if we're in those early environments because that's the most intelligent, adaptive thing a body could do. It's priming future generations to deal with an environment, right, anticipating that this environment never changes, whatever it looked like

for our grandparents, that's the most genius thing that a body could do, right? If I set my lineage, my offspring up to survive, anticipating that this environment isn't going to change, those modifications then might have been the difference between life or death, but they have changed for so many of us. Those environments were not in scarcity and lack, as some of us are, to be clear, but not all of us are still living in those environments, but our genes, right, think they are. So it's important to understand that, but we now know, I mean, the choice that we have available to us is real and the impact of those choices are incredible.

because one of the incredible studies I reference is it's called the Dutch hunger study. And just to briefly explore it or it followed along women who were pregnant during a severe famine in the Netherlands where they had literally zero calories to eat. And what it found was their offspring and future their offspring's offspring showed changes along different genetic patterns, having to do with diabetes, having to do with heart disease, having to do with emotional issues. And so those lasted, even beyond these children, to be clear, were not born in a famine. Yet their bodies were reacting as if they were. And so within their children's bodies, they would have maintained those same epigenetic changes. This is why some of us even struggle with weight because we come from a lineage where holding on to calories was necessary because food was inconsistent or short to begin with.

So we still have those biomarkers as if we're, living in that same scarcity or inconsistency. But this study really highlighted the positive power of change because it then showed that then those children, if they were to be in a nutrient-dense environment with supportive relationships included, they actually were able to change that epigenetic pattering and erase all of those impacts from not only themselves but for their future generation. So when I literally, I get lit up when I say as I have chills now, we have the ability to change not only our world, our children's, our future generations world. And I believe as we come together in awareness, as we return to our inherent capacity to be collaborative creatures,

I do believe we have a greater ability to contribute to changing the entire world as far as I'm concerned. Let's go. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, you're doing it with your work. I strive to, in my own way with mine. And it's exciting when you really view it as the empowering lens it can be. and you do acknowledge the grief, you do acknowledge the burden and the weight that it feels like as a person who's going through these things. But then I think as you do more of this work, it really does become, oh, wow, this gets to be a gift not just for me, but as an extension, my whole family and everyone lets you come after me in those generations.

And that's exciting. I'm curious, as somebody who is committed to doing this work supports with a lot of people online and in your own clinical practice doing this work, what do you do when somebody is committed to this work and their romantic partner is not into it? What do you see the difficulties there? How does somebody navigate that? Because I think it's a big theme, and especially with our community as well, as like there's this tension of waking up to these things, doing the work, and then their family, their friendships, their partnerships, they're not, not to say one's better or worse, but it can become challenging, obviously, when you take full responsibility

and accountability for your own growth and other individuals around you don't seem to to the same degree. So how do you navigate that? Yeah, it's challenging. I mean, because when we begin to change, we do impact that change reflects outward, right? We begin to, in small ways, show up differently,

which then means even those closest to us begin to experience us differently. And again, living in a same similarly wired human body, it's change isn't going to be welcomed with open arms, even if the change that you are, you know, contributing to would be for the betterment of the relationship with this person, it's going to register to their nervous system is different. Unknown. What's happening here? They're not who I once thought them to be. And some of us hear that language. Who are you now?

I don't know you. You're not the little girl, little boy I raised, or what is this partner? It's not who I married, right? And it's like, well, I'm becoming likely more of myself. But so for us, it feels like this very conflictual, like upsetting disconnect because not only we're investing all this time, energy, the difficulty of creating change. We're doing so for our best interests, which will again reverberate outward, but again, it will just register to those people. So I like to just have understanding in those moments for why you might not be welcomed wholeheartedly in newness by someone that we love, but also to then acknowledge the new negotiations that we might have to make with that person, really, you know, carving out space,

understanding what for us is important, what changes we do need to. to maybe see more collaboratively integrate it within a relationship and drawing new boundaries. Again, I always like to point the kind of power back to ourselves because one of the most frustrating things is desperately wanting or seeing something that someone else could do differently that would benefit maybe them and them not being able to integrate your awareness or your change, right? Simply speaking, we can't make someone change. We can't love them the change. We can't automate them to change, right? They have to want to change. change on their own. So getting clear again with where we need new boundaries, where we can show up

differently, understanding that we can't, you know, control them. And then also holding space for the grief that might come along with shifting relationship dynamics, with, you know, things becoming actually different in the relational experience. For some of us, what might mean, though not for all of us, separations, endings of relationships. And I think relationships are the one kind of evolutionary point that is very challenging because as we grow, to some extent, we do need our relationships to grow with us. And a lot of us are met with those kind of points of conflict where someone isn't willing or wanting to grow. Yeah, I think Ram Dass is quoted if you think you're in letting go spend a week with your family at Thanksgiving. You know, I have a lot of compassion because I know a lot of people really struggle with this when they start to wake up to the greater aspect of self.

there is this tension where their family, their close friends, their childhood high school friends. The love is still obviously there, but the relatability in being able to talk about these things at the very minimum becomes challenging. I love the term, the phrase, attractivism is the best form of activism,

meaning your own liberation is the best vehicle for actually making change in the world, right? we try to proselytize people into our newfound sense of awareness and insight, usually always futile and met with resistance because there is somebody who's trying to enforce something from the outside. I found in my own personal life the change that I've actually made has been because I've been drawn to it, not because it's been pushed in. Exactly. And that could be the most inspiring thing that you give someone. Yeah. They witness you change enough. They see or experience you different. They see how empowered or what is happening now in your life.

and that is often how one is inspired into action. It does have to come from within. And I can understand, you know, desperately wanting a loved one to get on board to change. It's very scary to be on the precipice of change for ourselves within a relationship, though I think that is more, even just hearing you say like high school friends, I do think societally we have this belief that, you know, once a friend is made, that a friend must be kept, right? And maybe that's true and that's great.

And that's incredible if we have lifelong friends that we've been able to evolve with and stay connected to. But some of us try to kind of force ourselves to maintain connections that just don't fit anymore. And again, perhaps it's like we were talking about earlier, right, because of what comes along and all the beliefs around separation and loss and change. And it keeps us then betraying or neglecting ourselves and our relationships just to keep the tenure of the relationship alive. when in reality, I mean, some of us were put and found relationships in context that, again, we didn't get to control, right, because that's where we lived or that's where I was sent to high school in a suburb because my, you know, my private, my school I would have been sent to in my Philadelphia district was becoming very dangerous at that time.

So I was shipped away, right? So I didn't choose that. My parents chose that. Why? For the betterment of my future success, right? So for me, right, for a lot of us, the environments we didn't get to choose, the people, And some of us, of course, can maintain and will maintain friendships. It's not just to say, oh, we just get rid of people because they're old.

I think there's something also to say in working through growth and transitions with relationships. But it doesn't necessarily mean that all relationships are meant to come with us for the rest of our lives. Yeah, I always think how in many ways your new life is going to cost you your old one to some degree. and it becomes difficult because our old familiar self is tied with so much, and people expect that version of our personality to show up. And our sense of ambition can often be tied to this lack of searching, this feeling of searching for worthiness in the external world. So if it heal that, what happens to my ambition and my business?

If I'm not motivated by the same way, a lot of people fear that they won't be as successful, right? I think success as you define it changes as you grow instead of just money and impact on the external world to that feeling of home within yourself. But likewise, all these relationships, right, the codependent aspects of romantic or friendship dynamics that you then will confront as you grow and will then either ask that person to evolve with you in that dynamic or find a new one that suits you better. And I think that's something to acknowledge as well because, it can be difficult.

Yeah. I think, too, there's something to say about expanding, right, relationships to some extent, right? So so many of us put such an expectation that one person, right, be all things, right?

I want my partner, maybe understandably, to like my interest, to, you know, do every, right? But I think there's something to say in understanding that maybe one person can meet one set of needs and a friend over here

can be the person that you do, and hobbies with. And then a person over here, you know, maybe really get you emotionally because they've really been through something exactly similar in a way that your partner can't get. But doesn't mean that they like you any less or, you know, are connected or that relationship is any less secure or healthy, right? So I think there's something to say too. And thankfully, now that we are all interconnected on the social media world or internet world, love it or hated, I do think it gives us possibility to find that's why I open self-healer circle, like a more

community-driven environment, virtual environment, because I really understood how important relationships are. I started to hear very clearly from my community how limiting some of their relationships in their kind of real life, so to speak, or their geographical locations were starting to feel. And so finding relationships, I think that there's something, there's value in there, which would mean then exploring what your own expectations are of a person. Yeah, ideally, we all want the one perfect person who does it all, right? Like we talked about earlier, that's a little bit of a childlike belief, right, where we saw our parents as that ideal perfect person who does it all. I think most of us have come to the awareness in adulthood that there's probably not going to be

one perfect person who does it all. So if you're still holding that expectation, right, maybe you can relieve yourself and your partner of, right, being the person who really enjoys your hobbies. They're just not going to be that for you or, you know, there's something that is just not, you know, fitting, maybe you can find that fit. It's not to say outside the relationship, say, have friendships, right? Have a social group. Spread out where needs are getting met. And I think that could lead to fulfillment on a deeper level than we're aware of because a lot of us do have that childlike perfect person, idealized relationship model in mind that we're seeking and then we're upset and we're trying to fit ourselves that into the mold to find that perfection or we're

trying to fit someone else, and then we lose sight of what and who and the difference maybe and the value in the difference that they're offering us. Yeah, the tendency to evangelize newfound insight is, I feel like a consistent, consistent theme across the board with any newfound sense of awareness or insight. I'm curious, for people that do this work, they find a lot of resonance and healing, and it's very impactful for them and it impacts so many areas of their life that maybe feel called to start doing some of this work, whether they want to become a therapist or they're in the media landscape and they want to start sharing and powering messages and work with individuals to share this. As somebody who's such a prolific individual in this space and you've been a

gateway into so many people starting to explore these aspects of self and being able to become regulated, what advice or thoughts do you have for people that feel drawn to sharing more of this work in a similar way? My advice will be advice that I actually got, which is one time of my own past, which is if you have that desire or if you have something to say, someone wants to hear it and will gain benefit from it. And I'm saying that because I went kicking and screaming online, to be honest. I was sharing privately with my partner Lolly at the time, all of this insight awareness. We were going through our own dark night of the soul and our healing journey. And I was talking about this holistic model and what I saw that wasn't working in the traditional model and how I began to then work with new clients.

and she would look at me and say, Nicole, this is like groundbreaking. Like people, you need to tell people this. And there was, again, a little girl inside of me that only, you know, knew myself in a certain way, was very uncomfortable being seen publicly, was very always concerned about being misunderstood or misinterpreted or saying something that might upset someone, again, all dating back to my own childhood. So I did not love the, I liked the idea of giving my ideas, you know, to someone else to help impact their life. Of course, that's why I was a therapist, but I did not like the idea of doing it

publicly. I felt very uncomfortable, right? So that inner child was there telling me all of the reasons why I shouldn't share my thoughts with anyone else. So if I can be the voice of, you should, right, even if you feel uncomfortable as I did and still do in moments, it's very stressful for me to put out work that can and is misinterpreted, to be a person who is projected upon with people's ideas about who I must be, how I must be, right? All of that comes with impact on me. It's a lot. But the value, right, of giving and the skill then of learning how to tolerate and put up boundaries and navigate all of that will never surpass the value of giving knowledge. And so I do think that if I can be a voice of support for anyone listening, that I think we all have so much value,

whether or not you do so publicly or, you know, privately in your work or even just in your home and in your community, your voice is needed. And again, especially if you have that voice like I do that tells you all of the reasons why you're not worthy to be the one to be the speaker of the idea, you are. And again, those are learned habits. Again, so many of us have learned to water down our perspectives, though we have so much value. We learn from other people. Again, that's why I now exist and run in a community because I can share my journey. And yeah, maybe some people are like, wow, I live the exact same life as you. And a whole lot of people aren't going to relate to me.

So we need more people, comfortable, willing, brave enough to share their own journeys because, yeah, tools are great. Information is great. But again, going back to what we've been talking about, attunement, resonance, feeling seen and heard is what is really the most healing. I want to speak to you about that, like level of vulnerability that you share, whether it's online or not, right now we live in unprecedented times of the loneliness, epidemic, meaning crisis, and people don't feel attuned to. We're so immersed into the social

sphere, which is giving us almost a false sense of connection. Like we are, we see people, we can laugh, we can cry, we can feel connected in that sense, but it's not the same as a physical attunement of being seen in person. And so I think that we have these poor substitutions, oftentimes, of what true intimacy and connection we really yearn for. But I do think that the more we share vulnerability, and I strive to increasingly on this podcast, you with your channels and how you share content,

what do you think about vulnerability as it really is the most direct way to actually connect with people. Yeah, I mean, I do think to some extent we, it's interesting because there's a lot more seeming, right, vulnerability, possibility. But I think what I'm hearing you ask is like, what, what is the reality right there? How helpful is it or isn't it? Something I actually want to say about vulnerability and sharing is it's also important to use discretion, right? So just like needing to develop trust in someone and maybe this isn't the current habit that you're living, you know, I am someone who would share a lot to some extent with people without maybe fully

understanding whether or not they would be trustworthy of my story, whatever it is that I wanted to share with someone. So I want to be clear, right, that especially in a world where you can oh, well, I'll get famous if I just go online and, you know, say something really vulnerable. I really want to be clear that you have to be prepared for all of the different ways that one could react, just like as you're vetting a new partner or relationship, right, before you maybe want to tell them something that is very vulnerable or sacred to you, making sure that there's someone that you could trust, so to speak with that. So again, I think the virtual world is confusing to some extent, because the possibility for you to speak to an endless audience is

there for you to gain then, you know, extra byproduct of, you know, followers and, you know, sales or whatever it is that you're trying to promote. That all is there. But then the question is, right? Is it safe? Is it connective? Is it kind of grounded in what we're looking to feel, which is seen in known? And it's not to say that no virtual spaces can offer that. I mean, I try to hope and create in my membership, which is now an app, a space where members do feel increasingly safer, right, to share in a virtual space and have those moments of feeling known. But I just wanted to kind of verbalize the processes of doing that. Because just because it's possible and available and you have kind of people watching or listening, right, doesn't necessarily

mean that that could be, at this moment, at least, a fully safe experience. Because again, if you don't have the capacity, the support to use discretion in terms of what you're hearing, what you're sharing, if you don't have support or boundaries in terms of how to navigate, then what people may or may not do, the opinions or perspectives that they then might share, right, then you could create, and some people do end up then creating a more dysfunctional relationship with a seemingly kind of vulnerable creating moment, right, where they're sharing something and now it's out in a world and we can't take it back. And, you know, what once felt like an attempt or what was an attempt at connecting with someone now has turned into an overwhelming,

possibly even traumatizing moment for the person sharing. So I think. I think, as you're hearing, I don't have a full answer because this is so new, right? We don't know. This is new to be, have access to people's opinions from our communities. I mean, like you're saying, the internal world was not something that we talked about decades ago. And now we have people blogging about their thoughts and emotional, intimate moments online, not only in our community, but from around the world, from a culture that is so different than ours. So I am trying to, I think, feel my way through what to make of it, how to utilize it in a healthy, helpful way.

And I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer because a lot of it really goes back to everything. We've been talking about our own capacity, how in trust we are of our opinion, right? Can I share something and say, I'm sharing this because this is my opinion, even if you disagree with it, right? And depending on how you're going to disagree with it, can I tolerate then? your opinion because that's what we're really opening ourselves up to. And I think it's new. We're learning how to do it. Many of us are resourcing ourselves so that if it is important that we do share more publicly like you and I are continuing to do, right, that we're doing so from grounded presence and we're able to tolerate everything that comes along with it, even the moments where we need to

step out of our own public presence to replenish ourselves as an individual because that's part of the story too. Beautifully said. Yeah, it's an interesting terrain and new to our generation to be able to navigate. As people eventually turn off this episode and they go live their life, right? And there's this, when things come up and the inevitable triggers that happen in life, I love this question you pose about asking, is this about now or then, you know, is this something that doesn't have to always be looked at? through the lens of my childhood and overly identify with the way things may have been perceived in our childhood. And there's some really practical tools that I would love for you to share that I read in your book. There was many of them. One was like the attachment timeline. Another one was like writing a letter to your inner child. I'm curious for people that are

listening right now, what are a couple of your favorite ones that could be something that you could offer for people to do and get more clarity on our own developmental process, give us insight, into our own coping mechanisms and how to effectively meet those knees moving forward. So I think the first one is understanding the markers of when a reaction, I should say, is historical.

So knowing, right, being able to differentiate, is this from now? Like we were kind of talking about, is this something that's like real or is this kind of an older emotional imprint? And when reactions are feeling really disproportionate, when we do come down sometime later,

I'm like, oh, wow. Not that big of a deal now. I can't tell you how many moments where I'm convinced something is the biggest deal, a couple of moments. Sometimes a couple of days go by and I have a new perspective, right? It's like, oh, that wasn't as big as it once felt. And we've been, of course, on the receiving end of those moments where we are so confused by someone's reaction because it's so disproportionate to what's happening for us, right? So big, urgent, overwhelming reactions. Again, oftentimes they come with those sensations in the body where my heart is racing. I'm clenching. I'm clenching. I'm clenching. I'm. I'm crawling out of my own skin, right? So those are great, just cues and the practices dropping in in those moments where if I'm not sure what a moment is, right, just how big is this? Do I, am I seeing a flexible choice or am I locked and loaded? There's only one thing to do in this moment. When we lack flexibility, a lot of times too, that's a marker that it's kind of historical. Because again, at one time we didn't have flexibility.

We only had that one choice. and another really practical tool. And again, whether or not you have a picture, a lot of us, I think we lose sight in a lot of pun intended ways of our inner child. We forget, especially if we're older, what childhood looked like, what it felt like. So to kind of reconnect with our inner child

if we have access to pictures, right, going back, pulling out the photo album, actually physically gazing upon your childlike self, right? Because when we do that, we're kind of shifting our brain from analyzing mood to the story of the childhood and the beliefs that came from it to just the feelings, right? We see a child who's small. We see their vulnerability, right? Naturally in our brain compassion, right, and empathy begin to increase. It becomes really hard then to say, oh, that child was just too much or dramatic, right? We kind of humanize that little

part of ourself that's still alive today. And of course, if we don't have access to pictures, as some of us might not for any reason, we can do this with any sort of kind of imagination, visualization, or sensory practice. Because again, the inner child, all this childlike memory and experience and habits are stored in sensation, right? Not in the story. I'm someone who I can tell you very limited stories of my childhood because I can't recall much, but I can tell you how I felt. So if we don't have a picture, sometimes just closing our eyes and maybe imagining whether it was your childhood home, or maybe a room in your childhood, your bedroom even, where you spent most of your time. And so calling to mine, right, the image of whatever it was that was happening

back then, maybe smelling, right, the sense that what the room smelled like, maybe seeing the bright lights, like any time we can tap into visualizing maybe what you were doing, were you playing, were you alone, what was the expression on your face. And again, we're not forcing, and the accuracy isn't the point here. it's just kind of entering the sensory world of childhood. And most people will be surprised. I remember one of the first meditations I ever hosted. It was a public meditation in Venice Beach.

I'm on the beach when I first began the account. And I did an inner child meditation. I was so surprised at how impactful it was because just taking people through a guided practice of visualizing, sometimes even surprisingly so. People that came up to me and were like, I really don't even think about my childhood. and I was crying on that blanket over there

because when we enter the sensory world is when we kind of reconnect with that inner child. So I think the practical tools of in the moment to kind of determine what's older, what's real, what's new, and also just the general reconnection of that inner child world, again, through senses, through photographs or anything that we have. I mean, Jesus, now children will have a whole social media page that they can go look at and see their whole childhood

and we could talk sometime later about what that impact that might have. But entering our sensory world through visualization, through practices like that, meditations, of course, I free inner child meditations. I'm hosting one in a couple weeks myself as well. If you want to follow along, I'll give all the details. So anytime we can kind of tap into the feelings, it can help us kind of acknowledge that being, those habits are still present and then we can begin to, I think, become more aware in real time. Amazing.

I'd love to actually invite a challenge. for everybody listening right now. Like find a picture of you as a child that you can see kind of a smile, the playfulness, the radiance, take a picture of it or set it as the wallpaper of your home screen, screenshot it, tag at know-the-self, tag at the holistic psychologist, and we'll reshare it. I would love to, I think that's a, like our phone is our digital, you know, place. We visit a lot and we open many dozens of times a day. So I think that could be a great reminder.

for people. I actually had, I don't have it on today, but throughout writing the book, the two plus years it took me, I would wear a locket and I'd have a little picture of me in the locket and I would open and remind myself. And interestingly, when I found, it was actually a pretty upsetting trip down picture lane because when I saw pictures of me in childhood, I did not see happy carefree. I saw a lot of seriousness on my face. I was looking upset. sad. I could see in the expressions, even in photographs, right, where you're supposed to be smiling. I have this one, my partner likes to tease me about it, this one, a school picture where I look like very upset, like, like scary upset. Because I, you know, and all of that, you know,

emotion, I would, that's so, too, disclaimer here is sometimes when you're looking, right, you are seeing. Also, I saw in pictures, right, who was around, who wasn't around, right? What did our body language look like. I was really struck. Anytime I was around my mom, there was always like a distance. She was like holding my hand from far away. There wasn't, and again, understanding, again, the lack of emotional attunement and connection, I always felt a bit distance from her. And so it was really wild and moving and upsetting to some extent to visually then see, right, and kind of connect how I always felt, right, to the reality. Yeah, I was a little child who wasn't. carefree. I was laying in bed, listening to bumps in the night and thinking that my house was being

broken into and that my mom and dad weren't going to wake up the next day. And so you saw that on my pictures. So I think it can be a lot of value and of course, of course grief and upset and emotions can come up. But the value I think is in the connection, right? The picture was starting to match that emotional experience that I didn't have words for, right? I was a child who I would remember well to my 20s even. Strangers on the street would pass me and say smile, you know, and everyone was telling me to smile, and the reality was because I wasn't smiling. I was holding the weight of all of the stress that was in my childhood home, right? My home base was stress. Stress, chaos and control to try and manage the stress. And you could see that in the constriction and the heaviness of my childlike

face. So while it, of course, opened the door for grief of, wow, look it. I look upset as a child. it also opened the door for that connective alignment, like alignment, where I was like, oh, okay, that matches with how I've always felt without having the words for what I was feeling. I think it's such a potent reminder because not only maybe a lot of people don't have a photo, they can't find, you know, a radiant photo that connects them to that inner child. I also think of how important it is to, like, as children, we're so inquisitive, curious, creative, expressive, and how important do you think it is to examine, like, what those natural proclivities were and how we can revisit those and find newfound levels of expression where we

maybe shunned those parts of ourselves and we became who we thought we should be instead of who we naturally were? I think those, I think creativity, playfulness, joy, we regain that as we heal, right? As we gain more capacity to deal with stress and upset and discomfort. we also then gain capacity to be light, be joyful, you know, have moments of hope, return to our inherent creative nature, you know, be playful. Never, I, again, I was a very serious child and I was a very serious, you know, achievement-driven adult, and now I have so many moments where I can be playful, free in my body, not, but again, that didn't come immediately.

That came as a byproduct of all the work that we've been talking about, of how learning to live in a body, to take care of my body, to regulate my stress and my emotions, to stop over-relying on identities and learning how to give myself more moments of just easeful presence. Now I can have those moments, and they're not all moments. They're still stress and upset in my life. But again, on the other side of that that we gained, right, was there's joy, there's ease, there's playfulness. There's, again, creativity that doesn't have to exist in a traditional mindset of what creativity

even is. I think we're all creative beings just by being in action. That's great. Part of why I ask also is because I resonate in my own internal path. I'm curious to hear reflections if you have any. I grew up in a child with my parents split when I was like six or seven. There was abuse in the family. I don't want to go into too much detail because they're both alive and I love them for how imperfect they are. But from my perspective, looking back at that time, there was a lot of emotional chaos in certain moments, some of which I was shielded from, some of which I really saw. And part of my coping mechanism was I need to be put together. Like expressing what I perceive as wild emotions, anger, frustration,

outrage, that is not safe because it wasn't. I clearly wasn't. And so like that can lead to a life of perfectionism, of getting things right, being right, all of that. And I think I've found a lot of freedom and increasingly like just expression to any degree, using my voice, allowing myself to embrace the imperfection of being human and my own humanity. Like that has been such a big thing for me to explore. And still I think there's a lot of growth there. I'm having so much resonance hearing that. I mean, there's so much of my own journey.

that has been not only in the physical, I remember I would get new shoes and I wouldn't want to wear them because I didn't want to get a scuff on them because once they were scuffed, they were imperfect, or anytime I would have a stain on my clothing, a running joke with my family and friends as I would always kind of lick my finger and kind of spot, clean it off. And similarly, emotionally, right, I tried to stay put together. Why? Because in an environment, it felt chaotic or out of control in childhood, sometimes the best, quickest way to felt safety at least. right, is a sense of control, right, is maintaining, is of kind of keeping things together. And now I'm in this very interesting space of, I finally learned to find my voice and to share my

voice. And my voice, it turns out, comes with an accent that sometimes people can understand. It comes with speaking in a way that sometimes, right, isn't fully, you know, kind of comprehensible to some or saying big words that maybe don't, you know, kind of fully translate. So now I'm in this interesting space of trying to embrace my authenticity, me like, well, this is how I say it, right? But also to take feedback and to understand that if I want to be impactful, I do have to hear how some people are maybe hearing me. And if I say certain words that aren't actually translating to people, then I'm only watering down my message. So now I'm in an interesting space of like a felt conflict and sometimes I get mad. You know, if lovingly a partner,

my partner, she often does, tries to say, oh, record that video again. You know, I couldn't understand what you said, you know, say it again. And I want to knock around. Be like, well, this is authentically how I say it. So this is how the video is going up, you know? And like we have these moments now where I'm, and I think the illustration here is healing doesn't end. I still have a surly little person that now I've gotten used to speaking my voice and now I just want to say it the way I want to say it, you know?

But again, I have to be mature enough to also I want to say it the way I want to say it because there's value for little Nicole. and there's also value for the world. And little Nicole, who wants to be impactful, if I learn how to take some feedback and learn how to modify the way I say certain things. So that's my little aside of in real time, my lack of control,

and I want to be freer in a sense and embrace my imperfection. But again, how do I strike a balance where I'm not kind of going back into a robot and just doing things the way someone else wants me to do? How can I be me? But also, again, understand that I do want to impact the world and there are people that are then interacting with me

in some way. So to some extent, their opinion can be somewhat valuable sometimes. It's so, it's so, well, I enjoy the playfulness and, like, it's important to, like, not take yourself so serious in this process while still honoring the reality of, of these different behavioral adaptations. You know, I think we both were talking a little bit off camera beforehand of we'd love to have our spaces put together. And, I mean, oftentimes, the judgment we have to others and their behaviors are an extension of where we have that judgment within ourselves. I'm somebody who loves to keep a very clean space, or very organized space. My sister would maybe sometimes say a little bit OCD. And that can,

you know, historically has come out a bit more of like less bandwidth for people's messiness, both internally and externally, you know. I think I've grown a lot in that regard. But, you know, even the spiritual path, right, the pursuit of enlightenment is like, like the biggest drug for somebody who feels in some degree imperfect or wrong or they're looking for that path to have it together. It's like the biggest drug for that person, you know? And so even we have to examine, we get to examine the eye that wants enlightenment. Who is that eye, right?

And what's the motivating factor for that? And to me, I think that especially because we do explore a lot of themes around consciousness and awakening self-realization on the show. I'm sure there's probably a big theme by extension of the audience that's been cultivated here, a community that can also resonate with the part of us

that has sought out spiritual practices and the meditation techniques and all the things as a way subconsciously to actually avoid self and not meet it, which is paradoxical, but I think is true

and resonates with a lot of people. Oh, 100%. I think there can be a bypassing of the human experience by an overfocus on the spiritual aspect of our being. I think sometimes it can come along with a judgment or a looking down upon, right, the person who isn't as spiritually enlightened and elevated and who's just kind of a human being a human. But again, I think that there is an interplay, right?

And I make a case even in my book, one of the last kind of spheres of development is kind of returning to that transcendent or kind of the greater than us state. And, you know, my case is that we can't actually access that. So what we think we're doing right in these moments of bypassing is, again, just a protection. Because to be truly enlightened or kind of connected with all that is, whatever kind of your spiritual basis of that connection might be, that doesn't come out, come without safety, security in the human system. Like literally our consciousness can expand because when our body is stressed, it actually shrinks. We become limited in our consciousness state. we become only focused on the present moment and we're not able to, right?

And for a lot of us, if we don't have that capacity in our body, the focus that we're putting on spirituality becomes that point of distraction. It's the craziest idea that maybe we came here to have a human experience, you know? And I think that in spiritual circles, it's like there's a point of spirituality when you start wearing normal clothes again. And they're like all these different adaptations where it's like the most quote unquote spiritual thing is just embracing what is and not needing to have any sort of performance at any degree. And a lot of times we're oblivious to the degree we're still doing that. So it's a great reminder. And it's fun to still examine where that still lives and shows up within us. because yeah the way to become your true self and wake up beyond yourself is also to fully embrace

yourself. It's like the process of individuation. A lot of us focus on the transcendence without the integration and the descendants in a sense. And knowing yourself really is a active practice of embodiment, I think. It is not a idea, a concept. It's not telling the story. of who we are. It's being the being, the different unique energetic imprint that I am, that no one else will be, you know, or it doesn't get to be, and the translatable impact that that has on the physical world, whether it's through my relationships or the thoughts and creations that I put out. So even just love the concept right of know thyself and this, you know, but it isn't a, not knowing in the traditional sense, I think, that we anticipate it, not like telling the

story of who I am. It's living the unique experience. of who I am in a more embodied way. I love that. I resonate full-heartedly, and I strive to keep that in the forefront of just, instead of breaking ourselves up into these many different parts and say, oh, that's what I am. But the lived experience of who you are being is what it's more so referring to. Nicole, I have really love this conversation. I really enjoy the conversations where I feel like not just had a great dialogue that we get to

share with people, but I've also made a new friend. and I can feel really connected and alive in the conversation. Last little thing. If you had 60 seconds to share a message to everybody listening about the power of their inner child and embracing their humanity, what would you say? It's life-changing. I think the more we become aware of the past that has impacted us

and continues to reenact in the present, any moment of awareness gives us the opportunity to create a new choice, a shift that not only I think will have incredible, impact is that we talked about, what we become mentally more stable, emotionally more stable, physically more well. Our relationships become more aligned and collaborative. But again, those ripples really transfer beyond time and beyond space. So no time is too late. Any moment of awareness really is a moment of readiness of the ability to begin to choose differently as opposed

to just reenact what has once been. Beautiful said. Thank you. Is there anything else on your heart that you want to share before we close out? I just want to thank you for the beautiful work that you do and honestly for everyone listening because I really do believe this is in the times that we're living, which can be very divisive and difficult to navigate for many different reasons. Again, a lot of stemming from everything that we've been talking about. It's a really brave and courageous thing to put your thoughts and ideas out there to, you know, embrace yourself, become aware and, you know, kind of begin to do things differently.

It's brave because while we're wired for incredible growth, again, it is not. what is comfortable for most of us. So I never want anyone who's listening or on any stage of this journey to overlook the courageousness that it is taken to even get to where you are today, though it is the easiest thing to do is to overlook all that we have already done in favor of everything that we still want to do. So I hope I'm the messenger of, you know, a little bit of maybe peace and grace and celebration even for where you are today because, again, it is so powerful what we can begin to do for ourselves. And if we have children, our lineages, of course. Yeah. Well, said, I really love the word that you use there also, which is grace, like inviting

grace into this whole process because it can be very messy at times. And I think a big golden theme throughout this whole conversation is like doing the work, realizing the opportunity for growth and having compassion and grace for yourself along the process as you're inevitably going to stumble along the way. So I appreciate that and also how vulnerably you share your own process because I think that really connects with people to know that you're not sitting on a mountain top espousing, which I don't think at anyone would think. But people can really connect with your own human process of how this has been real for you. We'll leave links down in the description where everyone can stay connected with Dr. Lepera's work, her new book, Repairing,

the inner child and anywhere else people can stay connected with you? Yeah, across really any and all social media, however you like to consume your content, so much of what we're about at holistic psychologists is having these conversations, putting out these free accessible resources. So even if you don't, you know, have a dime to contribute to the book or the membership or anything, I really wholeheartedly you are doing more by just showing up as an aware being. So come follow me across all of the platforms. Amazing.

We did it. Thank you. Until next time, be well.