Your Childhood Patterns Are Still Running Your Life | Dr. Nicole LePera

The anxiety you carry, the way you go silent in conflict, the relentless drive that never quite feels like enough, these didn’t start with you. 

They started much earlier, in relationships and environments your body learned to survive before you had words for any of it. And according to Dr. Nicole LePera, until you understand what your nervous system actually encoded in those years, you’ll keep bumping into the same walls, the same patterns, the same exhaustion.

Dr. Nicole LePera is a clinical psychologist trained at Cornell University and the New School for Social Research, a New York Times bestselling author, and the founder of the global SelfHealers community. Her new book, Reparenting the Inner Child, brings together neuroscience, attachment research, and epigenetics to explain not just why we are the way we are, but how real change actually happens in the body, not just the mind.

In this conversation, you’ll explore:

If you’ve spent years doing the work and still find yourself reacting in ways that don’t feel like you, this conversation will help you understand why, and what to do next.

You can find Nicole at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we’re sharing our conversation with Jon Acuff about why procrastination is not actually your problem and the surprising permission shift that happens when you finally finish what matters most. Follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode.

Check out our offerings & partners: 

photo credit: Sara Waterman

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Episode Transcript:

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] Have you ever had one of those moments where you catch yourself in the middle of a reaction? Maybe you’re snapping at someone you love, or shutting down completely when you most need to stay present and you think, where did that even come from? Because here’s what most of us don’t realize until it’s cost us a lot. A significant part of how we move through the world. It isn’t a choice we’re consciously making. It’s this old survival code wired into us long before we had words for any of it, still quietly running in the background of our adult lives and the work of actually changing that, not just understanding it intellectually, but shifting it for real. That’s what today’s conversation is all about. My guest is Nicole LePera, a psychologist trained at Cornell and the New School for Social Research, creator of the Self Healers movement and the New York Times, best-selling author of How to Do the Work, and her newest book, Reparenting The Inner Child. We get into what’s actually happening when you feel hijacked by your own reactions, why you actually don’t need to excavate your childhood to begin healing. And how real change happens not through willpower, but through your nervous system. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:13] You write about this story of you as a kid, kind of launching off the staircase, railing into a beanbag chair. Your family jokes about it, you know? Oh, Nicole bounced off the wall. Funny. Ha ha. You know, like comments like that all the time when you’re in a family and you’re a kid. But looking back now, um, what was really going on there?

Nicole LePera: [00:01:39] What was really going on was a lot of energy. I’ve since learned that anxiety is indeed an energy, um, that lacked an outlet. It lacked support, it lacked attunement. And as most of us will do in childhood, we become very attuned to the environment around us. What’s possible? Right? I had all these crazy things that I could fling myself off of. My family let me turn my living room into a playpen. So I did those things because that’s what all of us as children will do. We’ll adapt to the environment around us. We will find channels for our energy. We will create whatever version of safety or belonging is possible. And that’s what I hope to always speak to in my work now are beautiful adaptations create in childhood. For me, learning how to channel my energy into achievement and performance and perfectionism helped for a while, was socially validated, even though took me to the point in my journey where I think many of us meet work like this, it no longer works. So understanding that allowed me to understand what wasn’t happening for me, that lack of emotional safety and gave me not only some new, more compassionate language, but some new tools, which quite literally have helped me transform my relationship with my own energy and my body and my nervous system, but to create change for all of us.

Jonathan Fields: [00:03:00] Yeah. I mean, you used the word attunement in there early on what you were sharing, which think is a really interesting word that we don’t hear a lot. Um, um, pardon the pun. Um, something about it really resonated with me. Um. Love it. Um, take me deeper into what you actually mean by that.

Nicole LePera: [00:03:18] Yeah. So attunement, right, is if I’m simplifying things, which I often do, it’s the awareness of, um, in this case, what we’re talking about attuning to right is another individual in childhood attuning to a child. So it’s awareness of someone else, their emotional states, um, and the ability to then as you’re beautifully kind of bringing up the word resonate with, right, stand next to be in support of kind of enter into that energetic space of another. Um, it is very much though, a skill that we have to literally learn Often in childhood that learning either happens or it doesn’t. And which leaves a lot of us then in adulthood, without the ability, despite sometimes very much well-intentioned desires, to see and know the loved ones around us, especially if they’re the children that we’re in care of. But it is a capacity that lives in our body that, again, can be created at any time. But I think a lot of us are beginning this journey from not having had the attunement that we needed to then maybe translate that same sort of attunement in our adult relationships.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:25] Yeah. I mean, it seems like also the way you’re describing it, attunement can be, I’m thinking to myself, is it a good thing or is it a bad thing? Is it just a thing? Um, and as you were speaking, I was reflecting on research I read years back on what they described as emotional contagion, where they would take someone, expose them to some horrific images. So they were in just a really negative state, bring them back into a group of people. And within a matter of minutes, everybody in that group was largely infected by this person who was sort of like a person of perceived authority in the group. Then they did the exact opposite. I think it was like puppies or kittens or something like that. They came back into the group bouncing. And same thing when we talk about attunement, when we talk about sort of almost like, you know, like changing our, our nervous system and emotional state to reflect that of people around us. This is, I would imagine, sometimes a good thing, sometimes a harmful thing. And oftentimes we have no idea it’s happening.

Nicole LePera: [00:05:19] Right? And this is really speaking to the underlying unconscious, I think is a better word process that our nervous system, our body, kind of that scanning feeling, sensing of the energy of another person. Right? This is all happening non-verbally. Of course, when we’re talking about attunement in childhood, our whole life is non-verbal. But I think the most common example, like you’re describing the research, I think many of us meet this in our daily life, right? When we walk into a room and perhaps two people are in the room and they were in an argument, Nothing is said right, but you can feel the heaviness, the stress, the tension in their energy. So not only is our nervous system doing that at any time, of course, this is a function that’s aimed at survival, right? With this idea being the quicker that that energetic scanning is able to determine that there’s a threat available or existing in the environment, then we’re so quickly that’s the process of neuro ception that I just described. Our body then is quickly able to deal with, to mitigate, to fight or to flee the threat. We have another kind of system that gets involved in the conversation about how emotions travel and emotional contagion, and whether it’s good or bad, is we all have in our brain something that’s called mirror neurons, right? Which fire when we not only see someone doing an action, but when we see someone having an emotional experience. So, right, you’re watching someone on television and they’re maybe going through the loss or grief around something that a person that they lost and they become emotional and right. We can become emotional and maybe find ourselves crying because we’re mirroring their emotional state. So all of this is happening behind the scenes outside of our awareness, unless of course, we choose to pay attention to it. But all of that is then going to drive our behaviors, which, you know, for some instances can result in positive emotional states being transferred to other individuals around us. But though in other instances, especially when it’s stress or more difficult emotional states, we are communicating that without even words.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:27] Yeah. And these, these shifts, it sounds like they can really be kind of like downloaded into us at very early ages in ways we’re not even aware of. I mean, you describe another situation. I think you’re like four years old. Your mom is a couple minutes late picking you up from preschool. Your immediate thought is not, oh, she must be stuck in traffic. It’s something very different.

Nicole LePera: [00:07:51] Right? It’s not even. Oh, I have four extra minutes to play, right? Immediately it went to what I think some of us commonly know. And maybe experience is the worst case scenario. And specifically for me, it was like something happened to mom because that was really representative of the stress and the overall emotional state in my home. But all of us, regardless of the home and the players that were present or not, the parents that were there and what they were capable of. We are all again attuned to our environment in early childhood. We don’t have language, insight, maturity. We can’t zoom out and understand things with words and have things communicated to us in that very logical way. However, we are still learning and the learning is incredibly powerful in the psychological world. What we’re talking about is implicit emotional memories or simply emotional memories, right? So these things that again. For some of us in adulthood, we can’t give words to what’s happening, but our heart is racing. But we’re bracing because again, before language, everything that we’ve experienced, including the relationships that we were relying on for our physiological survival, everything was encoded in our body as sensations and then as survival driven responses, which is why some of us wake up in adulthood, right? And we logically know things. We know we’re safe. We know we’re worthy, yet we still feel anxious, overwhelmed, and unworthy because that’s the lived experience then, of these old imprints that are coming alive again. Well, after the date or time or even relational status of our childhood.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:29] Yeah. And I think so many of us trip into that, um, sometimes oftentimes brought to our knees. I mean, you mentioned just earlier in our conversation, this is something else. You write about this, you know, you kind of hit your 20s and 30s as someone who from the outside looking in, looks like you have it all together and so many people can probably relate to this. They’ll have their own version of this, whether it’s advanced degrees or the relationship you always wanted or, you know, like the money in the bank account, the status, the apartment, all the yada yada. Right. Um, but you hit this moment where you’re like, this isn’t me.

Nicole LePera: [00:10:03] Before I even questioned whether it was me or not, what I felt earning accolade after accolade, degree after degree, right. Success after success, even relationship after relationship. What I felt first was empty, unfulfilled. And if I have to admit, I did feel a bit shameful, like who am I to quote unquote have everything? In a lot of ways, I was even reminded of how easy things for me in childhood were because I seemingly excelled academically and athletically, and I then had a string of good things, things I’ve achieved. Yet internally it wasn’t mapping on to how I felt about my life, because how I felt about my life was very detached, very unfulfilled. And so what I have come to learn, all of that anxious energy in childhood from a very attuned stance, became very channeled into the things that I saw, earned me attention and praise from my caregivers, my mom in particular. So I became the very prototypical overworking, overachieving, over striving person who, while I was getting everything right, it didn’t really land. And that to me, right? Once I kind of understood that or questioned, I should say, what was driving me in action. Then I got to the question that you’re very wisely posing, which was, well, who am I if I’m not all of this right? If I’m not everything I’m doing right, who am I kind of behind all of it?

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:40] Yeah. And I think that’s a question that, um, if we’re fortunate or if we’re really intentional about it, we, we stumble into at some point, but I wanted to drop into something you described so many of these patterns, they’re set in motion fairly early in life and often in a relational way in relation to people who are perceived caregivers or people who are people of status in our lives, people who we want to be seen by and loved by and protected, and who we want to develop loving relationships with, which really drops us into this world of attachment theory. Um, and attachment theory has become almost kind of like it’s pretty mainstream at this point. People can name their attachment styles, you can go take probably ten different quizzes online. Um, you were trained by some of the, the OG researchers in this field, Miriam and Howard Steele at the new school. Jeffrey Young schema therapy. What do you think the popular conversation gets right about attachment and what does it really miss?

Nicole LePera: [00:12:46] So what I was even kind of laboring over and I’m writing a book about inner child healing, yet I can’t not talk or even ground this conversation in relationships or attachment. Why? Because they are so foundational to who we come to be and ultimately who we know ourselves. And for some of us, the identities that we continue to repeat. Even if you’re like me, they’re not creating fulfillment or even they’re creating outright dysfunction or suffering in our life. And the reason why I had to begin a book on individual development, so to speak, with a relational stance was because as children, we are, if not the only perhaps I think we are the only right. We are born so underdeveloped, meaning we can’t survive. A human infant can’t survive on its own. It needs some version of care from someone else to feed it, to soothe it, to. To be there in care of its physiological existence. So from that point of need, survival, need. We are so attuned to the environment around us and we adapt based on one particular question, right? What happens is someone available for me to meet my needs and when I need comfort or connection, what happens when I reach for that? And so to simplify what attachment theory and our attachment dynamics and labels really are saying is if care was consistent, right? If someone was physically present, though also emotionally attuned and present to help us support us through stressful moments, big moments, our body, right? We’ll learn that closeness is safe, will become.

Nicole LePera: [00:14:20] I’ve yet to really meet very many people that are securely attached. Right? But that will become our blueprint then, so to speak, for relating to others. I think the larger category that most of us fall in, myself included, is if that care was inconsistent or overwhelming, right? My body is going to learn a completely different message. It’s going to learn to cling to the little possible connection that was there. Mind learning. Oh, performance creates connection. So I’m going to cling to performance. And then any version of negative feedback is going to feel so overwhelming, even if it’s mild, helpful criticism because I only know myself in this one way or right. We’ll brace. We’ll pull away. The prototypical avoidant. Right. If care was overwhelming or not present, some of us are like, oh, okay, if no one’s going to be there for me, I’m safer alone. Right? So all of these attachment styles, I think what’s important is we got that part right. We need relationships. They can. We needed them in childhood. We need them well, throughout our adulthood, our entire life, the way we learn to relate in childhood does is something we carry with us as this kind of like relational blueprint. It impacts how we show up in relationships. What I hope to add to attachment theory is the neurophysiological biological imprint of attachment. That makes some of us very versed in what our attachment style is, but still unable to create the secure attachments that we want and deserve.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:54] I want to drop into that in a meaningful way, but use the phrase inner child and I can’t. We need to tease that out a little bit, because we’ve all heard this phrase at some point, if not in conversation, you’ve heard it on TV. Um, a lot of people will hear the phrase inner child and they’ll start rolling their eyes. They’re like, oh, I must be watching an LA sitcom or something like that. Um, what are we actually talking about when we’re talking? When we use the phrase inner child, what are we talking about? And why is it, why does this matter? To understand.

Nicole LePera: [00:16:24] Admittedly, I would have been a person that, you know, didn’t understand what it was when I read the limited literature on it, because I’m not the first person to speak of her child. Of course, it seemed to me that it was like this visualization, this kind of like talking to this more amorphous, you know, aspect of ourself. And for me, the scientist at heart, it just simply didn’t land. So I didn’t really care to think about it, even though I was clear that childhood did impact us. It took me to be well into my career to begin to explore working with clients who were kind of feeling stuck despite having a credible insight, awareness, and even commitment to their healing to again, understand that to build that bridge from insight into action, we, we actually need to create new choices. And our body is so foundationally involved in those choices. So if I were to simplify what inner child is to me, and I hope the takeaway is for anyone that is listening or chooses to buy my new book, is that it’s a part of us that we all have, no matter how long ago childhood was, no matter how difficult it was, and we don’t want to think about it. It is still literally wired into us as as implicit emotional memories. And it impacts, right? Because this part early in life did a lot of learning. Just like I said, it learned how to stay connected when security or attention was scarce or inconsistent.

Nicole LePera: [00:17:47] It also learned how to handle unpredictability. It learned how to handle conflict, disconnection, unmet needs. And so those then, right, that learning is what most of us meet sometime in our adulthood, right? When we seemingly instinctually feel driven to certain emotions or reactions or even roles in our relationship, despite wanting to change, knowing that they don’t serve us because again, they are so wired into our body. So it takes us not only understanding, maybe more compassionately why? Right? Maybe us staying quiet now in an argument where we could speak up at one time that maybe helped prevent conflict in childhood. So we can see that part more compassionately. But at the same time, we can now show up differently, right? We can teach our body that it’s safe to speak our mind or to express our needs to someone else or for me. Right? The overachiever. I can understand that. I learned that that’s how connection and worthiness was created for me in childhood, right? But I can understand now that I can be worthy in other moments. I can be worthy in a moment of rest even, because that’s what we want to do, right? We don’t just want to understand why we’re struggling. Most of us want to change and limit or decrease the amount of struggle that we’re having.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:05] Yeah. I mean, I think everyone raises their hand to that. So I want to make sure I’m really wrapping my head around this. Would it be would it be correct to then say something like, the inner child is a set of patterns that are instilled at some earlier age, that largely show up in the way that we behave and interact with the world.

Nicole LePera: [00:19:26] That’s a beautiful definition. I would say they shape our habits, our relational patterns, our personality traits, even our preferences. And it’s confusing because we’ve repeated them for so long outside of our awareness that some of us are, they even feel like they’re who we are, right? We feel like we’re just choosing to be independent, especially if you grew up in a Western society, right? We’re independence and individualism is celebrated to some extent, but it can feel to some extent, oh, I’m just choosing to be this. But for some of us, it developed out of protection because relying on others at one time meant hurt or disappointment or sensitivity. Right? We’ve practiced being so hyper vigilant to the environment for so long that we just feel like we’re a highly sensitive person. It’s just who we are in temperament. But in reality, that was a very adaptive hypervigilance or scanning for danger in unpredictable environments. Ending it with my own example, right drive can feel like ambition. It’s celebrated by society. But again, that was the only way at one time that I could secure attention and therefore safety and connection when I needed it most.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:33] Yeah, I mean, that makes so much sense. And it would make sense then also to say, well, part of these patterns and behaviors would be functional or helpful to the way that we live, and part of them are also going to be dysfunctional or unhelpful. But I think part of what I’m hearing underneath all of this is that even if we think this is like, almost like an identity level, DNA level thing, that in truth, the vast majority of this is really learned. And if it can be learned, then we can either unlearn it or change the associations we have 100%.

Nicole LePera: [00:21:03] I’m happy, Jonathan, that you’re highlighting, right? Because a lot of these adaptations are aspects of ourselves that we don’t just want to throw away because they were an early adaptation, right? Drive can absolutely be harnessed in moments where I also give myself rest. I don’t have to be so driven. So I think it’s important to and where I get to in my book is that the goal of all of this isn’t to erase our childhood or become someone different, it’s to expand to allow all aspects of who we had to be, but also who we want to become. Mhm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:41] Yeah. I mean, it’s funny as describing, I remember a friend of mine telling me that, um, his therapist at one point told him to load an image of like his six year old self onto his phone so he could reconnect with his inner child. Because there were aspects, there were patterns and behaviors that were actually wonderful and joyful and playful and light that he had become just fiercely disconnected with. And it was almost, you know, like, so it’s not all bad, you know, it’s like there, it’s the full suite of everything. And sort of like our job is to figure out where are the different patterns, how are they showing up in our lives and how do we want to relate to them, keep them, change them. Um, you introduce something along the way. Um, you call the, the individual development model. Um, so what is this? And how, how does it why does this matter? How does it expand beyond the traditional sort of frameworks that we’re talking about here?

Nicole LePera: [00:22:33] So the individual development model is kind of my way of thinking of the answer to, I think, a question that maybe all of us ask, which is why am I who I am? Right? How did I become me? Who is me? And there’s many different theorists who theorize or came up with their idea of how we became who we are. And what I saw lacking in those models was kind of back to what I was saying earlier, which was the impact and role of our or the role of our environment relationships included, and how it impacts our neurophysiological development. So the individual developmental model is kind of five different spheres that all of us as a developing human right kind of go through, so to speak, Based on kind of core needs at certain times. Beginning with our body, right? Being back to this idea of we’re completely dependent, we can’t even feel safe. Contrary to what was even popular parenting wisdom up until recently, a child can’t soothe themselves on their own, right. They need a calm, grounded caregiver to show up when they’re upset, crying, dysregulated, hungry, tired, or whatever to be soothed their nervous system. So with safety and security being the first kind of foundational area, again, that is so greatly impacted by who, if anyone was around when we needed them, and then more so how safe they were, right? As a person to calm us down, were they regulated enough to actually send those signals to our body through co-regulation of our nervous system, to calm us down when we needed it? And then we kind of progress through development, right? Once safety and security happens and the next thing we do, those of us who have any interaction with toddlers maybe have our own right.

Nicole LePera: [00:24:21] The next thing is we separate from that home base that’s safe and secure to go individuate right? We go, we explore. We need boundaries. We need limits. We need discipline to be told when we’re crossing boundaries and limits and come back to safety. Right? And again, we’re learning in all of these areas based on who or what is happening around us. And then we kind of progress from there into a more emotional space where we become attuned right to other people emotionally. We kind of interact, we develop agency, we see that choices that we make have impact in the world around us, specifically other people and how they feel. Um, then, right. The learning that we do is we become ourselves after we’ve no, where do we find safety? We know how to kind of go out and explore ourselves. We start to learn our emotional world. Then we can be authentic, so to speak. And then finally, kind of the last kind of sphere is almost returning to the deepest sense of belonging. Right? The sense that, in my opinion at least, we are all connected to something, someone greater than ourselves.

Nicole LePera: [00:25:26] But also, you spoke to something earlier very wisely. It’s also returning to our inherent joy, our creativity, our purpose, and our passion. So of course, right, there’s kind of very generally speaking, that’s kind of areas of development that we evolve through. And of course, maybe listeners like, well, I didn’t have safety and security. What do you mean boundaries limits? My goal then is, is to present a framework of what I call reparenting or simply right, stepping in, creating new habits and patterns, maybe being the steady, calming, nurturing caregiver that we didn’t have, maybe creating limits or boundaries where we didn’t have them, maybe for the first time, learning how to reconnect with our own emotions so that we can be emotionally intimate with other people, maybe taking off the masks of identity, not being our authentic self, instead being the overachiever or the caregiver so that we can express who we really are. Then allowing us to be purposeful and passionate and joyful and creative. And again, all of these things that I think we inherently are. But again, based on what was happening or not happening around us, including the people and relationships. A lot of us kind of haven’t developed the security that we need it to be. Those things, though, again, through Reparenting, we can create that now.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:43] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. The journey you described, you know, like my brain was translating as we started in complete dependence, we we then moved to like largely complete independence. And then we kind of moved back to the middle of interdependence. Um, does that land.

Nicole LePera: [00:27:05] I, it’s landing so much. I have chosen, of course, so I’m very generally speaking, but as you’ll see in the book, I even map this on to development of certain brain areas right from our nervous system’s ability to regulate, to create the safety and security some of us are lacking to our limbic systems, our mirror neurons. And so I’m mapping again the body foundationally because it’s nice to know and understand when I just said, but my goal is to give the tools to do some relearning in the areas where we’re not. We haven’t developed the security that we always needed.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:40] Yeah. I want to get into some of the tools. Um, I’m curious about something else here. Um, a lot of our audience are like, they’re navigating the middle years of their lives and there’s, there’s something that that often happens in midlife that, that you speak to. It’s this idea that, you know, the, the pace of life finally kind of slows down enough for the, quote, old material to start to surface. And a lot of folks in the 40s or the 50s, they describe this experience of kind of like suddenly being confronted by feelings they thought they had already dealt with. Um, what’s actually happening there from an awareness from a nervous system perspective that we can key in on. That’ll be really helpful.

Nicole LePera: [00:28:22] I think that things come to the surface right when our attention shifts, right? So the more time space, the more familiar we are with life and patterns, and the more attention, right, kind of goes into becomes available. Let me word it that way. The more then we are so quickly able to pay attention to the things that we’ve been distracted from, or even that we’ve been very even physiologically protected against allowing to come to the surface. So I think for physiological changes that happen as we age, I think lifestyle and life circumstance changes. That happens as we age, that attention to some extent is freed up. That will then allow us sometimes, you know, even despite wanting that to be the case, to then be met with stuff from long ago. Stuff that we think we were already beyond. And it can be very challenging, I think, especially when it happens in our later years, because, you know, we have this idea that, oh, I thought we got over that. It feels like we’re backtracking, backsliding. We can even then begin to shame ourselves because of the reemergence. And so I could even make a case that this happens in any healing journey. The more we become present and less protected, counterintuitively, the more we feel uncomfortable, which is what often then sends us right back into using those old protective mechanisms and not looking at it at all.

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:48] Yeah. I mean, it’s like when I’m a long time meditator and I remember one of my early teachers telling me like, this actually isn’t going to fix anything, you know, but, but what, what will happen if you stay with the practice for like over time, you’ll just start to see more clearly what’s what’s really within you and around you. It’s not going to resolve it like that work is still going to be there for you to say yes to, but it’ll just help, you know, like you described it as, muddy waters will start to clear and you’ll see what’s actually underneath them. And it feels similar to the process you’re describing, you know, and when, when that happens, um, and this is again, something that you write to and speak about, it’s, it’s not like we’re just remembering these things that are causing us strife. We’re, we’re literally reliving them.

Nicole LePera: [00:30:39] We’re reliving them. And no, I think again, those moments, whether it’s just the natural shift right into awareness, nowhere often do we relive them more than in moments where we are in a reaction, right? In a stressed, driven state. For some of us, it looks like an overreaction where we’re screaming and yelling and saying and doing things that are out of character. For others, it looks like a kind of distracted reaction where we’re leaving a hard conversation that we know we need to have. We’re running from relationship, relationship, or job to job. And for others, it looks like an underreaction where we’re not removing ourselves from something that’s unsafe, whether it’s a relational dynamic or a physical experience or, you know, we’re shut down. And so in those moments, it’s so important. I always want us to understand it’s coming from a physiological place. And what is happening is we’re becoming emotionally flooded because those are the confusing moments, right? Where we have all the know and we know that these habits and we don’t want to be saying or doing these things, or we want to stay connected because this person is important to us. Yet our body goes into a stress driven autopilot, so to speak, where we tune in somewhere down the line, right? Sometimes hours later, sometimes days later, right. And it’s like, oh gosh. And we carry that shame based on the reactions that we’ve had. So my hope is always to not only give, right, the, the why in those moments, you can’t just calm down. Like maybe a very well-meaning loved one is telling you to do because.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:11] You have to say to anyone.

Nicole LePera: [00:32:12] So flooded and brought back in time and your body can’t calm down unless you teach your body how to calm down.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:19] Yeah. What? Talk to me about this phrase, emotional flooding. What is the actual lived experience or feeling of emotional flooding? So we can kind of better understand if and when it’s happening to us.

Nicole LePera: [00:32:31] So beginning in the body, as I often suggest we do, it feels very much like a stress response, which impacts three major systems that we can give ourself awareness of by focusing our attention on our heart rate, our breathing, and the tension in our muscles. So for a lot of us, right, a moment of emotional flooding. And again, I’ll just briefly talk about the over and under. B is when our heart starts racing, our breath quickens, our muscles become tense. We might clench your jaw or even our fist, right? We’re flooded with energy. I want to also give justice, though, to those of us that kind of shift into a more shut down state where instead of all of that amplified energy, we might feel numb, feel cold in one second, right? Our heart rate, we can’t even feel our heart in our chest, and we’re holding our breath and our muscles might well feel like putty. We want to get up and run, but we don’t even feel like we can summon the energy to. So that’s what’s happening in our body, right? This immediate. We don’t have to think about it. Our body is already shifting into that action or reaction in our mind. What’s mapping on to that stress response? Because that’s what we’re talking about here. Whether you’re in the fight or flight with that amplified energy or the kind of shut down state, the other end of that spectrum in our mind, and I’m sure some of us very much relate to this, it looks like urgent, overwhelming, all or nothing, black and white. You’re always you’re never type thinking, um, those are really great markers.

Nicole LePera: [00:34:00] Again, when the reaction is immediate, urgent, all or nothing in body and in mind. We don’t feel like we can even stop, right? Our body’s reaction in those moments. Those are great cues that what’s happening is emotional flooding. And even tying it back to the concept of our inner child is reacting in that moment, which is why oftentimes the reaction we’re having outwardly the screaming, yelling, saying something we don’t want, taking our, you know, toys and going to our own sandbox or not speaking, giving the silent treatment feels a bit, I mean, this developmentally immature because quite literally, it was formed at a time where the only thing we could do was lash out before someone else struck us. The only thing we could do was run away from the situation or flee in our mind through imagination. The only thing we could do was shut down and not say anything, trying to make us invisible. Because in that flooded moment, again, neurologically or physiologically speaking, the chemicals, the stress response is reacting, and then the habit is often grounded at an earlier time where we didn’t have different capacities, which is my goal, right? Is to tune into those moments beginning in our body so that we can learn how to regulate our stress response not only through daily habits, but practices in the moment so that we can regain choice. Because in those moments, we become locked and loaded. Our body and those old habits are going to dictate what happens next, not our mature, rational mind.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:22] Yeah. I mean, if it’s not coming from your mature, rational mind to start with, it’s like really embody, it’s physiological. It’s really hard to sort of like think your way out of it. Um, and you know what you’re describing the sense of flooding. I think so many of us have felt it and will feel it, but we don’t translate it. Oh, this is like this, this is like this phenomenon you’re describing. We sometimes use the word like, this is just my life. Sometimes we just think I’m like, I feel it. So often I feel like I’m just kind of always in survival mode. But this is the way it’s always been. This is the way everybody around me has always been. This is the way my family and family culture have always been, you know? Um, and and this is something you speak to, like this notion that survival isn’t the same as living. Even if we think that this is just the way it is, you know, for someone who has been high functioning, um, in survival mode, 20 years, 30 years, maybe 40 years, they’re joining us and they’re now realizing, oh, this is what’s going on. And wow, has there been a cost to this? Where did, where do they even start to begin?

Nicole LePera: [00:36:28] So I often get asked some version of this question, especially for listeners maybe who are not able, much like myself, to even recall what happened in childhood, to even map on to. Right. Right. Why am I what what happened to create this very familiar way that I am that it feels like it’s almost just how I’ve always been and how I’m meant to be forever. Um, because if you’ve ever heard me share. I can recollect very little of my childhood. I’m intentionally using that word because the memory of my childhood lived in this very neurotic, very kind of achievement driven person. So to change, right. We don’t necessarily need to know what created it or even believe, so to speak, that it’s not who we always are and are meant to be. But we can begin now by noticing our daily habits, our relational patterns, right? How our body feels by taking moments throughout our day to pause, to shift our attention from wherever else it may be, on focus on whomever else it might be focused on, and to even just as simply explore what am I feeling? Again, checking in with those three areas. How’s my breath? Am I holding my breath? Is it very quick? Right? If I’m holding my breath, can I kind of release that tension and allow myself to breathe? Our body is naturally breathing. If it’s quick. Can I slow it down? Right. That’s going to impact the rate of our heart. Can I notice the tension in my muscles. And if I’m feeling a lot of tension, can I release it? Or if I’m feeling on that numb kind of end of the spectrum where I don’t even feel like I have muscles or energy, can I stimulate my body’s energy system so we can start now at any time, but quickly, I just want to speak to it is very confusing because a lot of us do see these patterns, myself included.

Nicole LePera: [00:38:17] I would have said, right, I am anxious. Why? Because my whole family is right. It’s just genetically passed on to us. So what I hope is a takeaway is not regardless of what we know happened in childhood or not understanding that, you know, family from the early family environment to even ancestral environments that are passed on epigenetically to us, or how our body’s stress system functions can often then be the answer to why these all just seem like. And this was a running motto in my family. This is how we are as we’re always like this, right? And so my hope is to counter right, not only with the possibility of change in any moment. Right to maybe even wonder if maybe we’ve just become who we need it to be. Maybe to question that running narrative that it might not just be. Because genetically we’re all just like this. It might be because we’ve shared the same environment, or we’ve came from the same ancestors whose stress systems had to adapt in the same way, becoming so hyper vigilant because they were under overwhelming stress or trauma. And now we all share the same coping mechanism.

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:24] Mhm. I mean, that lands so powerfully. And I think so many of us have probably heard some version of this is just the way like, look, your mother was like this. Your father was like this. Your grandfather was like this. Your it’s just, this is us. This is our family. This is the way we roll. We’ve always been like this. It’s in our genes. But what’s really interesting when you dig down, and I know this is something you speak to also is this notion of. I remember reading the research on this maybe five years ago when we started to see that, um, you were looking at genes and then this word epigenetics starts to enter the conversation, sort of like what is switched on or switched off. And we start to learn that, well, maybe certain things were expressed three generations ago because it had to be expressed for survival purpose. Right? But that the not just the genes themselves, but and tell me if I’m getting this wrong, the epigenetic state, whether it’s switched on or off, is actually heritable, that that state can be passed on for generations. And, and then we think, well, this is just in our genes. But in fact, it’s just whether that sort of state is switched on or off. And that is something that we have control over.

Nicole LePera: [00:40:28] 100 epigenetics kind of shifting science into that awareness that we are beyond just the DNA that doesn’t control, um, the entirety of our experience, but it’s again, how those genes are expressed or not. And so through different mechanisms like methylation, certain genes, particularly around our stress response system can again, really simply turn on or off and impact us. So I’ll use an example that I actually used in the book to maybe visualize this. There was a very fascinating study. It happened in the Netherlands some years ago, when a community of people were experiencing such a severe famine that they at times were relying on literally sawdust to make bread. They had no nutrients, no calories. And they studied women who were pregnant at this time. And what they found was that even once. So this person’s body, to understand the science behind it. When food was unpredictable or scarce, they were in a famine. So they didn’t know when they were going to get the next dose of food, or if there was going to be any nutrients in it. The beautiful thing that a body does is it will change certain systems. Again, I’m going to simplify it. It will hold on to fat, right? It’ll use energy in a different way because it will be preparing for the expectation of continued food insecurity, uncertainty, or scarcity. So what they found was that women who were pregnant at that time of famine, even though the famine thankfully went away, you know, food went back to quote unquote normal, so to speak, when these children were born, what they saw in their epigenome, right? Their DNA didn’t change at all, but their same signals, right? That turned on and off to hold on to fat, to use energy differently.

Nicole LePera: [00:42:10] Again, simplifying were the same as if they were present during the famine. Because think about it logically, right? That is beautifully smart from a body. If assumably right, the offspring are going to be born up in the same environment. Our body always wants to predict what’s going to happen next, so it can sustain survival through what’s going to happen next. So what’s going to happen next is we don’t know when food’s going to come next. Then it makes sense that I’m prepared in this epigenetic way in case if and when that happens again. So that again, simple example, which is why some of us have in our ancestral Lineages, food insecurity, financial insecurity are the scarcity that is quite literally wired into us, giving us a hyper reactive stress response around certain environments or stimuli or fears or worries that were beautifully adaptive, assuming that we were born into the exact same environment. But what’s happened for most of us is our environments change, our resources have changed, our relationships have changed. Some of us are living on the complete other side of the world than the body that we were wired, or then the environment that our body was wired to exist in.

Nicole LePera: [00:43:20] So epigenetics, again, how the genes are expressed impact everything from inflammation, stress regulation, or immune response, our physical or emotional health. But they’re coming again from a beautiful adaptation at one time where that worked was necessary in the environment. The good part of this is just to wrap the hope into this with the story. They continue to study these individuals who were in utero and then born, And they found that those who committed to lifestyle changes to. Regulating their body and, you know, had nutrition available to them, were equally able to epigenetically shift the genes on and off in the other direction, so to speak. And this is what my hope is for all of us, not only to have some compassion for why we are stuck and our body is reacting to environments that maybe we’re not living in, but to give us the physiological tools to when we say break cycles, we’re not just talking about right. Showing up differently and creating a little impact in terms of behaviorally, we’re actually talking about changing the way not only our genes are turning on and off, but the way our offspring’s genes, if we choose to have them, are turning on and off quite literally breaking cycles.

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:30] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Yeah. I mean, it’s really powerful because you’re describing not just changing behavior, but literally shifting your neurophysiological state. Mhm. Um, which also is how so many people relate to us. Like, like you described earlier in our conversation, you walk into a room and two people have just had a fight. You’re not there when a word has been uttered, but you feel it because they are radiating something. Right. Um, and we bring that, that, that state into every interaction. And we also bring it into like the interactions we have with ourselves. You know, um, when we tune into this and one of the things that you also, I don’t want to skip over this because I think it’s really important. You mentioned we don’t necessarily need to pinpoint what the thing was that set the pattern in motion when we were younger. We just need to understand how it’s showing up in our lives now to start to do the work, to change. That’s so powerful to me because I think so many of us do feel like I can’t, quote, fix this until I know what started it. And you’re kind of saying maybe not.

Nicole LePera: [00:45:37] Yeah. And I’m saying that because I’m speaking to, again, me who very early on. It, and it was a running joke for a little bit of time when I. It became I became aware to me, you know, when I started to have friends in high school and stuff and everyone would be like, oh, every now and then share a little story about their childhood. And mine was blank. Um, it even translated to being out with those said friends. And a couple weeks later they’re saying, hey, do you remember when we went there or said and did this? And I’m like, no, I don’t really remember that. And so what I’d come to understand, right, is that my inability to recall was actually an example of everything we’ve been talking about today. Right. When I lacked the safety and security in childhood, the most protective thing for my body to do was to pay less attention to me and what’s happening around me, right? To disconnect or to dissociate my awareness. We actually now have a ton of research that shows the impact of cortisol, one of our main stress hormones. How much? Again, our brain, while I’m going to localize memory to one system, the hippocampus. There’s a lot of different systems involved in the way our brain works, but so to speak, cortisol very much impacts our hippocampus, the ability to kind of hold and recall memories. Right? So now I have a different story in mind, right? Which is the way the reason I lack the story was because there was so much cortisol, not only from the moment I was born into the environment, but I’ve come to realize, and this goes for for listeners, right from if we understand, if we have access to information or not about the details, if we have a sense of how stress our mother was right when we were developing in their body, right.

Nicole LePera: [00:47:26] We can get some sense into how stressed our in utero environment was. And what I come to this was actually told to me at my mother’s funeral, and it was told in a, you know, kind of seemingly joking way. One of my aunts came up to me and my mom and her were very close, especially when I was born. And my mom was 42 at the time. And because she had already had two children, my older siblings were 15 and 18 years older than me. They were not trying to get pregnant when my mom started to have pretty consistent morning sickness symptoms, very much because there was a lot of health related issues in my family with my older sister in particular. So there was a lot of when something happened, right? And I was a little girl who assumed something happened bad to mom. It was because often what was bad happening in my family was health. So my mom’s mind immediately went to, I’m having morning sickness, I’m sick, I must have stomach cancer.

Nicole LePera: [00:48:15] So she confided in this aunt looking for support. You know, that she thought shared her belief that she was likely coming down or had stomach cancer. And my aunt, you know, very much urged her to go to the doctor to get a diagnosis. And the diagnosis was me. So I now think, right, how much cortisol was washing through my mom’s body? Because not only were they living in a stressed environment in a city with, you know, dangerous things happening outside the door to health related things happening inside her, with her child included. Now she’s having these symptoms that she thinks is cancer, right? All of this cortisol washing through the placenta and impacting my neurological development. So again, the lack of memory, I kind of have a new awareness and it all maps onto what we’re talking about here, which is chronic stress, whether it’s in our ancestors or our environments in utero or not, will impact the way our brain wires and fires. Right? Many of us are going to be then born with a amygdala, right? That emotional center that’s always scanning for danger, that’s overreactive constantly scanning for danger with a prefrontal cortex, right? That’s not as online as we would like it to be. And we quite literally, in a way, we become, we are born wired for the threat that we might not even actually have physically experience or may never experience in the environment that we’re living in.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:41] I mean, that’s wild. Um, our brains are strange little beasties. Um, so somebody joining us for this conversation, right. And they’re nodding along. Um, um, and, and you talked to, I asked you a little earlier, like, what’s the first step in if we zoom the lens even out a little bit from there and then kind of thinking, okay, there are things about the way that I’m showing up in my life that I’m even looking at that and saying, wait, what? Where is that coming from that I’m getting? Either I’m getting enough space in my life where it’s starting to like, really be reflected back at me and I can’t turn away anymore. Or maybe and maybe it’s causing enough strife that I actually, I need to actually finally do something about it. I need to figure it out. Um, talk to me about sort of a toolbox or a set of tools or a frame that we can start to bring to this moment.

Nicole LePera: [00:50:34] So kind of going back to the foundational place where change happens. We cannot create, make even think about. Remember even this conversation with maybe all the new tools I’ll share with you now, unless our body is feeling safe, right? So kind of back to those building and consistent check ins, setting alerts on our phone, post-it notes, kind of connecting this new check in habit with something you already do every day. Brushing your teeth, drinking coffee, building those moments of refocusing our attention to our bodies. Signals of stress are so foundationally important for two reasons. So that a we can create some new lifestyle habits, generally speaking, right? Noticing what time we go to bed, what time we wake up, how rested we feel, when. How do we feel after we eat certain foods? Obviously trying to give our body the foods, the energy, the nutrients that it needs. Seeing how much we move in a given day, right? Give making movement as a part of our day. If we if we’re able to, if we don’t yet move or slowing down, right? If we are moving all day long and there’s never any moments of rest outside of those kind of daily lifestyle type habits, right? Tuning it in the moment as my breath is starting to elevate or quicken, as my muscles are starting to tense, knowing that my body will get to the point of no return, as I call it, where it’s too stressed, it’s going to rely on old choices, old habits, I should say, not being able to make new choices. And in those moments, right as we notice, maybe our breath is getting faster and our voice is getting faster and louder, beginning to slow all that down, right? Beginning to maybe refocus on all of the support that is around us.

Nicole LePera: [00:52:12] Our feet on the floor, my back against this chair, maybe even just tuning in to right. As we kind of acknowledge, I go back in time, I become a little kid tuning into the current environment, right? Doing the quick like naming of neutral things in our environment to remind us that I’m here, I’m present, and even maybe whispering to ourself I’m safe because with safety right now, we can shift from reaction into a new response, right? Say the thing that we want to say stay instead of disconnecting and then kind of some other practical steps. We all right. Have a voice of criticism beliefs in our head again, formed in our earliest environment. They do not just go away with a magic wand. Similarly, I always like to break down change into two steps, right? I become aware of what my stress signals are. I make a new choice. I create safety where there isn’t. I become aware of my critical voice or the beliefs in my mind, right? The new choice I can make. I can’t shut those off. But what I can do. Back to your meditation practice, right? It’s not changing anything per se. It’s kind of flexing that attentional muscle, noticing when you’re down the rabbit hole of criticism, or where you’re coloring your current experiences with past beliefs, reminding yourself of how unworthy you are in this moment. And this person’s lack of text response is an example of how that’s all going to happen in our mind because that’s what we’ve learned and practiced what we can do.

Nicole LePera: [00:53:34] Once we become aware of how much our mind is coloring our current reactions is we can refocus our attention away from that mind again, back to our breath, back to our body and time and space. Back to the movement of the tasks that we’re engaging in. So I think those are kind of really foundational, helpful habits. And of course, whatever else we’re noticing and seeing with awareness, we can then individualize our journey, right? Create the opportunity for change, move toward connection, tell ourself and our body create safety in our body if connection wasn’t always available. So it feels unfamiliar, um, separate from connection. If maybe we came from too enmeshed of a household and we make everyone else’s problems, our own problems, right? If we notice that habit awareness, now we can start to create boundaries or separation, right? Acknowledging that we are different, we can feel for someone, right? Attune like we began the conversation, but we don’t maybe have to take over responsibility. Like a lot of us, people pleasers, appeasers, and caretakers immediately do so with awareness, right? That’s a brain area where we’re not super stressed, where old reactions and identities and roles are going to take over. Again, we’re noticing that that also happens in our mind. We’re narrating our life. We’re kind of inserting old beliefs in new circumstances, even where they don’t apply. And then we can make those new choices, whether it’s simply just refocusing our attention away from something that’s unhelpful in our mind, or again, refocusing our attention to our body, asking our body what we need in that moment, and then making those choices, shifting how we’re then relating to someone else.

Jonathan Fields: [00:55:12] Mhm. I love that. So it’s sort of I mean, it feels like first we notice our physiological state, then we notice our behavioral response or even our thought response. Then we say, okay, what can I do to kind of downregulate the system to go from 78 to 40 5 to 33? I’m old. Um, and then we kind of ask ourselves, um, what is the response or the behavior or like, what’s the move right now that would, that would give me the feeling that I actually want to feel, and maybe not even just in this moment, but moving forward.

Nicole LePera: [00:55:48] And what a powerful question for those of us who never were considered, were asked who maybe had very well-intentioned parents who wanted to give us what we needed, but we don’t yet know. So I want to kind of make it clear here two things that you very wisely said. Age aside, we don’t go from 100 to 0. It really is a smaller kind of movement, right? We don’t go from completely overwhelmed to peace and zen, right? We shift slowly. We downshift through small, consistent actions. I can even make a case that the father, the more we move out of our kind of comfortable, habitual behaviors, right? Those of us who at New Year’s, we want to start a new life starting tomorrow. And now we want to have all these new habits. What we’re really doing is we’re stressing out and already overstressed system. So as frustrating as it is the pathway, the change is best made with small, consistent steps that we’re able to maintain. Which is why in all of my work, I try to break down these habits, new habits, into the smallest choice that we could make and maintain, because that’s how change is only possible, right? We have to stay within a window. We don’t become so overwhelmed, even though it’s completely natural. So in that moment, many of us are reparenting. If we didn’t have a parent who showed us how to care for our physical or emotional body, now we’re creating some new habits that are so much more supportive.

Nicole LePera: [00:57:11] And then to the next question of what do I need right now? I’d want to speak to us who might not know right away, right? Might never have had a parent who cared to ask, or who could meet our need if and when we were able to. Once we got the ability to verbalize it, verbalize what it was, or attune to what it was before we could speak it. So I really want to normalize as you begin this journey. You might not know. I still don’t know what I’m feeling in any given moment and what I need in any given moment for some of us, myself included. Right. This kind of awareness happens once my body is calmed down, and then I can explore now and get curious and say, okay, well, that reaction didn’t work, right? What can I try now to soothe the energy that I’m still experiencing in my body? Because again, for the, for many of us, as we begin this reparenting journey that is healing, even just asking the question of what do you need? What would feel supportive right now? But again, I want to normalize. You might not know and that’s okay, because what you’ve done is you’ve broken a habit. You’ve paused enough to give yourself space to ask. And now you can get curious and experiment and explore. And for your inner child, that might be the first time ever. Show someone you are showing up in service of your own best interest or your own needs.

Jonathan Fields: [00:58:31] Yeah. Circling back to your inner child, you dedicate the book to little Nicole, who was always enough exactly as she was. What would you want to say to somebody else who’s joining us right now, who’s just beginning to realize that the patterns they’ve carried for decades aren’t who they actually are? Not recommendations, not science, but just human to human.

Nicole LePera: [00:58:53] It’s got a little emotional hearing that, because there’s still a part of me that doesn’t fully believe that. Right? That only sees worthiness in, in action. So I want to reiterate, all of you listeners are inherently worthy. You know, for just being who you are. And I also want to, you know, normalize any, any resistance, any difficulty in believing that maybe even any emotionality that you might notice come out when someone like myself suggests that because that’s a beautiful moment where you’ve met an inner child, right? Mine was alive right now, kind of hearing that, hearing that reflected back to me to some extent, believing it, but to another extent, not fully. And that just really illustrates the complexity of this human experience. And you know what it means to be human. And I think the final thing that I would end with is, you know, I think so many of us and one of the reasons why I’ve shifted my focus from individual work into a community based setting online include it is, I think so many of us really, truly believe we’re alone. We’re the only ones who feel this way. We’re the only ones who do this. I can’t tell anyone that this is what’s what I’m struggling with. So I want to say that that is so not true. And the reason why I so readily share my own self is in hopes, right? That you can kind of break down that that wall of feeling alone because we are all so much more similar than we are dissimilar. And again, we are all so worthy for just being who we are in all of our messiness. The things we’re good at, the things we’re not good at, our joy, our sorrow, and everything in between.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:28] Mhm. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up.

Nicole LePera: [01:00:37] To live a life that’s yours is what comes up, right? Because we all even have different ideas of what good is. Um, I think our journey here is to find ourselves, find our way back home, get curious, explore that beautiful creature of worthiness and to and to create space in our environments and our relationships to live that expression. So I think that that is the ultimate goodness in life is to live a life that’s yours.

Jonathan Fields: [01:01:04] Mhm. Thank you. Hey, before you go, be sure to tune in next week for our conversation with Jon Acuff about why procrastination is not actually your problem and the surprising permission shift that happens when you finally finish what matters most. Follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Kris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you’re still here. Do me a personal favor, a seven-second favor, and share it with just one person. If you want to share it with more, hey, that’s awesome, but just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time. I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

The post Your Childhood Patterns Are Still Running Your Life | Dr. Nicole LePera appeared first on Good Life Project.