How To Heal Your Inner Child with Dr. Nicole LePera

(soft music) - Hi everyone, welcome back to Jillian On Love. I have a very special guest today. Dr. Nicole LaPera, otherwise known as the holistic psychologist. Dr. Nicole has amassed a following of millions over the years, helping people to heal very old childhood wounds and educating people on the importance of the nervous system and how the nervous system is very closely linked to our mental and emotional health. Her new book, Reparenting the Inner Child, is out now. And it is a brilliant and incredibly comprehensive book and almost teaching manual. And how to heal very old wounds and how to actually be the parent that you always needed for yourself. In this conversation, we talk about epigenetics, how to overcome certain wounds, how to change. And also the very important boundaries that we need in order to have a life and not get totally consumed by urgency culture and everyone else's stuff. So without further ado, my conversation with Dr. Nicole LaPera. - Well, welcome back. Well, thank you for having me. I'm super excited. - I'm so excited. First of all, I love your new book, Reparenting the Inner Child, which I believe is out already, 'cause by the time this is out, that will be out. I wanted to start from the very beginning with your intro because you gave a lot of information and context about your experience. And I related to so much of it. There was something you talked about, sort of describe being a rather restless child, right? Like never being able to sit still, not knowing where to kind of channel that energy. And then you go on to describe that what else was actually going on in the home, that you are the youngest child and your siblings are much older than you. I think like 15, 16 years older than you or 14, 16 years older than you. And that your elder sister had some health challenges. And so there was a lot of stress and focus on that. And so the way that I sort of interpreted it was this merging of this child that had a lot of energy. Maybe some of it was anxious. I would say a huge portion of it was just creative energy that just didn't know where to kind of go and just physical energy. And then a home environment that wasn't able to support that. And I related that so much. And what I kept on thinking, 'cause this is a debate that I had often with my father who was a psychiatrist is the, is where do we draw the line between nature and nurture? And I wonder if this is something that you, I mean, it is sort of what you talk about. It's like so much of your work is about the nervous system, but then also conditioning. And it's like, are we born with a particular nervous system or is our nervous system shaped by our household or is it two things that sort of like collide and then create this sort of child, if you will? - Yeah, I mean, I similarly have always kind of thought, could have where is that distinction between who I just am and how much outside of me environments and of course relationships, how much they impact me. And I really have come to understand the science of epigenetics for me has been completely mind blowing, understanding, 'cause for me that's really where this intersection is. We are energy developing nervous systems, kind of this physical being that is shaped by environments. And the environments that were, you know, kind of now understanding impact us even predate our earliest family environment. So just kind of mapping this onto my story, I'd come to realize that the stress in my home began actually in my parents' childhood homes. And so this is of course information that I gathered over time, you know, really understanding that my mom and her own childhood actually lost a sibling. She was one of three children. There was a fourth one. So really understanding right this idea of health anxiety, anxiety around kind of physical wellness, that shaped in my opinion, my mom's inability to then deal with the stress of having her own child with physical illness. So again, I don't think it's like kind of the chicken or the egg conversation. I don't think that we can remove one from the other because epigenetics is actually a beautiful system, so to speak, that prepares us assuming that future generations are born into the same environment. So I think what a lot of us are walking around with, and of course I speak to that in this book, is an inner child that is greatly physiologically impacted, the way our nervous systems function, the way that we can attune to our emotions or another person's emotions that are quite literally passed down from earlier environments that many of us are not even growing up in our own childhoods. To find epigenetics for the people who are listening to may have never even heard that term. So epigenetics, I think traditionally, many of us have understood a more genetic model of being, this idea that we have a sequence of DNA and inevitably we are just going to be a manifestation of what our genes tell us or are kind of reflect about us. And we now understand that epigenetics is the way genes function. So of course we all have DNA that can't necessarily be shifted or changed, but what can be changed are how certain genes turn on or turn off. And again, this is impacted by early environments and a really common or very interesting, I think example, illustrates kind of the epigenetic impact of food, insecurity or scarcity. This idea that right, if in some moment there was a lack of consistent nutrition, certain genes that encode to hold on, I'm going to simplify this, of course, to hold on to fat so that predicting, that food would become scarce at another time, then we could utilize all of this storage of fat to continue to sustain life. And so that's a really common example. So genetically the shift then happens in terms of how we store fat. And then of course some of us down in the lineage of time continue to hold on to fat, predicting that again there would be a food scarcity in our future, even if that's not the case in our current lived experience. I mean, that's kind of wild when you really think about it. And you know, because you talk a lot about in your book how you can absorb the stress in your mother's womb. And yet it's so interesting because when you think about siblings, when I think about, I have two older sisters, but I grew up, my eldest sister was as much, much older. So I grew up in the household and she's a different father. So if you think about like my biological mother, my biological father, me and one sister share that. And how different we are and how different those genes, the epigenetics have been expressed in us. And I think it has to do with also the state of the marriage between my mom and my dad when she was born, which is then influenced by so many different things in their lives and how that impacts the child. Yes? I mean 100%. Every relationship. And so I mulled over that for a while too. Because I'm writing a book about individual development yet. And I mean to speak to the work that you so beautifully do, right? Yet you're going to hear about attachment relationships because we are greatly impacted by all of our relationships, including the stability or instability of our caregivers relationship or even going far back, kind of acknowledging that I do speak about in utero, the stress that was present or absent when we're developing. Because when we're developing, quite literally, in another human's physical body, now we're exposed to the functioning of their nervous system to the amount of stress hormones that can quite easily and literally permeate our us, the placenta, and impact our development. Which is why I think going back to this question of the chicken or the egg, nature, and nurture, it can be very confusing, right? Because some of us see very clearly patterns and cycles passed through generations where, right? So to speak, my whole family was a neurotic anxious mess, right? And so it seems like on the surface, right? That's because of genetics. We are all just doomed to be a neurotic anxious mess. But again, when we understand that we are impacted, our development begins again in another individual stress plays an incredibly foundational role in our ability to feel safe and secure in the development of our nervous can actually shift the way certain powerful brain centers organize and then function later in life. Now we can get a better understanding of how much the environment is actually shaping and causing the similarity in some of the patterns that so many of us are determined to break. - It's so wild. And I've heard you also speak about sperm and how some of these traits, I don't know if you would call it traits, but some of the epigenetics living inside the sperm. So if someone wants to have, if someone is pregnant or there's like a newly married couple or whatever, a newly partnered couple, and they want to have a child and they want to, and they want to start a family, what do you suggest that they do in order to create? I mean, there's only so much control, right? 'Cause we are, we are who we are and we're not just influenced by our home, we're influenced by all our experiences. What would be some of your advice to parents to, when preparing for a family? - I think the most important advice is to kind of assess and to the best of our ability, kind of shift and create some new habits around our own physical and emotional wellness, our own stability, sense of safety, sense of security. And of course, if you're listening, you're like, well, I don't have any safety security, I'm not well at all, does that, is that me saying, right, that you should avoid having children? Absolutely not. We now know that change, right through neuroplasticity, can happen at any time, though we also now know how foundationally important it is to have caregivers, right? Who, not that they don't become stressed or disregulated in moments, because that's natural, that's human, we're all going to have those moments, but that their body, physiologically speaking, has the ability to turn off stress, to be grounded, to be attuned, can be the place of soothing comfort for a developing nervous system that now we know verified by science cannot, an infant service system, that is cannot regulate on its own. So any shifts, I believe, change begins with first awareness. So any expected parents, parents, or people who want to become parents, focusing then on their own foundational safety and security, again, I'm not speaking of a hypothetical concept. I'm speaking of how safe and security you feel in your body, right? Can you manage stress? Can you come back down or be calmed down from a stressful moment quickly and easily? And if you can't, right, can you develop some tools through daily habits, with nutrition, with movement, with rest? And also in the moment, tools, learning how to calm ourselves down from an escalated, disregulated moment, so that over time you can create the safety that your child will quite literally need to soothe their own nervous system when they are disregulated. It's incredible, and I think that you've pioneered this in many ways, this conversation around emotional regulation and how incredibly important that is. And I grew up with two very disregulated father, like severely, but there was no language for that back then. And how, and it's so scary, it's scary to be around someone who's very disregulated. Regardless of who that person is, it can be very, and when I say very disregulated, like literally does not have control, like can't, does not have the capacity to even bring themself into a more copacetic state. And it's very scary. Would you describe your restlessness? Because my perspective is, of course, super creative. Lots of, 'cause my mind, 'cause my yoga background, I go to lots of shakti, lots of energy, lots of vitality, just not knowing where to channel. Do you see that side of you? Do you see that part of who you were? Or do you see it as more, like wounded? Now I've come to see my, I'm even hearing you describe me as a creative, right, being, having creative capacity. Up until a decade ago where my kind of perception began to shift, I would have argued that I left creativity in high school arclas, right? This traditional model and I never really felt, like what I was doing or how I was living in the world was an act of creation. So I would have argued kind of against that, but I now understand that kind of my limited way of thinking about creativity in addition to my wounding, right, when we are in survival mode, right, being creative, thinking about what creativity is, is right, having a new unique to me, solution to, an everyday problem, whether it's how I want to decorate my kitchen, right, in the way that works for me, or a more traditional, right, active creativity, like say a book that someone wrote or a piece of art that someone wrote. And what I know to be true is I like many of us, right, when we're living in survival, creativity isn't possible. We actually become more limited in our thinking and our reactions than creative. So now looking back, I understand my childhood is, yes, I was an inherently creative being. Children, right, are an act of self-expression. Anyone who has children know that they say, what's on their mind? They live out their emotions until they're taught otherwise. And teaching doesn't necessarily even have to happen in the direct moments where we're directly told not to do this or we're shamed. Sometimes it can happen in small moments where for me only certain aspects of my being, demonstrating pretty early on that I was quite good at softball and academics, which traditionally speaking in my parents' world, those two things would leave me to financial security, right, getting a good job, meant an education. Athletics was a great way for me to get into the good college to do just that. So I was attuned, like all children are, and I picked up on the cues, right, that my mom was the most present that she ever was because she spent most of her time disconnected because she was so overwhelmed by her own stress. Again, my trauma that began in her own childhood and the stress that was happening within my family from health-related stress to growing up in a city that wasn't always safe. So I saw what gained my mom's attention, what gained her validation. And I continued then as we will all do to repeat that. Some of us have very celebrated survival mechanisms, right, being a hyperachiever and society in the West here is something that everyone was clapping. But again, that began to be, or that developed, like that became the channel for all of this overwhelming energy. Again, because it was so connected to how I maintained connection and worthiness within my primary relationship. - This episode is sponsored by Nell. Food waste is one of those problems that is actually quite huge and sometimes feels impossible to fix. But here is the wild part. Most food waste comes from our homes. And that means we can actually do something about it because you know that moment when you open the trash and you get that hit with that smell, it's nasty. It's food waste, it scraps, it's leftovers, it's melting lettuce. 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That's $75 off at mill.com/jillion and use code jillion. Mill.com/jillion and use code jillion. Yeah, I mean, I get that entirely. And it's interesting how some people will actually rebel because it's when their rebelling is when they're able to get some sort of reaction or energy from one or both of their caregivers. In fact, I was speaking to someone recently and she's kind of always been a rebel and actually that's been a great, great for business, amazing for business, terrible for her love life because she keeps dating these guys who are just kind of dreadful, you know, just, and she's like an amazing person. And so, you know, we were trying to, I was talking to her about it and she said, you know, her mom, she has a great, relationship with her mom now, but her mom used to want to always impose all these rules of what she should be doing. So she just had this breakthrough like, "Oh my God, I just wanted to date men who I knew my mother would not approve of just to piss her off." And I was like, "Great, now that you know that, now you can let that go because the only person you are screwing over is yourself, but it's fascinating the things that we do." Switching gears a little bit, you talk a lot about the state of the nervous system and our responses. Like, what is most commonly known as fight or flight, but then there's also other states. I wanted to zoom in if we could on functional freeze because it seems like this is an epidemic pandemic. And it's something that most people find themselves in way more often than not. And actually when it's been described to me, literally, I'll be like, "Okay, I'm in that right now. I'm scrolling, reading about functional freeze and then identifying that I'm actually in it. Can you tell us a little bit about that and why you think it's so common for people to be in this state, even if they're not, quote unquote, traumatized. They're not dealing with anything major, maybe in their life, but it's more insidious than that, it seems. So if we want to think about, right, again, I'm going to simplify a lot of this. If we want to think about the nervous system as our sympathetic nervous system is the gas in a car. I'm sure listeners have heard of this, right? It activates our energy, it creates tension in our muscles, our heart rate begins to elevate, we begin to begin to breathe quickly. Why? Because the intention there is to fight, to overcome or to flee the threaded hand. And then of course, if we then want to think about the parasympathetic nervous system as the break, right, where all of those systems slow down, we can then think about functional freeze as literally both the break and the gas kind of pushed down at once, right? Or we're not, we do have energy and quite literally those of us who are living in functional freeze, like we're going about the motions of life. Some of us can be quite efficient at going about the motions of life. But inherently kind of the break part of that equation is we feel disconnected, right? We're not feeling connected to maybe the life experiences that we're having or for me, but all of the achievements and accomplishments that I am gathering as I push myself forward. So I think it's really common. All of our nervous systems more or less kind of work the same way with the sequence of events depending on, right, the, the bigness or the consistency of the stressor that we're experienced, we'll kind of all, right, we'll first attempt to fight or overcome whatever is, you know, threatening to us and then inevitably when that doesn't happen, we will drop into shutdown. And so I think, you know, very commonly with very few of us who have had the attunement, the ability to kind of cope or come back into a calm, grounded state of ease, full presence. We have learned and had to, I think society is playing a big role in this, right? We've had to keep that guess also being pushed down at the same time to keep us showing up for obligation, showing up for the life around us. And again, even in some moments being celebrated for how much that we can hold on our plate or how much right we can do. And even I think action for some of us, right, becomes a helpful distraction from all of the overwhelm and trauma that we don't have the tools to deal with. And I think a lot of people are in it. I think technology, I think things just moving so quickly. I think social media can do this to us. There's so much disconnection right now. There's so few people actually relating to each other because everyone's at home and their phones. And I see it, you know, I see it how it affects couples. I see it how it affects, you know, our relationship with ourselves. How do you, I mean, this is a little bit off topic, but I think part of it, how do you personally with being plugged into social media, which I can totally relate to? How do you navigate it? I'm sure it's changed a lot over the years, but has your relationship to social media and all of that and technology in general? Has it changed? Something that you have to just be mindful of and stay on top of and notice when it's like taking too much out of you? I'm really curious to know. I think while I will be the first, of course, to celebrate. Social media, right, the advent of information that is ever available to us 24 hours a day to connection. That's ever available to us, right, on this little phone that I carry around. I have now built, right? My passion is being able to now be expressed through these moments of connection, having a global community and membership, right? So I will always be the first to highlight the value of that, but the reality of that is that is such a far cry being endlessly connected, whether it's to other humans from around the world and or information about what's happening around the world is so drastically different from how our ancestors and quite literally our body is wired physiologically to function, right? Looking back to generations ago when we lived in small villages, we didn't have airplanes to kind of take us around the world to even connect with other people outside of those that were geographically near us. And news really only traveled by word of mouth, again, usually related to those around living around our area. So now, right, we are so categorically living as existence that is always connected. So if we just want to translate this to stress in our nervous system, we are inundated with stressful experiences, relationships, connections where someone can just tap out and text me and there's an expectation of urgency to respond, right? Because I can because the phone dinged in my pocket and it's right, right? So now the stress is so great. And again, very few of us are equipped with resilience or the ability to deal with stress, namely this amount of stress. So how I deal with it is how I suggest we all deal with it, which is being aware of the impact of all of these connections, even though there's a positive side of it. There is a saturation and overwhelm. And if you are already in an overwhelmed system, the more you open yourself up to whether it's the news or relationships, right, the less boundaries you have or separation limits to what you will engage with or limits around how quickly you will engage with certain texts or emails or contact, then we are just now in another kind of situation where without boundaries and limits, we can continue to be overwhelmed. So personally for me, that means like really holding myself accountable, seeing how much time I'm spending online, what I'm looking at online, how available I am to deal with the stress of what I might be reading, but also in my personal life. And so this began very early on when I discovered that I had no boundaries in my family at all. Stress traveled so quickly because anytime something stressful will happen, usually health related to one family member, near immediately the whole family would get a call or a text. Oh my god, that's my bad. In the expectation that you're immediately available to the point where, right, if I was unavailable for, you know, too long and I would call up then panicked, say what happened and we had, we would preface phone calls with nothing's wrong, well, it's not that bad, but here's what's happening, right? Oh god, because there was this like, you're related. Immediate, right? So I saw that and I had been, you know, aware that I was living in functional freeze and actually I kind of went over the brink. I started to go into a more shut down state. I shared this in my first book and I referenced it here. I started to faint. So I was clear. And then my body is completely overwhelmed and what's only adding to the overwhelm is being endlessly available, right, is hearing the ding on my phone and seeing that it's mom, dad or my sister and like something made could be happening there and not giving myself the opportunity to check in and say, Nicole, do you have the bandwidth to deal with something that could be very small, a really non-issue or even something that's a legitimate issue. So one of the first shifts I made that now I apply to all of my life and points of contact, I shot off alerts. I made it a point to, right, to not give anyone the power to just ding me whenever. You can text me and call me all you want, but I would have to make the conscious choice right to go into my text and to see your little bubble up there. I wasn't going to allow it to ding me at any time. So I gave myself, and now I continue to live my life. I don't have any alerts on anything because that has helped allow me to choose. Right? Because so quickly I could have said, stop texting me about things that aren't stressful or that are. I don't have the time or the space or I can't deal with it. But again, a boundary isn't about controlling someone else's behavior. So essentially what I was saying was, you can keep texting me whether it was family, friends or whomever. Yeah. But I will have the opportunity now to pause, to check in with myself, to determine how much space I have to deal with something that could have been very real and stressful. [BLANK_AUDIO] but I get to choose kind of what resources I have available sometimes choosing to delay, interacting with the text until I was in a place where I could hear and then deal with whatever is on the other side of it. - This episode is sponsored by Quince. So I've been doing a little spring reset with my closet lately, focusing more on quality basics over just like a bunch of stuff that I don't need. 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That's not gonna cost me several hundred dollars and Quince is it. So refresh your spring wardrobe with Quince. Go to Quince.com/onlove for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. Go to quintse.com/onlove for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/onlove. That's a powerful reframe of boundaries because I think boundaries are something just like a lot of things that are commonly misunderstood and we think it's about shutting someone else out. When really it's just about self-preservation. And at the end of the day, the self-preservation actually makes it so that you can relate better to the people in your life. I mean, it's really, when it's in service of having better relationships versus in service of punishing someone, it's a completely different animal that we're speaking about. And so I think that that's really important for listeners to hear that that's what that really is the point of boundaries. Like if you can understand the intention, self-preservation, so you're not totally overwhelmed. And we all know that when we're totally overwhelmed, we get kind of mean with the people we love, you know? Or we are, it things escalate quickly and then we get into our heads and we create all these stories and we make it the other people's fault. And it just, it creates a lot of friction and tension inside any sort of system. So I think that's really powerful. Was there a particular chapter? I mean, I'm sure you've been asked this before, but maybe not. I've been asked this before too. And I think it's an interesting question. Was there a particular chapter that you wrote that was harder for you or more emotional for you? Or do you feel like at this point, it was just sort of like, this is your third book and you were able to kind of, there's distance, if you will, between you and sort of the subject matter that you're able to write it with more ease. It's an interesting question. I'm never actually considered kind of the emotional difficulty of kind of sharing my own journey in the pages of this book. I don't think any, for me, there is still a lot. I think that I'm feeling my way into in terms of my own past trauma. So admittedly, I do still think I have a tendency, which can make writing and delivering information about something a little bit more easeful, because I still have that tendency to disconnect, to dissociate, to tell it from a very logical, analytical, right? I want to the reason why I share my story is so that my hope is that someone who much like you're kind of sharing yourself to be doing, right, who kind of had a similar experience, can feel a little less alone and maybe gather some insight, awareness, and tools to begin to create change. So I think I know, let me put it that way, I still have that. And I think that's an important part of this book. And all of our journeys, which is like a light switch, I don't just not dissociate anymore. I still have a tendency to disconnect from difficult emotional material. And so I think that's why maybe I'm even having a hard time, because even if I've written something in this book, and I know my first book talks a lot about being disconnected or not being spoken to from my mom in particular, who she wasn't kind of outwardly emotional, she would just shut down, go quiet, give me the silent treatment. And so you've heard me speak in that book and maybe in other occasions about when I came out. I didn't come out when I was discovered, I should say, as having my first girlfriend as being a lesbian and my mom did not speak to me. And so when I even tell that story now, I can admit, I don't know if I fully, or I know I don't fully feel how that is still for me to have that aspect of my being essentially rejected. Again, I have theories about why my mom and a much more traditional kind of generation, thinking that femininity was gonna get me the quote unquote traditional husband and the security financial, because that's how it was for her. I am so much, I can just sit here and analyze it. If I'm being honest, I still struggle to connect with how that was for me, my inner child emotionally, to have that. So I think similarly, the deeper the wound, the more quickly I go into, analyzation, right inside, I can share the story from a very distanced way, but I mean, I'd be lying if I kind of said, oh, I'm fully, I'm kind of fully healed that wound because to heal the wound, we have to fully feel the wound. And I still have those protections, protective habits that as it starts to near overwhelming feelings, right? I escape to analyzation. Yeah, no, I get that. But that's a very common thing that people do for sure. And I relate to that fully. But thank you. I thought that was a very honest and vulnerable response. So I don't think you dissociated all in that moment. [LAUGHS] So if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, OK, my wounded inner child is running the show. In my relationships, even in my work, where do I begin? Obviously, by reading your book, 100%. But let's just say they have the book in hand, and they just need some words of wisdom or anything like that. Where does one even begin? If they think that that's what's going on, what do you think is the entry point? The entry point, I think, is understanding how awareness of how much our past impacts us, right? Seeing those, whether it's the moments of overreaction, underreaction, whether it's the identities right me as the overachiever, maybe a listener as the caretaker or the underachiever, all of these ways and definitions that we've applied to ourselves that again have originated as our earliest best attempt at creating either safety or connection in our childhood that we continue to rely on well into adulthood. Because without that awareness and acknowledgement, we're going to continue to allow those patterns and habits to dictate and direct our reactions or our choices or even our complete identities. So with awareness, then comes the possibility of creating change. Because what change in healing really is, right? It's not understanding. It's not achieved through insight alone. It's not achieved through coping, right? Me continuing to say, so far, distance emotionally, it's actually created through new actions in real time, where I give myself quite literally a new lived experience. And so that's kind of the journey that I outlined in this book is the journey of reparing, right? Of becoming aware of how our pastille impacts us from our habits to our beliefs to our identities, and then giving our self the opportunity to be able to show up differently. That first again begins with validating all of our experiences, with allowing in, right? All of the ways that we feel, all of the pain, all of the unmet needs, and then showing up in new actions. Because without that, right? We are going to continue to repeat the only thing that we knew how to do at one time. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Financial stress is one of the worst kinds of stress next to health stress and relationship stress. And it affects far more than our bank accounts. It can take a serious toll on our mental health and on our relationships. And 88% of Americans are feeling some form of financial stress at the start of 2026. Money worries just brings on a lot of anxiety, sleep disruption, and can even bring on depression. And especially, you know, there's a lot of people, and maybe you relate to this, who grow up with certain beliefs about money, you know? And money doesn't grow on trees or you have to make a certain amount in order to feel secure and everyone. gives money a different meaning. And for some people, it's like if they don't hit this specific goal, like they'll never feel secure. And money, it's not just the money, it's what it represents. And for a lot of people, it represents safety. So the moment it goes below, what your particular comfort zone is, is the moment that you feel unsafe. And then you start to go into some sort of survival mode. And that is the impact of financial stress. So when you are starting to feel that, when life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. And better help does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences. And they're 12 plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time, which is pretty amazing. So when life feels overwhelming, therapy can help sign up and get 10% off of betterhelp.com/onlove. That's better. H-E-L-P.com/onlove. And I think it's important to note, and I think, you know, you talk about this a lot, you don't have to have had this terrible childhood to embrace the opportunity to repair that inner child inside of you. Because even if you didn't have a terrible childhood, you could have, there could have been one event where, I don't know, your parent didn't pick you up from school on time. And that event can be etched in your system as they don't care. And that can become a story, like a very central narrative. And so I think that sometimes repairing is just also, I would imagine, the way that I see it. And I think this is what you're saying, tune is that it's sometimes looking at that, investigating sort of that narrative. Like the one that's kind of running the show and maybe looking at it from a new and different perspective. You know, my father wrote, I don't know, we ever talked about this, but I think you would find it interesting. My father is a psychiatrist, a child and family psychiatrist, and wrote a very famous book called The Difficult Child. I don't know if you ever heard of that book, but it was about me. And the revised version doesn't have my name, but the original one that was out for, you know, 20 years had my name. And so it's been an interesting journey of sort of shedding that identity as being difficult. But so much of it is just, you know, understanding how, I mean, it's a terrible label to give a child. But and now I just try to embrace it as, you know, some things that are difficult about me, legitimately, are actually kind of amazing. And, you know, and so I wouldn't want to change that. But it's, it's so, how does one parent, like sometimes your kid is going to be exhausting, is going to be a lot, is going to be, and I put this in giant quotation marks difficult. How do we, because I think this is so important, I think what's so powerful about your book is that yes, it's about reparenting your inner child, but I think that's also indirectly a very important manual for parents. And so how does, for the parents who are listening, how do we navigate? Because I don't think the, the answer is tiptoeing around your child, you know, and make, and just giving them free reign, because that's its own disaster in it of itself. How, how, how, I mean, we're always, we're not perfect, we're going to mess up, we're going to mess up in our relationships. But how does one as a parent become mindful of how much weight their words carry in the consciousness of their child without driving themselves insane or with fear? I think it's, we have to strike a balance, right, with that awareness that as we once thought, right, children have needs, they have emotional needs, they're very attuned, right, their mind is developing from a very early age, even before they have language and their mind is always trying to make sense of the world around them so that they can predict the safety of the next moment, the security of their connections, right. So you will always hear me endlessly kind of describe why it is that these moments, right, seemingly small moments where a parent denies your reality, or they don't see or hear you, or they've I curiously tried to live through you, or they don't model boundaries, or they too much focus on appearance, right, why these matter? Because as in childhood, in a state of dependency, whatever a parent's doing or not doing is going to be filtered through us, meaning, right, we will assume responsibility for every action or inaction of our caregivers, because developmentally, we're trying to make sense of the world around us, secure those connections that quite literally allow us to survive, and we don't have the maturity, the ability to zoom out, and understand all of the different factors that impact parent's choices. So it's important to understand that these moments will impact a child, and it's also very important to understand that, as you wisely are even acknowledging, that we are human, right, that it isn't about nor is perfection possible. What is most important, isn't necessarily, right, those moments where a parent is not showing up in a supportive, comforting way as they would want to, but is what happens next is what is then most important, right? Can a parent come back and maybe, right, in a moment where they had an over-under reaction for whatever reason, or right, they weren't able to see or hear you, or they deny your reality in a given moment, are they able to come back and kind of give an alternate version for the child? Hey, child, this had nothing to do with you at all, right? I know I might have said something, but this had nothing to do with you and everything to do with, right? How I was feeling in that moment. It's those moments of repair or reconnection that I think become more important or more impactful, than the humanity that will exist in any given moment, in any given relationship, especially, again, one in which a parent is needed every hour of the day, right? And never is there, I mean, I don't know if any of us have a job that is so on call with so many needs, and the reality, I think that parents also have to acknowledge is they are so impacted by the way they were parented. So even you kind of referenced right an over-correction that I think really commonly happens, if say you had a childhood that was super strict or restrictive in whatever way or there was a parent who maybe didn't give any attention to your emotions, and now you kind of go to the other extreme and you're going to be permissive, right? There's not going to be any boundaries or limits on anything. A child can do whatever they want with their emotions, right? Even if it's harming someone else. And so that, right? Sometimes a very well-intentioned over-correction can also come with consequences for the child. But again, all of this goes back to what you learned, the capabilities, the resources, what capacity you have, which is why then, right, all roads lead back to, repairing, right? To even if you have an active child in your life that you are in care of, because another question I commonly get asked is, well, can you do both at the same time? And the reality of it is you already are doing both at the same time, because your inner child is going to be alive any given moment that you're interacting with your child. Even those shameful moments, I am so struck when I was in private practice, I would work with many mothers, new mothers, and they would come to me and be very distressed. And finally, they would kind of admit to some extent how much they were struggling with their child, how overwhelming their child is, how they wake up up, how sometimes they want to literally like check out, shake the baby, they can't do it. And they would say this with such shame. And more often than not the person that was saying that, was came from a childhood where they didn't have any of their own needs met, where vulnerability in another self was shamed or was kind of reacted to with perhaps abuse. So of course, right, in these moments, now where a being is needing you 24 hours a day, it's natural, right, that there's a reaction that isn't maybe the one that you want to have as a loving supportive parent in that moment. This episode is sponsored by Nature's Sunshine. It can be really frustrating to battle overwhelm and brain fog. So for example, struggling to stay focused, or maybe you're feeling like distracted on packed about calls or you know, you just have a lot of decisions to make. And that is making you fatigued and is just slowing down your day. When we need to stay locked in, when we need to be focused, typically what we do is reach for caffeinated products that actually only make us jittery or come with some sort of like intense like crash soon after. Nature's Sunshine brain edge combines hand harvested yerba mate with powerful new tropics to support focus memory and cognitive performance without the crash. It's a clean plant-powered drink mix. You can enjoy hot or cold. So you have a shortcut to help you focus and become more alert. And I love it. I really, really do. I love your Bermate. I've been a your Bermate fan for many, many years and this product is actually excellent. I've used it before recording, working, or like if I've just had to power through a really long day and it really helped me feel sharper and more capable without, again, making me, you know, it doesn't give me a bunch of adrenaline and then like crash my blood sugar, which is the worst feeling ever and actually is really bad for you. So don't fight through feeling foggy and lethargic. Ignite your mental performance with brain edge. Nature's sunshine is offering 20% off your first order plus free shipping. Go to naturessunshine.com and use the code Jillian at checkout. That's code Jillian at naturessunshine.com. - Yeah, that's a wonderful explanation and so much of it just points to accountability. And this is huge and romantic relationships. Just being able to say, you know what? It's not you, it was me. It was my emotional state. I got exhausted. I got overwhelmed and I said something that I didn't mean and I think and that's modeling, right? And then you're showing your child what it's like to apologize, what it's like to genuinely take responsibility for something that you say or do that you wish that you hadn't said. Is there anything else as we start to wrap this up that you would, that I haven't asked that you would like to share? 'Cause this is such an important book and just you know everyone knows it's out now and available wherever books are sold. It's seen, I know you had a workbook but when I think about, I kind of think of this sort of a trilogy as like the third of a trilogy is that sort of how you see it? - I really see this book as kind of a theme that's been woven through whether it's my books or my work in general, I really, my hope for this book is that really it's kind of a manual that will live on in time, even beyond when I am going to give readers. Of course I like to explain things in sight and awareness right where all these habits come from. You'll meet a whole bunch of chapters, maybe some new information about kind of why you've developed certain habits in your life. Though I am most proud of being able to give kind of like a road map of what re-parenting is simply or what inner child work is that is so grounded in development, in the body, in our physiology. 'Cause again, I'm not the first person that I did not coin the term inner child, I'm not the first person to spoke of it. I think that's kind of dedicated to Carl Jung way back when. But what I continue to see, is that it lacked kind of a grounding in our literal physiological development. Again, impacted by everything that we've been talking about throughout this entire conversation from generations before us to environments, some of which were not even grown up into to beliefs and culture and everything in between. Because my hope is that in the pages of this book, you can locate kind of where you are on a re-parenting journey and kind of find your own to the best of ability, of course, that we can put in pages of a book, your individualized, so to speak, road map of what to do. Because that is become now the most common question I imagine is something that you get this in couples work, is okay, all of the insight and awareness is great. I have these patterns. What do I do now? And so what I'm most proud of is kind of the thought that I have given and the tools that I have embedded in these pages that will hopefully give readers. Of course, you'll hear about my journey and other kind of characters in the book and maybe you'll relate and see yourself but more so then you will have your path forward. What that means for you, as always, all the tools and resources I like to call them back pocket tools. Because the reality of it is we have to remember and have access to doing the new thing in real time to create change. So in addition to all the chapters having kind of accessible whether it's exercises and exploration, self-awareness or actual practices, and entire chapters devoted to the re-parenting journey, where my hope is that readers can kind of find themselves and have the actual practical tools that feel accessible in a given moment to begin to create not only change but lasting change. - Yeah, that's wonderful. And you do, you give a lot of tools and practices to apply and absolutely, we can't think our way out of this. The mind and the body are one. And I think that's just the most important thing. And as people become more sort of nervous system, quote unquote, "literate," the really what it is, it's not just understanding the function of the nervous system, it's understanding how everything that you feel, every emotion that you experience, it's living in your physiology. And so the fastest way to kind of release some of that is actually through the body. So I appreciate all the somatic work that you also include in your book. Where can people buy it, find it, learn more about you? Let us know. - So the book I'm hopeful is wherever you love to buy books, most book, major book, read tellers should hopefully have a copy of the hard copy of "Repairing the Inner Child." It is also available on Kindle and audio book. So however it is that you like to consume your book content. Hopefully you can find it there. Though, again, outside of the book, we are so-- we pride ourselves, Holistic Psychologists, that is on putting out this information, the tools, the resources. So if it's not the book or not the right time for the book, please come find me on all of the social media platforms. There will be some version of the handle, of a Holistic Psychologist, so you can join in this conversation, increase your awareness, but I think most importantly, interact and connect with other people who are on this journey. My community is so gracious with sharing their own journeys and stories in the comment section. So I know many people gain that feeling of being a little less alone and even difficult moments by just connecting with other people. So come find me on social media for sure. It was such a pleasure to have you, Dr. Nicole. And thank you so much for your incredible contribution to the world and to people's healing and just your unwavering tenacity when it comes to putting out this information into the world and everything that you've integrated for yourself in helping others. So I thank you. Thank you. I really, really, wholeheartedly appreciate that I can reflect all of that gratitude right back to you for the work that you do. Again, I think in terms of even this conversation, nowhere is our inner child more alive and well and challenging us and in our relationships. So and to all of you listeners, I wholeheartedly mean this when I say this. As we create change, right, more safety and security in ourselves, extending that outward to our loved ones and our communities. I have chills as every time I say this, because quite literally, I feel like this is how we are joining together in a very crazy stressful world as we talked about, but we are beginning to empower ourselves with action that I truly believe is life and if not world changing. I agree. Thank you. Juliana Love is a Q-code production executive produced by David Henning and Steve Wilson, produced and edited by Travis Howe, Music by Will Tendi.