Dr. Nicole LePera

What was really going on was a lot of energy.

I've since learned that anxiety is indeed an energy that lacked an outlet.

It lacked support.

It lacked attunement.

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 created in childhood for me learning how to channel my energy into achievement and performance and perfectionism.

helped for a while, was socially validated, even though took me to the point in my journey where I think many of us 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.

Yeah, so attunement, right, is if I'm simplifying things, which I often do, it's the awareness of, in this case, what we're talking about attuning to, right, is another individual in childhood, attuning to a child.

So it's awareness of someone else, their emotional states, and the ability to then assure.

Beautifully kind of bringing up the word resonate with right stand next to be in support of kind of enter into that energetic space of another.

It is very much, though, a skill that we have to literally learn.

Often in childhood, that learning either happens or it doesn't, which leaves a lot of us in adulthood without the ability, despite sometimes very much well-intentioned desires to see and know the loved ones around us, especially if they're the children that we're in care of.

But it is a capacity that lives in our body that, again, can be created at any time.