Dr. Nicole LePera

But the way our offspring's genes, if we choose to have them, are turning on and off, quite literally breaking cycles.

And I'm saying that because I'm speaking to, again, me, who very early on, and it was a running joke for a little bit of time when it became aware to me.

You know, when I started to have friends in high school and stuff, and everyone would be like, oh, every now and again, share a little story about their childhood.

And mine was blank.

It even translated to being out with those said friends.

And a couple weeks later, they're saying, hey, do you remember when we went there, said and did this?

And I'm like, no, I don't.

Really remember that.

And so what I'd come to understand, 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, right?

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 memory.

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.

The 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.

we can get some sense into how stressed our in utero environment was.

And what I come to, this was actually told to me at my mother's funeral, and it was told in a kind of seemingly joking way.