Dr. Nicole LePera

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 away.

alone, right?

So all of these attachment styles, I think what's important is we got that part right.

We need relationships.

We needed them in childhood.

We need them well throughout our adulthood, our entire life.

The way we learn to relate in childhood 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.

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 inner child, of course.

It seemed to me that it was like this visualization, this kind of like talking to this more amorphous 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 incredible insight, awareness, even commitment to their healing to again, understand that to build that bridge from insight into action, 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 doing,

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 those 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.

It also learned how to handle unpredictability.