Nicole LePera

It's painful to look back.

I struggled to recollect a lot of my childhood.

I can't really tell the story of what happened, though we are all

inevitably going to continue to repeat the habits the patterns the way we learn to cope from that early childhood environment and it really is pervasive the impact whether it's in our romantic partnerships our work relationships those of us who have children we meet the inner child the part of us formed in childhood in all of those moments so i think it is incredibly important to help us build that bridge from like insight awareness about what is impacting us into the new actions that i think we all deserve to make for ourselves

Yeah, so for me in particular, in my early childhood home, and this was confusing for quite some decades, especially as I became a clinical psychologist and I was working with people who had really identifiable trauma.

in the old sense of the word, these kind of cataclysmic, life-changing moments of abuse, neglect.

And I did not have that.

I could not remember moments where there wasn't a parent present.

But what I've come to understand is that trauma is really not only what happens to us, but it's whether or not we had the support.

So for me, while I had two very present parents who were very well-intentioned, who were urging me to succeed in all of the ways that they thought would

translate to me being secure in life relationally and financially, they didn't have the emotional tools.

So in my family, there was a lot of high anxiety, a lot of worry, and a lot of anxiety that I carried with me without the language or words.

And even as I gained the words, I'm anxious.

I didn't have the tools to be able to, nor did I think it was possible to be able to switch those habits.

Yeah.

And aside from, I think, modern world challenges that you're very beautifully describing, information has changed drastically, even in my field.

I mean, parenting experts until just a couple of decades ago, never were speaking of emotions, how emotions map onto a developing nervous system, how children quite literally need not only a present caregiver or

but a calm, a grounded one.

And the reality is because, again, our parents were raised by humans and had a childhood themselves, and so many of them are under-resourced for all of those reasons.

So even if they desperately want to show up in support of their children, they're lacking the ability in their body, which is why I'm always talking about the body development, acknowledging that while these patterns are wired into us, so to speak, and they become our autopilot in these reactive moments, no matter how much we want to do differently, we kind of drop back to those