Good Life Project
Your Childhood Patterns Are Still Running Your Life | Dr. Nicole LePera
07 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What childhood patterns influence adult behavior?
Have you ever had one of those moments where you catch yourself in the middle of a reaction? Maybe you're snapping at someone you love or shutting down completely when you most need to stay present and you think, where did that even come from? Because here's what most of us don't realize until it's cost us a lot.
A significant part of how we move through the world, it isn't a choice we're consciously making. It's this old survival code wired into us long before we had words for any of it, still quietly running in the background of our adult lives. And the work of actually changing that, not just understanding it intellectually, but shifting it for real, that's what today's conversation is all about.
My guest is Dr. Nicole Lepera, a psychologist trained at Cornell and the New School for Social Research creator of the Self Healers Movement and the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do the Work and her newest book, Reparenting the Inner Child.
We get into what's actually happening when you feel hijacked by your own reactions, why you actually don't need to excavate your childhood to begin healing, and how real change happens not through willpower. but through your nervous system. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
You write about this story of you as a kid, kind of launching off the staircase railing into a beanbag chair. Your family jokes about it, you know, oh, Nicole bounced off the wall. Funny, haha, you know, like comments like that all the time when you're in a family and you're a kid. But looking back now, what was really going on there?
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Chapter 2: How does the inner child concept relate to personal healing?
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.
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Chapter 3: What role does attunement play in emotional development?
I mean, you use the word attunement in there early on what you were sharing, which I think is a really interesting word that we don't hear a lot. Pardon the pun. Something about it really resonated with me. Love it. Take me deeper into what you actually mean by that.
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.
But I think a lot of us are beginning this journey from not having had the attunement that we needed to then maybe translate that same sort of attunement in our adult relationships.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like also the way you're describing it, attunement can be, I'm thinking to myself, is it a good thing or is it a bad thing? Is it just a thing?
And as you're speaking, I was reflecting on research I read years back on what they described as emotional contagion, where they would take someone, expose them to some horrific images, so they're in just a really negative state, bring them back into a group of people, and within a matter of minutes, everybody in that group was largely infected by this person who was sort of like a person of perceived authority in the group.
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Chapter 4: How can midlife trigger unresolved childhood issues?
Then they did the exact opposite. I think it was like puppies or kittens or something like that. They came back into the group bouncing and same thing. When we talk about attunement, when we talk about sort of almost like changing our nervous system and emotional state to reflect that of people around us, this is, I would imagine, sometimes a good thing, sometimes a harmful thing.
And oftentimes we have no idea it's happening.
Right. And this is really speaking to the underlying unconscious, I think is a better word, process that our nervous system, our body, kind of that scanning, feeling, sensing of the energy of another person, right? This is all happening non-verbally. Of course, when we're talking about attunement in childhood, our whole life is non-verbal. But I think the most common example, like you're
describing the research. I think many of us meet this in our daily life, right? When we walk into a room and perhaps two people were in the room and they were in an argument and nothing is said, right? But you can feel the heaviness, the stress, the tension in their energy. So not only is our nervous system doing that at any time, of course, this is a function that's aimed at survival, right?
Chapter 5: What is the neuroscience behind emotional flooding?
With this idea being the quicker that that energetic scanning, right, is able to determine that there's a threat that available or existing in the environment, then we're so quickly, that's the process of neuroception that I just described, our body then is quickly able to deal with, to mitigate, to fight or to flee the threat.
We have another kind of system that gets involved in the conversation about how emotions travel and emotional contagion and whether it's good or bad is we all have in our brain something that's called mirror neurons. Right. Which fire when we not only see someone doing an action, but when we see someone having an emotional experience. So, right.
You're watching someone on television and there may be going through the loss or grief around something that a person that they lost and they become emotional. And right. We can become emotional and maybe find ourself crying because we're mirroring something. So all of this is happening behind the scenes outside of our awareness, unless, of course, we choose to pay attention to it.
But all of that is then going to drive our behaviors, which, you know, for some instances can result in positive emotional states being transferred to other individuals around us. But though in other instances, especially when it's stress or more difficult emotional states, we are communicating that without even words.
Yeah. And these shifts, it sounds like they can really be kind of like downloaded into us at very early ages in ways we're not even aware of. I mean, you describe another situation and you're like four years old.
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Chapter 6: How does epigenetics affect our stress responses?
Your mom is a couple minutes late picking you up from preschool. Your immediate thought is not, oh, she must be stuck in traffic. It's something very different. Right.
It's not even, oh, I have four extra minutes to play, right? Immediately, it went to what I think some of us commonly know and maybe experience as the worst case scenario. And specifically for me, it was like something happened to mom because that was really representative of the stress and the overall emotional state in my home.
But all of us, regardless of the home and the players that were present or not, the parents that were there and what they were capable of, We are all, again, attuned to our environment in early childhood. We don't have language, insight, maturity. We can't zoom out and understand things with words and have things communicated to us in that very logical way.
However, we are still learning, and the learning is incredibly powerful. In the psychological world, what we're talking about is implicit emotional memories or simply emotional memories. Right. So these things that, again, for some of us in adulthood, we can't give words to what's happening, but our heart is racing.
Chapter 7: What practical steps can we take to begin healing?
But we're bracing because, again, before language, everything that we've experienced, including the relationships that we were relying on for our physiological survival, changed. Everything was encoded in our body as sensations and then as survival-driven responses, which is why some of us wake up in adulthood, right? And we logically know things. We know we're safe.
We know we're worthy, yet we still feel anxious, overwhelmed, and unworthy because that's the lived experience then of these old imprints that are coming alive again well after, right, the date or time or even relational status of our childhood. Right.
Yeah, and I think so many of us trip into that. Sometimes, oftentimes brought to our knees. I mean, you mentioned just earlier in our conversation, this is something else you write about this. You know, you kind of hit your 20s and 30s as someone who, from the outside looking in, looks like you have it all together. And so many people can probably relate to this.
They'll have their own version of this, whether it's advanced degrees or the relationship you always wanted or, you know, like the money in the bank account, the status, the apartment, all the yada yada, right? But And you hit this moment where you're like, this isn't me.
Before I even questioned whether it was me or not, what I felt earning accolade after accolade, degree after degree, success after success, even relationship after relationship, what I felt first was empty.
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Chapter 8: How can we redefine our sense of worthiness and identity?
And if I have to admit, I did feel a bit shameful. Like, who am I to, quote, unquote, have everything? In a lot of ways, I was even reminded of how easy things for me in childhood were because I seemingly excelled academically and athletically. And I then had a string of...
Good things, things I've achieved, yet internally it wasn't mapping on to how I felt about my life because how I felt about my life was very detached, very unfulfilled. And so what I've come to learn, all of that anxious energy in childhood from a very attuned stance became very channeled into this. the things that I saw earned me attention and praise from my caregivers, my mom in particular.
So I became the very prototypical, overworking, overachieving, overstriving person who, while I was getting everything, it didn't really land. And that to me, once I kind of understood that, That or questioned, I should say, what was driving me in action. Then I got to the question that you're very wisely posing, which was, well, who am I if I'm not all of this? Right.
If I'm not everything I'm doing. Right. Who am I kind of behind all of it?
Yeah, and I think that's a question that if we're fortunate or if we're really intentional about it, we stumble into at some point. But I want to drop into something. You described so many of these patterns. They're set in motion fairly early in life.
often in a relational way, in relation to people who are perceived caregivers or people who are people of status in our lives, people who we want to be seen by and loved by and protected and who we want to develop loving relationships with, which really drops us into this world of attachment theory. And attachment theory has become almost kind of like it's pretty mainstream at this point.
People can Name their attachment styles. You can go take probably 10 different quizzes online. You were trained by some of the DOG researchers in this field, Miriam and Howard Steele at New School, Jeffrey Young, Schema Therapy. What do you think the popular conversation gets right about attachment and what does it really miss?
So what I was even kind of laboring over, and I'm writing a book about inner child healing, yet I can't not talk or even ground this conversation in relationships or attachment. Why? Because they are so foundational to who we come to be and ultimately who we know ourselves.
And for some of us, the identities that we continue to repeat, even if you're like me, they're not creating fulfillment or even they're creating outright dysfunction or suffering in our life. And the reason why I had to begin a book on individual development, so to speak, with a relational stance was because as children, we are, if not the only, perhaps I think we are the only, right?
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