Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I think a lot of us avoid our bodies because what is stored in there is a lifetime of very overwhelming emotions that we don't have the capacity to deal with. So a lot of times we'll see mirrored in what happened in childhood, in our adult relationships, or maybe we see the opposite. What is reparenting?
Chapter 2: How do childhood experiences shape our nervous system?
It begins with presence and another really practical tool because when we enter the sensory world is when we reconnect with that inner child. Because the more aware I am of what's happening behind the scenes, the more than I give myself the opportunity to change patterns or habits that aren't working for me.
Many of our parents and our grandparents didn't have access to this information, and what I came to understand was so much of change happens through the body, not just through insight alone. I think the cataclysmic moment was... I get lit up when I say this. I have chills now. We have a greater ability to contribute to changing the entire world, as far as I'm concerned. Let's go.
Yeah, let's do it. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a clinical psychologist and founder of The Holistic Psychologist, which is a global platform with millions of individuals committed to self-healing and mental wellness.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of emotional attunement in childhood?
She is a New York Times bestselling author, and her new latest work, all about reparenting the inner child... is focused on the old science of our oldest wounds and more importantly, how to actually heal them. We're going to be doing a deep dive today on all things childhood, nervous systems, the patterns that are running our life without us really realizing it, and so much more.
Dr. Nicola Pera, thank you for being here.
Chapter 4: How do attachment styles affect adult relationships?
Thank you for having me, Andre. I'm honored. You start your new book with this understanding of how often... our life was really chosen for us before we were old enough to really choose it. And I'm curious to start off, what is the cost of an unexamined childhood?
Yeah, I think that the cost is the cycles, the patterns, those points where so many of us remain stuck, even with incredible amounts of insight and awareness, whether it's moments where we're emotionally overreacting or underreacting, not speaking up when we need to, whether it's when we become so identified with the roles we play that they become so much part of who we are that we can't imagine ourselves
Being anyone other than something that someone perhaps has chosen for us to be. I mean, really, the consequences even go into emotional symptoms that so many of us are struggling with, whether it's depression, anxiety, physical symptoms. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, the stress.
of living by someone else's rules, beliefs, habits, patterns, things that we had to do at one time in our childhood literally to survive causes a physiological stress on the body that I think that there are numerous physical health conditions that really are the byproduct.
So I think that there are so many costs that so many of us are living, especially as now we live in an age where there is so much information that we can get our hands on, yet we're
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Chapter 5: What is reparenting and how can it help us?
We continue to struggle to, I think, create the change that we want, again, because so many of the habits and patterns were grounded in what we needed to do at one point or who we needed to become to survive. And while our mind might have updated in some ways, our body remains stuck in that past. I think you're right.
Ever increasingly, there's more information about attachment systems and the nervous system, and it's great that we have more and more access to
Chapter 6: How can we meet our emotional needs with compassion?
across social media. I would love for this episode in this conversation today to feel super alive, talk about our personal experiences and make it really accessible for people to tune in and to leave this episode with tools that can really support them finding home within themselves.
I think so often we're seeking for something outside of us to, to, to subdue that feeling of not being okay within. There's this quote, which I loved when I read in your book, um, For many of us, the longing to find ourselves is really the desire to unearth what we buried to survive. Want to share more on that?
Yeah, I mean, I think I have chills, you know, hearing this and this idea of home even that you're referencing. I've been thinking a lot about it because I think we are endlessly seeking, right?
Chapter 7: What impact does status-oriented parenting have on us?
Whether it's a feeling internally or a particular way that we believe that our life should look, right? like this idea of home, we're trying to find it.
And so many of us, I think we wake up at some point, and I know for me, it was when I was entering in my 30s, where while I had a home, I was, you know, landed, developing a career, and I was near my family, which was very important to me at that time. I had a partner, I had relationships, yet I had no, I had felt so alone in a crowded room. I didn't have a stable sense of groundedness.
So I really dove into trying to understand, like, what is home? Is it something, is it a physical creation? Is a certain way that our life would need to look? Is it a feeling? And why do so many of us exhaust ourselves to some extent or continue to engage in dysfunctional homes or patterns when we really do want and deserve otherwise? And
I continue to find kind of the answer lives and lands in our childhood, in what our earliest home, not what it looked like, because I'm one of those people who from the outside, my home looked steady, stable, secure. I had a father who was very committed to supporting me and my older siblings financially. I had a mother who was very committed to staying home and raising each of us.
So for a long time, I couldn't understand why. why I felt so empty inside, why I continue to seek substances to numb myself, to seek achievements to get a internal feeling of fulfillment. And what I came to understand was home is a feeling. Home is a sense of safety and security. And the reality, I think, for most of us that we're waking up to is we didn't have that internally.
So we continue then to seek it
through actions through patterns again through reactive moments where we're trying to regain stable stability security safety that we never had I know you've been doing this work for a while but was there a specific moment for you when you realized this there was a personal journey here that something felt wrong that you needed to do more of this work yourself what was the personal access point for you doing this work
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Chapter 8: How can we regulate our nervous system effectively?
I want to say it was like a cataclysmic moment per se. I think it was a lifetime of moments that were stacking on top of each other. And so again, very driven by achievement in my family. That's what I had been told would get me financial security, would get me emotional security. Again, in a family where conversations about emotions were largely absent. So I continued to achieve and I did that.
I got... letters after my name. Again, I had a successful relationship, yet I continued to feel very alone, very disconnected. Throughout my 20s, I would cycle through partners, always convinced that it was them not showing up, not being able to emotionally connect with me or to support me. So it took me a while to understand the role that I was playing. And it
A little bit of me feeling disempowered, having been in therapy myself, having had clients now consistently coming into my office week after week, month after month, year after year, and continuing to feel just like they would report to me, really frustrated, really disempowered, continuing to feel like the insight that we were coming to in our sessions wasn't enough to create change. And
On top of that, I had some physical kind of symptoms that were starting to kind of bust through. I was feeling exhausted all of the time for a period of time, seemingly out of nowhere. I ended up fainting on two occasions, which were really scary. And in those moments, I did, I think what a lot of us do, I went online and I was like, what is wrong with me?
I think a lot of the journey to create or help others change begins with ourself. And that kind of spiraling of worst case scenario. I was very convinced that something was probably wrong with my brain. Why else would I be fainting? Thankfully, I met a whole bunch of literature and research that wasn't taught to me in my training program about the nervous system, about the body.
And I started to begin to make sense of what I was experiencing as a lack of emotional bandwidth, a lack of emotional resilience. And again, the result then of a lifetime of not having those secure emotional connections. And then understanding that allowed me to, I think, see the clients similarly. And tracing then back,
The symptoms that were bringing people into my office, whether they were an individual struggling with depression or anxiety or maybe families and couples that I worked with a lot, was the same kind of through line. The symptoms in adulthood usually trace back to childhood experiences where our body adapted in the best way that it could. I find it really fascinating how
the expression our coping and behavioral adaptations take differently and can vary quite widely. If for whatever reason, you know, a few individuals, and you give this example of, you know, they all have an unmet need and they find a solution to that. One becomes a schizophrenic, one becomes addicted to drugs, another one becomes a high-performing overachiever.
And I think that societally we really celebrate and reward people Celebrity, successful individuals, people in positions of power, which often, in more cases than not, frankly, are actually being motivated by some sort of wounded childhood that they're trying to externally create semblance and safety for outside of themselves.
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