The Holistic Psychologist: Why Childhood Wounds Block Intuition, How Trauma Pulls You Into The Past & The Science of Reparenting Your Nervous System | Dr. Nicole LePera

What if the reason you feel stuck isn’t about your job, your partner, or your motivation, but a wound you’ve been carrying since childhood? In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Nicole LePera — better known as “The Holistic Psychologist” and author of Reparenting the Inner Child — reveals why your adult patterns are NOT random…and why insight alone will never set you free. Dr. Nicole LePera breaks down the 9 different childhood wounds silently shaping your adult relationships, like: - If you couldn’t trust a caregiver → why you’re guarded, suspicious, and prone to self-sabotage - If you had too much responsibility → why you’re a compulsive caretaker battling burnout and weak boundaries - If you were rejected → why perfectionism and people-pleasing became your survival strategy She also reveals: - Why “inner child work” feels like being pulled into an alternate timeline (how your nervous system literally drags you back into the past!) - Hidden damage of being a parentified child, and the burnout, resentment, and boundary struggles that follow you into adulthood - Shocking prevalence of sibling abuse, and how it fractures the inner child in ways most people never acknowledge - Real dangers of corporal punishment (& what it wires into a child’s nervous system) - Why denying a child’s emotional reality creates lifelong shame - Shame 101: What it actually is, how it’s different from guilt, how it lives in the body - How unresolved emotions block your intuition and keep you from your life path Dr. LePera explains how childhood wounds don’t just live in your memories — they live in your body. Chronic tension. Digestive issues. Hyper-independence. Emotional numbness. “Survival mode” that you thought was normal. (It’s not.) We also unpack: - Can you truly heal if you can’t reconcile with your parents? - How emotionally immature caregivers were shaped by their wounds - Why it’s especially hard to admit you need inner child healing when you’re a parent yourself - What people are getting completely wrong about boundary-setting - Delicate balance between honesty with kids & preserving parental authority - Why it’s never too late to become the parent you didn’t have - Shadow work: The unconscious forces driving your projections & sabotaging your relationships And maybe most importantly…How to have grace for yourself while making small, powerful shifts. Because healing isn’t about blaming your parents. It’s about reclaiming your power. It’s about realizing survival mode was adaptive, but it doesn’t have to be your forever state. If you’ve ever thought: “Why do I keep doing this?” “Why do I feel shame for no reason?” “Why can’t I just change?” This conversation might be the missing piece. On the other side of this work? Clarity. Regulation. Authenticity. Hope. And proof that it’s never too late to come home to yourself. Go to https://kachava.com and use the code BREAKDOWN for 15% off of your first order. Head to https://www.superpower.com and use code BREAK at checkout for $20 off your membership. Unlock your new health intelligence. 100+ biomarkers. Every year. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod Dr. Nicole LePera’s latest book, REPARENTING THE INNER CHILD: The New Science of Our Oldest Wounds and How to Heal Them: https://theholisticpsychologist.com/books/reparenting-the-inner-child/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Original music composed by Mossbridge Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The takeaway for this whole conversation is that what is contained in our shadow are those qualities that weren't welcome, that did get us rejection, or abandoned, or abused.

• 0:09Mayim Bialik?

  If you are having any dissatisfaction, if people are accusing you of being sensitive, or reactive, or aggressive, there's something going on that is wired into your system.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  There's really powerful studies where the more trauma, the more likely we are to misinterpret neutral stimuli as threatening, that everyone's unsafe, that the world is unsafe. So much of our stuck points really traces back to our childhood. This part doesn't go away.

• 0:35Mayim Bialik?

  I think what a lot of people might have a gut reaction to is, I don't want to go there. They did the best they could.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  The reality is we're enacting that past, especially within our relationships. And survival modes have been so normalized, over time you begin to deny your own instincts.

• 0:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Can shame prevent us from following our instincts?

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Shame is a shutdown. We're actually disconnecting from our intuition. We're not even tuning in to where intuition lives inside of us.

• 1:03Mayim Bialik?

  How does reparenting change that wiring?

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Well, change begins with awareness first. That's what reparenting and healing really is. Learning how to experience the current moment in a new way with a new choice. This is our opportunity to finally move forward.

• 1:24Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 1:25Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:26Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. Today's one of those days where we reveal something to you that you did not know was governing your decisions, your relationships, your career, your life path, and even your ability or inability to access your intuition. We're talking to the holistic psychologist, someone we've been wanting to talk to for a long time, Dr. Nicole LePera. She's the bestselling author of How to Do the Work, How to Be the Love You Seek. But we're going to be talking about reparenting the inner child, the new science of our oldest wounds, and how to heal them. And what we're going to talk about with Dr. Nicole is how the things that we dislike...

• 2:10Mayim Bialik?

  In others, the things that we find challenging in others are actually reflections of wounds that we have sustained from even well-meaning parents that will persist in us for our entire lives unless we learn how to identify those wounds, repair them, and be able to be in touch with the truest and healthiest parts of ourselves.

• 2:31Jonathan Cohen?

  This episode pulls back the curtain on what is guiding us, what is shaping our behavior, what is influencing us and motivating us, and at times even keeping us stuck.

• 2:42Mayim Bialik?

  We're so excited to have the holistic psychologist here in person, Dr. Nicole LePera. Welcome to the Breakdown.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Break it down. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here.

• 2:51Mayim Bialik?

  You know, we talk to a lot of people who feel like they're doing all the things that they're supposed to do. They're, you know, they're responsible and they're intentional and maybe they're meditating or they're exercising or they're adding this and they're trying to be connected. Something is often missing for people. And I wonder if in the writing of this book and in the work that you do, what do you feel is this kind of missing thing that so many of us need to know about?

• 3:17Speaker 00

  The missing thing in my realization about is really what inspired this book in particular, because I started to see a really through line in the individual work that I was doing historically and now the community that I'm running, which is very much like you're describing. So many people, incredible insight, incredible awareness, yet continuing to repeat patterns, having moments of reactivity where we're either exploding outward or we're shutting down and really just having moments where we're unsure of what is driving, what feels like instinctual reactions. So armed with the question of why is it that we can't continue to create change, I really began to understand that so much of our stuck points really traces back to our childhood, to our early environments,

• 4:01Speaker 00

  to things that, so to speak, our inner child or this part of ourself that was formed in those early environments and had adapted to a lack of stability, a lack of support, a lack of attunement in the best way that they knew how. And this part doesn't go away, even though we get bigger, we have more tools, maybe our environment has drastically changed as it has for some of us, yet we continue to meet that part in seemingly inexplicable moments where our body kind of like snaps into action. We don't get a response back as quickly as we would one, and we begin to spiral into, right, shaming statements, wondering- Did Valerie give you notes about us? Did our therapist give you notes about us? I mean, these are the moments, though, right, where we're like, what the heck is

• 4:45Speaker 00

  happening, right? I know this person loves me, I know they're probably busy, why am I seemingly in a panic attack, thinking that they're leaving me? So these are the moments where our inner child is really speaking through the actions inherent in our bodies, sensations and then reactions that become, again, instinctual.

• 5:02Mayim Bialik?

  First of all, I'm on board. Like, I've been a fan of this for a long time, for better or for worse, but I think what a lot of people might have a gut reaction to when when they hear that, and I think this is probably true of a lot of people, is, I don't want to go there. They did the best they could, I'm fine. It's gotta be, it's him, it's her, right? It's it's it's not that, and if it was that, it happened so long ago, I don't want to go there. How do you help people push through that to understand that, guess what, we can't just operate like freewheeling and hope that we figure life out without looking at that?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  The first thing I want to offer is compassion to all of those sentiments of, why would we want to go back in time, especially if time was painful? Why would we want to seemingly blame, right, our parents? I think that's another common interpretation of, oh, you're telling me that they, you know, are bad people, when in reality, I think a lot of us have the awareness that our parents really, truly did the best they could. And regardless of how we feel about our past experience, or even how much access we have to what happened in our past, because you'll hear me often talk about, a lot of my childhood is blank. I could not retell the story, so to speak, though- The reality is we're enacting that past in these moments, especially within our connections,

• 6:23Speaker 00

  within our relationships. So regardless of the difficulty, and something I also want to emphasize here is gaining understanding for what, who made us, what made us the way that we are, doesn't necessarily mean that we are removing the impact, or we're making the impact okay. We can still pull back and say, I understand the circumstances, the environments, maybe even the parenting that my parents experienced themselves, that contributed to their lack of ability to be a consistent, stable caregiver and give me the attunement that I needed. And still, I am impacted in the following way. So we have to, I think, hold space, understand that it will be uncomfortable, but we're not blaming, and we're not actually being stuck in our past. This is our opportunity to finally move forward in a new way.

• 7:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Insight isn't enough. And I can speak from my own experience. I feel really comfortable at the level of the mind, understanding all the dynamics. And I'm like, that makes sense to me. And, and, oh, I see that pattern. And, okay, great, I got it. But that's different than actually going and facing those parts that were hurt in a way that we can't intellectualize.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Right. And for a lot of us, I'm much like you, insight is a really smart protection strategy, right? When we're living in our mind, when we're analyzing, I mean, I trained to become a clinical psychologist. I was so comfortable up here, because everything that was living in my body was so overwhelming. But when we're talking about the inner child, in my opinion, when we're talking about creating change in any area, we're not just talking, yes, the mind is incredibly powerful. We all know that when we imagine a scenario, when we are reliving it in, you know, felt experience, though, it's the felt experience that re-trains our nervous system. And now we know scientifically, through neuroplasticity, that we can create that change, but it's not going to be from the top down. I think even as my field for so long, right,

• 8:16Speaker 00

  emphasized cognitive behavioral therapy, this idea that you change your thoughts, you change the way you experience the world, though the case we're now making in the field is that those messages go both ways. We have to change the way our nervous system is processing events, our daily experiences, so that we can become more responsive and not rely on the old instinctual, gut-driven habits, as they feel like they're just who we are.

• 8:41Jonathan Cohen?

  A lot of our conversations talk about sci-phenomenon, metaphysical.

• 8:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Trying to understand the structure and form of the universe. And I think there is a very particular angle to that in this conversation that may help people move away from, "Oh, I have to go revisit my childhood," which can feel like a drag. The way that I think about it is that there are multiple timelines playing out simultaneously, and you're not actually in this timeline fully. There are versions of ourselves that are actually driving the bus, and they are going to poke their head out and take control in any moment, and it will impact your ability to get where you want to go in this timeline if you don't look at that stuff.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  100%, and those, again, are the moments where we're literally pulled back in time, which is why, I mean, I will be the first to admit, I have a lot of moments where I'm acting, right, seemingly out of character, where my responses are a bit more immature, right? I'm screaming, I'm yelling something that I could be communicating much more calmly and groundedly, or I'm shutting down completely, and just like my mom did to me, I'm giving the silent treatment, I'm not talking to anyone. And we've been on the receiving end of those as well, right? Disproportionate reactions, where on the surface, they feel confusing, but if we understand this beautiful timeline analogy, right? They do look very childlike. They are in action, in emotion. When we think of a child even having a tantrum, right? They are just emoting, and that's kind of what we look like.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  So when I even say immature, I'm not trying to degrade anyone in any way. It is a beautiful way to think about it. It's like we do go back in time in a very real way.

• 10:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Like, if we think of the Marvel analogy, a little portal has opened up somehow in this moment, and we just got sucked backwards. The work is actually, how do we stay here?

• 10:24Speaker 00

  You talk about different types of wounds, you know? And there's this notion of, like, the wounded inner child. And I think a lot of us kind of like, "Yeah, yeah, it got hurt," whatever. You go through nine different types of wounds.

• 10:37Mayim Bialik?

  I'm just gonna name them right now. There's distrust, abandonment, rejection, humiliation, overresponsibility, scarcity, rebellion, powerlessness, and injustice. So these are the different kinds of wounds. And some people might be like, yes to all. Hard to be experiencing all of those. But what I, what I love is this last column. What's the adult pattern, right? So if your wound type is one of distrust, you will be guarded, suspicious, you'll create emotional distance or sabotage because the internalized belief is that people are unsafe and trust leads to betrayal.

• 11:15Jonathan Cohen?

  Overresponsibility is really interesting because a lot of people think, I was so responsible and they get praised for being mature. Beyond your, you're an old soul, you can handle this.

• 11:25Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, well, as an adult, you will. You will find yourself compulsively caretaking, burnout, difficulty setting boundaries. Also, rejection wound leads to people pleasing, perfectionism, and hiding authenticity. I mean, if you don't know what kind of wound you had, look at what your last four X's said about you. Or look, look at what you, when you get really, really rigorous and honest with yourself. What am I actually doing? I'm over-functioning, right? I'm, I'm having urgency, I'm shutting down emotionally. Oh, guess what? That's scarcity. It's very interesting. And to me, this is a very interesting way to kind of map also what happened in our homes of origin, right?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  And what you're beautifully describing is a great start point because I often get that question, especially again, if I don't want to go back there, if I don't, like me, have access to the story. A lot of people then will think, well, can I heal? Where do I even start? And we start right here, right now, right? With what are those moments where we're having big, urgent, overwhelming reactions? Or even the more consistent roles and identities, right? That we have assumed are just. Who we are, I can even go as far to make a case that some of these roles are celebrated by society, right? The overachiever who's endlessly exhausting and saying yes to everything gets all of the accolades, right? The person who is shutting down sometimes is the easygoing, low maintenance person, right? The person who is passionately erupting every

• 12:52Speaker 00

  now and again is the person who has so much passion and motivation and drive. And so the list really goes on. I think now, society to some extent has created not only stress that become then the moments where these wounds are activated, but it's actually created a kind of self fulfilling validation cycle where we get accolades similar to the experience in childhood, where connection and safety and love and attention came in these moments, we keep repeating them because our body doesn't update that circumstances have changed, that I'm older now, that I might have access to safe relationships, yet I continue to feel unsafe and even safe circumstances again because that memory at one time and those

• 13:36Speaker 00

  reactions are quite literally what I had to do to maintain the connections that kept me alive.

• 13:40Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:24Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:09Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show. A lot of talk now about emotionally immature parents. And we had the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Lindsay Gibson, who kind of literally wrote the book. But there's, there's, there's kind of an aspect of that that gets highlighted in, in your book and kind of in the work that you do. Can you talk a little bit about what it means when we have parents who are doing the best that they can, but ultimately they're not really emotionally mature? And what does that look like for us? And what does that do to someone when you are parentified?

• 15:47Speaker 00

  First, emotional maturity, really generally speaking, is the ability to be with, tolerate, process and respond responsively to our emotions. And so while emotions, right? These kind of sensory experiences that send us information about how we're experiencing the world around us, right? A racing heart tells us that we're scared, there's a threat. So these are wired into us. What is not, however, is the capacity or the ability to know what to do with the feelings that we're having. So understanding what emotional maturity is, I think, can kind of give then a greater understanding of why the large majority of us as adults, even with very well intentioned

• 16:26Speaker 00

  parents, did not have that sort of modeling in childhood because parents are humans who were also raised by other humans, some of which in generations where, whether or not kind of given their environment, they were dealing with scarcity or they were living in an actually threatened environment where there was war or other abuse or trauma, they didn't have the tools even as recently as it blows my mind that my field would have professed a parenting method that is now so counter to what we now understand about the nervous system, which is this idea that a child in infancy can Cry to the point where they calm themselves down. Of course, I'm referencing the cry it out method. Again, it was developed by doctors.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  It was professed by doctors and by some doctors still. But that is not the reality. Not only do we need physically present parents who have the means, the resources, the money, the finances, the attention, they need to emotionally, right? Know what to do with their own self. So for all of these reasons, I think very few of us had that modeling in action. And the result then is we suffer our own trauma. We're left alone with very big emotions. And then we develop our own, often dysfunctional coping strategies that we continue to carry with us.

• 17:41Mayim Bialik?

  What does it mean when a child is parentified? When you have to take care of a parent's needs? And in some cases, and in many parts of this country and the world, children do have to help take care of other children. And they do have to, you know, if parents are working and that's sometimes it's just what happens. But what does that look like for that child? And what does it look like as an adult?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  One of the most common byproducts of emotional immaturity then is parentification or a role reversal in a sense where a child either in practical ways where they're quite literally caring for the home, caring for siblings, cooking, doing kind of actual daily tasks. Oftentimes you will see this, at least in this country, and I'm sure all countries, in immigrant families where for many different reasons, the child is left in care of or needing to translate for about, you know, conversations that are so developmentally out of the realm of ability for the child, but more commonly emotional parentification, right? Where there's a blurred boundaries. The parent relies on the child, vents to the child emotionally, turns to them for

• 18:45Speaker 00

  support, shares private details about what's happening, maybe within their marriage or within their, the co-parent.

• 18:51Mayim Bialik?

  Can't even imagine someone doing that.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  And sometimes though, what is important to understand is these are often a reaction to the parent's own childhood, right? If a parent was left alone in their own emotions, sometimes they very much think, well, I'm not going to hurt my child in that way. My child will never be alone. We're going to be so close, we're going to be besties, right? So sometimes well-intentioned choices that we're making to right the hurt of our own childhood, right? Lead to, so then the byproduct of course then is a child who feels overly responsible, often overextends themselves in relationships. Says yes when they mean no, and then gradually begins to develop resentment, which is very the natural feeling that we have when our needs aren't being met, or when we're appeasing or appeasing or caring for the world around us,

• 19:37Speaker 00

  to the extent that we even feel responsible for other people's feelings, as if we can stop them or change them. And so it really is very pervasive, reparenting, whether or not we were, again, in practical care of the home or emotional care of the home. So many of us, right, were mature beyond our years, and then we prided ourselves on that, and now we have some dysfunctional habits where we're not even cared for in our relationships.

• 20:01Jonathan Cohen?

  In that scenario, people can also not feel close to other people unless they're in that dynamic, because that's what was modeled to them as closeness. If someone isn't sharing everything about their problems or that person that they're dealing with, or, you know, especially if a parent is processing what's happening in their marriage with a child and using that child as emotional comfort or a sounding board, then they go into what may be a more healthy relationship with boundaries, and all of a sudden it feels super boring.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, we begin to then gravitate and seek, right, that which we know, and so closeness equals caretaking. So we attempt to be the caretaker, or we do get confused and feeling like something is being kept from us if we're not fully given all of, you know, the story, the information. The reality is, is in a healthy relationship, there is something I had to learn myself, and still learning. Separation, right? There's space for me, space for you. We share feelings, and I can support your feelings, but never are they my responsibility. Never were they to begin with. We don't cause feelings in someone else. Going back to kind of something you brought up a bit earlier, all of these, again, are beliefs that, at a natural developmental time, early in life, we only had ourselves to blame.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  We're in what we kind of know as an egocentric state. It makes sense in childhood. We are the center of our universe. We can't zoom out and see all of these different factors. So someone's actions or inactions reflect on us and impact us directly. So we have to teach ourselves, right, over time, that that's separation. You're here, I'm there. Your feelings are not my responsibility. I can support them and love you through them and be present. But I can't take them away, nor was I the cause of them in the first place.

• 21:45Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I remember the first time I heard that. I mean, I'm embarrassed to say how old I was. Like, the first time that was articulated to me. And it sounded foreign. It sounded like another language. And it's not like I remember ever being explicitly told, "Your responsibility is to take care of my feelings." You don't, that's not how it's told to you. But it's told through, you know, a million paper cuts, right? It's just like a million paper cuts of, "Make me feel better. I will come to you when I need that," right? Like, and those are the messages that you receive that make this mountain of, "I am responsi-- I'm powerful," right? This is like the basis of a lot of 12-step work, or Coda, or, you know, Al-Anon, things like that. Is, like, guess what?

• 22:29Mayim Bialik?

  You're not responsible, right? I mean, you're part of, and there are consequences of interacting with people. I'm always interested in why people don't want to do this work. And I'm sure you are too, because this is, you know, what you do. But one of the things, and it was when you mentioned the Cry It Out method. I think one of the reasons a lot of people are loathe to think about the inner child is because if they are parents, they are simultaneously learning about the things that they may have already done that have caused a challenge to their child, right? And, you know, Jonathan and I are huge, you know, natural birth hippie people.

• 23:13Mayim Bialik?

  And, you know, I wrote a book on attachment parenting and my experience with that. And I got, you know, my head served to me on a platter, you know, for implying that breastfeeding is a natural, you know, thing that mammals do, right? And there's obviously an extension of that. But this notion that, you know, many people feel, "I did the best I could, leave me alone. I didn't have any other options, so I just let them cry until they threw up, and everybody seems fine now," right? What does it look like to be able to say, we may be also creating something as we parent? How do you open that up for people? It's Tara. I'm already thinking as I'm reading it, did I do this to my kid? Oh, my kid's very organized.

• 23:57Mayim Bialik?

  Is it because I created K? You know? How do you approach that?

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Right. I think, again, it's with sensitivity, with grace, with compassion, because it, I mean, no bigger role, in my opinion, is it to raise a child, to be in care of literally a dependent creature who needs you for every single thing. I mean, that is just so beyond our capacity even at times.

• 24:21Mayim Bialik?

  Well, we do it alone in this culture also, which is not how mammals are supposed to do it.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  And then we do it alone, disconnected, right? From family, from support, right? There's just so much with so much stress. And so it is natural and normal, I think, to mess up our child, to not show up perfectly. So with that then aside, my hope is always, and why I'm always going into the science, the underlying, you know, creation of these habits is so that the parent who is feeling shameful or upset about what it is they have done, that they can, again, expand to understand that they were doing exactly what they learned to do, right? And the reality of it is, is we do need more support. We are at capacity. Sometimes we don't have the bandwidth to come into a room with a crying child and be a calm, regulated figure.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  So to some extent, like pausing for a couple of minutes before we open that bedroom door, right, might be the best plan of action. So the other takeaway is I hope that all parents understand that they too are a human who has their own needs and their own capacity, that many of which are well beyond. So with that said, I will often always then follow that up with some practical tools, right? How can a parent then not only be more compassionate of why they're struggling in ways that they're feeling shameful about, but how can they begin to make small shifts? In their current circumstances so that they can be more resilient, so that they could, you know, kind of rebuild their capacity, which might even be looking for support,

• 25:50Speaker 00

  telling someone when you need help. Because again, a lot of us have this idea that it's selfless to show up and do everything on our own, or that we've learned-

• 25:59Mayim Bialik?

  That's strength, right?

• 26:00Speaker 00

  We've learned that vulnerability is weakness. So to be a strong person, right? We can't tell anyone. And I have this patterning in me. It is so difficult to tell someone when I am in a state of vulnerability because I did not have a parent who was able, when I was stressed in childhood, it just added seemingly, again, nothing directly said, to more stress in the household. So it became safer for me to hide my problem, so to speak, and deal with them alone. So I still have that kind of deep feeling in me of, don't tell anyone that you're, you know, needing something because then you'll be seen as weak or a burden.

• 26:33Mayim Bialik?

  And there's also something to, you know, some kids and parents, and this is true for us when we were kids, and it's true for us if we are parents, some kids and parents have a more natural gelling, right? They get each other more. And they often are more similar, but sometimes they're not, right? But that's another kind of shade here, that if you have a parent who, who is mismatched essentially with their kid, it doesn't mean they don't love them, it doesn't mean they're not trying, but there's a, a possible wound, right, waiting to be inflicted.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Right. I was sharing kind of the capacity thing because I used to work with a lot of new mothers and they would come in and be so shameful. And I knew they wanted to say something. And then finally they would come out with it and they would say, I'm struggling. Sometimes I hate my kid. They're too much. I wanna, I do wanna like shake them. I understand why people. And this was not a dangerous parent, right, so to speak at all, right? This was a parent who was, you know, at capacity. Another reality that's very hard to say is you're, sometimes, yeah, you just get, uh, just like in our adult relationships, like some people you just vibe with more, right? You're on the same wavelength, you have the same interests. And other people are like a little Martian and like you don't really get them. They feel like a little alien and that's all okay. And so the final thing I want to say to parents is there's never a too late.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Coming to this awareness, having honest conversations, telling your children when you know what, you didn't show up in the way that you would have wanted to. We think again that we have to hide all of that from our kids because we don't want them to think less of us. Sometimes those are the most real healing conversations that we could have, those moments of repair, when you know what, it was a little hard to, you know, connect with you in childhood, you know, whatever child it is, because you know, we have different interests, but you know, like, and I'm sorry, I wasn't able to be present. That could go such a long way because now you're giving language to the felt experience. When you were talking about things aren't directly said, they're often not, they're indirectly felt. But those feelings are real and they're forming beliefs and they're forming habits. So if you finally say, here's language, right, that aligns, you weren't

• 28:35Speaker 00

  wrong, your reality was valid, right? Mom was, dad was unavailable for whatever reason.

• 28:40Mayim Bialik?

  Mama cried a lot.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Right? Yeah, mom was overwhelmed, you know, and a lot was going on and it had nothing to do with you because that's another thing children will do.

• 28:47Mayim Bialik?

  They'll implicate the other parent also, right? Like, if I've said, like, I was really, you know, you don't want them to think, like, was she struggling because he wasn't helping? Was he, you know, like, you don't want to insert. I mean, that's what's also hard because a lot of, and this is actually something I'd love for you to speak to, sometimes when we get really self-aware and we go to therapy and we do all the things and we read the book and we, you know, check off all the things and we do all the charts, you know, we can almost have too much information that can often overwhelm children. It can also overwhelm partners who are not at that level. Can you speak a little bit about how to, how to have this information, but be able to also gauge when and where you get to put it out into the world?

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it, the important thing to understand and get honest with ourself about is what is our intention or expectation when we're sharing information? Because a lot of times we're sharing information to impact change, to make someone do something different, right? I want to tell you something about yourself.

• 29:45Mayim Bialik?

  To hear ourselves talk.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  So that, right, so that I feel valid and my reality is real and now here I'm gifting this awareness to you so that now you can do something about it. You can stop doing what you're doing or do a little more of what I need you to do, right? There is an intention there. Not to say that, of course, we sometimes want our partners or need our partners to change and A vantage point of someone who's not ourselves can begrudgingly sometimes be the information that we need to integrate into changing, but I think most of us who understand, who are dog-earing pages and doing the work, it is the daily commitment of, again, creating the new action. So it's not to say that one of the intentions of sharing information might not be to create or elicit change in that other person, but I try to use as

• 30:31Speaker 00

  a marker for even myself, if my intention also doesn't include my ability to hear myself speak. And the reality in that is like my ability to validate my reality, to share my perspective, to say what I might need from you or how I'm experiencing this relationship. That, for a lot of us, is something we haven't had the space to do. So that then, right, if then you don't live up to the expectation, right, I still was able to speak my truth.

• 31:00Jonathan Cohen?

  When Maim opened this segment of the conversation about when people feel almost uncomfortable going and looking at these things, because the response is often, "Everything's fine." What I'm struck by is that we haven't even begun to realize what human potential is, because this is so ingrained in normal. So many people are living life stuck, confused, emotionally unregulated, not even realizing what emotional dysregulation is, because they're spending so much time trying to manage those emotions through distraction, or digital distraction, or strange dynamics, either in relationships, or at work, or elsewhere. And so we haven't even begun to say, "How do we connect with intuition and have it

• 31:43Jonathan Cohen?

  guide us? How do we feel more alive? And how do we feel inspired to do the things in the world that we're excited by?" Because everything is just fine. Fine is the enemy of what might happen next.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, we become so much of these feeling states and survival modes have been so normalized that they really just feel like... Who we are and how we will always be and what society, right, has contributed to. And this is now just what the human allotment has been. And so there's all of this. And then this is a function of our nervous system. It it prefers familiar, even if familiar comes with fineness or, you know, a lack of fulfillment. It becomes that home base that we continue to gravitate toward. And often it does take such a kind of movement outside, right? It's kind of even this, the common scenario of some of us don't even realize how much we're clenching our jaw until you're asked to unclench your jaw, right?

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, I didn't even realize it was clenched until you kind of prompted me to drop my tongue from the roof of my mouth down and allow my mouth to hang up. And wow, that feels very different than how I normally feel, right? It took me changing to inspire then the realization of, wait a minute. And I think you're right, a lot of this has been so normalized at a societal level that we've lost sight of potential.

• 33:03Jonathan Cohen?

  And if someone is listening and is like, well, I don't have a child. I mean, I'm in a relationship or it's fine, or I may not be in a relationship. Can you talk about how these patterns relate to friendships, relate to being at work, relate to anything that you want to do in life? It's not just about raising children.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Oh, 100%. I mean, these patterns follow us across relationship type, not just reserved for romantic relationships or family relationships, including the relationship with ourself, right? From how we define our own worth to the things that we do when no one's looking, right? And the habits and things, dysfunctional things that are shameful moments that we want to avoid, all of that was something that we learned, right? Because we also in childhood not learn only how to show up to continue to preserve connections or avoid disconnection, we learn messages about who we are.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Right, and so so many of us have this internalized messaging that doesn't say that we're a worthy creature who's creative with endless potential, right? We have all of this belief around our own limitations that we then continue. So it is so pervasive, it's not just within relationships, it's not definitely within just parenting relationships as well.

• 34:13Mayim Bialik?

  Also, along the lines of the jaw, you know, it's a it's a great example. And, you know, if anyone's ever been led through like a guided meditation and, you know, kind of the first time that you're actually listening and getting it and you realize like, oh, there's all these places in my body that I didn't realize. And and I wanted to mention, you know, as as we know, the body keeps the score, right? And, you know, some of us have a tendency to clench in our lower back. And you get a lot of these reports and Dr. Sarno was, you know, kind of the first to sort of turn this on its head and say like, wait, there seems to be a personality type relating to people whose backs keep going out. What is going on? And indeed, you know, that that's a common place. A lot of people will have stomach problems, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, you know,

• 34:58Mayim Bialik?

  like all these things that we're told it's genetic, there's nothing you can do. Well, guess what, everyone, like, medicine has completely changed in the last, at least the last 20 years, I think, you know, we've started talking in such a different way and especially the last, you know, 10 years. Can you talk a little bit about the somatic impact of shoving this stuff down? Because I think a lot of people might say, you know what, I'm just gonna put like chocolate cake and alcohol and cigarettes and weed on top of this, and that will be heavy enough to keep it down, right? What happens in our bodies? What happens in our nervous systems when we don't tackle this?

• 35:35Speaker 00

  It doesn't go away, right? And emotion is energy. So repressed or right, kind of pushed down energy, even if we're not paying attention to it, we've gotten very savvy not paying attention to it, it is signaling stress to our nervous system. It is quite literally keeping us in a pervasive state, a chronic state. Of stress. So our own emotions then become, right, our body stressor. And if we were never able to process or allow the tension to release or, right, all of the different hormones that, you know, contribute to the different emotional experiences to be metabolized, then it continues to impact some systems like our fascia,

• 36:16Speaker 00

  this kind of web-like casing that covers all of our organs and our, you know, muscles. And it then continues to activate as if we're still having the stressed experience. And so I know for me, I have such tension all across my midsection, like the trunk of my body, because one of the major muscles, our psoas, that kind of connects to all of the major organs and allows us to like spring into action when we need it. Though if we are constantly signaling stress because it's real in our environment or it's living in our bodies because it's emotional, then that fascia system is going to become so constricted. And I watched this with my mom, who for a lifetime struggled with chronic pain that was of an unknown origin.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  And she went to every possible doctor under the sun to find out where it was being caused. And the reality of it is, in my opinion, it was being caused by all of this lifetime of constriction and nervous system dysregulation. And to be clear, it was very much real pain in her body. I mean, she would wail and cry at night. It was absolutely heartbreaking. It is very real, but in my opinion, again, that's the ultimate.

• 37:19Mayim Bialik?

  You know, what we're now learning, and again, even 10 years ago, this was sacrilege to talk about this. And I have a friend who has had Cohen's since he was very young. And, you know, they used to say, it's in your head. You just need to take deep breaths, which is very dismissive to say to a young person who's in excruciating pain and can't control, right, like their body that way. And but what we now know is not sacrilege to say, and we had, you know, we talked with Gabor Maté about this, like, that's not normal. It's not normal for the proportion of women who have autoimmune conditions, for us to act like this is normal, for our bodies to not recognize, right, our own organs, hormones, and glandular systems, right?

• 38:00Mayim Bialik?

  And the notion being, your immune system is affected by this kind of stress, by holding that emotion in, right? Your fascia, your immune system, I mean, all of these properties, the way you metabolize nutrients, like, it should not be considered normal that we have a rise in young people getting cancer even. Like, something's going on in the system, right? And what if the answer is right here?

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Obviously, we two live in a society, you know, world where, right, food isn't natural, and we're living under blue lights, and none of us are in the sun, and we're not sleeping well, right? So there's all of that as well, but there 100% is the internal. And I think what the most saddest part for those people, right, who are going into doctor after doctor, and to some extent, being medically gaslit, most of those individuals, right, grew up with that being their kind of initial wound or trauma, which is having a parent who is denying your reality. So now it's kind of like a reenactment, right, where you've learned that your emotions are your internal instincts because a parent, right, kind of dismissed your upset, or

• 39:09Mayim Bialik?

  Or there wasn't room for you to have.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  Or there wasn't room. It was like my family, there was nothing overt, but it was just too much stress to begin with. So there wasn't room. So over time, you begin to kind of deny your own instincts, and now you're going to a helping professional, desperate for an answer, and to some extent, you're being not only re-traumatized because you don't have an answer, and you're still struggling with autoimmune or whatever the symptom is, but now to some extent, you're being gaslit again, right? You're being told that, no, that is not what's actually happening, right? You're like, you're being dramatic.

• 39:39Jonathan Cohen?

  The denial of reality, I mean, I'm getting a little emotional because it can be so subtle and so destructive. Just to listen when a child speaks and we're like, no, that's not how it happened. That's not what that toy is for. And all of a sudden, the thing that they were trying to do, which was reach out for connection and share something with you, has been turned into something that tells them that they're not right, that their internal world doesn't work, that something is wrong, that they don't see the world properly. And what does that do to their instincts?

• 40:16Mayim Bialik?

  It makes you self-conscious, avoidant, self-deprecating, and having shame-driven behaviors. That's the humiliation wound type.

• 40:23Jonathan Cohen?

  And I want to like, almost rip another layer off of this. When you talked about, oh, if I can just fill it with chocolate cake. People don't even realize that they're being driven to an action because of this. And I can speak from my own experience. I came down to the studio like three nights ago. And the first thing I did was raid the cupboard and eat all the chocolate. And it wasn't until a day later that I recognized the emotion that I was going through, the uncertainty that I was having, the navigating like six unknown things that I was like, "Oh, I went there and like, I know I have a sugar problem." But in that moment, all I thought was, "There's some sugar, I'm gonna eat some of it. It's not a big deal. I haven't had some in a while."

• 41:08Jonathan Cohen?

  How much of the jobs that we pursue, the relationships that we pursue, the video games that we think we're just trying to conquer, how much of that is a result of us being unable to sit and navigate and feel like that child inside of us who said, "Isn't the world like this?" and was told that it wasn't, is just trying to find its way.

• 41:30Mayim Bialik?

  Also, how many of the relationships that we avoid? And the jobs that we turn down? And the opportunities that are presented to us and we don't feel worthy? We don't feel like we can do it, right? I mean, it's everywhere. It's everywhere.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  I'm shaking my head because I wouldn't be sitting here today if I listened to my inner child. Because as I started to, you know, think holistically and speak about what I was doing first to my partner, Lali, who was with this, kind of this whole journey from the start. And she was like, "Nicole, this is so important. This is groundbreaking. Like, you need to tell people." And I was like, "No one wants to listen to me. I cannot go online and tell people." And it was, and it still is in moments, right? An inner child in me who was like, "No, don't see and hear me unless I'm in this really curated space of doing things that I know I'm good at, which is not public speaking and the least." So for me, right, it is still like, I would have, if I wasn't aware enough and had a supportive partner to help me work through that resistance, I would have denied my opportunity to even live at impact.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  But just something quickly about addiction I want to speak to as well, because that's kind of what we're getting at. I worked for a very long time with people at different stages of... Addiction, whether it was inpatient unit, outpatient units, in family systems, struggling with addiction, and I believe, and I speak about this in the book, that addiction isn't as narrow as we've come to believe it to be. I mean, it's widening a bit now where we have online gambling and this and that, but I think that there are so many behaviors, like you were saying, Jonathan, that are addictions, because addictions are an attempt of coping, right? They're a coping mechanism, in my opinion, right? They're not a genetic chip. Yes, habits are passed through generations, just to kind of give language to everything we're talking about, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we are genetically doomed to develop

• 43:09Speaker 00

  an addiction. An addiction will develop when we have no other way

• 43:12Mayim Bialik?

  That's right.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  to cope with our emotions, and we feel so deeply shameful that sometimes unworthiness itself becomes the trigger.

• 43:19Mayim Bialik?

  We've spoken to a lot of people, you know, about addiction. It's actually not the problem, it's the proposed solution.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Exactly. A beautiful, intelligent one at times. It has a lot of terrible consequences, of course.

• 43:29Mayim Bialik?

  Right. Whatever I'm feeling now, I don't want to feel, so I'm going to, whatever, watch porn, eat, smoke, do drug, like whatever, drink, like, that's the solution. And that's why when people get sober, it's often worse than it was before for the partners and the people who love them, because now you're seeing your partner with no coping mechanisms. We took their solution away, and now they're stuck with the exact reason they started using.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Right. And to complicate things further, going even back to sugar as a very common addiction that's very normalized, that I also have myself, sugar has a very interesting kind of physiological reaction inside of us, which to some extent, it releases oxytocin, which makes us feel good and comforted and connected. And so, right, if, kind of tying this all together, if we feel disconnected, unworthy, right, that wound is kind of, if we have a lot of cortisol, sugar becomes the most comforting, comforting habit, and most of us have it, if not in the foods that we're eating anyway, in our cabinets. And so then we kind of continue to foster, right, a feeling that is an escape, because that's what coping is. The quickest way, and our nervous system will memorize the quickest

• 44:38Speaker 00

  way, that one time that was the only way, to relieve my discomfort. But it doesn't, again, ever go away. It comes out, like you're saying, in moments where we don't have the coping tool anymore.

• 44:48Mayim Bialik?

  And, and also the, you know, the field of kind of functional medicine, and especially, especially functional medicine in the realms of psychology. Are kind of showing us that like there are certain bodies that will crave things preferentially to try and soothe what's going on. So there's, we can look now at serotonin receptors. We can look at these things and say, what was your body programmed to do? And ah, it makes sense. You know, you hear doctors say, oh, if, if I were looking at this genetic profile, I could predict without even knowing you, what your three main triggers are and what your three main comforts are. Right?

• 45:29Mayim Bialik?

  And so often, sugar becomes that thing for the depressed personality, the anxious personality. It's like, I can't help it. Right? And that's what it feels like. This feels good. I can't help it.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  Let's complicate things even further and bring the story way back in time where for some of us, the way our body even metabolizes nutrients or holds on to weight was impacted by environments that we aren't even a part of. And a lot of us have in our lineages, food scarcity or moments where we did not have access to nutrient dense foods. And so the most, you know, amazing adaptive biological solution then is to change the way our genes function, to begin to hold on to fat storage to, you know, for the next time where food is scarce. And so we generations later might be born in a family. My dad has a lot of scarcity wounding behaviors that came from a time where his needs were unmet from past generations that he passed on.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  When I'm looking around, like, why are we holding on to all of this stuff and rotten food in the fridge?

• 46:27Mayim Bialik?

  Because we just survived the war.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  It's still food though, right? And I had to learn, my partner had to teach me that when food stops tasting like anything, there's no nutrients in it. So I had to remind myself because we just held on, right? And so we hold on to food, calories, behaviors, we hoard, we do all of these things again, some of which are responses to environments that we're not even. Living. So to speak to then the body, right? We're growing up in a body that thinks that there's no food around and we're holding on and then we live in a culture where different bodies are idealized and now we feel even more shameful and broken because we're doing everything we can to eat right and yet we can't lose weight.

• 47:02Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and also be having extra weight on you in generations past meant you could survive whatever was gonna happen, right?

• 47:08Speaker 00

  It was a sign of wealthy, right, at some times.

• 47:11Mayim Bialik?

  The word in Yiddish is zaftig. It's a pleasant word, right? It's that you're plump, you're healthy, you're healthy, right?

• 47:16Speaker 00

  If we want to make be psychological about it, for some of us, it's a buffer of protection, right? There is just so much that gets wrapped up in bodies, consuming behaviors.

• 47:28Mayim Bialik?

  We're gonna hit pause here on part one of our conversation with Dr. Nicole LePera, the holistic psychologist. There is so much more in part two, including a deep dive into shame, things that you didn't even realize were driving all of the judgments you have about other people. Guess what? It probably has its roots in shame that you experienced. We'll also talk about boundaries and how to have healthy ones for yourself and for other people. And we're going to discuss something that's not often talked about, sibling abuse. What's the difference between normal sibling rivalry and when does it become abusive?

• 48:03Jonathan Cohen?

  We also touch on reparenting the inner child and how that actually rewires the nervous system, why the nervous system focuses on creating similarity, not necessarily what is best for you, shadow work, and how to have hope moving forward, doing this work, and what can come from it.

• 48:23Mayim Bialik?

  Join us on Substack for bonus content related to this episode, including vagus nerve exercises that Dr. LePera walks us through, from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

• 48:50Speaker 03

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