It Got You Through Childhood, But Now It May Be Holding You Back.

We all have an inner child that takes the lead later in life. For some, it fuels joy, connection, and delight. But, for others it keeps you stuck in past patterns that are taking you down, stressing you out, and isolating you from the very people you keep saying you love.

Dr. Nicole LePera has spent her career asking why, and the answer isn't that you haven't tried hard enough. In this conversation, you'll explore:

- What the inner child actually is from a neuroscience standpoint, not a pop psychology standpoint, and why so many people who roll their eyes at the phrase are dismissing something that's real

- Why childhood adaptations like perfectionism, over-achieving, or going quiet in conflict were brilliant survival strategies, and how they become the source of suffering in adult relationships

- The neuroscience of emotional flooding: what's happening in your body when someone tells you to just calm down and you physically cannot

- Why stress responses are epigenetically heritable, and how your ancestors' survival adaptations may be running your nervous system in an environment those adaptations were never designed for

- Why midlife is often when the old material surfaces, even decades after you thought you'd moved past it, and why that's not a setback

- Dr. LePera's Individual Development Model: a five-sphere framework for understanding how we became who we are, and where reparenting actually begins

- The specific body-based practices that create real change when willpower and awareness have stopped being enough

This is a conversation about what it means to finally stop surviving and start living from the inside out.

About Dr. Nicole LePera: Dr. Nicole LePera is a holistic psychologist trained at Cornell University and the New School for Social Research, and a New York Times bestselling author of How to Do the Work and How to Be the Love You Seek. Her new book, Reparenting the Inner Child, brings the latest neuroscience and epigenetics research to the question of how we actually heal the patterns formed in our earliest years. She is the founder of the SelfHealers movement, a global community of people doing this work together.

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00:00 Why We Get Hijacked
01:16 Nicole’s Childhood Adaptations
02:59 What Attunement Means
04:24 Emotional Contagion Explained
07:27 Implicit Memories and Anxiety
09:28 Success Without Fulfillment
11:48 Attachment Theory Reality Check
15:53 Defining the Inner Child
22:15 Reparenting and Midlife Surfacing
30:49 Stress Autopilot Reactions
32:12 Defining Emotional Flooding
33:21 Body and Mind Markers
35:35 Survival Mode Costs
36:21 Start Without the Story
39:32 Epigenetics and Inherited Stress
45:23 Memory Gaps and Cortisol
50:21 Toolbox for Regulation
58:18 Worthiness and Living Yours

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Follow Dr. Nicole LePera:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/the.holistic.psychologist
Website - https://theholisticpsychologist.com/
Get Reparenting the Inner Child here: https://amzn.to/4ufnGC6 (affiliate link)