The Anxiety Trap: Why Thinking Doesn't Help | Dr. Nicole LePera & Dr. Mark Hyman

I get an email and I feel all of a sudden this clutching in my chest, this tightness in my belly. I'm like having literally a panic attack about sending an email that says, no, why am I feeling like this?

I continue to hear, I can't help it, but I'm still stuck repeating patterns. So we come to believe this is just who I am, how I am, and how I will always be. And so the reality, thankfully, we know in science that we can change.

Dr. Nicole Lepera is a holistic psychologist trained at Cornell University and a number one New York Times best selling author whose work has reshaped the global con around healing and personal responsibility.

Our environments have changed, we've gained more resources or access to them, but our nervous systems are still reflecting danger that it believes is present in moments where we had to learn how to create safety, security, belonging, where many of us had to modify or show up in particular ways and performance driven ways. And all of these models left out the physical body. You could be eating the healthiest foods, but if you're doing so in a body that's on edge, that's bracing for that next shoe to drop, then that's not going to create the safety that your body needs to repair.

What are the practices? What are the tools? Because I get the concept, but like, how the hell do I do that?

We feel more shameful when we know better, when we try to white knuckle or get better quicker and then we end up falling right back into those old habits. It takes the thing that we hate to do. We just have to make consistent new choices to create that change.

First and most important, relationship is a relation to yourself. Cause that is what other relationships are predicated on. Hey, it's Dr. Hyman. I'm so excited to share this episode with you today. But before we dive in, I want to get your help. Please take a minute to hit that subscribe button. Whether you're watching here on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, it truly means the world to me and it helps my team and I bring you this podcast every single week. Plus I don't want you to miss a thing. So thanks so much for being part of this community and I'm glad you're here. Nicole, welcome to the podcast. I'm so looking forward to having you because you've kind of been a bit of an iconic class when it comes to psychotherapy and psychology and you know, just challenging the orthodoxy and helping us think differently about mental health and mental illness. And it's like it's kind of refreshing. You know, you'd think if we had a model that worked well, everybody would be mentally healthy. So something we're doing doesn't work. Just like our model of health doesn't really work for chronic disease, which is why we have so many sick people. Even though we have a great healthcare system, you know, at least an advanced healthcare system. I'm excited to talk about your new book, Reparenting the Inner Child. The New Science of our Oldest Wounds and How to Heal them. It's become very personal for me because, you know, I thought, you know, that my childhood wasn't that bad. I thought that I was pretty well functioning, well adapted, you know, a doctor. I've written a bunch of books, you know, have a lot of friends, you know, challenging the relationship front. So I might need your help there offline here. But I really didn't really come to terms with how much my childhood impacted my entire operating system for my whole life. And I talked a little bit about it, but I, I recently had a profound experience where, you know, I, I, I've had a lot of, you know, therapy and talking and coaching and I understand my patterns. Like I know, you know, my stepfather was abusive. I know he was rage aholic. I know that. So I'm not trying to get there free therapy here. Just, just being clear, I'm just gonna share this background. I know that, that I was taught by my mother to be a people pleaser to him. I knew that my mother was depressed and I had to take care of her and was a parentified child. I know all this stuff in my head and in my nervous system, which is why I'm bringing this up because in your book you really go into the problem is in the nervous system. It's not necessarily just something you can have insight about or just talk about. And I, and I realized that even though I have an understanding, like I'm a people pleaser and I'm going to say this, it sounds really stupid, but like I get an email, for example, from my speaking agency that says so and so company wants you to speak at their event. And I'm like, I don't know these people. I never heard of the company, whatever. And I feel all of a sudden this clutching in my chest, this tightness in my belly. Like I get anxious and I'm like, can I say no? I'm like, I don't really want to go to like Timbuktu, Iowa to give a talk on something to some corporate bunch of people, but nothing against them. But it's like I got other things going on in my life and I'm like having literally a panic attack about sending an email that says, no. Oh, I'm going to disappoint the speaker's bureau. Oh, I'm going to disappoint. And I'm like, this is crazy, right? I mean, I'm a grown guy. Why am I feeling like this? And I'm just going to kind of close the story by sharing that I recently did ibogaine, which is a psychedelic from West Africa that resets your whole neurochemical system. And in a way, your book Reparenting the Child reminded me of this experience I had in that. Because I was in the very beginning of the journey and I went right to the basement of my childhood home. I just run home from being bullied by these kids. And I was kind of a little nerdy kid and I was a foreigner because I was American in Canada. And long story, anyway, I ran home and I wanted to kill myself. I was just over it. I didn't want to be bullied anymore. And it was just painful. And then I just was crying in the basement. I was there witnessing the whole thing. So I was literally visualizing, not really visualizing, but I was literally in the movie of this experience. And I could see the colors in the room, the books on the shelf, the couch, everything. Like it was. I hadn't even thought about it in like 50 years. And I, and I, and I was like, what does Mark need? Like, what does little Mark, he need? He's like, he needs his father to tell him he's safe and he's good and he's loved. And then, and then I needed, you know, that. And he wasn't. My father was. My parents were split. My father was. Abandoned us and was sort of wasn't around. And so I went in as Mark, my grown up Mark, into that room and I held him and I reassured him. And then I realized, and then I realized I had this whole story that I made up about that, right? So I, I made it mean something, which I have to perform for love when. And there's benefits, right? I got trip to New York Times, bestsellers and blah, blah, blah, you know, like whatever. But. But I'm like, it's also caused a lot of suffering for me. And, and, and so your book, it seems to be an unlock for how to really understand how to handle this in a different way. And so I'm just so, so excited you wrote it because it's, it's like I said at the intro, is this sort of challenging the orthodoxy of how we think about mental health and how these little traumas, they can be little traumas or big traumas that happen, it can be neglect, it can be just their parents weren't attuned to us, they didn't understand us. It could be that they eat us or they sexually abused us. I mean, the whole spectrum has profound impacts for decades on our health. So, and our mental health and our physical health. And so, so a lot of your book is about how these, these, these patterns that we adapt. Like my pattern of being a people pleaser, overachiever was an adaptation, but ultimately it's, it's, it's interrupting my full happiness. So kind of can you walk us through how you sort of came to reframe psychology from the old model of talk therapy to more of the, the sort of reparenting, somatic therapy based frameworks and we'll get into what that is and how it affects our biology and how it affects our health and where it comes from and all that. So I, I'm just like, I'm so excited for this conversation.

I, I'm so excited, honestly, Mark, to be here with you as I was sharing kind of with everyone here, meeting your work and your focus on kind of underlying causes for physical disease and even just awareness and growing my own awareness of the human body was so transformational because my journey began not with this information, not with learning about the nervous system or nutrition or really the interconnectedness between our mind and body. In school, much like traditional programs, I focused on the mind and my program, like many, focused on the power of the mind. Right? We change the way we think, ultimately we can change how we feel and then what we do. So flash forward, much like you, achievement driven. I had all of the letters, we

went to the same school, all of

the, we went to Cornell. So so much of our personal journeys, not having the attunement, only being seen in my own childhood through achievement. Some of it, I believe is right, passed down through generations. Achievement, finances that equals security. So I understand, I think, why kind of I adapted the way I did, but in all of this training, I never once learned about the body. So flash forward in time. I had a very successful practice. Very gratefully I would have clients, very self aware clients who would come in week after week. Myself, I was in talk therapy, the Sigmund Freud model. If we could talk about, right, the ultimate talk therapy where you lay on a couch and you literally just talk. What I started to See and hear and feel was endless amounts of frustration. This didn't feel like it was working my life. I would have clients come in that it didn't seem like much like yourself, I know my patterns. Yet in those moments when a text doesn't come, I can't help but worry that this person doesn't want to, you know, be in partnership with me anymore or I can't help but push my body past its limits to perform or achieve. I continue to hear, I can't help it, but I'm still stuck repeating patterns and a lot of us even repeating patterns that we see in our families. So we come to believe this is just who I am, how I am and how I will always be. So starting really at a low point where I was like, what the endless student in me, I went online, I'm like, what is happening here? There's wow, look at all this information about science practitioners like yourself. And I learned, I learned about the body, I learned about the nervous system and I started to put pieces together and understand that the reason why so many of us are stuck is not because we don't know better. And now we have a world of endless information. It's because of what our body learned in childhood. In moments where we had to learn how to create safety, security, belonging, where many of us had to modify or show up in particular ways and performance driven ways and appeasement driven ways. And ultimately over time, if we didn't feel safe, seen, supported in childhood, our nervous system could not regulate. And what we are now seeing, I think whether you're in the mental health field or system or the physical health system, it's decades, generations of imbalances in our nervous system that are quite literally translating into physical health issues and to emotional health issues.

Yeah, it's so important. And I, and I want to, I want to sort of loop back on what you mean by sort of in our nervous system and nervous system regulation because I don't know if most people even know what that is. You know, it's like the ways we adapted to make ourselves feel okay, worked in that moment, but then they don't work in the rest of our lives. And that becomes, and that's what I saw. I saw that the story I made up about that story, what happened to me became the script of my life and that became the operating system unhooking. It has been really interesting and I, I, I, the ibogaine itself had, has some incredible properties of resetting your nervous system in a way that it is kind of the nervous system reset that you're talking about, but it's not the only part of it, but it's, it's really fantastic in how it works for me. I think people don't understand the depth of which these things impact our, our lives and our emotional states, but also our physical states. And you talk a lot about these adverse childhood events. This is a, a sort of scientifically validated questionnaire that has been used in medicine to determine when bad shit happens in your childhood. Like how bad is it? And you get a score and you can just go online and you can, you can fill it out, we'll link to it in the show notes. But you can get a score. What your score? I think mine's 4 or 5. I don't know. Whatever is 8 or 9 or 10. Like, it can be bad. And, and that is very predictive of later health consequences. Autoimmune diseases, cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart disease. I mean, it's quite, it's quite compelling. Like, it's like incredible data. So maybe you can share a little bit about that data and why that's so important.

Yeah. So the ACEs score, I think what's so fascinating or the scale itself is while in a lot of ways I think it does focus on the more traditional traumas that many of us kind of identify or associate when we hear the word trauma, the physical abuse, the sexual abuse, the verbal abuse. It's really interesting because there are some questions in there that touch more on the emotional neglect, the disconnection, not feeling special or seen in an emotional capacity. And I could even make an argument that moments of physical abuse, moments of verbal abuse, sexual assault. It talks about parents being separated, parents dealing with substance abuse issues or incarceration. If I were to, as my brain likes to do, simplify what it's really hitting on through, I think there's what, maybe 12, 15 questions. I don't know the exact number of questions, but, but it's touching on attachment disruption. Right. When a child doesn't have the secure attachment, not just the physical presence or the absence of abusive behaviors, but the emotional connection that a developing nervous system needs. Because when we don't have someone who's A physically present or B at ease and in their safe, in their own body, able to regulate their own stress responses, then our nervous system isn't going to have that safe point of co regulation. And when we don't, I mean, we then live in a chronically activated body. And to speak to the study, then somewhere down the line, whether it's all the physical health consequences that you just named, like cancer, like heart disease, like diabetes, or in my field, the emotional conditions, the anxiety, the depression. Again, we are now in the field starting to understand that what underlies these symptoms and these diagnoses. Much like I had myself, anxiety, I thought I had anxiety because there was a neurotransmitter deficit in my brain.

Chemical imbalance.

Chemical imbalance. If I only right replaced that chemical, I would need to replace it with something external like a pill forever, or else my levels would drop again and I would have the experience then of anxiety. And now we understand anxiety is at completely normal, appropriate experience of a nervous system that's activated. The difference though, in someone like myself who's chronically anxious and someone who has anxiety in appropriate moments is again, a nervous system that can't return to baseline, that is staying always in that overactive, you know, state. And again, somewhere down, down the line, we end up with gut issues, with sleep issues, and again with either physical or mental diagnoses that some of us. And I saw this on a personal note in my mom, my mom who had a lifetime of trauma both in her own childhood and in my own family, with different experiences around health that had happened with my sister in particular. She suffered from chronic pain and mystery illness up until the day she died. I mean, watching her go from doctor to doctor to seek and always thinking, oh well, we had the cause now and then we treat that cause and it never went away. So living really in the suffering. And that's a large reason why my mom wasn't able while she was physically present, emotionally, she was so overwhelmed with her own anxiety, with her own physical pain and physical condition, that she simply couldn't be that calm, stable baseline for me. So living though in the suffering, my whole family, I mean, just to watch that, it's really devastating.

Well, you mentioned the generational stuff. I just want to look back on that because people don't realize that it's not just your direct family, it's your parents family and her parents family, your grandparents family. And it goes back and that gets written in your epigenome. And literally we don't just inherit the emotional states, but we literally have our genes prescribed in a different way.

And this, it's a beautiful adaptation right back generations ago, the changes that happen in the individuals, our ancestors, that is bodies were necessary, right? They were responding to either food insufficiency, financial insufficiency, emotional instability, right? That was real. And that's what the human system is so beautifully wise and intelligent. Right. Those adaptations were necessary in those environments, but because of the epigenetic changes that then happen. And this is again a beautiful system with the idea that offspring are going to assumably be born into the same environment. So. Right. It's like our body and our genes are setting us up to prepare us for what we think we're being born into. Now, if you, you know, kind of complicate things further by thinking about our first environment, which is in utero. So even before, even beyond looking for what our ancestors were dealing with and what their environments look, looked like or what they had to navigate in terms of stress, what then did our, you know, parents environment look like? How much stress was happening when we were quite literally developing in the womb? And so if there was, you know, interpersonal violence, again, if there was any insecurity in finances, in food and nutrition and whatever, then the environment that we believe we're being born into is quite an unsafe one. So all of these adaptations are beautiful, are necessary at one time. What then has happened though, is, is for many of us, our environments have changed, we've gained more resources or access to them, but our nervous systems are still reflecting danger that it believes is present.

It's so interesting because I, I think, you know, this, this sort of collective unconscious, this Youngian philosophy, I don't know if it's embedded in your work or not, but it feels like it because I've been listening to a lot of it on YouTube and it's kind of some AI version of him or whatever, but it's, it's actually quite good, best way to learn. And you know, he talks a lot about the inner child, which is a lot of the work around reparenting the inner child. Most people don't know what is an inner child, like, what does even that mean? And also he talks about this framework, which is different than Freud, which is more pathology based, he's more about human development and he calls it individuation. And your model is called the individual development model. And I'm just wondering if there's some. Am I just reaching for something or is there like a connection between your thinking and how this inner child stuff and individuation and kind of letting go of these childhood traumas actually can help you become a whole person.

Yeah, I mean, my model I think really integrates like from Jungian to Freudian to the medical and model. And I think that's.

I don't mean to pigeonhole you, but I just, I was like, oh, these,

these seems like, I mean I, I, I inner child, I believe he was Jung was maybe the first person who like worded that, that concept. And then of course John Brad Bradshaw made a career on speaking about it. So by, by no stretch of the imagination am I the first one to speak of anything of, you know, these are not new concepts. But the model that I'm presenting is now an integrated one because there's been million different kind of developmental models. But in my opinion they've really only focused on one aspect of development, right? Cognitive development, how we go through these different stages and we learn to think differently or kind of socio emotional development. How this is I think the closest one to my model simply right. How my emotional relationships impact my development as a person. But all of these models left out the physical body and universally. I mean we all, we all are wired, right? We, we all be the same foundation, put it that way. We're not wired in the same way.

We have the same wiring.

Wiring, right, is influenced and tailored to our environment. So if I were to want to get like really simplified of what inner child is, it's all of those habits that we learned in our earliest environments to create safety for ourselves, to express ourself, to learn how to be in relationship with other people. Because in childhood that's what's most important. And most of that learning is happening unconsciously, without words. Which is why even the way you described it, right, I, I, I had this experience and my heart got, I, I felt this tension, this clenching, the sinking stomach that is the living then memory of what happened, right? And then you have the awareness to say oh well because it traces back to this moment in childhood where I was, you know, being bullied and I had a need and I understand this now narrative I've developed, right? But the body spoke first and so few of us and I will be the first to share. Of course being a clinical psychologist, I spent the large majority of my life living in my mind thinking I was, you know, being psychologically aware and insightful and right. So very few of us, of humans I don't think were practiced in living in a body. And we're definitely did not have the modeling that we needed to develop emotional maturity or simply the ability to be with emotions and to regulate greater and greater emotions over time. Again because we were raised by parents who lacked resources, who lacked information. I mean it's mind blowing to me that only I think it was in the 70s maybe where the cry it out method, I mean if you read, oh my God, Ferberizing parenting books, verbalizing psychologists even would have told a parent to put your child in a room and if it cries enough it'll eventually

come up a little bit in that here to my daughter, she would like be put in the room and let her cry. I'm like oh.

And that's only because I mean no shame, not in meant to shame parents. You were doing the advice at the time that was not grounded in awareness of the nervous system. So very few of us again had the parents that not only knew what to do but could do it. Right. Cause it's. And I think now we have a lot of parents that are really aware and have more aligned parenting practices. But if in their own bodies they don't feel safe, they don't feel at ease, they can't tolerate disappointment or uncomfortable emotions then what their child, even if they're saying the right things, unfortunately the child is going to feel the energy of their body and of their nervous system. Which is why in my opinion this work is more important than ever so that we can align insight with action and actually begin to break the cycles.

Yeah, it's such an important, it's such an important frame of the whole problem of mental health because you're right, you could talk forever about it. I had these insights forever about it. But unless I reset my nervous system, I can't, when I get that email I can't stop that automatic response. Right. I don't know how to regulate it. And when you, I think that's kind of what you mean by nervous system regulation. The, the model of, of that you've sort of developed is really about sort of reestablishing and it kind of, it surprised me a little bit of attachment theory where part of the therapy for that is, is reparenting yourself is the idealized parent. What would you're like when, when I was sharing earlier about that journey where I went in as my adult, you know, 65 year old grown up mark into that room to comfort the little mark. That's in a sense a little bit of reparenting. I don't know if that's it is. I'm just guessing but I'm kind of. And it, it really helps. And I, and I do that every single day when I wake up, I meditate, I do breath work and I then I go back to those scenes and I re. Experience that physiologically and it's really helped me, you know, since I did it to kind of anchor that experience. And, and so now when I get to those emails I'm like no, it's okay, I'm gonna say no without the physiological response and that.

I mean, so if I wanna simplify, right. Reparenting is a becoming aware that we have these parts of us that are speaking through our body. Not to shame them, not to righteous thing, rationalize. Oh, childhood was so far back there. I don't want to think about it. It was too painful or it's unnecessary. And to see in real time again through the spoken language of our body how alive childhood really is. I mean, we don't have to in a woo woo way or like you know, cradle our inner child. It's as simple as yes, my body. When Mark right is opening an email, I can say the same for me. I can't say no. I hate to say no. Right. Boundaries, limitations, not something I learned. I love to be a people pleaser and be presented right in a certain way. I don't like to disappoint others. I struggle to. To disappointment myself.

There you go.

So here we go.

So we're in the same club.

I've opened up the email and my body is speaking. So whether or not I want to say, oh, this is my inner child, right. Worried to say no in this moment, afraid of disappointing mom or dad or whomever, what is most important is to just honor that my body is having a reaction. It's real. And then right. Getting curious because the reality of it is, and I think this is sometimes embarrassing, so I'll be the first to say it. I'm a 43 year old adult who still doesn't fully know what I need in most moments of the day. Right. So especially when I'm having a big emotion.

Don't be so feel so bad. I'm 66 and I still no idea, right.

I'm still learning, but I can sit here and talk about it. But when it's the lived experience, like I don't know fully how to take care of myself. I don't know especially emotionally how to take care of myself. I still struggle to share when I'm in an emotionally invulnerable place and I need support because this is not something that I've practiced. So I'm sharing that because I think the journey for a lot of us begins again when we tune into our body is having a reaction. Often it is the past alive in the present. If we do have the awareness of all of these stories and identities and roles and dynamics that we play in a relationship, great. Though the real action and change happens when we get curious first and begin to explore well I don't, maybe I don't know exactly how to make myself feel better right now, but you know, I could try, I could experiment with

different things and, and, and, and so that I want to get into more around how, how the practices work because you talk about a lot in your book how to actually implement a model of nervous system re regulation, you know, but, but what I find really interesting is you're, you're sort of widening the aperture around mental health to talk about not just your own mental health, not just your childhood trauma, but also the ancestral trauma we talked about already and even the cultural trauma and your own life stresses. So you've got so many layers. You've got your childhood environment, you've got your ancestral trauma, you've got the culture, you've got your actual life stresses. It's a lot to deal with. And that all kind of in some ways works to dysregulate us.

I mean, I think generally speaking, before we even think about our individual cultural belief systems, which absolutely, you know, cause, cause stress, tell us what roles or things are appropriate or not appropriate. I, if I want to speak as generally as possible, societally, I mean, society has, has shifted. We have information available at any given moment of any day. We live under blue lights. Very few of us are even have earth or grass to go touch at any given time. I mean, we quite literally are living so disconnected from how we're wired to live, you know, in small villages, not in huge cities, not living on top of each other with all of the noise and the sirens being connected to the earth's rhythms. Waking up with the sun, sleeping with the moon. I mean, this sounds like a, a great vacation for some of us that we wish we could sign up for, but it's not the life we're living.

So like during COVID when I was in Maui and I just slept outside and woke up with the sun and went to bed with the sun, right?

But that's, and then we have pressures and financial obligations and very few of us are living geographically near family or support. We're, you know, have migrated to other, you know, countries or what have you. So we are living in a very stressful, urgent, you know, inducing culture societally. Then again, you begin to think about the different cultural systems that we were born up in. Not all of them are aligned with what is healthy and, or with what we need individually. Yet when we're born into these systems, right, we're assumed that we're just going to adopt all of those cultural aspects. And again, not Always is that healthy for us or appropriate?

The other thing that's really refreshing about your work is that a lot of people feel shame and feel bad about themselves for having anxiety or depression or having any mental health issue. And there's such a stigma about it, but you kind of reframe it. It's not that there's something wrong with you. I'd love to sort of maybe have you share how you have reframed this from the traditional model of like, you've got a condition that's bad and you're mentally ill to. This is just your best adaptation to a bad set of circumstances.

So two things I want to say about shame. The first is, again, when we have awareness of the different underlying learnings, a lack of safety that manifested again, whether it's the depression that we feel shameful about because we can't get off the couch or right, we want to be productive, but we're just too anxious. So I think when we have that awareness, we can relieve some of the shame, understanding that these were normal adaptations to a stressful life experience. Something else I want to say about shame, because shame is actually quite a natural human emotion. It's a necessary one. It helps us to understand that our social connections are important because shame happens when we step out of boundaries socially. Right? We get embarrassed. So it is a way to kind of keep us within the guardrails, to stay connected because we are much safer and stronger as a human being when we are in a community. So we have to think about shame being natural, normal, healthy. But of course, the shame many of us are living with is foundational, is toxic, is grown out of a childhood. Because in childhood, when we are dependent, we need someone to take care of us. We literally can't physically care for ourselves. Again, our nervous systems can't regulate on their own. So when mom or dad or whomever isn't physically present or emotionally present, the only way our mind. You kind of brought up this idea of interpretation and a meaning a lot. The only way our mind can make sense of what's happening is it will assign us as the cause of their behavior. Because we don't have the maturity to zoom out and see all the different reasons why mom or dad might not be able to show up the way we wanted or needed to.

So something you're doing wrong that have

nothing to do with us. And the second aspect is it's safer because it puts us back in control because we are very attuned as children. So if I can get the sense of what Makes mom or dad go away, right? I'm simplifying it. I can then modify how I am to try to get them to come back quicker or to stay. So what happens then is if I'm to simplify it, for whatever reason, mom or dad couldn't meet my needs, the immature, just developmentally, I mean, meaning that my mind, or story my mind will tell is I have done something wrong, right? I am at fault. And there is the kind of like seed of shame. And then of course, we have individualized, we tailor, right, why I'm at fault. So for me, I think it might be similar, right? I'm at fault because I am not performing. I'm not showing up as an easy child, as successful in this way. So I will be more of that. And then all of those parts of me that aren't performative, easy, successful, I continue to shame because that was the messages that I got. So I. When we have this understanding, not only of why we're struggling or stuck in the way that we are, but also when we understand why so many of us feel so deeply unworthy, it's because we assigned that meaning. We weren't worthy of care in childhood. And that's real. We don't want to invalidate that. We want to leave space for how sad that is, how angry you might feel. And then through action, we want to show our self worthiness by learning how to care and nurture for ourselves.

And we both went to Cornell. So I'm wondering in my mind, like,

what's in the water up there?

No, no. How many kids that go to Ivy League colleges have this story about performance,

you know, like, and I think where the. It's confusing. Cause I think I much like you, right? I saw the world celebrating me. I had everything. I had a successful practice. I had all these accolades, right? I. I had partners. So shame. When I, when I talk about shame, shame was something I wouldn't even speak about because who was I to be not fulfilled or not happy in life, right? Because I had it all. And it felt very shameful for me in the beginning to start to admit. Like, I actually don't, I don't feel fulfilled. I fantasize about running away from this life that I've created for myself. And that was very real, that disconnection, that lack of fulfillment. But I was kind of inadvertently shaming myself for feeling that way because I didn't have the reason or the story that I was taught would lead to those behaviors.

So maybe people have heard about and I want to Sort of loop back to where we're getting to how to reparent. Because this is the whole thesis of your book, right? We're just talking about the why we need to reparent now. Like, and how we're. We kind of misinterpret a lot of information that came to us as children as our best adaptation to a shitty environment. You know, the, the idea of like the attachment frameworks is something that most people know about, but I only learned about it fairly recently. There's like the anxious attachment where you, where you respond to a shitty environment by getting more anxious about things and being more needy, or the avoidant attachment style, which is where you kind of are self reliant and independent and don't need anybody or anything. And you know, you kind of push away intimacy or connection. And then there's the disorganized, which is even. I don't know how you describe that, but it's more like messy and chaotic and PTSD level. And then there's the secure, which is like where you kind of actually are emotionally regulated, which is what you're sort of talking about. But I think your individual developmental model goes beyond that. So can you talk a little bit about detachment framework and how your model goes beyond that and why it's different?

If I were to generalize what we're talking about when we're talking about attachment, we're talking about, right. How I show up in a relationship, right. What do I typically do? Like beautifully described, right. Do I pursue in the anxious model? Do I struggle with distance and pursue and try to close the gap or other end of the spectrum very loosely, right. Avoided.

Do I text 40 times in a minute? Right.

Or do I typically run away? And closeness feels scary, so I push away. And the important takeaway is I've learned to do one or two or both. The I would argue the disorganized is kind of like a blend of the two where it's highs, lows, very chaotic. A desire to be close, but close feels very fearful. Again, the important thing is I learned this because in childhood, again it would have made sense if something was unpredictable or chaotic to be very hyper vigilant. Right? The more anxious mode of being. If I scan and wait for the shoe to drop and notice every change in tone, embrace myself probably in childhood there was a benefit because the quicker I noticed the change in tone that might have led to either the explosion or the disconnection, the quicker I'm able to possibly close that gap and to deal with it. So we Learn how to relate to other people based again, in our earliest relationship. So what my model I hope does is it even expands it beyond how am I relating to others with whom I'm in a relationship? But how am I relating to myself? Do I know who I am? Am I able to separate myself from another person through boundaries so that I can discover and then begin to express myself? Do I have the ability? So to be clear, secure attachment doesn't mean lack of conflict, doesn't mean a lack of uncomfortable emotions. It means the ability to deal with those in a grounded way. So my model, I'm hoping, kind of expands to gain and give readers the understanding of, from kind of top to bottom, like who I am and how I've come to be. My argument would be it has been right, an adaptation to early environments that even predated you, beginning in your ancestors. And then the goal of the reparenting journey that I take readers on is how to begin to first and foremost create the safety and security in my body so that regardless of what's happening out there, and this even speaks to your work, you can have access to the healthiest foods, right? You could know what to eat. You could be eating the healthiest foods. But if you're doing so in a body that's on edge, that's bracing for that next shoe to drop, then that's not going to create the safety that your body needs to repair, to replenish, to actually grow, evolve, and change. So the reparenting journey will take you through different kind of pillars, if you will, where all change begins in safety and security. Very few of us know how to feel safe and secure in our own bodies. Then it continues with creating space from other people, people, especially for those of us who had no boundaries or no space in childhood. We need to learn how to separate, learn how to give ourselves space, to have different opinions, desires. Learn then how to navigate emotions, not avoid them, not suppress them, not white knuckle them, not hope we never feel them, but learn how to make space for them, to communicate them, because that's what creates the relationships that most of us are, are seeking and not in. We want to feel deeply connected. We want to feel understood. We want to be able to take space from our loved ones and not worry that they're going to be gone when we come back to reconnect. And very few of us have had those experiences. So through small daily choices, practices, I have many in the book, most are grounded again in the body, we begin to develop that safety, that security. We Begin to create space. We begin to learn our own emotions and then learn how to share them with someone else so that ultimately we can be ourselves in relationships and begin to feel that connection that so many of us are looking for.

Well, this is great. You talk about five developmental spheres, you know, in the book, and you touched on the first, which is safety and security and freedom to. And the second, the freedom to explore and become, which is like, so how do you go out on your own like a toddler? Right. You have to feel safe as a baby, but then you're like, run up in your toddler and fall away and then come back. It's that same thing, but as an adult.

Yeah, so.

So break it down for us with the first. The first section, which I think is really important, the safety and security, because that seems like an anchor point. And, and you talk about how to, you know, that you have to be able to feel safe in your body and your nervous system. And we talked a lot about nervous system regulation. So talk about how that helps you heal from this either. Controlling behavior, hyper vigilant behavior, shutting down behavior, panic, anxious, Anxious behavior. What are the practices? What are the tools? Because I get the concept. I think most people understand. Yeah, I want to feel safe and secure, but, like, how the hell do I do that? You know, like, what do I do next?

Ye. It begins by first connecting with our body to be able to determine whether we're not feeling safe. Right. So the major systems that shift and change when we're under stress or having an emotional reaction are our heart rate, our breath, and the tension in our muscles. And I'm really emphasizing this first step because I know for myself, I spent little to no time in my body. Like I said, I was always in my mind, always zooming around and worrying about someone else's body and what they needed and not connect it to my own. So rebuilding first noticing. Well, even if I were to write, listen, prompt listeners right now, like, do you feel, like, can you feel your muscles? Do you feel your heart rate? Like, how are you breathing? Are you breathing? Are you holding your breath? It's building in those checkpoints throughout the day. So simply creating the habit of checking in with our body so that then if we want to focus just on those three areas, we can begin to notice as our body shifts into or maybe is consistently in a stressed state with our tense muscles. I mean, I don't know how many of us walk around with tense jaws. I know I do. My shoulders might as well be up to my ears. Like Their earrings, right? All of these moments where for some of us, it becomes so normal, we don't notice until someone says, put your shoulders back. You're like, oh, wow, it's relieving some tension or drop your jaw, right? Oh, wow. I didn't realize how much tension I was holding.

Most of us don't realize how stressed we are until we don't feel the

stress, don't realize it. And that's the thing too, about stress. We become so familiar. We develop such a baseline for stress stress that I referenced this study where individuals who have a higher, just general, consistent level of stress actually will be less likely to rate things that are objectively being rated as stressful by someone else who has a lower baseline of stress as stressful. So simply, they're not registering stress unless it crosses a higher threshold. So we become so used to it, we're ignoring the fact that we are living in it chronically for a long period of time because it's just what's there. And we become addicted to it to some extent. So especially if we're so depleted, this happens a lot. If we're so depleted, we're exhausted. Some of us only feel inspired to act when there's a deadline, when we have to, right. When something is causing us stress to compel us into action. So then we start to say, oh, I work good under pressure, right? I'm, I, I, I, I juggle all this so well, right? And that is to some extent the case because the nervous system became activated by the stress enough to. Right. Inspire action. So we, for all of these crazy reasons, we become so familiar with our body being in a stressed state that you're right, we wake up and we don't even realize how stressed we are, let alone the impact that it's.

The first step is really just like, tune into it and be aware of your, like, simple body sensations. And then when, when you notice you might be feeling stressed, then. Then what?

So when you notice, I mean, the first thing that happens, right, is we begin to move really quickly. We talk really quickly, right? So some things we can do is notice we can slow our pace of movement down, our pace of speaking down, we can begin to slow our breathing down if we're noticing that we're like, our chest is heaving or maybe we're holding our breath, right? We can maybe relax a bit to allow some breathing to happen. Um, we can begin to even just tune into. And these practices seem really simple, which is why I think a lot of us, like, what's this really gonna do. And I'll be the first to say, if you do it once, nothing at all. If you consistently practice though, reconnecting with my body, right? Elongating my exhale, moving a little slower, tuning into the present environment. What can I see? Smell. Right. Simple practices, but they're go a long way because they bring my attention to the present moment, right? They help maybe shift my physiology into a calmer state. And then over time they're beginning to allow my body, because my body naturally wants to come back down, my parasympathetic nervous system wants to come back online and calm my body down. It wants to go back to homeostasis. So sometimes we just have to get out of our own way and notice when we're doing things that are preventing our body from fully. And the most thing that prevents our human body is our mind. Because these are the moments now because our body is communicating with our mind. A stressed body will naturally result in stressed thoughts, racing thoughts, ruminative thoughts, where now I'm only thinking about all the things in my life that are causing me stress, right? So the more I'm continuing down that cyclone of thinking about stressful things now I've created this, this perfect storm where my, the stress in my tense muscles are communicating to my mind, resulting in stressful thoughts. The more I allow my attention to focus on those stressful thoughts, the more I keep my body in that stress response. And some of us have been living this cycle for our whole.

Yeah, I saw, I saw that when I was in the journey and I began, I think how much I've been in a sympathetic state my whole life. Like I just, it's just a normal, you know, it must be a month. When I was a yoga teacher, I was just doing yoga seven hours a day. And I probably didn't feel that I slept like a baby. And it was, I felt the best I'd ever felt. But you know, who has time to do seven hours of yoga a day?

I mean I woke up to being to the extent of my just exhaustion, the depletion that ended because of decades of me living in that sympathetic overdrive when I fainted out of nowhere. And I wrote about this mainly in my first book because it scared the crap out of me. I thought coming from a family of health related issues, I thought, oh this is for sure that brain tumor, that was just a bruin. And so I got really scared. Until thankfully that timeline, that time period of my life really coincided with this learning. And I now have a reframe of oh, no, you actually lost consciousness because you kind of reached the final stage of the nervous system journey of fainting when your body was so depleted. Decades of exhausting yourself, never being able to calm down and rest and replenish that my body literally just shut me down entirely.

Reminds me of my mother who used to faint a lot. And I would have to save her when I was a little kid, but she would faint because she was so stressed, because she was never allowed to be a kid. She was the parent to her parents because they were deaf. And then when my parents split, it was very stressful and she just, she kind of couldn't function.

Yeah.

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That happens so much when children, for different reasons, because of, you know, physical limitations. A lot of times we see this in immigrant households too. Coming to a new country with the children being the only ones that speak the native language. And then they have to take on, understandably so much of the burden with parents who. Two parents are working in the household and there's children. And so then you have an older sibling taking care of the younger siblings. And I mean, this is, I mean

this guy, last night I went to the Comedy Store, which is a comedy club here in la, and we're recording and this Latino guy was talking about his, you know, growing up as an immigrant, first generation had to, how he had to like translate for his parents all the time. And he says, you know, imagine being a five year old or six year old and trying to translate adjustable rate mortgage and equity. And he doesn't know what that means. And like, he's like, got my parents into a lot of bad deals, you know, so it was very funny, but it's not funny, you know.

Yeah, this is serious and very real for. For a lot of just, again, just the factors that have contribute to now where we're living, the lack of support. And it's often necessary that that happens. So I'm not shaming that dynamic for being what was needed at that time. But again, I just think that speaks to a whole array of extra support needed for. For families and individuals really in general.

And part of. Part of this goes to some of the work that's sort of emerging around the trauma field around somatic therapy. People throw that term around. What does that mean? And it's sort of. You're kind of hinting at a little bit, but can you kind of unpack that? What is somatic therapy? How is it different from talk therapy? Why is it the doorway to actually solving a lot of the suffering we're all in right now?

So somatic soma, right, is based in body. So it's based. And again, there's different branches of somatic work out there, but it's based in the foundation of the body, creating change through body movement or body manipulation in a sense. Again, going back full circle. Why? Because our. Our life really is dictated by our body, by our nervous system, our emotional world included lives in our body. So I think the most commonly known perhaps, or at least maybe by me, um, Dr. Peter Levine, developed something called somatic experiencing. And I'm really aligned with that approach because again, there's a ton of different somatic work we can do, from yoga to movement to. His work, though, really focuses on the nervous system cycle. And the thought is, again, if we didn't have that safe, secure caregiver to help, again, if I'm simplifying the nervous system state to help go from an activated state, right, back to calm, grounded, connected, open baseline state, which hypothetically we should spend most of our time in, the belief is if we didn't have that right, our nervous system will default to different states, like the sympathetic activation that you and I are describing, right? Always on edge, running a mile a minute, the perfectionist, overachiever. Or it could look like shut down, where I have no energy, I'm disconnected, I'm more in that dorsal vagal state. But we kind of default and some of us then end up living predominantly, right? Reverting back to these states. So somatic experiencing is really not only understanding the state that our body might most frequently kind of go into, with the default state activating, but to then help our body complete, so to speak, the cycle. So if we're shut down in that Dorsal state where we have no motivation, right. Helping our body safely. Because this is again where I'm watching some of the field. The goal isn't to just, right, dive into the cold plunge because we know we're shut down. Because that could be completely overwhelming for a body that is shut down because it's shut down, because it's already too overwhelmed, right? So we want to gradually offer movement and like a softening of tense muscles so that I can move so we don't literally physically or emotionally overwhelm ourselves. Or again, if we're in that sympathetic activation, we want to help our body calm down, right? Slow our breath, slow our movement, like I was talking about earlier. Because the belief then is right. If I complete, and if I help my body complete that cycle, then I'm discharging that emotional energy and I'm reducing the likelihood that I fall back on the dysfunctional habits. The things I usually do when I can't discharge that energy, right? The overeating, the being distracted, the, you know, mindlessly scrolling, the appeasing and worrying and caretaking the world around me instead. Because the number one thing I think that. And this is why I went into like the don't overwhelm yourself. We feel more shameful when we know better, when we have a plan of action and when we try to white knuckle or very understandably like get better quicker, right. And then we end up falling right back into those old habits because that is going to be where we revert to as stress goes up slow. It takes the thing that we hate to do, which is the slow and steady and consistent process of creating new

habits is a longer time.

Yeah. And that's why I will be the first to. And we are giggling about here when I was talking, I will be the first to say all of the ways my old habits still come back as frequent as recently as this morning. Because it's a journey, right? And I think a lot of us have this expectation that once we become aware of these, these habits, once we have some new practices that miraculously. Right. All the old habits are just like your health too.

It's like, you know, to have a hundred pounds of those you can't do in a day. Somatic experience is interesting because it's really a different specific kind of modality. You can read about it, but it's essentially it's a, it's a methodology for helping you get back on your body, to re. Regulate your body, to regulate your nervous system and to sort of break some of this into Sort of the reparenting process is part of that, right? Yes, but there's other parts to it, right. So you know, the, the, the sort of Dan Brown from Harvard, the psychologist, was a Tibetan Buddha, talks about this sort of idealized parent. How do you like, like in that scene I talked about the beginning of the show where I was this little boy and I was 11. I went in as me grown up Mark, who's more mature and grounded and could then comfort him. That was sort of an experience of me in some ways reparenting. And I literally have to do that every day so that the 11 year old boy doesn't hijack my life, you know. And so you talk about sort of, sort of, in some ways it's mirroring young about this individuation. How do you sort of get back to your authentic self? That's what he's really talking about is these people who go through life and they're kind of in midlife and they realize, gee, wait a minute, like I've succeeded, I've done all these things, but like, I don't feel fulfilled, like. And he talks about how do you get back to this place of being whole and integrated, which I think is what you're referring to when you talk about your authentic self. So how, how, how do people get there?

Yeah. Once we, right, have safety and security in our body, once we've learned that boundaries and limits are important to have, those nos are just as important as those yeses, right. That we can give to people to create space. Once we then kind of begin to reconnect with our emotional systems and learn how to write, tolerate more uncomfortable emotions, right? Then the next really goal is to really see how I'm showing up, right. How am I expressing myself authentically when I have a perspective or a want or a need or an emotion, can I share that with someone or do I water it down? Do I suppress it, do I ignore it? Do I project it outward and make someone else the cause of it? And the reality again, going back to childhood because we need it to belong. We learned how, we learned the role to play, we learned the identity to wrap around ourselves. And that's where we began being the people pleaser, the caretaker, the overachiever, the black sheep, right? We became a role or an identity in childhood. So and a lot of us, it's not always necessarily negative. Some of us, again, we're giving messages culturally, societally about very well meaning messages about who we have to be, to be right, to be, to be, to be secure. And financially secure and emotionally secure in our adulthood. And so we need to get clear on two things. First and foremost is what are those roles that we're playing? Like, seeing ourselves kind of default into certain actions. And then we need to give ourselves the moment to pause and to now in adulthood, determine if that action or that role is still serving us as it once did. And I think that's the area where, again, it can. Needs to begin for a lot of us in curiosity, because it mainly is like, I just don't feel good. You know, I might not know why or who I even want to be or need to be. And this is really, again, what started my journey. I wasn't feeling fulfilled for all of the different reasons. And some of it was because I really wasn't feeling fulfilled in the way that I was working the career I picked, I, I much more resonate with what I'm doing now with thinking, with teaching, with writing. And my dad's joke, I'm a forever student is really being, you know, enacted in reality because that's what lights me up the most. I, you know, therapists, clinicians, we need them in the room to support individuals. And that just really wasn't.

You got 9 million patients on Instagram, right.

So that's. And what. And so it's, you know, I didn't know. Know where I was going. I just, what I knew first was I'm fantasizing about running away. So that's a marker that, like, something isn't, you know, connecting here. And so as I got then clear, this kind of leads into then the final goal of this whole journey. Once I became and understood what lights me up, what I get excited about what I don't like doing, and then I became more of who I am in the world, then we can reconnect with our deeper purpose. Like the. I believe we all have a function and a role that's for a greater good. Right. You might not do it as publicly as I'm doing it with. Right. Nine million followers. And you don't need to, because we impact everyone that we interact with. Right. So we all, I think, have a greater purpose. And I think this is why many of us are feeling so unfulfilled and spiritually depleted. And I'm not even talking about spiritual in like, a religious sense. I'm talking about spiritual. And I connect it to the greater sense of the universe and natural order of things. And I think, again, this goes back to society where we're not. We're not connected, we're not Even in communities, very few of us are anymore. And that's again, why we feel so depleted.

So it's so true. And I think, you know, when you're talking about through these practices and through all the exercises in your book, we don't have time to talk about all of them, but I encourage people to go get the book and there's gonna be a link in the show notes, and I encourage you to get a word and get books. It's called Reparenting the Inner Child, the New Science of Our Oldest Wounds and How to Heal Them. What I think you kind of hit on, which I think is really important, is this idea of relational neuroplasticity. And that's a big mouthful. So unpack what that means. And I'm going to say why it's important because as a doctor, you know, we think in some ways when we have these emotional states, we think we're fixed, but the reality is that we can rewire our nervous system, like literally change the neural connections, and you can literally change the nerve cells and how they function. It's documented through the science of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, which is creating new brain cells. So we know this is possible, but what you're talking about is through these practices, you're able to actually rewire it. So it's not. You're not like this automatic state relational

neuroplasticity, again, kind of brings us so full circle. And learning that neuroplasticity existed in science is, in my opinion, is an absolute game changer because, and my dad is of the generation where that wasn't the predominant belief. I can't tell you how many times, even to this day, my dad was like, oh, that's just how I am. I can't change, you know. And so the reality, thankfully, we know in science that we can change. We just have to make consistent new choices to create that change. But in terms of our brain and our neurophysiology, it can happen beautifully.

Thankfully, just after you go to the gym, you can build muscle at any age, right?

The relational component kind of brings us again full circle. Our wiring was built in. A relationship was impacted by those individuals that were either present and attuned to us and able to soothe us and comfort us or who weren't. So just as we were greatly impacted by our earliest relationships, we can be equally greatly impacted by our relationships now. And not to sound cliche, but the predominant relationship again begins with me and learning when I don't feel safe, right? My own Self learning how to create safety and security and then finding first and foremost what first of us become, a lot of us more often become aware of is when relationships aren't healthy, when we are participating in, you know, dysfunctional dynamics and then making the changes that we can. Because a safe and secure relationship, whoever it's with, with a therapist, with a best friend, with a romantic partner, if you're lucky to be working toward creating that with them, then that can be so impactful. Again, because our brain was wired in a relationship. So at any time into our future, in a safe relationship or in a relationship that's moving towards safety, we can really create limitless change. And then that becomes then what's modeled in future relationships, especially for those of

us who have breaking the chain of trauma, regeneration.

Right.

And I think, you know, you hit on this the first bit, which is, I think the most important, which is the first, most important relationship is a religion to yourself, because that is what other relationships are predicated on. And whether you're going to be healthy or not or whether you're going to be happy or not is really dependent on that. And I just can't thank you enough for the work you do and the messages you get out there. Definitely helped me. I know it's helped my wife, helped, obviously a lot of millions of people, and in some ways it's driven by our own stories. But thank God we had to figure this out for ourselves so we can teach the world, right?

Well, again, I reflect that gratitude right back. Like I said, your work was so pivotal in my understanding, and I'm just so honored and gleeful and excited that we can come across the aisle and talk to each other as, you know, doctors of different parts of the body and understand that it's the same experience that we're working to help humanity around. And it's so I'm just. I get a kick out of the fact that 9 million people are interested in hearing these conversations. And then I have a virtual community and people want to buy books on the inner child. So I'm here for it and we'll talk about it till whenever. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to share.

Amazing. Amazing. So, Cole, where can people learn more about your work?

Yeah, absolutely. So of course the book is available wherever books are sold. There's an audiobook as well. I am really, I think it's very important to get this information out for free, accessible content. So I'm really across all of the social media platforms, however you consume content, the holistic psychologist go give it a follow.

I have a holistic psychologist.

Holistic psychologist. Some version of that name, whether it's X or TikTok or YouTube or Instagram, all of the things. And again, we really do focus on giving content resources that can help information that can help individuals change. Whether or not you purchase anything that obviously I do offer. The other thing being my virtual membership community, Self Healer Circle. You could check that out@self healercircle.com we just actually released an app so it's super exciting.

Amazing. Well, everybody listening. We're gonna dive deep in more of Nicole's work. I'm certainly gonna dive deep. And we're doing an ultramind summit about mental health and the brain. Hopefully we'll have you on that and talk more about this. So look forward to it. Yeah. Thanks, Nicole.

Of course. Thank you.

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