In this episode of the Own It Podcast, host Nicole Hollar explores how anxiety and other limiting emotions can stem from generational and even prenatal influences. She begins by describing a client’s anxiety triggered by a seemingly unrelated restaurant incident, then expands to the concept of generational baggage that can be inherited without direct experience. Hollar cites two key animal studies: a 2013 rat experiment by Ressler and Diaz where parental exposure to a cherry‑blossom scent paired with foot‑shock led to avoidance of that scent in offspring across multiple generations, and a University of Pennsylvania study showing offspring of cocaine‑exposed rats also avoided cocaine. She interprets these findings through an epigenetic lens, suggesting that trauma can be encoded biologically and transmitted in utero. Hollar connects this science to her coaching practice, explaining how she helps clients release stored negative emotions (anxiety, fear, guilt, anger, sadness) using breakthrough sessions, talk therapy, and other energy‑based modalities. She emphasizes that recognizing inherited patterns empowers individuals to move beyond them, and encourages listeners to seek appropriate professional help when needed. The episode blends scientific explanation, personal coaching experience, and motivational advice.
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Welcome to the Own It Podcast with me, Nicole Hollar, where we're going to talk about stuff to help you get out of your way, take charge of your life, and well, other stuff too. Hey guys, welcome back to the Own It Podcast with me, Nicole Hollar. I was talking to one of my former personal development clients, uh, the other day and she just reached out to me. She wanted to thank me for really helping her overcome her anxiety. Now, anxiety is a really interesting thing, right? It's just. Really a fear of the unknown. Our unconscious decides to have a response to something that hasn't even incurred, or we create a story from it. Either we actually consciously know the story, we look at all the possibilities, we can work ourselves up, or sometimes not even. We just have these feelings of anxiety and we don't even know why. Now, anxiety, fear, uh, whatever it is, guilt, things that people have been holding on forever and they don't really know why. Limiting beliefs. We store these things in our unconscious. These types of energies do affect how our body behaves. I help people overcome all sorts of major negative emotions, anger, sadness, fear, hurt, and guilt. Those are the first 5 we release during a breakthrough session. It seems that I, I get a lot of referrals for people with anxiety. In this client's case, she would have an anxiety episode and she knew her mind was creating it because She could have had a bad experience at a restaurant and seen another table fighting, and then the idea of going back to that restaurant, she would almost go into a panic attack. And she knew it wasn't a way to live her life. Now, we can have our own stuff. We can have generational baggage. We can also have stuff from other lifetimes if, depending on your energy source and fields, but we do live in the quantum, so our energy does transcend ourselves. With that said, I explained to her one day about generational problems that people carry and how there is generational stuff that's linked between people. Now, in this person's case, her mom did have anxiety, so she got to witness what that looked like. But even without witnessing it, it's very possible that we can carry things through generations. I have helped people let go of depression that really wasn't even their own, that they Took on in utero. Without going into specifics and details about that, I wanted to share some interesting experiments that people had done. They, they did experiment on rats. The reason that science has often used rats in experiments is because their neurology is very similar to many mammals and it can be understood and associated to humans. With all of that said, there was an experiment in 2013 with a 2 guys, Ressler and Diaz, I believe. And what they did was they exposed the rat to, 2 rats, to a chemical that smelled like cherry blossom. And when they did that, they shocked their toe. Now the rats didn't like that so much. So they learned that this smell of cherry blossom was something that they should avoid. They had, those rats have babies. And those babies, without being shocked, when they would smell that scent of cherry blossom, they would move away from the scent because they knew that it was a negative thing. They also had those second generation rats have another generation. So the grand rats of the first ones who were experimented on, they too avoided that same stimulus of the cherry blossom. Because generationally speaking, from an epigenetic standpoint, they had learned and carried that energy through the generations and knew to avoid that smell. I always tell people, my clients, that, you know, when we're in utero, it's the baby's head start program. It's how we are collecting and navigating the world around us before we're even there. So we take a lot of information from our mother's actual biological and physical responses to to her environment. Another thing about that particular rat study was they took the rats and in IVF, they created new babies and they too avoided that stimulus of the cherry blossom. So it really shows us how, when we talk about generational trauma, how people can have it even if they've never really experienced it. And in my coaching, what I help people do is to let that stuff go. So that they can move forward. And it doesn't have to be big trauma. It could be feeling like a fraud, that you were afraid of being out in public, whatever it might be that's bigger or smaller to the individual. There was another study that a different scientist had commented on. He was from University of Pennsylvania. I forget his name, but he had, prior to that rat study, he kind of echoed the the sentiments of that generational exposure because he had done a study with cocaine. And in his study, the offspring of the rats who were given cocaine, which is a toxin, actually avoided the cocaine because they knew it was a toxin and they should stay away from it. I'm giving you guys this information to understand that sometimes we are in a place in our life that we don't really understand, that we feel we can't get out of. And sometimes it's not really the baggage that was ours. It might be carried from someplace else. And if that is the case for you, it's always really important to know that you don't have to stay and exist in that space. There are different people, authorities, places you can go for help. A lot of times talk therapy works for people as long as you can allow yourself to overcome the energetic element. I've known people who've done talk therapy for years. They can microneedle down to that very finite place when they experienced this thing. They still haven't been able to release it and move past. I help people release and move past. There are other people who use other energy modalities who do that as well. I definitely would encourage if you are in a place where you do feel like you're stuck, you're trapped, you're just running in the same cycle or the rat race, not to, you know, use a pun here. That there is possibility for you, but it's about recognizing that you have the potential and the ability to get out of it, even if it feels uncomfortable and scary. I'm going to leave that for you today. I hope you got a little bit of science and a little bit of knowing that you are very capable of having more than you realize. That's it. This is your time. I hope you have a great day.
