Nicole LePera: "Your nervous system is screaming at you!" Healing anxiety and panic
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.7 • 15.6K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2026
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Were you praised as a child for being ‘good’, for keeping quiet, or not making a fuss? Psychologist Dr Nicole LePera reckons that praise may have taught you to disconnect from your emotions entirely.
In this chat with Fearne, Nicole explains how even well-intentioned parenting can leave us with patterns that run our adult lives on autopilot. She talks through the practical process of reparenting your inner child, starting with something as simple as finding a childhood photograph. We hold our emotions in our bodies, so she also shares ways to tune in with your body throughout the day to release stress.
Nicole also explains why your nervous system keeps you stuck in familiar patterns even when you logically know better, and why shame, people pleasing, and perfectionism are all protective strategies we developed to survive childhood.
Plus, why does healing require what Nicole calls a return to ‘radical honesty’?
Nicole’s book, Reparenting the Inner Child, is out now.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Fern Cotton, a huge welcome to Happy Place. This is the show that lets you gently reflect on your past. |
| 0:09.3 | Today I'm chatting to Nicole LaPera. I learned, right, that mom and her emotions are to be managed. |
| 0:17.5 | So if that means stopping my behavior, not sharing my perspective or opinion or |
| 0:21.7 | emotional experience, in childhood, when we need those connections for our physical and emotional |
| 0:27.2 | survival, we'll listen to those messages before we'll listen to ourselves. That's what we needed in |
| 0:32.0 | childhood. It's someone to say, you are very upset right now. And I see that. And I'm going to be |
| 0:37.3 | here through your upset. And together, we. And I'm going to be here through your |
| 0:38.1 | upset. And together, we're going to get to the other side and show both of us that we're all |
| 0:42.0 | okay. And when we didn't have that, we have to be that person in adulthood for ourselves. |
| 0:45.4 | So you catch me in the middle of juggling actual life, the life of a working single parent, |
| 0:52.9 | and actually just any parent, because my son was literally just calling me moments ago saying that he's got a really bad headache at school. |
| 1:02.3 | So just navigating that alongside recording this, but it leads me onto the subject we're going to talk about today, which is actually not parenting |
| 1:11.9 | actual kids, but parenting ourselves. What a concept. It's something that I've definitely |
| 1:20.5 | heard being talked about a lot over the years. I've had friends who have really dived quite deeply |
| 1:25.8 | into this subject matter. |
| 1:27.8 | We'll use that language in conversation, like talking about the inner child, reparenting themselves. |
| 1:33.8 | And I've always sort of understood it. |
| 1:36.5 | But reading Nicole's book has absolutely opened my ears, eyes and mind to so many things. And I think actually, you know, it does |
| 1:47.5 | relate to parenting as well because I think many of us are trying to navigate parenting in a way |
| 1:53.0 | where we're not going to like fuck our kids up, which inevitably we will. There's that saying |
| 1:57.5 | that, you know, your parents fuck you up. And it, in the best possible way, |
| 2:02.5 | they usually do. And it's no fault of ours or our parents. You know, we're trying our best |
... |
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