My MB Alex breakdown is supported by Helix sleep. Bring is in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about five years now and I have been sleeping so much better. Jonathan and also our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of those issues, night sweats, back pain, motion transfer, those things are significantly better with a Helix mattress. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door, which is so much fun with free shipping in the US. They have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty plus they're happy with Helix guarantee. Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Go to helixleap.com slash breakdown for 27% off site wide. That's helixleap.com slash breakdown for 27% off site wide. helixleap.com slash breakdown. 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. 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. There's really powerful studies where the more trauma, the more likely we are to misinterpret neutral stimuli as threatening. But everyone's unsafe. The world is unsafe so much of our stuck points really traces back to our childhood. This part doesn't go away. 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. The reality is we're enacting that past, especially within our relationships. Survival modes have been so normalized. Over time you begin to deny your own instincts. Can shame prevent us from following our instincts? Shame is a a shutdown. We're actually disconnecting from our intuition.

We're not even tuning in to where intuition lives inside of us.

How does reparenting change that wiring?

All 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. Hi, I'm Mayan Bialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today's one of those days where we reveal something to you that you did not know was Is 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 LaPera, she's the best-selling 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 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. 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. We're so excited to have the holistic psychologist here in person, Dr. Nicola Pere, welcome to the breakdown. Break it down. Thank you for having me, is honored to be here. 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 responsible and they're doing all the things that they're

supposed to do.

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? 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 reaction. 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, to things that, so to speak, our inner child or this part of our self 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. What do I already give you notes? Did our thugs just give you notes about our... I mean, these are the moments though, right? Where we're like, what the heck is happening? 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.

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 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 got to be, it's him, it's her, right? It's not that. And if it was that, it happens so long ago, I don't want to go there. How do you help people push through that to understand that guess well, we can't just operate like free wheelining and hope that we figure life out without looking at that. 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 our parents? I think that's another common interpretation of oh you're telling me that they are bad people when in reality I think a lot of us have the awareness that 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, 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 need it. 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. Insight isn't enough. And I can speak for 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 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. And for a lot of us, I 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,

...