Nicole LePera: "Your nervous system is screaming at you!" Healing anxiety and panic
5/4/20261 hr 17 min
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.
If you liked this episode of Happy Place, you might also like:
Break Free From People Pleasing
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Clips
Showing 10 of 12Transcript preview
First 90 secondsFearne Cotton· Host0:00
[gentle music] Hello, I'm Fern Cotton. A huge welcome to Happy Place. This is the show that lets you gently reflect on your past. Today, I'm chatting to Nicole LePera.
Nicole LePera· Guest0:12
I learned, right, that mom and her emotions are to be managed. So if that means stopping my behavior, not sharing my perspective or opinion or emotional experience in childhood when we need those connections for our physical and emotional survival, we'll listen to those messages before we'll listen to ourself. That's what we needed in childhood, is this- someone to say, "You are very upset right now, and I see that, and I'm gonna be here through your upset, and together we're gonna get to the other side and show both of us that we're all okay." And when we didn't have that, we have to be that person in adulthood for ourselves.
Fearne Cotton· Host0:45
So you catch me in the middle of juggling actual life, [laughs] the life of a working single parent, uh, and actually just any parent, um, because my son was literally just calling me moments ago saying that he's got a really bad headache at school. So just navigating that alongside recording this. But it leads me onto the subject we're gonna talk about today, which is actually not parenting actual kids, but parenting ourselves. What a concept. It's something that I've definitely heard being talked about a lot over the years. I've had friends who have really dived quite deeply into this subject matter, will use that language in conversation,