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I'm Dr. Nicole LePera, The Holistic Psychologist, founder of SelfHealer Circle, a virtual membership community where individuals join together to take healing into their own hands. New York Times bestselling author, my new book, Out Reparenting the Inner Child. Today on Big Think, we talk about the six archetypes of childhood trauma, what our inner child really is and how it impacts our daily life, and then we explore the process of reparing and how that it can create lasting transformation. But before we talk about our inner child and how it
impacts us today, we need to understand the early impact of trauma, what trauma really is, and how you might have experienced it yourself. Chapter one, the six archetypes of childhood trauma. across different backgrounds and different life experiences, I came to see that present- day struggles really weren't about the present day. Whatever was keeping us stuck, whether it was the anxiety, the conflict, or the self-doubt, these were strategies that were actually formed at a time before we even understood what it meant to feel emotionally safe or to be truly seen. So,
my childhood was full of a lot of love and at the same time, it was full of a lot of stress and a lot of tension. My dad worked really hard to financially support my family, myself, and my two older siblings, and my mom stayed at home to take care of us. Conversations about feelings were very rare. Conflict would erupt and would seemingly vanish into silence, and we would go on as if nothing happened. What sticks out most about my childhood is how little I can remember. Most of my childhood is really a big blank. What I can recall is laying up awake at night, always worried
that someone was going to break in or always worried that my parents weren't going to wake up the next morning. My body was always alert, always bracing, always scanning for danger. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was living in survival mode. The anxiety, the dissociation, and eventually the physical symptoms were the result of a nervous system that was formed at a time where emotional safety was inconsistent. I saw the same pattern when I opened up my private practice so many years later in so many of my clients and I really came to understand how
trauma isn't just something big and dramatic that happens. It can be small subtle moments of a lack of emotional regulation, attunement and repair. Those moments can have such big consequences on us. And this understanding really helped me to see many of the symptoms that we are understanding as dysfunction actually aren't dysfunction at all. They were formed at a time where they were our best strategy to cope with the environment and the relationships around us. I think for a really long time the self-help conversation, what I learned in school, what I was applying to my own life was
missing the foundational role that our body and our nervous system plays in creating our experiences. From moments where we feel safe to moments where we feel on edge and reactive. When most of us hear the word trauma, we think of big catastrophic events, whether it's abuse, natural disaster, car accidents. But what I've come to learn is that trauma is not necessarily about what happened. It's really about the support that we have to process our experiences or to process what happens. So trauma really can result from daily experiences. So for example, something that
some of us might have experienced in childhood is having a family that's going through a divorce. So, one child, for instance, might have had a parent show up during a divorce and tell them that, you know, I understand what's happening. I'm here with you. This isn't your fault. And allowed that child to cry, to experience their distress, their grief, their upset. That's going to be a drastically different experience of course than a child for instance who same divorce maybe didn't have a present parent around or didn't have someone to be there with them through
their upset leaving them to process their grief completely alone. Same experience completely different outcomes. And I think more commonly um you could have a child who comes home from school maybe shares an experience of feeling left out or bullied and very distractedly the parent might be scrolling on their phone telling them just to get over it. The message then that leaves the child is that they are alone in their emotions. The more frequently that type of experience happens, a child can turn into someone who ends up being hyperindependent because they have learned
that in moments of need, in showing vulnerability, they have come to expect that similar to their parents scrolling on their phone, no one will be present to them. For a while, trauma has also been believed to be a an individual experience. The person who has the traumatic experience has then the impact. What we now know from epigenetics is that impact can travel across generations. Ancestors who have lived traumatic experiences with food scarcity or abuse or war type trauma can actually pass on changes wired into our biology or how our genes can express themselves impacting
future generations, ourselves included. And with that then we have really come to understand the pervasive impact of these traumatic events. again, whether within ourselves or passed on from our lineages, which can include mental and emotional issues and including incredible um physical issues as well. When people wonder, you know, if everyone out there is having a traumatic experience or has been traumatized, I think trauma is very pervasive. I think very few of us were raised with the emotional attunement that we need it. We might have had physically present parents,
have had our physical needs met. Maybe we didn't have neglect or abuse in the traditional sense. But what we mostly lacked, the large majority of us, is the attunement that our nervous system needed to be able to cope with big events and even small daily events, stressful events, just developmental events. So I think, you know, quite pervasively, um, trauma is something that unifies us in the human experience. Um though thankfully we know from neuroplasticity that even the wiring the survival habits and patterns that many of us have adapted based on traumatic
events can be rewired can be changed throughout the entirety of our life experience. You know if you have childhood trauma if you find yourself repeating habits and patterns that don't serve you. If you find yourself feeling emotionally out of control in a moment where you can't show up the way you want to. And if you feel yourself acting out of character or really don't know who you are in life, understanding the impact of our past is incredibly important because for the large majority of us, we're still repeating the habits and patterns that once kept us safe. We're
doing so and we're calling it personality. We're believing it's just who we are because we haven't been able to create space from who we've had to become to survive those earliest environments of inconsistency or neglect. And without having awareness of the impact that our past is having, we really limit oursel to be able to make new choices to create a future that's more aligned with who we want to be. Unresolved childhood trauma shows up in many of the habits and patterns that we continue to repeat day in and day out. In childhood, we will seek safety regardless of what
is present or not. We will modify ourselves and we then rely on those habits even though the context has changed believing that is the only way to create safety and security. So couple examples if in childhood shutting down during conflict was the thing that kept us safe. We could become an adult who even in a conversation with someone who wants to understand us or seek resolution, we continue to rely on that shut down pattern, closing oursel off from those moments of understanding. Or another really common one, if in childhood appeasing others maintained connections,
then we become an adult who kind of pushes our own needs aside, says yes when we mean no, and quiet quietly then ends up gathering resentment because the people that we want to see and hear us, we're not actually showing up for authentically. So many of us have in different areas of our life, especially relationally, the way that we've learned to create safety, which again usually involves modifying oursel in some way, that our nervous system hasn't necessarily updated, understanding that contexts have changed. We might be around safe, supportive people, and we can show
up differently, but we don't believe that yet to be true because we are still reacting to a past that's no longer present. So really common you know habits and patterns that many of us develop are one of dissociation or of disconnecting. If in childhood our emotions if there was no space for our emotions if we maybe shared with a parent how upset we were and we were immediately shut down or shamed for our feelings. The safest thing to do is stop sharing is to disconnect. That's what dissociation is disconnecting from the physical body or the emotional body.
And then what once protected us in childhood ends up putting a barrier or a wall between us and other people. We end up being the person in a relationship who's having a lot of big feelings. We might need the support, but we might have loving partners on the other side of us telling us that I don't know how you're thinking or what you're feeling because you don't tell me. We've created a distance out of protection that is now sabotaging our intimacy. Other common ones is we can become overfunctioning. If in childhood we had to either kind of physically support the household
or emotionally manage the people around us, we end up continuing to be hypervigilant to other people. We continue to please or appease putting our own needs to the side and we continue to show up then in ways where sometimes we even feel anxious when someone else is having an emotion. like we continue to have to manage someone else's feelings again because in childhood managing someone else's feelings is what avoided the explosion or avoided the shame. So we continue to operate in that way and we end up exhausting oursel, burning ourselves out. We're becoming resentful of other
people because within our relationships we don't leave any space for ourselves. So there are six really common archetypes of childhood trauma. The first is having a parent who denies your reality. This is growing up in a home where there wasn't space for you to share your perspectives or your emotions. And common example is say for instance you shared with your parent that they might have made a joke that made you uncomfortable or maybe one of your siblings said something that upset you and you go to your parent with your upset and you're told to stop overreacting
or maybe you're told that you're being too sensitive. more moments of that, you know, kind of denial of what your experience is leads to an understanding that my emotions aren't valid and that my internal world can't be trusted. So, in adulthood, this can translate to second-guessing your instincts, tolerating behavior that doesn't sit right, not speaking up in moments where you do need to speak up. So, healing in this moment looks like reconnecting with your instincts and learning to stand up for yourself even when it's difficult to do that. Another common archetype is
having a parent who doesn't see or hear you. This might look like having physically present parents, but emotionally they are absent or they feel like they're a million miles away. So, a little kid might come home really excitedly showing their parent their new drawing. And the parent might just kind of say, "Oh, yeah, that's nice." without even looking up for whatever it is that they're doing. more moments of doing that, right, result and translate to the feeling that we're not actually there. We're invisible. What we have to say or do doesn't matter. And then in adulthood,
it translates to those behaviors where we might not speak up in a group. We might not feel like we're being heard when we do speak up. So ultimately, the goal is to reconnect and to see and hear ourselves first. um to learn how to validate our own experience without overly relying on someone else's validation and to seek relationships where people are actually interested and value um our perspective and what it is that we have to say. The third archetype is having a parent who vicariously lives through you or who molds and shapes you. And this is really common
in childhood where there's a lot of pressure to perform or to achieve in some way. A child gets the feeling that love is conditional, is based on them performing, where certain aspects of our behavior are celebrated and other aspects are ignored. In adulthood, this translates to overwork, p perfectionism, trying to avoid even the most mild criticism because we have learned in the deepest sense that our worth depends on how we're performing or what it is that we're doing. So healing for this archetype really looks like learning how to embrace our imperfections,
how to show up as a human and how to disconnect our worth from what it is that we're doing. The fourth archetype is having a parent who doesn't model boundaries. So whether this looks like physical violations where our physical space, our physical body or our personal space like diaries are violated or even more commonly our emotional space. It looks like having a parent who relies on us, vents to us, shares their problems, looks to us for emotional support. And this gives us then the message that love and connection means us caring for someone else, which then
translates into adulthood is overextending oursel in relationships and even at times feeling guilty when we have our own wants or our own needs. So healing really is deciding and determining where we need boundaries and then learning how to set and honor our boundaries. Noticing moments where we feel that old sense of over responsibility for someone else. And learning how to create separation where we can very lovingly say that's yours and this is mine and I can still care very deeply about you even though you're over there and I'm separate from you. Another archetype
of childhood trauma is having a parent who is overly focused on appearance. And this grows from households where appearance, physical appearance, family appearance mattered more than emotional connection. So whether you had a parent that criticized your weight, your clothing, or the way you presented yourself, more consistently you receive those messages, the more you begin to tie your worth on your appearance. you become an adult who's overly focused on how you look. Um, sometimes you end up working tirelessly to present yourself in a certain way. You might
pursue goals that aren't yours based on appearance purposes. So really, the goal is to separate value from how you're looking to someone else so that you can really come to the understanding that your worth is inherent based on who you are and you are lovable with all of your imperfections. The final archetype of childhood trauma is having a parent who can't regulate their emotions. This looks like a really erratic, unpredictable parent. One who might be really calm, grounded, nice one minute and then explosive, overreactive, or even shut down the next minute. Slam doors,
silent treatments teach you that emotions are dangerous and the only way to keep safe is to be hyper vigilant to what's happening around you. Always on edge, always on watch. which translates then to hypervigilance in adulthood. It translates to overreactivity or our own inability then to navigate our own emotional reaction. So healing involves understanding when our body is flooded. Learning how to pause and to calm our body down so that we can show up more grounded and more intentionally instead of overreacting to emotions around us in a more panicked state.
The most common childhood archetypes are having a parent who doesn't see or hear you or who can't regulate their own emotions. I think this is really pervasive, common, widespread because very few adults have learned the tools themselves to be with their own emotions and or to see or reflect or hold space for another individual's emotions. And these are really habits and patterns that are passed down through generations. So if in their own childhood our parents that is if they didn't learn or have a calm grounded regulated emotional presence then they themselves aren't going to have
the tools to be emotionally present regulated ground it to be able to truly see or hear their child even if they very much want to in their intention. So some really common male adaptive coping skills that developed in childhood that now sabotage our relationships are hyperindependence where in childhood if relying on someone came with hurt or with disappointment the safest thing that we can do is to stop relying on someone else. We learn to deal with our problems alone. We learn to shove down our emotions and we learn how not to ask for help. We go about life on our own.
And of course then in adulthood, what kept us safe from disappointment in childhood ends up then cutting us off from the connections that we very desperately need. Another really common pattern that sabotages our relationship is by people pleasing. What kept us safe in childhood, deferring to someone else's wants or needs, now ends up disconnecting us from the connections that we want. At one time, learning to say, "I don't know. I don't care. whatever it is that you wanted. It might have been the easiest path to maintain those early connections, but now
it just disconnects us from ourselves. We end up not showing up as who we are, not expressing what we need. And over time, we end up growing then resentful of the people that we're in relationship with. When really, right, we're still operating under that assumption that we can't or it's unsafe to share our perspectives, to share our opinions, or to share our wants and needs with someone else. So, coping with childhood trauma is essentially our best strategy that we can use to deal with or to get through the moment. A lot of times it looks like distracting oursel. looks like scrolling,
staying busy, shutting down, avoiding conflict. It's the quickest, easiest way to decrease the discomfort. But in reality, the habit and pattern is still underlying. So healing involves not just dealing with the moment or getting through to the next moment. It actually involves rewiring the way our nervous system is working so that we can experience the moment in a new way and make a new choice. Actually create a new learning in our body around each of the old moments that resulted in an older habit or pattern. So a quick example of the difference between coping and healing is
say for instance you're in an argument with your partner. Coping might look like leaving the room, shutting down or going silent. Where healing might look like noticing the panic rising in your chest, your breath quickening. It look like slowing down your breathing so that you can help regulate your nervous system just long enough so that you can stay present and teach yourself a new outcome. That conflict doesn't necessarily mean disconnection or rejection. A lot of people begin a healing journey on their own through journaling, through reflection,
through, you know, self-care practices. Though the reality is most of our wounds were formed in relationship. So to truly heal, we need to be in relationship. Um healing happens when we have the presence of safe and security when we can vulnerably express ourselves whether it is to you know supportive professionals or to loved ones to create the safe space of presence in our relationships is really what most of us need to heal. So any parent figure that is watching it, I want to wholeheartedly um acknowledge to you the enormity of the task of raising another human
being. To be in care of a developing human that is quite literally completely dependent on you is in my opinion there's no greater uh role that we could play here. So after acknowledging that I want to acknowledge also your humanity that you too were impacted by the parenting that you have had in your own childhood which can for many parents make it really difficult to show up in the ways that we truly want to or know that we're capable of. So my message to parents is always one of compassionate understanding of how we have become the person that we have become and how our
childhood has impacted us which then unfortunately is a uh cycle that gets carried on. Though as with all of my work, my hope is that you hear empowerment and compassion in this understanding so that you too can show up giving yourself some new tools so that then you could give your children some new tools as well. So any human or parent that sees themselves in these cycles, um I hope to arm you with not only again graceful, compassionate, understanding, but some new tools to begin to break those cycles and a reminder that in moments of high stress,
um high need when a child is in a disregulated state, those are the moments where we are most likely to sadly enough rely on old patterns where we snap or we disconnect or we shut down. So the the emphasis for parents or any of us trying to change is to practice that change, practice new choices, giving ourselves support, relying on the support of other adults in our life to help us to regulate outside of those moments because in the pressure cooker um of a moment where there's a child disregulated who needs you then to be the person to calm yourself down, right? Sometimes
we quite literally can't unless we're practicing outside of those moments or even taking a moment, taking a couple deep breaths before entering the bedroom of a disregulated child. That will be so much of a better circumstance for both you and your child than just trying to get there so quick. Because when we get there and we're overstressed or overreactive, we might not be showing up the way we want. So even in moments where we have dependence like children, we still have to care for oursel as an individual and make sure that we're eating well, we're sleeping well, we have
outlets for our own stress or support in our own life, whatever it is available so that we can have the resources to show up as the grounded presence that we want to be giving to our children. Chapter 2, the inner child. So inner child oftent times is believed to be an ab abstract or a metaphysical type concept but in reality it's a body-based memory. In childhood before we had logic before we had language we had sensation and we had reflex. In psychological terms this is known as implicit emotional memory. It's that bodybased learning um that again happened in our earliest environments,
which is why so many of us can logically know we're safe. Our partner's not leaving us. Yet in those moments, our body, our emotional body takes over and we spiral into a belief that we're being rejected or that we're being abandoned because our body speaks even quicker than our logical mind does. Which is why for many of us insight and awareness doesn't translate into changed action because we have all of these implicit emotional memories, these scripts in some ways that are running behind the scenes dictating how we feel and then what we do even when we logically know
better or no different. The inner child shows up not only in our reactions but it shows up in our adulthood as our habits and patterns and even our identities. we become so merged um with the habits and patterns that we begin to believe that they are just who we are and we lose sight that they are who we've had to become. So the overachieving child right might feel like we're just driven when in reality continuing to seek success came from a childhood where love was conditional. For others, independence can feel like a choice when in reality it was a protective stance when
we couldn't depend on people around us to show up for us. And sensitivity for some of us feels like our temperament, but really it was born out of an environment that was so unpredictable that we had to develop a vigilance to the environment around us to protect ourselves or to keep ourselves safe. The most common place that we meet our survival strategies are in moments where we're stressed out or where we're feeling disregulated and seemingly mindlessly, right? We reach for our phone and we start scrolling. We reach for food and we start eating. um we reach for substances and we
start using things and we then confuse right those things for just a byproduct of who we are or our lack of willpower when in reality all of those actions are our nervous system or our body's best attempt at finding our way to safety or to some semblance of connection in absence of that. You can tell when you or someone else is reacting from their inner child and not their adult self by the size of their reaction. When it's really big, overwhelming, all-consuming, all or nothing, that's usually a sign that it's from an older time. And I'm sure many of us can
call to mind a moment where someone's reaction took us by surprise, seems disproportionate, left us confused. Those are moments where again of more often than not it signals a similar past experience where that person whether it is oursel or someone else didn't have the support that we needed to cope. So reaction size is a really great marker. Inner child reactions feel so intense and disproportionate to the moment because we are in a state of what is called emotional flooding where physiologically we are actually having that big of a reaction. We have
cortisol coursing through our body and our we are literally flooded. our amygdala or the emotional center of our of our brain is overactivated while the preffrontal cortex the very logical grounding part of our brain becomes underactivated. So in that flooded moment in a very real sense we become that reaction and that's really important to understand because so many of us right we can shame that reaction or have been shamed when someone tells us just to calm down if our reaction doesn't match the moment but in our own bodies it does feel as big as it is that we're experiencing
it because it is big. we are flooded with emotion and we don't have the ability to return as quickly to a grounded state of presence where we can have a more reasonable or maybe responsible reaction. So a really common example of a inner child type reaction is you're sitting at work and you get an email about a meeting that's coming up and you immediately begin to spiral at your desk thinking worrying about getting fired. So in your adult mind, right, you might know that you're doing well at work. your last evaluation went great, but that spiraling reaction of the inner child, right,
might have come from a time where it was more inconsistent your environment or unpredictable. So, in a similar way, now you're bracing for the worst case where that email means that you might be losing your job when in reality that's not the case at all. Understanding human development can help us shift from seeing uh these moments of reactivity, these symptoms or these dysfunctional habits and patterns. Shift from seeing it as a deficit to seeing it as a very intelligent adaptation to our earlier circumstances. So if we can understand all of the ways in which our needs
weren't met or begin to explore what it is that we need it in a given moment, then we can create a shift then in how we're experiencing ourselves in those moments. So in childhood, we really adapt based on one question. We observe and notice what happens when we reach for connection. And if connection was consistently available when we reached out for it, we end up learning that our inner child learns that closeness is safe and we develop a secure attachment. If though when we reached for comfort or closeness, it was unpredictable, it was overwhelming or it was
unavailable, then we might end up clinging toward any possible closeness or connection that might be available. We might end up bracing oursel because at one time we're used to it being so overwhelming or if it was unavailable we might end up pulling away entirely developing the belief again that I don't want it or need it as we do in an avoidant style because it wasn't available to us at one time. So we can think of the inner child as this kind of being inside of us that learned to expect certain experiences from an in another individual within our relationship and then based on those
expectations that becomes what we commonly know as our attachment style. Children develop roles or learn how to show up in their environments and in their relationships to secure connection and belonging because in childhood that is what sustains our existence. So in childhood if we have learned that there was no space for us right we might turn into an underachiever who continues to keep ourselves small not to share ourselves with the world because at one time avoiding that presence in our childhood was safe. Overachieving on the other side of
that is very common. When we learn that love was conditional, we begin to make our sense of worth based on or our value based on our achievement or based on how we're showing up in the world. Again, people pleasing is a very common experience. If in childhood tending to the world, the emotional climate around us created safety, then we continue to be the overextender or the caretaker in our adult relationships. When we ignore our inner child and its unmet needs, it doesn't go away. It continues to drive our habitual over or underreactions or even the roles
that we're playing in our relationships. When we lacked attunement, when we lacked attention, when we lacked safety, our nervous system will continue to seek it out in the only way that it once knew how. And the longer we continue to repeat or live within those habits, the more we become convinced that there's no other possible way to be that is just who we are and how we are not understanding that it is our inner child and it's unmet needs that are driving those habitual reactions. So until we begin to acknowledge the role that our past is playing and begin to create
new choices, we become fused. we call personality patterns that we had to develop to adapt to our earliest circumstances and reflexes. We take them to be a just who we are when in reality they're who we've learned to be. Understanding the impact that our parents had on us really means acknowledging and observing all of the ways in which we are still seeking safety or trying to create security when we didn't once have that. And being able to acknowledge maybe the limitations of our parents as again individuals who were raised by parents themselves who might not have had the
tools can give us a bit of context can give us a bit of grace and compassion maybe for ourselves maybe for our parents. Though it absolutely doesn't remove the impact. It's helpful to hold space for both when we can understand what shaped us and at the same time acknowledge the impact that it might still be having in our life. Becoming aware of our inner child is the first step in changing those actions or those reactions because without awareness we are going to continue to run on autopilot doing the same things that we have always done. Though change
is created through new choices um new choices that begin with our body, new actions that we can take, giving our body a felt sense of security where we didn't once have that. So we really need to pair insight with action. Our nervous system doesn't learn by logic alone. It learns by new lived experiences. Which is why through all the work that I offer, it is built on the foundation of reconnecting with our body, seeing those moments where we're overwhelmed, flooded, reliving older reactions or reenacting our past so that we can actually begin to make those new choices. Again,
quite literally teaching our nervous system a new way to experience the present moment so that I can not only do things differently, I can come to believe and then ultimately feel differently. A really immediate way that all of us can get reconnected with our inner child is by finding an old photograph of that child and taking a moment and taking a look at it. When you look at a photograph, your brain will automatically begin to react to the size of yourself, the vulnerability, your facial expression, and it will immediately then increase compassion and empathy and make
it really hard to dismiss that little being or call it too dramatic or too over the top and help you really to tune into maybe what that felt experience of childhood looked like or was like for you. And even if you don't have a photograph, kind of accessing our childhood through our senses can be an incredibly helpful practice. Um, even just taking a moment right now and closing your eyes and maybe calling to mind a childhood home of yours or maybe a particular room in the home or a space where you spent a lot of time as a child and taking a moment and really
tuning into whatever is coming alive in your mind. Maybe even smelling the aromomas or seeing the sights of whatever it was that was around you. Taking a moment to notice what you're doing. What facial expression do you have on? What does your body look like? How are you holding yourself? Is anyone else present around you? And instead of needing to focus or worry too much about the accuracy or the details or even thinking about what happened, maybe just take a moment and drop in and ask yourself, what did I need? Did I need attention? Did I need safety? Did I need
protection? Because this is really a practice of reconnecting with that being that still is inside of you. It's a practice of empathy, of being with in a compassionate way that part of you so that you can give yourself then an opportunity to begin to incorporate that part into your daily life and begin to show up differently and show that inner child a new response from your now adult self. Chapter 3. Reparenting for lasting transformation. Reparenting the inner child is beginning to step in as a compassionate, nurturing, caring adult, perhaps an adult that you never had present in your life. And now in modern society,
reparing in my opinion is more important than ever because a lot of the habits and patterns that many of us have carried from our childhood out of protection are rewarded in society. Whether it's the overachiever who's exhausting themselves trying to gain value or worth in their actions that is rewarded by a lot of the society around us who sees that as drive who sees that as ambition whether or not it was you know the person who is more shut down in a moment of conflict is being termed as easy lowmaintenance and a lot of those actions I think are rewarded again in society as
it is currently um that aren't actually healthy for us as individuals. So as we think about our inner child and a journey of reparing, I think naturally it can be a little confusing of where to start, how much of my past I need to be aware of to even get started. And the most practical powerful place to start is right here, right now. Um again, it's less about the story or the details of what happened and more about what is happening. The most foundational practice to support reparing is to begin to honor the presence of our past in our current moment. And to do that,
the number one practice I'm always talking about, especially in my membership, self-healer circle, is beginning to develop a conscious awareness of oursel day-to-day. And that can look as simple as what I call beginning a practice of daily conscious check-ins, which is setting maybe an alarm on your phone for one to two times a day or maybe pairing this practice with something you already do every day, drinking your coffee in the morning or something that you do before bed at night. And what the practice really looks like is in that moment that the alarm
goes off or you're taking a moment to pause and to refocus your attention not on what's happening in the world around you, but back to yourself. Beginning to notice how you feel in your body, how is your breathing, how are your muscles, are you feeling at ease in your body in that moment? And beginning to notice what the thoughts are that are going through your mind. The more we begin to practice consciousness in moments where we're not having a reaction, we can begin to build the bridge then to the moments where we need to um show up differently in those more reactionary
or flooded moments. But the practice begins again as all things will with awareness with locating our self uh in real time perhaps in an adult body in different circumstances to remind our inner child that the circumstances have changed. I have things available to me now. Perhaps I can begin to have my needs met in a new way. And that's what reparenting actually is. It's a practice of learning how to show up in a new way in support of those deeper underlying unmet needs. Reparenting is different from coping. Coping is a way, a means to get through each moment,
to continue to allow life to function around us without actually changing what's driving a lot of these dysfunctional habits or patterns. And that's what reparenting actually allows us to do. It allows us to show up in the moment in a new way. So, say for instance, you're waiting for a response text back or an email and a lot of time is going by, right? coping in that moment, you might feel your body begin to elevate with a sense of urgency. And as per that urgency, you might begin to fire off text or rethink your state, whatever you said last to them,
overanalyzing what your response is or convincing yourself even that they must be upset with you. That is why they are not responding to you. Where reparenting might look like noticing that urgency building in your chest, beginning to relax the muscles that you might be tensing, beginning to slow the quickening breath that you might be noticing, and giving yourself just a moment of pause before you react in that old way. So that again you can teach yourself a new experience in that moment which might be distance doesn't mean disconnection doesn't mean rejection or
abandonment instead of just coping with the moment and easing the discomfort as quickly as possible by trying to reestablish connection. So the more we practice in those moments of connecting with oursel of regulating our body of our nervous system in a new way, we're actually reversing that pattern and we're beginning to strengthen the pathway to our prefrontal cortex so that we can continue then to show up in a more grounded, more reasonable, more responsive way into the future. So there are a lot of misconceptions about reparing. Uh, a really common one is that reparing
is a blaming of the parents. Reparenting actually isn't blaming parents or our past at all. It's simply acknowledging the impact that our past is still having on our present moment. Another really common misconception about reparing is that it's bringing us back in time or it's keeping us stuck in our childhood experiences when in reality our nervous system is already doing that. Reparenting is our opportunity to update those past programs into ones that are more aligned with the future that we want to live and to create for oursel. Uh, another common I think
misconception about reparing and really healing in general is that it can be immediate and that is just simply not the case. It took years for us multiple repeated interactions or experiences for all of these patterns to form. So change equally is going to take time, consistent practices of new choices. Though the byproduct is true and lasting transformation. When we begin to reparent oursel internally, we develop a greater capacity to deal with stressful experiences. Our nervous system doesn't immediately react into a state that feels overwhelming or out of control. Um, we learn
how to navigate our reactions. We learn how to downshift or recover more quickly when we do feel stressed out so that we can remain calm and grounded and in choice as opposed to in reaction. The most important step of reparing is to remind oursel of the present moment that we're in and of the safety that is available in any given moment. So really helpful daily practices are something as simple as just taking a look around our current space or our current environment and maybe taking a moment to note three to five neutral objects or even comforting safe objects that you might see
presently available. Uh another really helpful practice is to slow our breathing, slow our movement. All of those slowing downs activate our parasympathetic nervous system, sending signals of safety to us. Now, acknowledgement is really helpful when we can understand what is happening instead of shaming the reaction that we're having in a moment. Reminding ourselves that we are safe in this moment, that it's an old reaction. Not negating what we're feeling, understanding it can help us be more grounded, more present, and more in a compassionate state
of awareness as opposed to a shameful, disconnecting state that many of us often go into at the first sign of stress. One of the main things that you will gain from this reparing journey is you will increase your capacity to deal with life's stressful, upsetting moments. you'll gain a sense of resilience uh where you can stay grounded and intentional in choice regardless of how you feel or what's happening around you. And it also gives you the ability to expand your awareness and your experience of all of the different parts that make us who we are,
including our inner child, because it's still with us today. Not only does it contain all of the trauma and unmet needs, but it's actually a very beautiful space of creativity and joy and playfulness. So the ultimate goal of this work is not to separate oursel from what happened or the parts that are uncomfortable. It's actually to wholeheartedly embrace all that is who we are. And on this journey to get started, it's it's really learning the moments where our body is becoming stressed because those are the moments where those older patterns are going to come to the surface.
So even just taking moments throughout your day to when you're doing those conscious check-ins, noticing how high your stress is feeling. Meaning the more tension you're holding in your muscles, the quicker your breath is, the faster your heart rate, the more stress your body is under. So in those moments, beginning to teach yourself how to calm down. Maybe by pausing what you're doing, taking a walk again, slowing your breath, slowing your movement, that's increasing your capacity, by helping your body come down from a stressful experience. And that's what we want to do is we
want to have a lot of capacity to deal with more and more stress. In addition, of course, to acknowledging those moments are probably a moment where your inner child has been activated. There's probably something similar happening in your environment or the way you're feeling in your body that is contributing to why you're having that level of a reaction. And so these practices really help us do both things at once, which is understand the body's role of our past, how it's coloring our present through increased stress and reactivity, but it's also psychologically and
emotionally making space for all of these different parts, our past, our present, and our future. Emotionally and relationally, we feel more calm and grounded. We begin to engage with other people relationally in a more grounded way. We show up more authentically. We're better able to directly communicate our wants and needs. We can shift out of all of those different roles of the caretaker or the overachiever in our relationship where we're fixing everything into a state where our soul focus becomes remaining authentically connected. We no longer just worry
about losing the people around us. We actually assess whether or not we feel safe and authentic when we're around the people around us. I think a natural byproduct of this journey for a lot of us, those of us who have parents that are still living, is to bring our learnings, bring our awareness and have conversations, bring it back to our parents. And it's really important obviously to understand, of course, if we have access to our parents, right, that not all of the time might we get the exact reaction that we want to receive from our parents. Of course, we want to be
able to share with them the impact that our past have had, their actions or inactions. And we want to hear compassion. We want to hear them validate our experience. We want to hear them having space for how it was for us. And while some of us might receive that, not all of us will receive that from our parents because our parents are humans too, right? they become stuck in their beliefs, their perspectives, how things were for them. And many can feel very defensive or attacked, especially when they tried their very best in a very well-meaning way to show up in care of each of us.
So, it's important to understand and ask ourself what the expectation is that we're having when we're engaging in conversation because of course we all want to have understanding and validation, but can we make space for the possibility that we might not fully get that from our loved ones, our parents especially? So, is it enough for me to validate my own experience even if what I'm hearing on the other side isn't um what I had wanted to see or to hear from my parents. And ultimately, us being honest, whether or not they give us the reaction that we want, whether or not
it brings us closer to our parents and eventually they're able to hear us in a future, what we're doing is we're validating our inner child. So we will have a different experience of that interaction. One where we maybe had a voice for the first time where we didn't have a voice when we were in a course in childhood. A really common experience that many of us have when we learn new information and begin to implement new information in our lives is we very excitedly want those around us, our loved ones, especially our parents to get on board to gain the same perspective or
awareness and to use the tool show up differently. especially if we're gaining the value of them ourselves. Though the reality of it is, as many of us realize, when we begin to change ourselves, change is hard. It takes a daily commitment. It takes action. It takes walking through discomfort, creating capacity where there wasn't. And the reality is for a lot of us, our parents, change is too hard, right? They've become so stuck in their ways that it becomes too unfamiliar. the new information is too much and the new actions are overwhelming. So having that awareness, especially
when we're feeling frustrated that someone doesn't see how exciting this information is or they're not doing the steps that we know that they would benefit so greatly from. Again, we have to understand that while our while our nervous system can create incredible transformation, growth and change, it actually prefers the familiar habits, the repeated patterns because it gains a false sense of security. So, knowing that might give us a little bit more compassion for the person in our life who's struggling to hear new information or integrate new information. And
if you are that person, right, struggling to do something about what it is that you're learning, having that level of compassion as well, right, it is so difficult to translate in insight into action because we're challenging our body, our nervous systems capacity. We're pushing ourselves a little closer, right, out of our zone of comfort and tolerance into that zone of stress. And if we don't have the tools or the ability to deal with stress, we're going to repeat the old patterns and then feel even more shameful and more broken. So the practical then step is
to break whatever it is intention that you want to set for yourself down into the smallest most accessible choice possible and then still knowing that it's going to be uncomfortable. It's going to challenge you and push you out of your comfort zone. uh in my community self-healer circle we talk every month about a concept called a small daily promise. It's really emphasizing the smallalness of the choices that we can stay committed to because the bigger the choice even though naturally if we discover that our life is you know not functioning the way we want it.
It's so natural to want to re reform our life reshape our life you know 20 in 24 hours but then the more new we're doing the more stressed we become. So, it's the smallalness of the promise, staying committed in action, anticipating that it will be uncomfortable, and then showing up through discomfort time and time again, not shaming oursel when we fall back into old habits, but giving oursel every new opportunity to create and maintain that new choice. One idea that I hope anyone would take away from this conversation is an awareness of where we've
come from and why we are the way we are today. And at whatever age that you come to this awareness um I would say that you are a step ahead um of so many other people on this planet. So many people will live and die living in autopilot repeating patterns that don't serve them. So awareness is something to be celebrated, not to be shamed because awareness to some extent is a sense of readiness. And we can't change what we're not even aware is present. So having that moment and seeing ourselves in action or knowing the patterns that we continue to repeat that don't
serve us is the foundation on upon which we build then new choices or new action points. And there's never a kind of concept or it's never a too late. It's a opportunity at any moment that you become aware to show up in a new way and create ultimately a new future for yourself. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think Members community where you get access to videos early adree.
