If Your Body Does This, You're Stuck In Survival Mode (& You Don't Realize It) | Dr Nicole LePera

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   It's really clear to me, Nicole, that we see the world through the state of our nervous systems. What would you say the common signs are that might indicate someone has a nervous system that is perhaps a little bit out of balance?

2. NLDr. Nicole LePera0:17

   I think the first sign that really inspired this whole journey into holistic focus, obviously grounded in the nervous system, is a kind of feeling of stuckness. No matter kind of how I'm thinking differently, I can't seem to change those reactions in real time. And I think beneath the surface when we begin to drop into our bodies, it's a sense of restlessness and agitation, I think, for a lot of us, where we feel on edge, we feel uncomfortable in our own skin. I think many others kind of don't even feel connected to their bodies at all. They have a sense of numbness or a lack of awareness that they're even living in a body on the day-to-day. But I think those are the kind of the major signs, because our nervous system is determining how grounded we feel, how aware we are of our surroundings, our ability to think clearly and logically and responsibly about life. And again, when we're kind of driven by dysregulation, we lose access to all of that.

3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:08

   Yeah. I think a lot of the time it also shows up in our relationships-

4. NLDr. Nicole LePera1:12

   Oh

5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:12

   ... doesn't it? Often with those really personal and intimate relationships where we might blow up, you know, get angry-

6. NLDr. Nicole LePera1:21

   [laughs]

7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:21

   ... get annoyed, become overly sensitive to criticism. All these things also indicate a dysregulated nervous system, don't they?

8. NLDr. Nicole LePera1:29

   Yeah, I think the more that we are kind of in relationship with others, but the relationship with ourself included, those are, I think, the moments where we kind of notice not only the dysregulation, what I speak of as the inner child, those moments of the disproportionate reactions where we're saying and doing things that we don't mean. Again, our intention is to show up as a, a caring, connected individual, yet we're blowing up or shutting down. And again, I even think it's beyond those moments of reactivity. I think a lot of us have adapted. We become an identity, we play a role. We kind of function in a certain way within our relationships, whether we become the caregiver to others, the appeaser, and I believe all of that is kind of grounded in these dysregulated moments beginning in childhood, where those were the only way that we have learned to adapt because that was all that the circumstances allowed at one time. Yet our body hasn't updated. We're in a different context. We're perhaps in different relationships, yet we're still driven to see, believe, and repeat the same patterns.

9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:29

   For someone who's never come across the term inner child before, or perhaps someone has no awareness that their childhood experiences might be impacting their adult behaviors and their adult reactions, how do you get this message across to them if they need convincing?

10. NLDr. Nicole LePera2:53

    Yeah, so our, our inner child is a, a part of us that was formed in childhood that we retain, right? It's what learned safety, it's what learned connection, it's what learned how to deal with unpredictability, conflict, disconnection, unmet needs, and I think there's a lot of us-

11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:07

    Mm

12. NLDr. Nicole LePera3:07

    ... especially well into adulthood, where we either don't want to look back, it feels like it was so far ago, we don't imagine it's still creating any impact in our daily life, or if you're like me, I have very little ability to recall-

13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:21

    Mm-hmm

14. NLDr. Nicole LePera3:22

    ... what happened. I can't tell the story necessarily of what was happening or not happening in my home, yet I'm living those reactions. And those are the moments that we were both kind of just talking about, the kind of disproportionate reactions-

15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:34

    Mm

16. NLDr. Nicole LePera3:34

    ... the identities that just don't feel like us, our inability to change even if we set the intention to do so. All of that is kind of indicative of this inner child that's living in our body. The sense of urgency, the overwhelming emotions that quite literally seem to take over no matter what we want to do differently, and I think many of us, again, we meet those moments-

17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:55

    Mm-hmm

18. NLDr. Nicole LePera3:55

    ... in our daily life or in just our daily patterns in general.

19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:58

    Yeah. Okay, so the central idea I feel i- in much of your work, including your brand-new book, Reparenting the Inner Child: The New Science of Our Oldest Wounds and How to Heal Them, is that in childhood we undergo certain experiences. Some of those are positive. Some of those perhaps are not as positive as they could've been. And we adapt to those situations, and those adaptations can become problematic. So I wanna go back to a passage in the introduction of your new book that I really enjoyed reading. "Before the external world begins to shape our instincts, we exist in a state where we feel spontaneous and free, filled with wonder and awe, connected to our natural inclinations, creativity, and imagination. But as soon as we begin to explore our environment, we start picking up cues about how to belong, and with that awareness comes a slow disconnection from our natural wholeness." That's the book in a nutshell.

20. NLDr. Nicole LePera5:13

    Mm.

21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:14

    That's such a powerful message, isn't it?

22. NLDr. Nicole LePera5:16

    Yeah. That's, I think, our human experience, and these adaptations are beautifully evolutionarily driven. They are, they're wiring us to survive those early environments because we need connection to physiologically sustain life, right? We're one of the few, if not the only mammal that is born so underdeveloped, and this is a newer-Finding in our field where, I mean, there was a time where parenting experts, even just a couple decades ago, weren't talking about the immaturity of the human nervous system, right? This idea that children could just soothe or calm themselves on their own. And the reality of it is that we can't. And our nervous system is being shaped even before we're physically born into whatever circumstances we're born into. It's actually being shaped by our ancestors. And again, this is a beautiful adaptation because we live driven by prediction and survival, and we want to, right, more or less learn the environment enough so that we can begin to function in that environment. And in childhood, when relationships are the foundation in which we find safety and security, though of course not all of us-

23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:19

    Mm-hmm

24. NLDr. Nicole LePera6:19

    ... do have those relationships, those are where those earliest adaptations begin. And so ideally, right, we not only have present caregivers, we have caregivers that are grounded and safe in their own bodies. And I think this explains why the large majority of us are not, um, living or do carry dysfunctional habits from our childhood because even if, as was the case for me, I had two very present caregivers who were very well intentionally doing the best they can, even seemingly committed to breaking some of the habits of their own childhood. Yet, without the information, without the capacity in their own nervous system to be calm, grounded, attuned to a different developing individual, a child that is not them, many of us are left more so with unmet emotional needs, where the person around us is dysregulated themselves. So no matter how much they very much want to support us in exploring our environment and venturing out and developing our own unique self, they're unable to, again, because they're carrying the adaptations that served them in their earliest environments.

25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:22

    It's basically, I guess the question for us as children, are we going to be authentic or are we going to attach?

26. NLDr. Nicole LePera7:30

    Mm-hmm.

27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:30

    You know, attachment versus authenticity. And you know, as Gabor Mate will say, "Whenever a child is faced with that choice, they will choose attachment-

28. NLDr. Nicole LePera7:40

    Right

29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:40

    ... over authenticity."

30. NLDr. Nicole LePera7:42

    Right. Because attachment get, is the only way. As a child, they can't step away from the relationship. They can't zoom out and understand all of the different reasons and factors which are contributing to their parents' inability to allow them to be authentic. All they know, and again this is very survival driven, is they need their parent. So they will contort themselves and, you know, in all of these dysfunctional ways. Oftentimes they will idealize the parent because it's safer to imagine, right, that they, the parent is good, and this is, I think, where shame begins to develop. In addition-

Episode duration: 1:54:12