3 Surprising Reasons Why You Have No Childhood Memories ft. Dr. Nicole LePera | Mel Robbins Podcast

(ticking sound) As I looked around, I kept almost telling myself, "Well, what is wrong with you, Nicole? Why aren't you, you know, feeling good about yourself? Why aren't you feeling fulfilled? Why aren't you feeling even connected to this life that you created?" And for me, I landed on the answer being the childhoods that most of us have grown up in were keeping us disconnected from ourselves, from our life, and from our relationships.

If somebody is going, "That's me," what is something, Dr. Nicole, that you want to tell them right now about what this means if you're experiencing this disconnection from what your life is like today, and what you're feeling inside? (instrumental music) Dr. Nicole, thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me, Mel.

Um, I want to start with, um, a particular post that you put on social media that went crazy viral, and it really struck a nerve for me, and y- you posted this thing where you said, "At 32 years old, I realized I was a child in an adult body," and this just hit deep for so many people. What did you mean?

What I... Thank you, um, for, for calling out that post. Um, I think, you know, for a lot of us that, that can be really challenging, um, to hear that about ourselves, and for me, if I'm speaking honestly, it was very challenging to come to that awareness, and what I meant was mainly around my emotions and the way that I hadn't learned, um, of course, in early childhood, to, to tolerate, to navigate, to be able to process my emotions, and in many ways, and I use this language, I think this is the, the part that becomes difficult is, in a lot of ways, I was very emotionally immature in the way that I handled the frustrations, the difficulties, and the stresses of life. Because the reality for me, as I think is the case, which is, I think, why it resonates force with so many of us, is that so few of us, for many different reasons, which I'm sure we'll dive into, many of which today, um, we didn't have those safe environments. We didn't have those emotionally attuned caregivers who themselves learned how to navigate their own emotions. So, I mean, needless to say, parenting is a, is a large, large task in and of itself, and, you know, when we don't have that safety, and when we don't have someone modeling, mirroring, attuning to us emotionally, what we do then appear is like a child in an adult body.

I want to take a step back, because for those of you who have not, uh, read Dr. Nicole's New York Times number one best-selling book, which is a game changer, How to Do the Work, um, I... Or you don't follow her online like millions and millions and millions of people do, can you tell everybody what your life looked like at the age of 32? Because, you know, when you talk about emotional immaturity, it's not like you were running down the street naked, taking a baseball bat to the side of a wall, like kind of rambling gobbledygook. You were high functionally- high functioning and successful. So will you just give everybody, like what does life for Dr. Nicole at 32 look like when you have this realization that, "Holy shit, I can't process my emotions maturely"?