Dr. Nicole LePera explains why insight alone never produces lasting change and walks through the science of reparenting: The practice of stepping in as the adult presence you may never have had.
About the speaker: Dr. Nicole LePera is a holistic psychologist and NYT bestselling author behind Reparenting the Inner Child.
Timestamps
00:00:44 Chapter 1: The six archetypes of childhood trauma
00:03:02 Personality vs. survival patterns
00:10:47 The hidden trauma you didn’t know you had
00:17:31 The 6 childhood trauma archetypes that still control you
00:23:45 Chapter 2: The inner child
00:29:16 What your inner child actually is (it’s not what you think)
00:36:58 Chapter 3: Reparenting for lasting transformation
00:38:38 The benefit of daily conscious check-ins
00:45:55 Reparenting: the skill that rewires your brain for good
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
I’m Dr. Nicola Perra, the holistic psychologist, founder of Self Healers 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 reparenting 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 1: Becoming an emotionally healthy adult
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 and so many of my clients.
And I really came to understand that 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 allow 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, 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 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 hyper-independent 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 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 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 needed. 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 lack, 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.
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Related Video
“The Body Keeps the Score” Author on Understanding Trauma
Bessel van der Kolk explains that trauma, once seen as an exception, is now recognized as common, emphasizing the importance of understanding experiences and behaviors rather than viewing trauma as something that needs to be fixed. Watch the first lesson here.
