The Holistic Psychologist on Mental Health, Kids & Parenting

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and in this episode, you’re going to hear a conversation between two Dr. Nicoles about some of my most favorite topics in the realms of mental health, children and parenting. I’ve got my dear friend Dr. Nicole LePera, The Holistic Psychologist on the show today, and we’re going to dive into our personal and professional experiences in the world of mental health, how we’ve come to understand mental health diagnoses and treatment differently over time, what we actually need to do to improve mental health for ourselves and our children, how we can be better parents to our kids and ourselves, and honestly, who knows what else we might get into. When the two of us get together, there’s never a shortage of things to talk about, and I thought it would be fun to let you listen in. If you don’t yet know who Dr. Nicole is, let me tell you a bit about her.

She was trained in clinical psychology at Cornell University, the New School for Social Research and the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. She’s the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, How to Do the Work, and the podcast host of SelfHealers Soundboard. As a clinical psychologist in private practice, Dr. Nicole often found herself frustrated by the limitations of traditional psychotherapy. Wanting more for her patients and for herself, she began a journey to develop a united philosophy of mental, physical and spiritual health that equips people with the tools necessary to heal themselves. Dr. Nicole is the creator of the SelfHealers movement, where people from around the world are joining together in a community to take healing into their own hands. In 2019, she founded SelfHealers Circle, the first virtual self-guided global healing membership. SelfHealer Circle has members in over 60 countries who heal as a collective. Her latest workbook, How to Meet Your Self just released this week, and we’re going to tell you all about that. Dr. Nicole, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here!

Dr. Nicole LePera

So, so honored to be here, other Dr. Nicole!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I want to start this conversation by actually having you share a bit of the backstory of what brought you to the work that you’re doing today, because I think a lot of listeners will recognize you, they know your name. I mean, you’ve got millions of people who follow you on social media. But I’m not sure how many people really know the backstory of what brought you to this place. You didn’t just decide, “Oh, I’m just going to be famous on Instagram” one day, and started posting stuff. You have a wealth of your own professional and personal experience and things that led you to that. So let’s start there with what brought you to the field of mental health, and then even further to the holistic approach that you take. What’s the back story?

Dr. Nicole LePera

Yeah, absolutely. I’m actually giggling even hearing you kind of describe being famous on Instagram, social media, or whatever it might be, because I can assure you that there was a past self of mine that very much would never have imagined a scenario of being so visible. And of course, what I’m referencing here is my conditioning, and I think that’s a really great entry point in terms of what brought me here. And so as far back as long as I can remember, I very much was the little girl afraid of the world. I think that’s the best way to describe myself. I mean, anxiety, as far as I was concerned at that time, and for very many decades, was wired into my physiology, into my bones, into my genetics. I saw a lot of fear in my family that was riddled with chronic health issues, living in a city that of course has its own array of stressors. I really understood myself as being one of those anxious beings, and I think from that vantage point of I’m struggling, and from a deep-rooted curiosity, I’m always someone who’s very interested in understanding what I imagined to be a very powerful mind of people. And I began to see differences in myself and my peers as I was aging, and I think to seek to understand what makes people like me different from me. I explored the field of psychology, and very intuitively, struggling myself with anxiety and really seeking to understand the human condition, anxiety included. Before very long, I was marching down the clinical psychologist aisle, many years of training in, and as you even read in my bio, seeking additional training in Psychoanalysis in Philadelphia, where I moved after getting my PhD, quickly set up a very successful practice. And before very long, I was feeling pretty much the opposite of successful very quickly. The anxiety that I had been living with was really near debilitating. I started to physically struggle in a lot of ways, not only just feeling generally exhausted. I started to faint, I started to forget words midsentence, in mid-session with some clients. And actually, before I was seeking to understand a new way of theorizing and changing the way I work, if I’m being perfectly honest, Nicole, I was seeking to understand what the heck was wrong with me. At this point, I was feeling quite frightened that there was something physical going on that was manifesting in these symptoms and actually a physical illness. And the gift fear and the whole world of Google, I did some digging, and I’m very interested and curious, I still have that mindset, I love learning and reading, and I was really blown away because what I started to learn about at that point was not the science I had been taught where everything is wired into our genetics and things are just inevitable. That anxiety, of course, I’m going to have it. And the only thing I can really do is manage it over time. And this was largely what I felt I was tasked with in the room, week after week with my clients, a story of management. Now I’m starting to learn of this whole new version of science of epigenetics, that, yeah, our genetics of course, play a role, but so does our environment. I dove down the rabbit hole a bit more and really started to learn about this body, where our genetics are housed, our choices, our lifestyle, and I landed on polyvagal theory and our nervous system. Again, all of these are concepts that I imagine we’ll talk a bit more about, but for me were entirely new. They began to create an understanding of why I was struggling in the way that I was, and why I was mirroring the struggle of so many clients. By that point, having had the practice for several years, I had seen some clients since it opened. So I had years of a relationship, as you know, week after week, hour after hour, of a lot of insight, a lot of awareness, a lot of plans of actions to break these habits to feel better. And a lot of the report of the same old habitual behaviors, as far as I see it, with increased suffering and increased shame. And what I was learning in my own exploration was really starting to give me some language to why we’re all so universally stuck, and ultimately, what we can begin to do to empower ourselves to do, the choices we can make, even if we do go into a helping professionals office, whatever that might be, week after week, how we can actually create change in our life. And going on my own journey of healing really then inspired me to begin to speak about this. And the joke I was making earlier about not wanting to be visible, what I discovered at that time was how much I did water down myself, my story, for some reasons I’m sure, as you’re familiar with in the field, we’re taught not to be a human, not to share that. I’m listening to a client stuck in the same way, “Oh, geez, I’m stuck too”. There was this overarching message that we are given not to be human. And if I was being honest with myself, I was seeing how much I watered down myself, not only in the clinical room with people, but with others. So for me, when I first created that account, geez, some three plus maybe four, I don’t remember what year it was at The Holistic Psychologist handle first went up on Instagram, for me, it wasn’t an attempt or it wasn’t an intention of becoming famous. I really had no expectation of what would happen. For me, if I’m being fully honest, it was more of an exercise and a commitment I was making to myself personally, to give myself a bit of a platform to challenge this new truth speaking, and also to, of course, begin to share the tools that were working for me.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And it obviously resonated so deeply with people, globally. And I think that speaks to this tipping point that we’re at, more broadly in the fields of mental health and medicine, about how we understand and address these things. The fact that 5.5 million people follow what you’re putting on there on these platforms because they’re having similar experiences, have lived a life of a similar experience of like, “Okay, I’ve done the things I’ve been told to do. I’ve done the counseling, I’ve done the therapy, I’ve had my child in the therapy, I’ve done the medications, I’ve done these things, and I’m still really struggling. What’s wrong with me? What is the missing piece here?” And I think you being willing to put that out there for yourself has been such an interesting social experiment in a way of seeing how much the general population resonates with this, despite the fact that we have more therapists out there, we’ve supposedly got more treatments available than ever before. Yet we also have more people suffering and struggling than ever before. And I think that’s why your story and what you’ve been putting out there just resonates so powerfully.

Dr. Nicole LePera

Yeah, I’m hearing what you’re saying, and I couldn’t agree more. And interestingly enough, the resonance I think people are seeing in my story, whether I’m sharing my journey of conditioning, of struggle, of trauma, the healing journey that I’m still on, people are seeing themselves in reflection. And that’s the reality, I’m getting chills even as I’m saying that. I’m coming to learn and really live into the embodiment of the reality as far as I at least believe it to be, is that we are so much more similar than we are different, yet we spend so much time focusing on those differences. So again, there was nothing necessarily unique about the handle, that was Nicole LePera, showing her story. It was all of the similarities that everyone was seeing in parts of their own journey. And if I’m being fully honest, it wasn’t even just the community of the collective. It was other helping professionals like yourself. I was meeting and connecting with other people in the clinician seat, whatever that might be for them, that we’re coming upon the same realizations, that had begun to modify and shift their practice to work more holistically. So I was really affirmed in having that resonance be so clear, it being so universal. At that point, I kind of really understood what then my journey was to become. I mean, not only was I feeling misaligned working in that older way, just providing talk therapy, I was already aware that I needed to modify the way I was practicing to embody a more holistic approach more generally. It really did highlight the need for these conversations, and also the reality that so many of us are having this same realization or are beginning to have these conversations. So the need for the community, the safe space in which to begin to connect with these other like-minded humans, whatever side of the couch you’re on.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, for sure. And I think that piece about the professionals really relating to what you’re talking about, it’s so interesting, because if we look back in time, and you and I didn’t know each other when we are both starting out on this journey of our careers and all of this, but it’s amazing how much they mirror each other in terms of the same kind of path, of like, “Okay, I’m going to become a clinical psychologist. I’m going to go to the best places and get the best training and I’m going to do this”, and then for me starting to work with children, teens and young adults, and having much the same experience that you were having at that time in your practice with adults, of like, “Okay, wait a minute, we’re making some progress. But boy, we’re getting stuck. I’m using all my tools. There’s got to be something else”, and seeing patterns and seeing them in my own children who were young at the time. I mean, listeners know my story of how I’ve started and come to do the work the way that I do now, and just seeing that play out in my own personal life, as well as in the clinic, and going, “Wait a second, there’s got to be stuff missing here.” And digging into it, getting curious and saying, “Well, gosh, is there anything written about this?”, and finding this whole body of research literature around things like nutrition and lifestyle, and like you said, epigenetics and trauma and all of that. And I remember having this experience of just sort of sitting back one day or after I’ve been reading a few research papers, and going, “How is it that I have spent as many years of my life as I have spent in higher education, getting as many degrees and certificates and things that I have, and no one has ever, ever told me these things before?” I mean, I remember that moment of just feeling like “Wait a second, something is way off here, that I can have a master’s degree in education, I can have a PhD in Clinical Psychology, all of this additional training, and this is the first time I’m hearing about some of these things.” And I think that that’s a piece that the general public really doesn’t understand, that we are not taught these things in graduate school, in our training. This isn’t part of what is touted in the mainstream of medicine or mental health, yet it’s so important, and there’s bodies of research literature around this, but it’s left entirely out of our training, and that really limits what professionals are able to understand and do with people who are struggling.

Dr. Nicole LePera

100%. Even speaking from my experience in the New School for Social Research, which in my opinion, and I think, in the field itself is seen and considered as a little more on the on the front edge, on the cutting edge of research, and it did reflect in the fact that of course, as we all know, or as I’m sure listeners have heard, CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy being the gold standard, of course, that was the pillar of my program, as well as psychodynamic work as well. And we actually had a concurrent to the training that we were doing with supervised videotaped case loads of CBT therapy, we were also trained on how to do interpersonal therapy, a very much more psychodynamic approach. So even coming through an institution that wasn’t as narrow as I know many clinical psychology programs are, I have a very vivid, very difficult experience. I was needing to navigate at that time I wrote my dissertation, and to make a very long story short, I met the concept of mindfulness in my early 20s, and as we all know, it’s a very highly researched concept now. One of the reasons I was attracted to the New School program in particular was they offered a concentration in substance use. And I was very interested in that, I got that concentration, I did a lot of work in outpatient, inpatient, all different types of facilities. And that was very attractive to me, because I was very aware of the concurrence of mental health issues and substance use. So to me that was intuitively, or I believe it to be a necessary part of the training program. So saying all that to say, one of the professor’s headed the research around addiction and the substance use program at the New School. And so I decided, oh, my gosh, I really wanted to do my dissertation on utilizing mindfulness-based approaches. The first seed was planted on really pulling back and trying to understand what substance use was. Again, seeing similar patterns and dynamics of the people who are supposedly having this chip that causes this addiction, and the rest of us who don’t have that chip, it made me question where these behaviors were coming from. So I wouldn’t have had this language at that time very early on in my schooling, though, instinctually I think what I was getting the sense of is: Addiction is a coping mechanism, in my opinion, for deep rooted pain. So I was starting to see an opening, I got really interested in utilizing, or in the possibility of us utilizing a more consciousness or mindfulness based approach, as a way to treat, in particular, the boredom, the distraction and the pain that often results in substance use to mitigate that. So long story short, I very much brought to the table, with this particular professor, all of this, my ideas on it, and I was shut down, to the extent that I had to do a completely different dissertation entirely. Lo and behold, about a decade later, I just saw that he put out a little research paper beginning to investigate the connection himself, but sharing all that to say, at a cutting as institution, I very much tried to be an advocate for trying to do something new, and the door was very much closed on me, I was almost laughed out of the lab, that there was no value in that. Again, I’m not trying to mark that I was the first person who thought of this connection, absolutely not. Though, I think what I’m just trying to illustrate is how much the field really is limiting and doesn’t allow curiosity and exploration outside of whatever they believe their boundaries are.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s so true. And we see that in all ways, shapes and forms in the field, whether we’re talking about the field of medicine or more specifically, the field of mental health, which I mean, the fact that we still even delineate a difference between those two things is just ridiculous to begin with, but we do. We’re so locked into these ways that we’ve thought about and done things, there’s sort of this institutional fear around what happens if we start to get curious or explore these things in a different way. And it in my opinion, is really keeping the field stuck, because we’ve got the data now that shows that just focusing on CBT types of approaches, with or without medication, with or without other kinds of standardized protocols or things that we might do, we’re not consistently helping most people, children or adults in the long term. And I get that that’s a really uncomfortable thing for a lot of people to hear, those of you listening, if you’re seeking out services, it’s not really comforting to hear that our track record with this stuff isn’t really great, particularly when we’re talking about children. But I think it’s really uncomfortable for our colleagues in the field to realize that, “Okay, wait a minute, we actually don’t get great long-term results with most people.” To me, I look at that, and I take that as a challenge. I get curious about that and go, “Okay, well, why is that? And how can we do that better? What are we missing? What do we need to understand?” Unfortunately, a lot of the people in our field just sort of shut down to it and go “Well, no, this is the evidence-based approach. This is what we need to do.” And even beyond that, really shut down discourse and dialogue, whether it’s on social media or whether it’s in our research journals or our teaching institutions or whatever around exploring other things. It’s unfortunate, because we have more people than ever before at this moment in time who are suffering with these kinds of symptoms, and yet we spend a lot of time in the field just fighting about whose approach is best or not, what we should be talking about or not talking about, and it’s like, we’ve got a world of hurting people, we’d better figure out some better ways to help people.

Dr. Nicole LePera

Yeah, I’ll be the first that I talk about often, even mapping the concept of new or unfamiliar as it pertains to healing. When we want to create new habits, we’re usually going out of the habits that were usually living in unfamiliar space. And I apply the same logic. I saw the same in myself. I wasn’t gleeful, necessarily, when I met this information. There was a little part of my subconscious mind that was rolling its eyes that was saying, “Okay, I read this in a book, and maybe I even read case studies, I’m the exception. I’m going to show myself how this doesn’t actually work, that my anxiety is boiled into my bones, and there’s no way to actually heal.” So the way I understand when people do kind of resist or even downright trying to squash new ideas, or can’t even access that space of curiosity, I understand it. Oftentimes, it’s that protective function. Something you’re saying feels very threatening, mainly maybe because it’s new, or maybe it has an imagined implication or consequence that might impact me. So now, what I’m responding to isn’t necessarily the information itself, but my reaction to the information. I just want to go back to something you said too about CBT in general, because I want to just take it a bit further, and say that I am of the opinion, and I believe that research even has documented this, that talking about trauma in particular in the format of CBT, actually can not only not create change or be helpful, it can actually be detrimental. It can be problematic. And I just want to apply this for your population here listening. Most of our trauma in adulthood that we’re carrying is nonverbal. When we have children who are not at a developmental stage where they have their full developmental verbal capacities, trying to help them talk through it is an impossibility. To heal trauma, we have to speak the language and hear the language of trauma, which is again, in our bodies. And as far as I want to say, again, speaking about it can not only be impossible, again, when you’re working with a preverbal child, but it can be even more problematic.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And that’s so important. For those of you listening and hearing that, this is about stages of development. For those of you who have chronologically older children who may have communication impairments, or cognitive impairments, or neurodevelopmental challenges that don’t allow them to access verbal language in the way that we might expect for a child of their age, this applies there too. We can still treat them though, and that’s the piece of it that so many parents feel like they can’t start to address things with their kids until they’re able to talk about it. They say, well, they told us counseling is not really going to be helpful because they’re not real verbal or they have auditory processing issues or language-based difficulties. And it’s like, well, I think going to a counselor is probably not going to be all that helpful for a lot of the things you’re dealing with anyway. However, there are approaches that will be helpful. Sitting and talking to someone isn’t always going to be the ticket, but there are a lot of things therapeutically that we can do to get at that, and we’ll get into that, I think in a little bit, because I do want to give people some ideas around that. But I want to touch on how we sort of talked about our experience in the field and how we came to look at all of this in a different way, and I want to talk specifically about the issue of mental illness, mental health diagnoses and treatment. You and I are both trained as clinical psychologists, which is just sort of ironic, because that branch of psychology we went into is really about learning how to label symptoms. Do assessment, and then give people a label, right? And yet, you and I both have gone so far. I tell people I’m such a strange clinical psychologist, because actually I do not give people diagnoses or labels, unless there is a real compelling reason, that they need it for insurance or to get school services or whatever, because I just have come to understand and believe both through looking at the data as well as my own experience with people that I’m not really helping them all that much by just giving them a diagnosis or a name for it. I need to understand why a person’s having those symptoms. And so I want to just go there because I know that you spend a lot of time talking about people understanding and getting to the root of what’s going on. And I often say, I can have 10 kids come into clinic this week, they all end up with a diagnosis of ADHD, but the things underlying what’s causing those symptoms of inattention, impulsivity, dysregulated behavior, might be very different in each of them. And so to say, well, they all fall under the same diagnosis, therefore, here’s the treatment we do for that, really misses the boat because I need to understand what’s going on for each of them individually. What is their history, their nutrition status, their stress level, their trauma history, what’s going on in the family environment? That’s what helps me develop a treatment plan that’s actually going to address their issues. So I’d love your thoughts on that, how you’ve evolved from this idea of our role as mental health clinicians is to give a diagnosis and then treatment, how do you think about that differently now?

Dr. Nicole LePera

I want to begin my answer by acknowledging the difficulty of programs, of trying to systematize behaviors into categories, because why do we do that, as far as I believe it to be? To understand, right? We want to understand what we’re seeing, and we have to have a point of reference, and then maybe how that applies to what gets to happen next in terms of treatment. I can understand the reasoning behind, even back to what we just talked about, programs in and of themselves, and needing to have a gold standard that’s tested and validated and all that. I understand the need for things like diagnoses, and gold standards, and research, and all that comes within it in terms of regulating a field, in terms of understanding human behavior. And I even am sensitive to the reality that a lot of people might feel a bit of relief when they have that label of understanding. If you didn’t have the language to define what’s wrong, what’s happening to me or why I’m struggling, I’m sure even for some listeners having that, “Oh, this is why. Now I have not only a point of reference, I might have a community to connect with, other people”, who might not have the same individual journey like you’re sharing Nicole, but we can understand, right? I might have a direction or a place to go for treatment, I might have things I can read, right? I have information. I might even have relief, I might have imagined something was desperately wrong with me, and now “Oh, no, it’s not. It’s wrong with all of us.” In this way, I can feel relieved in some sense. So I do want it to start there, because I understand where they come from and I understand the value that it has for some people. However, I think it can become a problem to some extent, if again, we’re identifying with our label, we’re not giving ourselves any possibility of living or making choices outside of what that label allows. And then furthermore, to speak to your beautiful point, we’re closing ourselves off from understanding the different underlying causes that might be contributing to the same symptoms that we’re putting together in the same category. So I am wholeheartedly in agreement, we do need to figure out a way to explore a more individualized way of working with our clients, as I imagine many clinicians do. Another thing I want to just be honest about, about labels and diagnoses, is a lot of times they are really just connected to treatment, to protocol, to how many sessions you even are allowed to continue to come into my office. So if I’m being fully transparent, back when I was a practicing clinical psychologist in that office in Philadelphia, people would come and work with me one on one, week after week, when it came time for that diagnosis conversation, which was usually if there was insurance involved, or they wanted to get reimbursement or something, I had a document involved, documentation, we would have that conversation. And if I’m being fully honest, I would have a collaborative conversation. It wasn’t me decreeing. I very much sat on the same side of the couch. It was like, “Hey, what would you think your diagnosis is?” And we had an exploratory if it was completely out of left field, and we had a practical conversation of how that would apply, and what would result in terms of their treatment. So I’m very sensitive to the fact that diagnoses follow us. They’re now on our medical record, in addition to giving us or denying us access to our services. So I really, again, transparently, took a very collaborative approach, understanding what diagnoses were and what the limitations are of them, as I believe them to be. I never spoke from my mountaintop in decrement because I understand all the weight that comes with diagnoses for those of us who don’t necessarily feel empowered by them.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, and I think especially when we’re talking about in the realm of children, there have been studies done on the long-term impact of giving kids labels and not also empowering them with information and an understanding that the label doesn’t define them. If we’re not having those conversations, a lot of kids grow up, and I see them as older teens and young adults, feeling very broken, feeling like there is something intrinsically wrong with them that cannot be fixed. And so I think we need to be sensitive to that, and it’s tough because parents and professionals are also trying to access services and things, and these are the doors through which you do that. And so it’s really tricky. I think you were talking about this idea of decreeing a label, like giving the label, and “Okay, here’s the treatment.” And we’re going to branch into talking about what you think is really important as far as how people are understanding what actually helps improve these symptoms, because I think what happens, we’ll talk to the parents listening, there’s this idea, and it comes out of our experience with the medical profession of when something is wrong, when we’re having a symptom, when we’re having a problem, you go to the doctor. And the doctor looks at that and goes, “Oh, yeah, okay, here’s the condition that you have, “Oh there’s a broken bone in your life, okay, you have a diagnosis of a broken femur,” or “Oh, your blood sugar is too high. Your hemoglobin A1C, okay, you have a diagnosis of type two diabetes,” that’s the framework that we have for this kind of stuff. Something is wrong, there’s a problem, we go in, and the doctor says, “This is the name for what you have. And now because we have the name for this, here is the treatment that fixes this.” So we take that experience and understanding into the realm of mental health or neurodevelopmental issues or whatever, and we think as parents, and I totally get where this comes from, “Okay, my kid’s having a problem. I go, I get on a waiting list. I wait to see the psychologist or whoever, the developmental pediatrician, whatever, I go in. Okay, they’re going to tell me what’s wrong with my child, and then they’re going to prescribe the treatment for how to fix it.” And what I know from 25 years of working with parents and kids, that’s such a common way of thinking about it, and yet there is so much heartbreak and frustration on the other side of that of going, “Okay, wait, we’ve gotten all the labels, and yet, what I’m discovering now in this whole realm is that doesn’t mean that there’s a specific treatment that fixes it.” And I think that’s one of the pieces that’s so different and leads people to feeling so frustrated. We have so much hope that okay, we’re going to get in there, and we’re going to get a name, and okay, now we know what to do. And the reality is that what to do isn’t necessarily connected to what the diagnosis is, or doesn’t necessarily work for everybody. And then parents are left for themselves or their kids going “Well, now what? Well, now what do we do?” And what I see is so many people who lose hope, who just go, “Well, my kid is the one who can’t get better.” Or “Okay, I guess I can’t be I can’t be fixed from this.” And you and I have such a different view of that, and so I’m just curious about your thoughts on that. Do you see something similar, in terms of how people approach that, and then the disappointment and the fear and the heartbreak on the other side?

Dr. Nicole LePera

Yeah, and again, I want to begin with sensitivity that when we’re seeing a loved one, especially a child, well, I can’t imagine the lived experience of having a child because I’ve chosen not to have them myself, but when I see my own loved ones hurting, we do want to relieve their suffering. So to have that one diagnosis, that one treatment, that is manageable, right? That gives us a path to relief. So I understand why there is almost an urgency too, and I’ll speak from my own very personal lived journey with my mom in particular, who suffered undiagnosed or was unable to find the exact diagnosis of chronic illness for the entirety of my life. I lived that experience, I guess that is what I want to simply say, of being the loved one, watching my mom suffer, or being at doctors’ offices with her as I did for about a decade before I understood that I was exhausting myself and not caring for myself in those moments, but I would be right alongside with her in that almost swing from hope, “Will this be the doctor that finds the diagnosis and gives me the cure? Gives my mom the pathway to feeling better?”, to then that hopelessness when it wasn’t that, or when that treatment didn’t work, or when it was just yet another medication with its own set of side effects. And again, it didn’t get to the underlying cause. So I very much lived that, up until my mom’s death this past year. Up until the end, she was actively being treated for a multitude of different things, in my opinion, trying to endlessly seek an underlying cause that they weren’t looking at. They were trying to get the surface level symptoms under control. And they weren’t actually looking at what the symptoms were, where they were coming from. So I can speak from the lived journey. Again, it’s not in terms of me with a child, it’s me with my mother and how it is to be on that rollercoaster and feeling, because I think this is also part of the conversation, feeling reliant on these doctors as the only ones who have the information. I’ve heard from many people in the SelfHealer community, as well as being actually downright told they’re wrong when they’re trying to advocate for themselves about symptoms or inner knowings that, “You know what, doctor? This isn’t feeling right, the diagnosis you’re giving or the treatment you’re offering. It’s not actually what’s happening with me”, so many people are deferring instead. And I watched that in my mom, this idea that the doctors do hold the answers. And I saw in many, actually, one moment in particular comes to mind with my dad, not my mom. My dad started, as he aged, to have his own health problems. And because we go right in to the doctor to find the cause of it, in the same cycle, I was actually in a doctor’s appointment with my dad. I won’t share the hospital that it had happened at, but I was appalled when he was getting prescribed a new medication. And I had gone, because I started to become a little aware of the need to advocate. So I came with a very much different intentional mindset into that particular doctor’s appointment. It was in the more recent past. And so my dad was having a conversation about a particular medication that he was going to be prescribed, I directly asked the doctor what the side effects are, to which I got responded, “Side effects? We don’t worry about those”, in the most condescending tone I have ever heard. At that point. I was like, “Oh, I see where you’re at.” And ultimately, I deferred it to my dad if he wants to take the medication. It’s his body and his choice. And I knew that was a choice he was going to make. So anyway, long story short, saying that to say I think that so many of us have been conditioned from generations prior where doctors were the gatekeepers of these answers, and it comes out then in the treatment room, where we defer, even if we have this inner knowing, and especially applying this to parents, you’re the one who knows your child the best. I’m sure you have so many inner urgings, or I can imagine many listeners have had those moments where what you’re hearing, or the test that’s being run or the diagnosis that’s being given or the possible treatment plan is touching something inside that just doesn’t feel right. And my hope is in the field and all the fields in general, that we shift — even outside of the field, my hope is in terms of global humanity, is that we were able to shift to a much more collaborative relational style in medicine, in psychology included.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I agree. We need that because we need the experience and the knowledge of professionals in certain cases and with certain things, but we also need to, as you’re talking about, acknowledge and respect and seek to understand the person’s own experience. I know there’s so many parents nodding along. I hear from so many moms, in particular, who have had those experiences in therapist offices, in physician offices, of being dismissed, of being shut down, of being told their intuition doesn’t matter, that those aren’t appropriate questions to be asking. And so I know that that resonates so deeply with so many of you listening. So I want to branch into this idea, then. You talk about this concept of self healing. And so we’ve sort of paved the way for that, acknowledging that there’s lots of good things that the fields of psychology and mental health more broadly and medicine can offer, but there’s also shortcomings. And so that leaves people feeling like, ”Well, what could I possibly do?”, like this idea of self healing, probably to some people, they’re like, “Well, what do you mean? If I’ve been to see the professionals and they haven’t known how to help me, how am I supposed to figure out how to help myself?” And I think it’s such a powerful term, SelfHealer. I view it as empowering, but I know there are some people who view it as “Oh, you’re just telling people to fix themselves.” Talk about where that idea comes from, and why you think that’s such a powerful paradigm shift for people to make.

Dr. Nicole LePera

Much like you, when I started to create and use the hashtag #selfhealer when I created that Instagram account, the way I frame and think about and I hope speak to the concept, is that it is an action of empowerment, of participating, becoming a conscious participant on our journey, wherever it might be that we’re on our journey. And I have seen, over the years of this hashtag and this concept being thrown around the internet, I have seen how so many people land on that idea, exactly like you’re sharing, to call this belief, that it means self in absence, or self on an island and absence of other supportive professionals. And again, of course, that was never my intention. I have the belief and I believe that neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology is even starting to reflect that a bit in the science, that we are interpersonal creatures. Really simply, that means we’re wired, we need other humans, our nervous systems actually develop in connection with other humans. We can’t survive, let alone thrive if we don’t often have the safety and the security or the resources that we share in community with other people. So what self healing really means to me is becoming an empowered participant. For all of us that have deferred to other people who have felt reliant on, or the many of us who, again, I’m going to speak really honestly, don’t have access. Over 50% of the SelfHealers Circle is outside of the United States. I very intentionally refer to the SelfHealer community as global, because I have to pull back and choose to pull back out of the context that is just the United States, where we do have access. And maybe in some parts of the country, you have to drive, and this is part of the case, you have to drive a long distance. So you might still be able to get there. There are countries where there aren’t services, or there are waitlists that are years upon years long. Or if we really want to talk about what some countries are living under, restriction of information, there isn’t this information even available to them. So again, saying all of this to say self-healing is being an empowered participant, for the many of us who can’t have, maybe we don’t have the financial resources, maybe there is the clinician in the town that we live in. I know with any practitioner more or less, whether you’re the clinical psychologist or not, with a huge price tag of that education, what fees are associated with these types of services. And the reality of it is they’re out of the affordability of many of us. So again, self-healing is learning how to be an active participant, a conscious participant, and is also highlighting the reality that even if we have the resources and the access to these helping supportive professionals, a lot of life happens outside of these rooms. A lot of our habits and patterns are where we’re stuck in outside of these rooms, in our relationships, not feeling safe in all of the different ways. So the tools in my opinion, the work of self-healing has to be applied outside of the rooms. For many of us, the journey of self-healing, even me, reconnecting with my family after choosing to probably take almost the better part of two years out of contact with them for my own healing journey, I started, I reengaged contact with them in the framework of family therapy session. So I am not one to ever suggest to people “Don’t get support. Don’t go on medication.” Many wild planes that I’ve heard said that I’ve said, that I would never say in a million years, I don’t believe them to be true. That very well might be part of your journey, I want you to be an empowered participant. I want your intuition to play a part in that room, I want you to be a conscious being outside of that room, so in that subconscious mind where all the habits and patterns are stored, you can actually use the tools that you and your therapist are talking about, and actually create change and transformation or relief in your life.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Absolutely, and, for all of you listening who are in the parent role, this idea of self-healing for ourselves as the adult, but also broadening that to this idea of self-healing for our children, or through the relationship with us, is such a powerful thing. And I know some people are probably thinking like, “Well, what does it look like to heal myself? What does that mean? I’ve never been to school for this, what would I possibly know about how to help myself or how to help my kid with these issues?” What do you say to that?

Dr. Nicole LePera

I think the first statement I make is that you do know. There’s a part of you, that intuitive sense, that is somewhere inside, right? Again, we are living, and the way I’m going to answer this in terms of the tool that I do want to offer right here, right now, so much of us are living in that autopilot, wrapped up in those subconscious habits, so disconnected from that intuitive place, where I’m attesting, you can kind of drop into for reference. You can intuit, you can attune to your children, you can get a sense through nonverbal cues in terms of what they need. Of course, this is a very tall order. I’m not trying to minimize the task of parenting in the least, though there is an intuitive place in all of us, as far as I’m concerned, that has that inner knowing, that knows what we need and that knows how to show up as a loving, compassionate being that again, I believe we are all wired to be. So because the not knowing, the belief of not knowing, and maybe the habits and patterns that are keeping us separate from that not knowing our coloring, our day, you will always hear me talk about that concept that I discovered in my early 20s, of mindfulness, of consciousness, of learning how to actually be that participant. And how that happens is when we first become conscious to ourselves, because that autopilot, those habits, and again, I’m imagining some listeners might not even think that they are a habited person, I assure you: Humans are habitual creatures. We begin our habits the moment we open our eyes. If you observe yourself for a week or two of time, as I offer the tools to do so in the new workbook How To Meet Your Self, you will see how your mornings tend to look the same, your afternoons tend to look the same, the way your meals are tends to look the same. Let’s drop in a bit deeper: Your thoughts tend to be very repetitive, you tend to narrate your life in the very same way, or your happenings of your life, day in and day out. Deeper still, you tend to recycle the same feelings or you’re caught in the same cycle of feelings. You don’t have access to the whole range of emotions of the human experience. We’re stuck in cycles in our relationship, and really, the list goes on. So to simplify, if anyone’s wondering how the heck do I start? How do I help myself? Change can only happen when we’re in that conscious space because if we’re not going to do something differently tomorrow and learn how to watch our habits or make that new choice, not do the thing we always do, the thing we always do is going to be what happens next. So learning how to tune into our consciousness for some of us, that means accessing a different part of our brain entirely than we’re used to living in. It might mean carving out the time in our day. The SelfHealers membership is very much self-directed, which means when you enter the membership, there’s a whole bunch of courses that you have access to, and there’s always a current course of the month where there’s workshops that are active around that. However, the first course we ever released, some three years ago now, we’re celebrating our three-year birthday, that’s wild to me, on November first. The first course we ever released will still be foundational to this day is called A Week in Consciousness. Every new member is highly suggested, regardless of all the other courses that they might want to check out, or the even the current course, to check out and to make that daily commitment to create consciousness, and we talk about the consciousness check-in, setting aside time in your day, it can be as simple as asking yourself two questions. Maybe you want to set an alarm on your phone. In the morning, maybe you set it for 2pm, you forget, 2pm comes, your alarm goes off. And you can do two steps in that moment: First step is simply notice: Where was your attention? Were you so immersed in whatever it was that you’re doing, your work tasks, interacting with your children, having a conversation with your boss, doing the dishes, whatever it is? Or was your attention, attention is so powerful, somewhere else? Where you lost and thought about the argument this morning, were you worrying about the upcoming presentation tomorrow? Or were you just somewhere else? I spent so much time somewhere else, I called it my spaceship. It was almost like a blankness of my mind. It wasn’t that I was necessarily thinking about anything, I was dissociated. I was in a shutdown, disconnected place. So when that alarm goes off, we’re going to check in, where’s our attention? If we’re not, which is likely, we’re not going to be fully immersed, present, living, the whole moment feeling the sensations, really being here, we can then make that action, make that commitment to tune into our presence. We can get a couple of hooks, as I call them, for our attention. It was, in my mind, somewhere else, it was blank. I can hook my attention on the fact that my body is breathing at any given moment. I can just take those five next breaths and just pay full attention to my body as it breathes. Some of us might want to use the environment, especially if we’re living in a dysregulated body, especially if we have health anxiety, which I’m very familiar with. It might be to ask yourself those questions that maybe some of you have heard of, “What can I see, touch, taste?” I can use my senses to hook my attention on them. When I’m fully here, in my body at this moment, as it’s being experienced, whatever might be happening, whatever I’m listening to, talking to, experiencing in terms of my sensations, I’m being conscious because I’m in observation. I’m able to note that I feel a little sweaty right now, my heart just went up a little bit. I’m hearing a noise over here in the corner. I’m in that conscious state of awareness. When we’re in that state, that’s the foundation of learning how to shift out of autopilot. Because until we’re there in the moment where that other old habit came in, that other old habit is going to be what happens next. That conscious participant I was talking about just a few minutes ago means making new conscious choices. We can’t make a new choice unless we’re conscious. So again, the foundation for any sort of journey of self-discovery, journey of transformation, maybe even just journey to explore what’s underlying the symptoms that we continue to talk about, begins in consciousness, because we have to be present if we want to have the conversation on lifestyle. If you do come to the awareness that some of your symptoms are coming from some of the lifestyle choices you might be making, we have to begin to make new lifestyle choices. So we need to be in that conscious state to even integrate those new changes. So again, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, I can’t say it enough. And that will then give anyone who’s like, “Well, I don’t really know why I’m stuck or what’s wrong or what’s underlying all of this,” the more conscious we become, we get to see the patterns, we get to see the things that we’re doing, we get to see the thoughts that continue to color those moments and send us in that explosive reactivity. And then we can understand what’s going on. And in that conscious space, not only do we have understanding, we can make a new choice. We can calm our body down if we need to, we can shift out of that endless narrative that isn’t helpful and begin to pay less attention to it. There’s endless things and we can do once we’re conscious of what’s happening for us. And again, I continue to highlight this because when we’re locked and loaded in that autopilot, I always say it’s like we’re living with those blinders on. We almost aren’t even aware, like I was sharing earlier, that we are as habitual as we are, that, oh, my gosh, these choices are creating how I feel or what I’m doing. we’ve removed ourselves from the equation entirely. And again, it’s understandable because when we’re on autopilot, we are reactive. Things happen. We do the thing we do every time it happens, and we feel shameful afterward. How can we not feel like a victim to our circumstances? Because there is no space for that new choice, because we’re not conscious to make it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Such a powerful, powerful thing for people to understand because it gets to the root of why so many of us in so many areas of our lives feel like we can’t or aren’t doing the things that we know we should do or want to do, right? Whether that is health choices that we know we need to make, the patient who comes in week after week and is like, “Listen I’m really anxious. I know you’ve told me that not drinking caffeine all day long, or all of these things would be helpful to reduce my anxiety, but I just can’t get myself to do it”, or the parents who come in are like, “Okay, I want to be responding to my child in this other way. I want to be implementing these tools and strategies, but I’m yelling before I even know it, I’m just not able to apply it.” And, to me, what I really think is true is that we don’t so much have an information gap about what would be helpful, we have an implementation gap. And what you’re talking about with a starting point of developing this conscious awareness, gets to the crux of that implementation gap, gets to the root of why it is that we struggle to do the things that we know would be helpful, or that we want to change. It’s because of that. But I think that’s sort of an unsexy thing for people to think about, right? It’s like “Oh, wait, yeah, I have all these issues, my kid has all these issues, and you’re telling me that the starting point is to become more aware. No, I wanted the 17 steps, like eat this, do this, don’t do this. And you’re telling me that I need to stop once a day or twice a day and just become aware of where my mind is.” But it’s that powerful, isn’t it?

Dr. Nicole LePera

It’s absolutely that powerful. And let me add another complicated aspect: What we’re being asked to become aware of is uncomfortable. It’s all of the emotions that that lack of awareness has provided us that distance, that safe distance from. There’s a reason we’re locked in these autopilots. There’s a reason for me I was living on that spaceship, because there was so much overwhelming discomfort in my body without that coregulating figure or an emotionally attuned parent figure to help me. I was left in that overwhelming feeling. Who wants to be there? That doesn’t go away, even if I got so good at being aloof, “Nothing bothers Nicole”, as I was described once, to my horror, in my late 20s, when that was the farthest thing that I felt myself to be, because I thinking I was emotional and connect it to my world. Little did I know that I was that distant from all of myself, out of protection. So I really again, want to very sensitively honor what we’re requesting people to do, which is look at this hard crap. And all of those best set intentions that we can feel really shameful and frustrated about when we don’t keep them, all of the knowing better, all of the tools, when we’re creating those thoughts for a different future outcome, we’re in a different powerful part of the brain that I continue to speak about, the prefrontal cortex. You can imagine different future scenarios that are not impulsive, grounded in the moment and reliant on past solutions to problems that don’t work. However, when the problem occurs, when we’re screaming and yelling, we’ve already dipped into our emotional brain, it took over our prefrontal cortex. I’m simplifying this. It went offline, all of that beautiful insight and awareness, we actually don’t have access to anymore. So we can carry, and many of us do, the shame that we should have known better. In reality at that moment, we couldn’t have known better, we couldn’t have because we were so dysregulated, our emotional brain took over, and maybe again, out of protection from an environment where once we had to do that. So as unsexy, as simple, yet complicated as I believe the practice of becoming conscious is, and as uncomfortably difficult as I know it to be, in my opinion, again, that remains the basis of making new choices, because without consciousness, we don’t have access to change.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And I take this even a step further by saying to parents, and all of you who are regular listeners of the show know I’ve talked about this many times, is that the hard reality of it or the uncomfortable reality of it, is that if we want to see change in our children, whether that’s a change in our typically developing child or a change in our child who has all kinds of symptoms and challenges, if we want to see change in our kids, the truth is that that starts with us. And that starts with us understanding and being aware of, and willing to shift ourselves. And it’s just a fundamental truth about how you support change in kids. And yet, there’s a lot of push-back on that from some parents, who are like, “Wait a minute, I’m super uncomfortable with that. I waited on a waiting list for three months to come in for you to tell me what you’re going to do to my kid to fix this, or what my kid needs to do, and you just looked at me and said, ‘Well, we need to start with some things with you.’” And yeah, that’s what you’re talking about is the root of that, because until we can be aware of and change ourselves, we can’t expect that from our kids. They develop, literally their brain development happens in the context of their relationship with us. And so if we are not able and willing to look at our side of the equation, and the one thing we can control, which is ourselves, we’re not going to get very far with kids. And I think that’s ultimately why a lot of pediatric focused therapy misses the boat, because the focus is on you drop your kid off for 45 minutes, someone will do something with them, and it’ll be different, and no. That isn’t how that’s going to work. Most of my work with family starts with the parents. A lot of people are like, “Well, what do you mean you’re not going to meet with my kid every week?” It’s like, “Why don’t we start with you?”, for exactly the reasons you’re describing. And I’d like you to take that a bit further, because I know that you really believe the same, that if we’re going to have change in children, it needs to start with us. And I’d love for your perspective about why that’s so critical that we start with ourselves.

Dr. Nicole LePera

I always love you and love your work, and I’m so indebted to the reality that you have to be the spokesperson to share this as kind of so foundational in your approach, because again, I get asked, of course, on the internet and within the SelfHealer community often, questions from parents about whatever it might be, whatever issue or concern they have around their children. Very well meaning, obviously, wanting to relieve the suffering, help support their child. And my answer is always some version of turning that reflection back, of honoring the role, again, like you’re sharing very beautifully, that the parent is playing. So I get to do that over social media at a distance, which is why I say, I love you, I’m indebted to the reality because I did work with a lot of parents and children when I was in my Philadelphia practice, and through my training as well. And I had that same experience of it being like, “Here’s my kid. Tell me I didn’t do anything wrong, fix my child, and then return them to me when life can return back to normal. Thank you”, and very similar to you, I had a protocol of involving them. I probably wasn’t as strict as you were because I didn’t have this information back then, but again, intuitively, I understood that there was something in the dynamic of the relationship, there was a role that the parent either could be playing a bit more of, that needed to be involved in the treatment. It wasn’t enough just to open the car door, let the kid run out and into my room, and then literally, “I’m not going to see you again until the next time I need to sign something.” So very similar to you, and again, my belief is the same in terms of we are impacting the developing brains, we are playing a role in terms of our relationship, and I am never someone who’s going to put blame, I will never use the word blame because what I understand is, all of the ways we are in our relationships with our children, with our peers, with our romantic partners, whoever it is, is impacted by what we learned, was modeled, taught, how our own brain developed in childhood. We are all humans raised by other humans. So we are impacted by the generations that came before us. And then of course, as information becomes available, the famous quote, “When we know better, we can do better,” right? And, again, whether or not we have access is a big question to all of this information, to then apply them. But ultimately, again, we are impacting every person around us all of the time. So you’re never going to hear me even use the word blame, because in my opinion, there is no blame, there’s underlying causes that I don’t believe are blamable. They’re a function of the environment, of the humans, of the political context, and of many different things, that again, for some of us, and for most of us are largely outside of our control. They’re just the patterns that we had to adapt to cope with the environments, the relationships, and the things that came before us. Though, again, this goes back to that empowerment of self-healing, I believe wholeheartedly in our ability to change and transform ourselves at any point of our life. Our brain is neuroplastic, our body can change and do extraordinary things. So as parents, to show up differently, I know, very well intentionally, when we see a child struggling, we want to tell them something to relieve them, or do something in that moment. And for many of us, it’s all of the moments that are before that, of developing that emotional safety and security, of developing regulation in our own nervous system so that when a child is crying, we can stay regulated enough to be that right point of safety. And that’s just one example of many, of how I believe it is important to include the parent, include the person, whatever relationship we want to change. Let’s throw parenting aside just for a quick minute: I want to change my relationship with my romantic partner, I want to feel differently in my relationships. Again, I used to do this, “Well, I’ll pick a different partner”, or “You just stop doing this. I don’t want to feel this way.” And again, my approach still applies the same. Absolutely not, you’re a participant in the relationships around you, whether or not it’s with your peers or with your children. So again, the version of my answer is always the same. It’s what role are you playing? What habits and patterns are you creating or bringing to the table that are keeping these dynamics in place? And again, can you begin to change? So I wholeheartedly am and always be supportive of your work, because being on the front lines, as you are Nicole, is literally life changing, is world changing for these families that you’re working with. And I agree in terms of building that foundation on the parents’ role in that journey is so important.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

You had a post recently that I just love that you put up, you said traumas are stored in the body and revealed in relationships, and I thought that’s so perfect. And that really is the essence of what we’re talking about here. We bring our own histories of everything we’ve experienced, been through, good, bad and otherwise, and we bring that into all of our relationships, including our relationship with our kids. And so you’re right, it’s not about blame, and it’s not even about blaming the adults who raised us for what we experienced. It’s about understanding and revealing, then, how we can shift and change, and there’s a term that you use, and other people use it as well, this idea of reparenting. And I think that’s sort of the essence of sometimes what we’re talking about, particularly if you’re an adult who has a history of quite a lot of different types of trauma, that now you’re seeing, wow, this is showing up in my relationships, particularly creating challenges in me raising my children. I think it can feel overwhelming to people, what is this idea of reparenting? Why is it important for us as adults, but also for our children? Because I think people go, “Oh, wait a minute, you’re telling me I need to work on myself. But I also need to work on my kids. I have to parent myself, I have to parent my child.” And I think I want to simplify that for people to help them understand that actually when we’re working on ourselves, when we’re doing this reparenting work for ourselves, it’s automatically helping our kids. It’s not like the separate baskets of things that we have to do, right?

Dr. Nicole LePera

I think I’ll start with an example of kind of the application or whatever what we’re talking about here, and then I’ll kind of backtrack and just share a bit about what my ideas on reparenting are, what it is the process of it. And so prime example being we have a child who’s upset, sad, for instance, right? They come home, they’re sad. What’s really going to be the difference in terms of your ability to be with your child in sadness is: How can you be with your own sadness? Do you have space in your life? Are you able to tend to your very normal human experience of sadness? Do you have sad feelings? And again, speaking from my lived experience of, I didn’t feel anything except stress. If I wasn’t stressed or overwhelmed, that was my resting state, or bored, agitated, those were the three things that I would kind of recycle in my feelings. You would never hear me saying “I’m sad, I’m angry.” I didn’t have access to those feelings. Again, why? I was so disconnected, I was on my spaceship, I was in a cyclone of a stress response. Of course, then, therefore, understandably, I only felt some version of the stress spectrum. So for some of us, even this idea of sadness, we might have many parents listening that are like, I don’t allow sadness, I don’t cry, I maybe was taught all the different reasons why sadness is too vulnerable. And I shouldn’t be sad, or maybe it wasn’t safe. When I cried in childhood, I was told to stop crying, or maybe I was just left alone to cry, and no one was there to sit with me in my sadness. So now I’m expected to be present to my child in their own sadness. So chances are, if I’m not able to be present in my own sadness, I’m probably not going to be able to be present in theirs. And in that moment, I might do something to minimize that. I might tell them not to cry because I’m feeling so uncomfortable, I might be distracted, I might very well intentionally want to be able to say or do something to make them feel better, but ultimately, the only way we can truly make someone feel better when they’re in their emotion, because we can’t take their emotional away, is to sit with them in their emotion. And again, for so many of us, if we didn’t have that safe space, that attuned caregiver who sat with us in our emotions and just held that space for us, not needing to fix it or change it or make it better, again, possibly a distraction, just be with it, we’re not going to be able to apply that then to our children. So from that very real lived example, of course, many different examples of things that we can model or not model, all again based on what we learned in childhood. So reparenting is kind of the big concept of acknowledging that even the daily self-care habits that most of us are repeating in our adulthood are the ones we learned in childhood. So in the workbook, I actually adapted and modified a version of Maslow’s pyramid I call it the Authentic Needs Pyramid, and I break it down simply into foundational physical needs; reparenting is the process of observing first, becoming conscious to: How are you caring for your body? Are you moving it? Are you resting it? Are you giving it the nutrients it needs? Are you breathing calmly and deeply, signifying that you’re at peace, at safety within yourself? So if many of you who are listening are like “Oh my gosh, I don’t attend to my body at all. How can I have children?” Reparenting then is caring for your body, because in your body lives that nervous system. And if that nervous system isn’t getting the rest, the movement, the nutrients, the calming breaths, if you’re breathing from your chest very quick all day long, you’re never going to be able to calmly ground yourself in the presence of your dysregulated child. Up a level of the pyramid, we have our emotional needs and need to be safely and securely connected to be able to express ourselves in that connection, so that we can be interdependent beings, we can retain the differences that make us, us, our uniqueness, while also being connected. So again, to help meet our needs of our inner child means when we’re reparenting, we’re acknowledging that all of the habits and patterns are stored in this inner child space, as I call it, in our subconscious mind. So when we’re not paying attention, we’re going to shift back again, whether it’s the behavioral habits that I was just describing, or the emotional habits where we don’t feel safe to authentically express ourselves, we suppress our emotions and or we modify the way we show up and we begin to assume roles or wear masks in our relationships. So for all of us, a very common experiences, when we’re trying to create safe space for a child’s emotional expression, we’re going to be really limited if we don’t give ourself safety to express ourselves, if we don’t show our children how it is to be authentically us. If they see instances of us being one way, and then putting on our mask with someone else and being another way, if we’re not safe, like I was sharing earlier, in those moments, to attune, to explore with them how they’re emotionally feeling, our reparenting journey then is learning how to do all of that for ourselves, reconnecting with our emotions, learning how to regulate our emotions, learning how to just be who we are, so what we’re modeling and how we’re connecting with our children is from a much safer, regulated, balanced, whole place. So I gave all of those different examples because reparenting can look very different for each of us, depending on the conditioned habits we’re bringing from our childhood, through again, to bring it all beautifully full circle, becoming conscious of those habits, especially applying this conversation to parents, how they show up and impact our relationship with our children. If you are the parent who can never hold space with sadness, setting up an expectation that you do something differently in the moment when your child is sad is probably going to set you up not to succeed. That means making space for sadness in your life outside of those moments, so that when you do need to show up for your child, you’re more regulated and more comfortable in doing so.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And this is so important for all parents. But especially for those of you listening who have kids with extra levels of challenges, who may be feeling just like “Man, I really struggle so much with managing the intensity of my child’s dysregulation.” Absolutely look at all of the factors and all of the things that directly can help your child. Also understand that what we’re talking about here applies to parenting these kids just as much, if not more so. It’s an opportunity, really, for us to become so much more attuned to ourselves and doing this work for ourselves, because kids with that level of intensity of needs, just require us to be there for them in a way that is more intense and is more present and is more attuned. And we can have an argument about whether that’s fair or not, but it is the reality of it. And so I just want to really make sure that you understand that this isn’t just for typically developing kids, this isn’t just for raising any child with any degree of need. And in some ways, kids with more intensive needs really require us to do this work-up for ourselves even more so, in order to support them and their fragile nervous systems with the changes that we want to see them make.

Dr. Nicole LePera

100% and that might also then mean, the need for support as a parent, the need for support in the form of space, asking if you do have access to other adults or caregivers for that one hour, two hours off, just to kind of replenish yourself. I mean, let’s even bring it back a step further: Honoring that you do need to do that. I think for so many of us who have been indoctrinated that it’s not good, we need to be selfless and just show up fully and serve all the time, and again, likely we had to adapt in that way for some safety-based reason in childhood, that isn’t the reality. It’s again, back to the cliche of you can’t pour from an empty cup. And that’s real, because what we’re talking about, again, is our nervous system resources. We’re not necessarily just talking about external surface-based things. We’re actually talking about carving out space to regulate our body, to maybe get some sleep, some rest, some nutrients that we need. So support, whether or not it’s asking someone to help us, or finding other parents, communities like you beautifully have created here, podcasts, things to listen to where we have access to other people who understand. It might be reaching out, having a conversation, leaning on others, because again, I do see a lot of errors, and I heard this from my family’s lived experience growing up, more so before I was born, and a little after, my sister had her own battles with some illness in her early childhood, and it was really devastating. My mom and dad have shared often with me, my dad coming from a very big Italian family, most of which were living in Philadelphia where my family was living at the time. And when my sister started getting sick, they were very integrated in the family, we had cousins, club parties, very much connected to my dad’s side of the family. Anyway, long story short, when my sister started to get sick and needed active service, she actually was trached at a very young age. And at that time, in the late 70s, having or caring for a child with a trach outside of the hospital was not really something that was done. So my parents very much wanted her to have as “normal” of a childhood as possible, so they learned how to change her trach, and my brother got involved, and there was a lot of need in the home. Anyway, sharing all that to say, in that moment, in that time period where my family was in need of help and support, my mom in particular was actually met with a lot of closed doors. My dad’s family really distanced themselves, and didn’t make themselves available. And I imagined my mom as someone who really struggled to ask for support, to say, “Hey, wait a minute, where are you going? I need you now.” So I imagine it was kind of unspoken needs with a little bit of discomfort, causing the shift away. Having had at least the stories told, and I believe that’s a big reason why my family was so locked in survival mode, because they didn’t have access to that supportive community. My dad was working two jobs to financially support so that my mom could stay home changing my sister’s trach, so talk about survival mode in absence of that family support. So again, all of it makes me feel a lot of different things, but I hear and see this idea of self-healing and this idea of healing out of relationship, because again, I am so connected to how important relationships are, and again, applying this conversation to parents, that might mean becoming conscious that it’s hard for you to ask for help and that you need it. And maybe challenging yourself to find the safe others or to connect with, again, a big reason I even started to use the hashtag itself or a hashtag, was for visibility, because that’s what people were doing. You put a little hashtag and everyone that likes that thing searches the hashtag, and you could find like-minded people. So again, one of the reasons I did that was for that community, really seeing all of the ways I wasn’t showing up authentically, and wanting to find the safe space to do that so you offer yourself a beautiful community. So again, safety, support. It might not be possible, we might not necessarily have access to the resources. A big reason, again, why most of what I put out is free resources. The podcast that I have, we pay that in house, there’s no ads. And again, all of this is the service for the many people around the world that I know aren’t having access to this level of support, my hope being a tool you hear, maybe even just a comforting word or the community that now you possibly have access to, even by just using that hashtag on free social media, maybe that becomes that lifeline that you need.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That’s so important. And, same on my side, it’s just the commitment that you and I both share to just giving people access to these things. And you do such a beautiful job of creating community online, through social media, through the circle that you offer, and giving us all practical resources and tools. And so I know that we have really sparked an interest in people listening to this conversation around “Wow, okay, I’ve had a lot of a-has, I’m seeing a lot of things that, might be helpful to me, and wanting to know now, how do I start to do this?” and I think your new workbook that’s coming out is a beautiful step for people to take to say “Okay, this conversation opened up a new awareness for me, a new way of thinking about this, and now I want to delve into this and start doing some of this work”, so I’d love to have you share about the new workbook and how people might find it helpful.

Dr. Nicole LePera

Absolutely. So the workbook actually was an idea, a seed that was planted when I was writing my first book How To Do The Work, which I very much presented in hope that it’s being read as a really comprehensive roadmap of holistic healing, what I think of it, what I mean about it, and I did make it practical in so much as at the end of every chapter, there’s journal prompts, exercises, things you can do to embody whatever it was that that particular chapter talked about. Though, I was very honest and realistic with myself, that by no means was that the comprehensive toolkit by any stretch of the imagination. So while writing that, I was like, “Hmm, a workbook”, that might be for all of those people who maybe aren’t going to choose to engage with a membership or a therapist or who just want a livable breathable roadmap for themselves to live with, or to use in conjunction with all of the other supports that they have in their life. So it was a seed that was planted then, and having the opportunity to create it into existence, and like I was sharing earlier, I really presented it, while it is entitled “How To Meet Your Self” with a space between the your and the self to really highlight the self that I’m referencing is the authentic self, that intuitive space who we all, I believe, have at our core. I very intentionally, however, wrote that workbook to mirror that pyramid that I was sharing about earlier with the first section being about the body, developing body consciousness, the second section being about the mind, developing mind consciousness, exploring things like our ego, our inner child, all of that, and then I make you wait until section three, because I very much think of it like a peeling back of the onion approach, we can’t meet our authentic self if our body is dysregulated, if we’re locked in our conditioning, our conditioned habits and patterns in our relationship, if our inner child isn’t reparented, we’re reacting all over the place, unable to make new choices that are in alignment. So we can’t meet our authentic self until we pull back all of the layers, in my opinion, of what we’re not. So of course, then when you enter into section three, we talk about things like purpose and passion and values and flow state and kind of all that deeper stuff that I believe, again, lives within all of us. We might feel very disconnected from it. I know there was a time where I used to roll my eyes at the concept of passion. I thought that was one of those genetic chips I just must have missed out on, because I would read about incredibly passionate people, and even Lolly, my partner when I was reading a particular book at the time by Dr. Wayne Dyer, he was telling his whole story of evolving from the clinical psychologist that I was at the time and to finding his passion and writing books and on this journey. And I was very inspired for him, and Lolly ended up reading it at around the same time as me, and she was like on cloud nine. She was like “I am Wayne! Oh my god! It’s like the same journey.” And I’m over here like, oh, I guess I’m alone because I don’t resonate with passion, with purpose. Even though it appeared that I was very motivated to become the clinical psychologist that I committed a decade of my life to, that didn’t resonate. And again, reality was I didn’t have passion or purpose. I was so caught in survival mode, that things like being passionate, being creative, being imaginative, those aren’t a priority when your body believes it’s just trying to survive that next moment. So for listeners who are resonating, who are like “I don’t have passion. I don’t have a purpose. Creativity, playfulness? What do you mean? I don’t stop playing in childhood?” Absolutely not. That’s a state of human existence. In my opinion, that’s a pure state of being. And if you’re not resonating with that experience yet, it’s not because that chip missed you as well, you’re not broken. Again, likely, the answer lives in what’s underlying, in the patterns that are living in the neurology of your mind, in the patterns that are living in the physiology of your body that are not allowing you to connect with that space. So my hope for the workbook is that it provides that comprehensive ‘live with’ roadmap, and I keep saying ‘live with’ because journeys take time. Many of the exercises I put throughout the workbook, my intention was not to just do them once, especially when we’re talking about those consciousness building ones, about regulating our nervous system. The hope isn’t it’s a one and done. Believe me, I wish there was a light switch model, like I call it, “Oh, I just did this one new thing. And I don’t ever have to do it again!”, I think all of us would be in a much different place. It’s about the consistent creation of new habits, which means making those choices consistently every day. So while the workbook, many might read it cover to cover, maybe go through it, my hope is again that you can actually live into that book. Take the time working your way through the journey, peeling back your own layers, with my overarching hope being is that you do get to meet who you truly are, and you do then get to begin to show up as that very beautiful being.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Beautiful and I just want to say, if you have not read Nicole’s first book How To Do The Work, definitely do that. Also definitely get the workbook How To Meet Your Self. It’s beautiful. You have not seen a book like this before. Certainly not a workbook like this. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing about it as it’s been in development, and now seeing it in full color. It’s a gorgeous book. It’s one that you’ll just want to have and use and refer to often. So Nicole, where should they go to get that, because it’s out now this week, which is very exciting. So where should they go?

Dr. Nicole LePera

Absolutely. It is where all major books retailers are sold. I actually created an Instagram page, @HowToMeetYourSelf as well as a website, howtomeetyourself.com, that will also have all links in terms of outside of major retailers, more local types of retailers that it could highlight. Check out your favorite retailer, whoever your listeners like to support, my hope is that the book does kind of fall into all of those hands. I advocate for it as much as I can on my end, though a lot of these, again, are publishing decisions made outside. And for anyone International, in terms of translations, much like How To Do The Work, my hope is that we can get this book translated officially into a workbook, into as many languages as possible, though the way international publication works is on a bit of delay. So if anyone is listening internationally and does want to get their hands on the workbook in their native tongue, if you will, stay tuned, stay tight, and all information again, I’ll filter through probably all the social media presence that I have. So just search The Holistic Psychologist pretty much on any platform now, and you could keep posted with what’s going on. And I will be talking about the new retailers, new countries, translations that the workbook is put into. And again, you could check it out across social media or on the website, howtomeetyourself.com.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Awesome. And if you don’t already follow Nicole on social media, it’s @TheHolisticPsychologist, please go do that now. You will be glad that you did, especially if you enjoyed this conversation, that will just be a good regular dose of all of these amazing things to your social media timeline. Who can’t use more of that? Oh, my gosh, Nicole, we could talk for days. We have talked for days. But yes, we will wrap up, we’ll give people’s ears a break and let them process all of this. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for the work that you’re doing in the world, for your amazing skill and courage and being out there on the forefront of sharing all of this with people. I just am really grateful to you for that. And also very grateful that you stopped by to have this conversation today. Really appreciate it.

Dr. Nicole LePera

Oh, Nicole, thank you, thank you, thank you for being a friend, being a personal and professional support through all of the journey, really, thus far. And thank you for the work you do. Like I said, it’s needed. It’s transformational. I am such a fan and a huge supporter and will always be of how you’re showing up in the world. So thank you too.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Thanks. And thank you to all of you for being here and for listening, and we’ll catch you back here next time.