Transcription
I'm Dr. Nicole LePera, the holistic psychologist, founder of Self-Healer 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.
The inner child. So inner child oftentimes is believed to be an abstract or a metaphysical type concept, but in reality, it's a body-based memory. In childhood, before we had logic, before we had language, we had sensation and we had reflex. In psychological terms, this is known as implicit emotional memory. It's that body-based learning, um, that again happened in our earliest environments, which is why so many of us can logically know we're safe. Our partner's not leaving us. Yet, in those moments, our body, our emotional body takes over, and we spiral into a belief that we're being rejected or that we're being abandoned because our body speaks even quicker than our logical mind does. Which is why for many of us, insight and awareness doesn't translate into changed action because we have all of these implicit emotional memories, these scripts in some ways, that are running behind the scenes dictating how we feel and then what we do, even when we logically know better or no different.
The inner child shows up not only in our reactions, but it shows up in our adulthood as our habits and patterns and even our identities. We become so merged, um, with the habits and patterns that we begin to believe that they are just who we are, and we lose sight that they are who we've had to become. So the overachieving child, right, might feel like we're just driven, when in reality, continuing to seek success came from a childhood where love was conditional. For others, independence can feel like a choice, when in reality, it was a protective stance when we couldn't depend on people around us to show up for us. And sensitivity for some of us feels like our temperament, but really, it was born out of an environment that was so unpredictable that we had to develop a vigilance to the environment around us to protect ourselves or to keep ourselves safe.
The most common place that we meet our survival strategies are in moments where we're stressed out or where we're feeling disregulated, and seemingly mindlessly, right? We, we reach for our phone and we, we start scrolling. We reach for food and we start eating. Um, we reach for substances and we start using things, and we then confuse, right, those things for just a byproduct of who we are or our lack of willpower, when in reality, all of those actions are our nervous system or our body's best attempt at finding our way to safety or to some semblance of connection in absence of that.
You can tell when you or someone else is reacting from their inner child and not their adult self by the size of their reaction. When it's really big, overwhelming, all-consuming, all or nothing, that's usually a sign that it's from an older time. And I'm sure many of us can call to mind a moment where someone's reaction took us by surprise, seemed disproportionate, left us confused. Those are moments where, again, more often than not, it signals a similar past experience where that person, whether it is ourselves or someone else, didn't have the support that we needed to cope. So reaction size is a really great marker.
Inner child reactions feel so intense and disproportionate to the moment because we are in a state of what is called emotional flooding, where physiologically, we are actually having that big of a reaction. We have cortisol coursing through our body, and our, we are literally flooded. Our amygdala, or the emotional center of our, of our brain, is overactivated, while the prefrontal cortex, the very logical, grounding part of our brain, becomes underactivated. So in that flooded moment, in a very real sense, we become that reaction, and that's really important to understand because so many of us, right, we can shame that reaction or have been shamed when someone tells us just to calm down, if our reaction doesn't match the moment, but in our own bodies, it does feel as big as it is that we're experiencing it because it is big. We are flooded with emotion, and we don't have the ability to return as quickly to a grounded state of presence where we can have a more reasonable or maybe responsible reaction.
So a really common example of an inner child type reaction is you're sitting at work and you get an email about a meeting that's coming up, and you immediately begin to spiral at your desk thinking, worrying about getting fired. So in your adult mind, right, you might know that you're doing well at work. Your last evaluation went great, but that spiraling reaction of the inner child, right, might have come from a time where it was more inconsistent, your environment, or unpredictable. So, in a similar way, now you're bracing for the worst case, where that email means that you might be losing your job, when in reality, that's not the case at all.
Understanding human development can help us shift from seeing, uh, these moments of reactivity, these symptoms, or these dysfunctional habits and patterns. Shift from seeing it as a deficit to seeing it as a very, very intelligent adaptation to our earlier circumstances. So if we can understand all of the ways in which our needs weren't met, or begin to explore what it is that we need it in a given moment, then we can create a shift, then, in how we're experiencing ourselves in those moments.
So in childhood, we really adapt based on one question. We observe and notice what happens when we reach for connection. And if connection was consistently available when we reached out for it, we end up learning that our inner child learns that closeness is safe, and we develop a secure attachment. If though, when we reach for comfort or closeness, it was unpredictable, it was overwhelming, or it was unavailable, then we might end up clinging toward any possible closeness or connection that might be available. We might end up bracing ourselves because at one time, we're used to it being so overwhelming. Or if it was unavailable, we might end up pulling away entirely, developing the belief again that I don't want it or need it, as we do in an avoidance style, because it wasn't available to us at one time.
So we can think of the inner child as this kind of being inside of us that learned to expect certain experiences from an in another individual within our relationship, and then based on those expectations, that becomes what we commonly know as our attachment style. Children develop roles or learn how to show up in their environments and in their relationships to secure connection and belonging because in childhood, that is what sustains our existence. So in childhood, if we have learned that there was no space for us, right, we might turn into an underachiever who continues to keep ourselves small, not to share ourselves with the world, because at one time, avoiding that presence in our childhood was, was safe. Overachieving on the other side of that is very common. And when we learn that love was conditional, we begin to make our sense of worth based on, or our value based on our achievement, or based on how we're showing up in the world. Again, people pleasing is a, is a very common experience. If in childhood, tending to the world, the emotional climate around us created safety, then we continue to be the overextender or the caretaker in our adult relationships.
When we ignore our inner child and its unmet needs, it doesn't go away. It continues to drive our habitual over or under reactions, or even the roles that we're playing in our relationships. When we lacked attunement, when we lacked attention, when we lacked safety, our nervous system will continue to seek it out in the only way that it once knew how. And the longer we continue to repeat or live within those habits, the more we become convinced that there's no other possible way to be, that that is just who we are and how we are, not understanding that it is our inner child and its unmet needs that are driving those habitual reactions. So until we begin to acknowledge the role that our past is playing and begin to create new choices, we become fused. We call personality patterns that we had to develop to adapt to our earliest circumstances and reflexes. We take them to be a, just who we are, when in reality, they're who we've learned to be.
Understanding the impact that our parents had on us really means acknowledging and observing all of the ways in which we are still seeking safety or trying to create security when we didn't once have that. And being able to acknowledge maybe the limitations of our parents as, again, individuals who were raised by parents themselves who might not have had the tools, can give us a bit of context, can give us a bit of grace and compassion, maybe for ourselves, maybe for our parents. Though it absolutely doesn't remove the impact. It's helpful to hold space for both when we can understand what shaped us and at the same time acknowledge the impact that it might still be having in our life.
Becoming aware of our inner child is the first step in changing those actions or those reactions because without awareness, we are going to continue to run on autopilot, doing the same things that we have always done. Though change is created through new choices, um, new choices that begin with our body, new actions that we can take, giving our body a felt sense of security where we didn't once have that. So we really need to pair insight with action. Our nervous system doesn't learn by logic alone, alone. It learns by new lived experiences. Which is why through all of the work that I offer, it is built on the foundation of reconnecting with our body, seeing those moments where we're overwhelmed, flooded, reliving older reactions or reenacting our past, so that we can actually begin to make those new choices. Again, quite literally teaching our nervous system a new way to experience the present moment, so that I can not only do things differently, I can come to believe and then ultimately feel differently.
A really immediate way that all of us can get reconnected with our inner child is by finding an old photograph of that child and taking a moment and taking a look at it. When you look at a photograph, your brain will automatically begin to react to the size of yourself, the vulnerability, your facial expression, and it will immediately then increase compassion and empathy and make it really hard to dismiss that little being or call it too dramatic or too over the top, and help you really to tune into maybe what that felt experience of childhood looked like or was like for you. And even if you don't have a, a photograph, kind of accessing our childhood through our senses can be an incredibly helpful practice. Um, even just taking a moment right now and closing your eyes and maybe calling to mind a childhood home of yours, or maybe a particular room in the home, or a space where you spent a lot of time as a child, and taking a moment and really tuning into whatever is coming alive in your mind. Maybe even smelling the aromas or seeing the sights of whatever it was that was around you. Taking a moment to notice what you're doing. What facial expression do you have on? What does your body look like? How are you holding yourself? Is anyone else present around you? And instead of needing to focus or worry too much about the accuracy or the details, or even thinking about what happened, maybe just take a moment and drop in and ask yourself, what did I need? Did I need attention? Did I need safety? Did I need protection? Because this is really a practice of reconnecting with that being that still is inside of you. It's a practice of empathy, of being with in a compassionate way, that part of you, so that you, you can give yourself then an opportunity to begin to incorporate that part into your daily life and begin to show up differently and show that inner child a new response from your now adult self.
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