Why Do I Have Few Memories From Childhood? Deepen Your Healing & Find Answers With Dr. Nicole LePera
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Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to a very memorable episode of the Mel Robbins podcast.

Hey, I'm Mel Robbins. I'm so fired up that you're here. I'm a New York Times bestselling author and one of the most trusted experts in the world on behavior change and motivation. And I'm also just noticing that whenever I get on the microphone, literally while the drums are beating and the show is about to open, my voice drops like an octave. I feel like I get this stuff in my throat, but that is not what this show is about today. This show is about something really important. It is

something that's really personal to me. It's something that I was really, it's not that I was struggling with this. I was really confused by something. And the topic is about memory.

And I wanted to talk to you about this today because the last episode that we dropped was all about the nervous system, how you calm your nervous system, nervous system repair, dysregulation, and also trauma. And the episode was like a runaway train. It's unbelievable how many of you listened to it. And it is already one of the most shared episodes that we've done. And of course, what happened is you had a ton of questions about trauma.

and about your nervous system. And here's one thing I want you to understand. If you are breathing right now, you have trauma, no question. There is no way that you can get through childhood and not experience some kind of trauma because trauma is just a situation that is either small or it is enormous and terrifying. A situation that makes your nervous system go on high alert.

So whether your trauma comes from a childhood where you felt unseen, unheard or unloved, or your trauma comes from some major catastrophic accident or some violent crime or physical harm or a tour of duty, you are experiencing moments where life triggers you and your nervous system goes on alert and then you have an emotional response.

This is something that we all deal with. And many people remember what caused their trauma. You wrote to me about it, and I cannot thank you enough for your deeply, deeply personal stories, for opening up about it, and for the revelations that you had when you listened to the simple things that you can do based in neuroscience to start the work of repairing your nervous system. And I want to applaud you for being interested in

in your own healing and interested in this subject and interested in taking control, not about what happened to you in the past, but how you're going to heal this in your mind, body, and spirit moving forward. Well, because of your questions, today I wanted to dig deeper. And I wanted to dig deeper on a particular angle about the topic of trauma. Because so many of you resonated with one particular aspect of that episode,

And it was the moment when Jessie, who is a member of my team and she runs video production here at 143 Studios, she jumped in in the middle of the recording and asked a question. And this was the one thing.

that so many of you wrote to me about because you were like, ding, ding, ding, that's me. So what I want to do to bring every one of you into the fold is to play the clip where Jesse asked this particular question.

Mel, I have a question for you. I've never been to therapy, but I get what you're saying. I just don't know how to connect it. Like I feel the emotions and I see what you're saying about the little T trauma, the big T trauma, but I don't remember it. Do I have to know what that little T trauma is to recognize it? Or can I just keep it generic and say, nope, that's little T trauma? Excellent question. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. When you talk about emotion, how would you describe sort of that relationship

repeated response that you're experiencing as an adult that you're now like, oh, that's probably little t trauma. What is it? What is your emotional response? I think there's a lot. It just instantly makes me want to cry, get emotional. I also resort to shutting down. But again, I don't know where that's coming from. Why am I so emotional about certain things? I don't have a bad memory associated with it.

Now, did you pay attention to what she just said? That here she is, she's an adult, and she feels emotional all the time, and she doesn't know why she's getting triggered. She doesn't know where it's coming from. And here's the part I want to highlight for you. She doesn't know where it's coming from because she has no memory that is associated with feeling overwhelmed or shut down. And in particular, she has no bad memory from her childhood. And so she's not quite sure now that she realizes, huh,

I clearly have some kind of trauma because I can't handle my emotions and I get triggered all the time and I don't like it, but I don't know where this came from. And so many of you resonated with this. And many of you wrote something else, that not only do you not remember where your trauma came from, but that you have no memories of your childhood at all. So I wanted to talk about this topic.

Because not having memories or not having a lot of memories from childhood, this is really common. This is one of those topics that is so common in terms of the human experience and nobody talks about it. There are some of us like me that have very few memories of childhood at all. And we walk around forever thinking that there's something wrong with us. So we're going to explore this today.

Because every time I talk about this on social media, I cannot believe how many of you go, holy cow, that's me. I don't remember much from my childhood at all. I thought I was the only one. And so I wanted to start by saying this is normal.

You're not alone. And if you're somebody that can recall your childhood with very detailed memory, there's still an important reason for you to listen to this. I think it's going to be very eye opening when we connect the dots between not having a lot of memories and small T trauma and also the kind of household that you were raised in.

And so I'm gonna bring an expert on to connect all these dots for us, but first I want you to understand something about memories from childhood. So the first place I wanted to start was by putting a highlighter on the fact that this is normal. I'm normalizing the fact right now that if you don't have a lot of childhood memories or heck you have no memories at all from your childhood, do not worry, there are lots of people like myself that go through this and have experienced this.

And so here's what we're going to do. I'm going to bring on a world-renowned psychotherapist who is an expert on this topic. And we're going to unpack this because I want you to understand why this happens, what you can do about it. And I also want you to understand how this is connected to trauma that you may have experienced or what it was like for you growing up in the household that you grew in.

And there are reasons why I want to make sure that I take a balanced approach here on this topic, because I not only know this topic based on my personal experience, but I always like to remind you when we dig into a big topic like this that I'm not a medical doctor. I am not a licensed therapist. I am not giving you advice on this topic. I'm just sharing my experience and what I've learned as I've researched this topic and

But you're going to be able to hear a world-renowned clinical psychologist explain this to you.

It's not only natural, it's normal to not be able to recall everything that happened in childhood. In fact, researchers and scientists have a word for it. They call it childhood amnesia. Now, they've not fully studied this yet, but they think that the reason why it's natural for a lot of us to not be able to recall what happened is because it has to do with how your brain sheds brain cells, and they speculate, even memories as you grow up.

And here's the thing, though, about your brain. Even if the memories are in there, and this is what I believe, I think that the memories are in there inside of you. But it's just that it's buried so deep in your subconscious, you're just not present to it in your day-to-day life. You know, I look at all of our kids or any of you that listen to the show that are in your 20s or that are in your late teens, and, you know, you grew up in a world where you are basically digitally native. And

And so you've grown up with apps like Snapchat and Be Real and all of these kind of cool social media platforms where you can have memories. And you know what that means? It means your entire life is basically documented online and you can go back into your memories literally seven years, 10 years ago even, and you can see what you were wearing. You can remember that exact day. Heck, you probably even have video from it. And on some level, that's a gift

Because your brain doesn't work that way. You can't just on demand go back in time with your brain and recall details like the song that was playing at 7.23 p.m. on a random Tuesday night 18 years ago. Now photos, photos jog your memory.

photos will bring that thing, that memory that's stored in your subconscious to the forefront of your mind. And that's a really cool thing. But one of the reasons why you may not recall a lot of memories is because it's just buried deep in the vault of the subconscious of your brain, just waiting to be jogged, waiting to be reminded. There's another reason why you might not have a

You may have grown up in a culture or with a family that doesn't do a lot of reminiscing. And reminiscing primes the brain to remember certain things. And some of you may have had the experience where you ask your parents or your grandparents to tell you stories about when they were little, and they really don't want to talk about it. So if your parents aren't reminiscing with you to help you jog your memory, and you're old like I am, I'm not really old. I mean, you know, if you're 54 like I am,

those memories are also not getting stronger as you age, and the muscle to recall them is also not getting stronger. But there's a third reason why you may not have a lot of memories, and that's the reason why I don't. I have trauma. Trauma, past trauma, triggers your nervous system to go on a state of hyper-alert.

And when your nervous system is in a state of hyper alert or you're living with a constant state of anxiety or you're always on edge or you're waiting for the next shoe to drop or you had a childhood where you were constantly under threat, whether it was poverty or discrimination or abuse or you lived in a country or in a neighborhood that had a lot of violence, when you're on edge like that all the time,

Medically speaking, neurologically speaking, this comes from research at UCLA, when you're on alert and your nervous system is in a state of alarm, it overrides your brain's ability to function properly.

The part of the brain where you're paying attention and you're storing long-term memory, it's overrided by the state of alert that you feel of always being on edge. Or if you're like me and you struggle with anxiety for decades, basically, if you're always worrying about what's about to happen, you're not even in the room or in the moment to be able to encode memories. When you hear the term dysregulated nervous system,

That's exactly what researchers, scientists, doctors, psychiatrists, neuroscience, that's what they're talking about. That you're in such a state of hypervigilance or alert that you're not really even present to make the memories. And I think a lot of people are just like Jesse.

that you realize now that you're adult that something's up, that you don't like how you can't control your emotional response, that you snap, that you shut down, that you micromanage. Or you're starting to go, well, Mel, I'm kind of like you, that there are large parts of my life that I just don't remember. And it may not be just in childhood. For me, I don't even remember a lot of college or law school. And by then I was a young adult.

See, there are also times in your life where you may go through something very acute, like grieving the death of somebody you love or going through a massive change like a divorce. It's very, very common for people to say that they don't remember months of their life when those sorts of things happen. And I'll be honest with you.

I used to think there was something wrong with me and wrong with my brain. For years, I'd kind of make this joke that I thought I had early dementia, but the truth is I was kind of scared that something was wrong. I mean, why did my best friend have total recall of absolutely everything that happened in her childhood, but I couldn't remember much of anything? It's as though years went completely missing.

And it's only when I started talking about it online that I realized how common this is. Every single time I would post about it, I would be flooded with comments. Oh my God, that's me, that's me, that's me.

Now, what you're gonna learn today is gonna give you incredible insight on this topic. And it's gonna give you deeper, deeper knowledge about trauma and how it connects to not having memories. And we're also gonna dig deep into a really important topic. And that's about how having emotionally immature parents can also be connected to having no memories. So buckle up because whether or not you remember your childhood,

this is going to be a very memorable episode of the Mel Robbins podcast because everything you're going to learn today will make a positive impact on your life moving forward.

So I reached out to a friend of mine, Dr. Nicole LaPera. You probably know her as the holistic psychologist because she is followed by millions and millions of people online around the world. And I wanted to have Dr. Nicole on to dig deeper with me and talk about why she thinks it is that people like Jesse and myself and perhaps even you have very few memories.

Dr. Nicole Lepera was trained in clinical psychology at Cornell University, the New School for Social Research, and the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. She is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, How to Do the Work, and the host of the podcast Self Healers Soundboard. As a clinical psychologist in private practice, Dr. Nicole often found herself frustrated by the limitations of traditional psychotherapy.

She wanted more for her patients and for herself. So 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 Self Healers Movement, where people from around the world are joining together in a community to take healing into their own hands.

In 2019, she founded Self Healer Circle, the first virtual self-guided global healing membership. Self Healer Circle has become a movement with members from over 60 countries who heal as a collective. Her latest book,

How to Meet Yourself, the workbook for self-discovery was just released. And one of the things that I love about Dr. Nicole is how fierce she is. She is so committed to you being your best healer. This woman has taken so much flack from the traditional psychotherapy, psychology, and psychiatry fields, and she is not stopping, man. She is on a mission to equip you with everything that you need to do the most important thing you could do for yourself. And

and that is to heal yourself and to create a better life in doing so.

Woo, I am so excited to introduce you to her. And the topic we're going to do first is what it means to be raised by an emotionally immature parent, which is basically someone who does not have the ability to deal with their emotions in an effective or healthy way. They can't deal with stress, sadness, frustration, rejection. And you as the kid, you feel the brunt of that inability to cope. And I'm embarrassed to admit to you that when Chris and I first had our kids, we were

I was that emotionally immature parent. So coming up, you're going to meet Dr. Nicole and you're going to learn the signs that you were raised by an emotionally immature parent. And we're going to go deep into this topic, how that emotional immature parenting relates to having very few memories and to trauma.

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Hey, welcome back. It's Mel, and I'm really excited because Dr. Nicole Lepera is here, and I am so happy, Dr. Nicole, that you are here. Congratulations on your new book, How to Meet Yourself, the workbook for self-discovery. Thank you so much for having me, Mel. Thank you, Dr. Nicole, for saying yes, because you are the one person on the planet that I wanted to talk to you about this topic, and I know how busy you are since you just released this book. Thank you.

And so I want you to give us a masterclass on emotionally immature parents and how that connects to little t trauma and how it also connects to having no memories of your childhood. How do you even know if your parents are emotionally immature? Yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot of things. So that kind of unpredictability, you know, having the explosive parent experience.

where we're always waiting for the next shoe to drop. Having on the other side of that, that disconnected parent who's never really either physically present or emotionally present. It can look like being made for different circumstances, different reasons to parent ourselves or to show up as our sibling's parent or our parent's parent.

It can look like a lacking of boundaries where oftentimes for very well-intentioned anxiety-based reasons, we have a hypervigilant, a helicopter type of parent, always micromanaging, always, you know, tending or worrying, over worrying, overstepping our boundaries, telling us what to think, feel, do with our lives. It can look like that. It can look like a parent, again, who has so many boundaries that they show that emotional disconnection. How does having a parent

who can't handle their own emotions they're either absent or they're all up in your face or they're inappropriate or abusive or a band like how does that impact you as a child

when we don't feel safe in our environment because of external circumstances, resources that we lack, our family lacks, or we don't feel emotionally safe to just share ourselves, share our thoughts, share our ideas, share our feelings, that creates an overwhelming emotional experience in us. And without that attunement or that safe, grounded human,

More often than not, this isn't the one-off, you know, where a parent was screaming and yelling one time when emotions ran high. This is when this has become a consistent pattern. It creates overwhelming stress in our child body with a lack of support or a lack of resources that

creates us or that shifts us physiologically, our nervous system into that survival mode. We are very adaptive creatures. Our body will deal with it in one way or another by, you know, fighting the situation, by becoming overreactive ourself as a child. This looks like tantruming, yelling, unable to actually soothe ourself. It looks like being distracted. A

A flea, a flight type response where a child is always unable to pay attention, distracted, doing a million different things at once. It creates a shutdown experience. If the stress is too much, too consistent, and I don't have that support, you'll do what I did.

I just began to check out entirely. And I'm just describing very simply all of the different nervous systems, cycled responses that we go into when the stress or there is a lack of safety in our environment. And we don't have an attuned caregiver to help literally our bodies come back into that regulation or come back into that safe experience. I think for a lot of people that hear this the first time, Dr. Nicole,

it's easy to kind of go like, well, isn't everybody's childhood like that? What human being on the planet isn't like that? Like, I'm so used to that. Isn't that what life is like? Absolutely. And I wanted to say two things quickly, too, that I think contribute. First and foremost, it's the reality that when we're children, we don't really have exposure to other experiences of life, right? It isn't until we have peers and we start to go over other people's houses. We

We don't have the experience to say, okay, well, this is what it looks like in my house. And it doesn't look like that everywhere else. So we'll assume, we'll generalize, we will make statements that, oh, this is what it is for everyone. That then gets complicated by the many of us who, for very different reasons, were told explicitly or indirectly not to talk about how things work.

Right. So we either maybe shame ourself for acknowledging the reality and we don't even we suppress it. We don't allow ourself to say, you know what, this is how it was in my childhood. That was very much part of my journey. The story that I heard about this present mother, you know, from my siblings didn't match up perfectly.

with my lived experience. And because as a child, we will always defer to the adults around us, especially when we need them to care for us. I suppressed the reality that, you know what? My mom wasn't super present outside from celebrating me academically and at softball.

My mom spent a lot of time dealing with her chronic pain. That wasn't the story though, that I heard in my family. So I suppressed my version of reality until I entered my thirties when I started to say, wait a minute, this is how it was for me. It might've been different for you in your childhoods because my siblings are 15 and 18 years older than me. So to answer your question, the more we become conscious, honest, and allow ourselves to then feel, I've left that out of this whole process, feeling right about everything

How it is that our experience was for us, allowing us to say, you know what? I didn't get some needs met and I'm sad and I'm in grief and I'm angry and I'm a million different things wrapped up into one. Allowing us to have that space now

to tend to how we feel about the experiences that maybe we have suppressed for so long, for whatever reason it is, will then allow us to begin to change them. I just want to share that because a byproduct for many of us, I used to think I was solely there was something wrong with my brain, the neurology in my brain, because I came to realize quite early on when it was a joke with my friends in high school of how little memories I have. I would go out, right? I would do things with them.

And I would have no memories with time with them. I wouldn't be able to even share how my my early, you know, Christmases looked. And I started to entertain all this, this concern for a very long time that I must have something wrong in my brain. That happened to me, too. For years, I thought something was wrong with me.

And I believed that this was a sign that I was either going to have Alzheimer's or dementia, that there was like something up with my brain. And, you know, whenever I would admit to friends from childhood that I just don't remember much, they would look at me.

like I had two heads. I actually submitted myself for a study that I thought I was suffering from something called selective autobiographical memory disorder. I remember it because I thought, okay, that's what's wrong with me. I have this very rare neurological issue that created this experience of, I don't remember my childhood. None of that was talked about in my family. It turns out none of us do.

And the reason for that is when, a couple of reasons, when we're not fully present, when we don't have that attuned safe space to be present to what we think, how we feel, how to navigate or regulate our emotions, going from overwhelmingly stressed back into safety. And we begin to check out like I did, we're not consciously present enough

to encode the memory itself, the recall, the kind of movie screen of what happened. I'm hesitant to use the word memory because the memory does live within our mind and our body, but we're not able to draw it up, call it to mind, describe it to someone else.

And then another aspect of this that impacts memory is stress. When cortisol goes up, which is the major hormone that deals with or that is released within our bodies when we're stressed out, the more consistently the higher levels of cortisol racing through our mind and body, especially in childhood, when

When our brain is still developing, because we now know that our brain is actually still developing well into our 20s, that high level of cortisol actually impacts a part of our brain that is responsible or plays a role in memory, which is our hippocampus.

So now we're not present. Our hippocampus and the functioning of our hippocampus, one of the memory systems, has impacted. Now we have this experience of I don't remember. And it took me beginning to share that I don't have memories, you know, walking through the shame of it all that I'm actually hearing overwhelmingly how few of us really, truly, again, remember those early things.

So I just wanted to go down that path quickly because a question I commonly get then is, well, then how do I heal? Don't I have to go back and tuck myself in and replay that terrible memory and know what happens? And the answer is no, because chances are, again, you're living, you're a living memory of that. You'll see it in these moments of emotional, immature reactivity or these moments of shutdown or even just in your general habits.

of relating to another human because all of that is so imprinted again in those earliest experiences that for the many of us, the many of you listening who don't have memories, I hope to relieve maybe some of the shame, maybe some of the worries of something neurologically wrong with you that I once had and also give you the place to start, which is right here, right now by becoming conscious to how it is you're showing up now.

Because again, that often is a remnant of that memory in and of itself, living in your mind, in your body, and often in your relationships, creating the world around you. That's relieving to hear that this is normal. Did you hear that, everybody? I mean, I know I said it was normal because I've experienced it, and I now know so many of you have. But, you know, when you hear a psychologist say it, it kind of makes you exhale, or at least it makes me exhale. And if you're like Jesse, who is now realizing, huh,

I have some trauma that I need to address because you get so emotional or you get triggered and you shut down or you explode. What Dr. Nicole is saying is that your emotional immaturity as an adult, basically meaning that your emotions overwhelm you, you can't process them, you can't cope, that right there, that is evidence that you are experiencing past trauma right there.

And she's saying that the place to start is exactly where Jesse did, by recognizing that when you get triggered by life and you're not in control of your emotional responses as an adult, that is evidence of past trauma. You don't have to remember when it began because you know it's happening now. And when we come back, Dr. Nicole is going to talk about how we change that. ♪

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Welcome back. You're listening to the Mel Robbins Podcast, and I have Dr. Nicole here with us today. You probably know her as the holistic psychologist. And one of the things that you and I first connected over is the fact that we both have almost no memories from childhood.

And I, like you, used to think there was something terribly wrong with me that I was going to have early onstage Alzheimer's, that there was something off. It's menopause. It's this. It's that. It's my anxiety. And I have so many experiences, like talking to my best friend from childhood, Jodi Brick, and she'll be like, remember that time? And it's not little shit, Dr. Nicole. It's like, remember that time you came to visit me at Central Michigan University? I'm like, no. She's like, yeah, you came for the weekend. I'm like...

I don't remember that. And so learning that it's not only just me and it's not something wrong with my brain, that this is a function of the childhood shit that is in my nervous system and how I was coping and processing all this stuff.

that impacted my ability to make memories and that that's okay. And I actually think it's way more common than you think.

Absolutely. And I'll speak to the point of how recent it is for me, even in the early years of my relationship with my partner, Lolly. I mean, she has talked about the opposite. She has an elephant memory. This girl can remember like what I was wearing and like wild. And she there's many things and moments where she's like, do you remember when we went to this place, did this thing? And up until, you know, very recently, my answer has been yes.

no, I don't remember being there with you, going, meeting this person really. And I'll have to be like, can you say more about what happened? And maybe I can recollect given other details, given what she said. But sometimes when I was in a place that we might have revisited, I'll get a feeling of familiarity. She'll be like, oh yeah, you don't remember when we were here last time? We did this. This person was here. I might not have that

recall, but my body feels somewhat familiar to what she's describing, what she's saying, the environment that we're in. And again, I just want to share that, you know, it didn't miraculously for me go away. The second I realized I didn't remember because when I first met Lolly, I was very disconnected. I was very dissociated. I was there in person, right? Having interactions in all of these different places, but my

my awareness, myself was so, so far away that again, I still didn't retain those recall-based memories and moments. So I just want to share that again because I think some of us might still have many moments. We might have something last week that we're hearing from a loved one that we did or didn't do or a place that we were at.

And we might not have the ability to recall that. And again, that might be maybe for someone listening, an indicator of how, you know, lacking presence of how there might've been something that feels unsafe. You might generally never feel safe. Your nervous system might still be so dysregulated that you're still on that spaceship. So your answer is honest to God, no.

You don't yet remember that thing, though I will share that as I become conscious. And for me, it's a daily commitment. It's a daily intention because I do have that habit to check out, to dissociate, especially as stress goes up. It doesn't immediately just... My nervous system doesn't just get on board. I have to teach myself how to stay grounded, how to stay connected, how to tolerate more and more stress so that I don't just...

check out and I can begin to remember and retain the life that I'm living. I want to just to land this for anybody listening where this is brand new. You've never even considered these concepts. When Dr. Nicole talks about the nervous system and then she talks about slowing down and, you know, working through, for example, the first part of the book, which is going to force you to slow down and it's going to force you

to get out of the autopilot of your life and truly go inward and consider your lived experience in your body. The visual that I think about is your nervous system is sort of like the engine of a car. And it's like, for me, revving all the time. And so my lived experience for a long time, my version of autopilot, was feeling like I was a...

car that was at, you know, like that was just the engine was revved all the time, but I wasn't going anywhere. And that I had this sense of always like trying, trying, trying, trying, trying, trying, trying, but no relief of feeling like it was enough. And what happens and what Dr. Nicole is saying is available to you, that you are your best healer, that you can pull over

Like the view that you are driving past because you're on autopilot or you're checked out or you're flooring it and you're addicted to being busy and achieving and outrunning the sadness and whatever it is that you're trying to outrun. You are missing this extraordinary view because your nervous system is just revving. And healing is the process of slowing it down and pulling over and doing the inner work. And again, you know, how to meet yourself, right?

this latest, incredible, transformative work of yours, the whole first third of the book is dedicated to exercises to help you do that. And so that's the first thing that I wanted to say, that what we're talking about when we talk about nervous system regulation is imagine a life where when you go to the grocery store and somebody else walks in front of you and grabs the last can of

of tomato sauce that you had gone to the store to buy, you don't lose your shit. You literally are able to tolerate that and not lose your shit. Or you get an email from work and your boss is curt with you. And it doesn't trigger a spiral of thinking that has been around since childhood where you, that's it, I'm so unworthy, I'm so stupid, the beat down.

And so when we talk about healing and we talk about regulating your nervous system, what she's actually saying is that you can liberate yourself

from the experience of day-to-day life where you deliver the childhood beatdown you've been doing subconsciously forever, and the small, daily, irritating, disappointing crap that happens in life doesn't send you into an emotional tsunami or send you to bury yourself in alcohol, that that is what's on the other side of this. Am I correct, Dr. Nicole? 100%. And it begins, just using a personal, my experience,

entire childhood lived experience up until my 30s and I became aware. It begins with becoming aware, becoming conscious of yourself and your current experience and in particular of your body. And what I wanted to share was I'm a self-proclaimed hippie at heart, I like to say, because all I've ever wanted is peace, rest, a moment to just be and the freedom that I imagined that came with

that. Yet what I was so largely unaware of until I began to turn that spotlight of attention down to my body is I never could rest. My family used to joke with me that I used to say, I'm bored, I'm bored, run a mile a minute. I was doing, doing, always on the go, which very much mimicked all

always going to that next hurdle, checking that next box. To simplify it, I couldn't relax. No matter how much my mind wanted that moment of relaxation when I didn't have anything on my schedule, for instance, and I was just sitting there. Here was my day, my Sunday, it's time to relax.

My body, because our body is talking to our brain and communication every moment of every day, my body was so tense. My nervous system was so dysregulated. This is where no amount of, in my opinion, positive thinking, me looking around saying, well, Nicole, nothing to worry about here. Just roll

relax. You have nothing on your schedule. There's nothing to do. Why can't you just feel at peace? And the reason was because all of the signals that my body was sending my mind was that peace, relax. There is something unsafe. There's a threat. I want to talk about this buzzing experience because for people that have never been to a therapist, never even occurred to them,

That maybe some of the things they experienced in childhood could be a form of trauma. Because you hear the word trauma and you think people that have had tours of duty or have been victims of violent crime or who have experienced a horrible accident or witnessed something catastrophic. And what we now know is that that's not true. That there are...

all kinds of small experiences that you may have dismissed or not remember that do cause your nervous system to go, oh, mom's mad. Oh, somebody's not talking to me. Oh, what? Dad's not coming home again tonight? Oh, she's drunk. Oh, what do you mean I have to be the man of the house? I needed a hug. Like all these little like things that just flip this switch inside you as the little you

that made you flip into what you refer to as hypervigilance. Now I refer to this as that buzzing, that sort of like zzzz. And what I noticed in my childhood is that if I was achieving, everybody's happy. But if I wasn't doing something worthy of bragging about, then it was duck and cover.

Who's upset? Is everybody okay? Like just, and so that's that buzzing, that sort of hyper vigilance. And when, can you talk about why it's important to notice if that's part of how you experience adult life and what it is?

I want to, you know, go back to, to that, you know, kind of expand it, expanding the need to expand the idea of what trauma is. Cause for a very long time, I, I didn't know why, you know, as I was, I was always beginning to become aware of the similarity and in patterns and coping mechanisms that I was seeing in myself and,

the clients that I was working with who did have those big T, those big events. Again, this was another moment where I entertained this belief that maybe there's something wrong with me. I even scoured the very few memories, the recalls that I had to try and imagine, could something really bad have happened? Because...

Why am I coping? Why am I dealing? Why am I struggling in that same way? So, you know, trauma, again, trauma really maps onto how supported are we when overwhelming, upsetting things happen? How safe are we consistently generally? Because the reality in our childhood is we are completely dependent on

on someone, at least one person showing up to meet our needs. We can't continue to survive on our own. And the reality of it is, and sometimes it's, you know, factors in generationally, the reality of it is children have needs that are beyond just

being kept physically alive. I mean, I didn't even know there was a brand of parenting in the not so distant past of this idea that children are like a plant, right? Just feed them. And again, some of this is colored by trauma. Being resentful if you need more, right? Exactly. Or this idea of even being indebted, right? You know, what I give to you, even though I've made the choice to create you, to have

you. And again, some of this, I want to be sensitive because it is colored by lacking of resources in our childhood. I mean, I know my parents at the age that they are, my dad was born in 37, right after, right, the Great Depression, where it was a feat for parents to have even enough to put food on their table. So again, I'm extending, you know, the opportunity to be compassionate and to understand all of the different reasons why you might have had a

parent who really did believe you were just a plant to be kept alive in the room. And that's not the reality. We need that emotional safety. We need that space to explore ourselves. We need a curious, safe human to create that space. And when we don't have that, when they're not physically present, when they're not emotionally present, when they're emotionally unstable or erratic, one of the ways that we cope because we are incredibly adaptive is

is we begin that buzz. We become hypervigilant to the external world.

world. Because if I become so attuned to a change in mood, to a change in facial expression, to whether or not my parent, if I learn the patterns of what upsets mom or dad, what creates a situation where they're not present to us, what creates a situation where they are able to give me the little bit of attention or connection that they are unable largely in other moments. And for me, very similar to you, it was when I was

keeping the peace, not causing an issue, not putting any more stress on the already overwhelming stressed table of the family. And when I was achieving, when I was bringing something for my mom, for my dad to be proud of. And for me, that happened very early on academically and athletically. Those were the moments where I would be celebrated,

at my softball games, I played softball well up through college, were the moments where my mom was actually present, physically present, celebrating me, talking to me about my performance in the game. So being hyper attuned to that, I very early on saw that pattern. Okay, everyone's really stressed out. If I don't bring any stress to the table, which means if I don't share what happened at school, if I don't bring the thing that I'm worried about, understanding that my mom, that was only gonna upset her.

So when we don't have someone who's able to attune to us emotionally, you know, detect when we're upset, help soothe, bring us down. I mean, again, the reality of our nervous system is not only is it developing in childhood, we need another safe place.

person to help us regulate, to bring us from overwhelmed, stressed, upset, back into that calm, peaceful safety. So when someone's emotionally apparent, is emotionally unavailable, that means the more consistently they're emotionally unavailable, of course. And for a lot of us, that was our parents' own survival mode, disconnected, locked away on their own spaceship. That means then we're consistently overwhelmed by our own emotions. Mm-hmm.

I'm just, hmm, on behalf of my husband who had an emotionally unavailable father. And that's right. Like, just jam those emotions down. Jam those emotions down. Let's talk about the silent treatment. When you have a parent that gives you the silent treatment, how does that impact you?

Oftentimes, a silent treatment is used in reaction to an upset, often when the parent is angry with us. And now the byproduct of that not only is lacking the emotional attunement or their availability, they're not present because they're not speaking to you in that moment. Again, creating overwhelming sensations without the support of them.

A lot of times it gives us this underlying, again, because we're so attuned, it gives us this underlying feeling that indirectly the statement is there was something inappropriate, wrong, shameful about how it is you were or what it is you did in that moment. And again, the more consistently that happens, the more likely it is some of us are going to internalize

that idea that if I'm me or if I express this aspect of me or this feeling, whatever it is that resulted in the silent treatment, we do a lot of times embed that deeper belief that that part of me is inappropriate, does cause people to leave. And a byproduct of that then often is not only the shame

And that we just are embedded within us, deep rooted beliefs of how it is that we're not worthy, that we carry through us, making us less likely to show that aspect of ourself. A lot of times, and this was my experience, we then, anytime we perceive anyone as being distant,

as giving us that curt response, right? At not being available to us, at needing time, natural human time on their own. A lot of us very immediately, hypervigilantly go to that narrative of I must have upset them. I must have done something wrong. And maybe we can't tolerate it. Maybe we begin to chase

right, them to try and get their attention because what it is is activating that deep-rooted abandonment, right? You either largely weren't present or you weren't present in these moments when I was doing something shameful. And now I'm just overlaying that filter into what's happening now. Even if again,

why they're short, why they're unavailable, might not have anything to do with us at all. They might be distracted with work, right? They might just need some time, like every human needs to be by themselves. It might not be anything in reaction to anything that we've done, but a lot of times we then struggle to tolerate distance, silence. I mean, we always assume we've upset, we've wronged, we've hurt someone in those moments. Wow. Yeah.

I know that everybody's now like, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And so obviously, Dr. Nicole has incredible resources. We're going to link to all of them. One of which is How to Meet Yourself. It's her latest book, although it is a self-guided workbook. It is a gift that if you're sitting there going, I got to go in. I got to heal. I'm telling you, get How to Meet Yourself.

Now, while they're waiting for their workbook, is there one thing, one thing that you could give everybody to do when they want to take the first step on the road to healing?

There absolutely is. I, again, full circle beautifully. Change happens when we first become conscious of where it is we're at. And the way that we create that consciousness is we begin to shift out of that autopilot of all the habits that you'll explore.

Within the book, within how to meet yourself. If you listen to, you know, any of the content that I put out on any of the platforms, it's about becoming aware in all of these different areas. Awareness happens when we're conscious first and foremost.

So the way we can begin is by creating one moment, one, the commitment, setting the intention, because remember the further we move into that unknown, the more we're going to challenge that subconscious mind. The more we're going to go right back into those familiar habits, because that's where we're comfortable. That's how we know ourself. That's where we feel safest. So I will always talk about, and we talk about in my membership, the self healer circle, a concept of a small daily promise, which literally means, so for this exercise of a consciousness check-in,

committing to every day, building in one moment where you're going to check in with yourself as a conscious being. Now, because most of us walk around with a cell phone, a lot of people can be helped benefit it by maybe putting an alarm on their phone for some time during their waking hours. So say you're going to set it for 2 p.m. in whatever time zone you're in. So at 2 p.m., your alarm is going to go off.

If you don't want to set an alarm, you could set the intention of every day when you brush your teeth, maybe that's going to be your moment. You can anchor it to some activity that you know you do daily or more often than not. Maybe it's your cup of coffee in the morning. That will be your one moment, your reminder. Others I developed when I began my journey, understanding how difficult it is to create change, how that autopilot from the moment you open your eyes, autopilot's ready to coast you through your day.

I actually began a practice of what I call future self-journaling, which really simply is every morning, and I still do it. I wake up and I set my intention for the day in a journaling practice. I write what that small daily promise is. So all of that is helping to remind ourselves

that that autopilot is at the ready. It's going to dictate your day if you're not aware. So maybe others, I'll set one more final possibility is post-it notes, right? Writing somewhere in your day that when you go into the bathroom, you'll see the reminder for the consciousness check-in. And I'm laboring this point to really highlight how powerful that subconscious is. How if you don't set that intention and remind yourself of that intention, you're never going to be able to make that new choice. So...

Of course, it's not a magic intention. You don't shut the journal. You don't see the post-it note and magically you're conscious. Now you want to embody that consciousness check-in. So what that could look like when that alarm goes off, when you see that reminder, when you're brushing your teeth and you remember drinking your coffee, you want to first just tune in naturally. The second, you know, you're like, oh, come to mind. Oh, consciousness check-in. Now's the moment I'm going to do it. Simply notice without judgment.

where's your attention? What was it that you were paying attention to? Were you actually pouring the coffee, smelling the aroma? Were you, if it was an alarm that went off, were you really immersed in the conversation that you were having or really present to the work that you were doing or the dishes that you were washing?

Or was your attention somewhere else? You were lost in thought, worrying about an argument you had, an upcoming presentation, right? Were you not aware of the given moment? Because where our attention is, is going to dictate how present we are. If I'm lost in thought, whether it's about yesterday or tomorrow or whatever it is, I'm not here to what's... I'm probably still doing the action of doing the dishes, of drinking my coffee, but intentionally I'm a million miles away.

So again, not to shame yourself, just to notice, am I fully conscious? Am I aware of what's happening? Or did the alarm almost scare me? I jumped out of my skin when it went off because I was so lost in thought. I was disconnected. I was distracted. I was on my spaceship.

And then in that moment, you can embody the choice to focus, to shift your attention. I like to say, grab a hook for your attention. And some options are, your body will be breathing. It's what keeps us alive. So for some of us, we can just attune in that moment to my breath.

The breath that's coming from my chest or from my belly, maybe just I noticing, just taking the moment once I've come to the awareness, oh, I was lost in thought somewhere else. How is my breathing? Hooking our attention on our breath. For others, the breath might be difficult at first. Maybe it can be what is happening in terms of the sensational experience, my senses. Is it alive because I'm washing the dishes, right? And I smell the soap on my hands or the coffee that I've just made.

Are there bright lights in the restaurant where I'm having the conversation with my friend? I might go through that, the five senses checklist where I make the intention to notice something I'm seeing, touching, tasting, hearing in that moment. I'm now in my body because I'm either paying attention to my breath, I'm paying attention to what's happening in terms of sensation, or I could just pay attention to the fact that I'm in a body grounded in time. Maybe I'm sitting and I just...

feel how my heels are feeling upon the earth, the walk that I'm on, feeling what it's like to be in a human body with muscles that are taking those next few steps as I'm on the go when my alarm went off. Maybe I'm sitting in a nice, comfortable chair. I'm laying on my couch. I can just turn my attention to how it feels to be supported, however it is that your human vessel is being supported in that moment.

And that commitment begins when we set that intention, when we notice where our consciousness is, not shaming ourself if you're not present. And then when we find the hook, and it might take experimenting with all of those different suggestions I just made to discover the one that just gives you a little more likelihood of becoming conscious.

conscious. And then you want to build on that daily commitment. Just keep that one promise for a couple of weeks until you're almost like, ah, I do this now. And then build two, three moments in of your day. Because the more present we are, the more we can then expand the more full focus to, okay, well, how is my body doing? Am I in that state of dysregulation? What's racing through my mind? What are those meanings and those filters like we touched on that are coloring emotionally how I'm

being or what I'm reacting from in this moment. None of that is possible until we first learn how it feels to be present to ourselves in our own presence in whatever moment it is that we're living. Well, thank you for sharing that. And I want to just say something to the cynics.

Because when you hear the word healing and you're dealing with topics like childhood post-traumatic stress, dysregulation disorder, it can feel sort of like, really? That's how I'm going to start this? And so I want to talk to you, the cynic, because I'm going to give you an example. You know how when you go away on vacation,

And it's like amazing because you're in a totally different environment and you're present to everything because it smells different and sounds different and looks different. And you're in a hotel room and you're on a beach or you're in the mountains and, and just everything is different. So it wakes you up.

And you have the sense of aliveness and presence. What Dr. Nicole is saying is that you're not going to be able in your current life to snap into that 24-7. And so this practice that you're going to have to prompt yourself to do and that you need to commit to doing is a way to start to awaken that feeling in your day-to-day life now so that you can develop this muscle of being present now.

to your own experience. And it's only from there being awake that you can then start to widen that out into what you actually want your experience of life to be. And I strongly encourage you, if you don't already, to follow Dr. Nicole online with millions and millions and millions of other people that she reaches every day at theholisticpsychologist.com.

How to Meet Yourself is a extraordinary self-guided workbook that walks you through how to meet your emotional self, how to meet your habit self, how to work through the ego, how to work through past stories. It's beautiful. It is just a gift. And so give this gift to yourself. And Dr. Nicole also has a membership program.

that is so popular that if you're interested, you should check it out, Self Healer Circle. But you have to be on the wait list before you can even register. So I want you to get in there and check it out if this is something that is interesting to you. So I want to thank you, Dr. Nicole, for showing up and for just really helping us

understand the opportunity that we all have to heal ourselves and to, in your words, start to be the parent that we didn't have because they weren't able to do it.

I want to thank you now, as always, for the opportunity to connect with you, to connect with your community and for how you so authentically, so bravely show up in this world. I'm so, so grateful. And I'm so grateful for all of you listening. You know, I want you to take a moment maybe as you sign off from this podcast to celebrate.

the fact that you tuned in, that maybe you heard some new, maybe some even challenging ideas and you gave yourself, I love the language that you're using, the opportunity to hear something new, to challenge maybe some familiar beliefs because it is in that

newness, doing something, making a new choice, challenging. Maybe what we imagined was, again, just inherently who we are, that great change, literal lifetime transformation begins. So I always like to just take a moment and honor the listeners, honor the work

and the conversations, Mel, that you have that give people what I believe is a life-changing opportunity to hear new information, to make the sense of it that makes sense and resonates in their own life, will then gift them with that opportunity to begin to integrate it through those new daily choices. And in my opinion, it is like those dominoes

that it quite literally begins with us becoming more conscious, more aware, and in my opinion, leads to, maybe this sounds idealistic, but world-changing new actions of our collective. And that's what keeps me inspired to show up. So thank you again for your time, your presence, and who you are. Oh, you're the best. I like what you said about dominoes and how it all begins inside of each and every one of us, that the first step is becoming more aware,

And the more aware that we become, and I'll go all the way back to the beginning, like Jessie becoming aware that when she gets overwhelmed in life, she shuts down or she cries and she doesn't know why. When you start with becoming more conscious, that does open the door to healing and to changing your response to things. And I don't think it's idealistic. I do think that when we start and change ourselves,

The world around us changes, there's no doubt. And one of the things that I just love about you, Dr. Nicole, is that you help me get clarity around the issues that I don't understand.

You know, like not having childhood memories, which is one of the first things that you and I connected around. And Dr. Nicole also says one of the first places that you can start once you start to become aware is just set an intention every single morning. And I like to think about this like a tow rope. That singular intention is something that you can hold onto that will pull you with that intention throughout your day. And it's powerful because if you set an intention today, today I'm gonna be peaceful.

Today, I am going to tap into my belief in myself. Today, I'm not going to be in a hurry today. That's going to be my intention. You can come back to that singular intention and it will help you center yourself and gain control. And the genius of it is in the simplicity.

Having a singular intention, as Dr. Nicole recommends, that is something you can remember, which means no matter how complicated today gets or overwhelming it gets, you can continue to come back to it. So I want you to use it. One other thing that I love about Dr. Nicole is that every single time she reminds us that you are your best healer, I just feel like a

Oh, yeah, that's right. I am my own best healer because I can get conscious and I can start healing my nervous system by setting an intention and noticing when I get triggered. And one more thing that you can do, pick up her new book. We will link to both her number one New York Times bestseller, How to Do the Work, and her latest instant bestseller, How to Meet Yourself, in the show notes. And if you do decide to start healing...

Know that I am right there alongside you doing the healing work too. In fact, it's been one of the greatest things that I've done for myself in the last three years. One thing that I noticed now that I get older is we all start down the path at some point. At some point, you're going to wake up and go, I'm so tired of this bullshit. Doesn't matter how much money I make or I don't make or what friends surround me or don't surround me. I am tired of the inner chaos.

You deserve peace. And just know that as you start to repair your nervous system and you start to dedicate your life to finding that peace and that healing inside you, I'm right there alongside you. And I also want you to know that I love you. I believe in you. And I believe in your ability to become more conscious and aware and to use the simple tools that you're learning every single time that we talk to create a much better life for yourself and

and inner peace that you deserve as you live it. All right, I'll see you in a few days. Oh, one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Stitcher.

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Empathy is our best policy.