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Coming up next on Passion Strike.
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I think sometimes there s a bit of misinterpretation in terms of what is meant by self-love.
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I think naturally when we think of self-love, we think of all the positive feelings that we could have about ourselves.
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Liking ourselves, being in celebration of ourselves, doing nice things for ourselves.
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Though what I ve come to learn is that self-love is much more than that.
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Self-love is grounded in the ability to be present
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to all of ourself, inside and outside of those more positive feelings or positive moments or positive, loving gestures.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles.
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And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become passion struck.
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Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 378 of Passion Struck, ranked by Apple as the number one alternative health podcast.
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And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.
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I am so excited to announce that my new book, Passion Struck, is now available for pre-order, and you can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you purchase books.
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It is also featured prominently on the Passion Struck website.
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Starting in December, I will be using my solo episodes to discuss different aspects of the book leading up to its launch.
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And in January, I m going to have different guests who I feature in the book on the program as well.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for joining us, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that.
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We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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In case you missed it, last week I had three great interviews.
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The first was with Amy Morin, who s a psychotherapist, international best-selling author of five books on mental strength, and an acclaimed keynote speaker who gave one of the most popular TED Talks of all time on the secret to becoming mentally strong.
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In our interview, we discuss how to be mentally strong as couples.
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We also talk about how to avoid unhealthy habits that can hold us back in life.
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I also interviewed Drew Plotkin, author of Under My Skin.
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Drew discusses the rollercoaster ride that has been his life and the painful secrets of his past.
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along with his own techniques and tools for continuously navigating life s never-ending trail of valleys and peaks.
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And lastly, I had on Matthew Weintraub, a healer, psychedelic activist, scholar, and entrepreneur.
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Matthew presents his groundbreaking book, The Psychedelic Origin of Religion.
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In this interview, we explore the profound ties that bind psychedelics and shamanism to the tapestry of all world religions.
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I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews.
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And if you loved today s episode or any of those other three, we would appreciate you giving it a five star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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I know we and our guests love to see the comments from our listeners.
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And those ratings and reviews go such a long way in bringing more people into the Passion Strike community.
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In today s episode, we explore the essence of our connections and their profound impact on our lives.
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I am so honored to have Dr. Nicole LaPera, a number one New York Times bestselling author and a luminary in holistic psychology.
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Today, our journey begins with a fundamental truth.
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Human survival is deeply intertwined with relationships.
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Our bodies and minds are innately designed to seek connection.
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However, these essential bonds, while nurturing, can also be the source of our deepest anguish.
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Dr. LePera unravels how our nervous systems, imprinted with past traumas and disappointments, paradoxically prepare us for threat and negativity.
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while our hearts yearn for compassionate connections.
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For years, relationship advice has hinged on the idea of compromise, altering our authentic selves to fit the needs of others.
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While seemingly logical, Dr. LePera argues that this conventional wisdom is a direct path to lifelong resentment.
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In her groundbreaking book, How to Be the Love You Seek, she proposes an alternate path.
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healing our relationships by first addressing the relationship we have with ourselves.
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This episode promises to be a transformative experience as Dr. LaPera guides us through her holistic approach.
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She illuminates how unmet needs from our earliest relationships shape our current dysfunctional patterns, often leaving us in a state of internal threat, even with those we hold dear.
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How to Be the Love You Seek is not just a book, it s a beacon of hope for anyone struggling with relationships.
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Whether it s challenges with a spouse, partner, family member, friend, or colleague, Dr. LePera s insights offer a healing roadmap.
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Listeners will discover how to create safety within themselves, recognize unmet needs, develop emotional resilience, and cultivate deep, meaningful connections through heart coherence.
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In our interview, we delve into these transformative concepts, replete with practical tools, stories, exercises, and journal prompts, offering a comprehensive guide for all seeking to break cycles of pain and embrace a life of peace and healing.
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Join us as we embark on this enlightening journey with Dr. Nicole LePera, as she teaches us to tap into our heart s innate capacity for love, becoming the very essence of the love we seek.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely stoked today and honored to have the one and only Dr. Nicole LaPera on Passion Struck.
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Welcome.
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Thank you so much for having me, John.
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I m honored to be here.
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You told me before you got on the show that you did a little bit of recon on me and I did a little bit of recon on you.
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I found out that we re both from Pennsylvania.
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You grew up in Philadelphia and I grew up outside of Philly in York slash Lancaster.
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And I have to ask, are you an Eagles fan?
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Of course I am.
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Of course, I actually would travel out to Lancaster to get some farm fresh meat and all of the things when I was more recently had moved back to Philadelphia.
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But yes, of all of the sports, football would be the one that I stay most closely connected to and absolutely Eagles.
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I moved to St.
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Petersburg, Florida about 11, almost 12 years ago now.
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And about nine years ago, I happened to be out and ran into five or six other Eagles fans.
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And we created something that s called the Birds of Berg here.
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And it started out with six to eight of us within three or four years, it was up to 50 or 60.
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It now has 1400 members and our games are so crowded that I can t even go to him anymore because you can t get a seat.
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That is so incredible.
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I love when I see people walking around in any of the really Philadelphia team gear.
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I always make it a point to shout out my agreement.
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Well, go birds.
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So, well, Nicole, I thought we would start out today.
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A lot of people understand traditional psychology, but could you explain what holistic psychology means and how it s different?
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Holistic psychology, I think for those of us who are familiar with the more traditional sense of the word, for me, that was really an overemphasis on the mind.
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With the gold standard, I think being in the traditional world, CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, which is really built around this idea that we change the way we think about certain things.
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Ultimately, we re able to change the way we feel and then what it is that we do.
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Having practiced in that kind of somewhat of a traditional sense, overemphasizing the power of insight and awareness, having created my own practice living in Philadelphia at the time and several years in where I had the opportunity to work with the same clients week after week, year after year at that
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point.
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And I started to feel really disempowered and the work that I was doing professionally, and then also disempowered in my personal life, because I continued to see myself and all of the clients that I was working with struggle to what I say is build that bridge from insight into action, to take the things that we were talking about week after week, and to begin to
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create change in whatever it is the area that they were looking to create change, right?
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Minimize the symptoms, shift their dynamics in relationships and feeling really disempowered, seeing myself continue to experience frequent anxiety, to struggle feeling disconnected in my relationships.
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I think I did as a lifelong learner in me typically does, I went online.
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And I was like, what is going on here?
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Why are we all so stuck?
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Why can t I help people create the change that I want to be able to help them?
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And ultimately that is when I was met with a whole new range for me of information that began to include conversations about the body, about our nervous system in particular, about our physiology.
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Instead of just emphasizing the conscious mind or those logical, insightful moments,
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I really began to look at the deeper subconscious mind and all of those ingrained habits and patterns that are keeping us stuck.
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And that s when I really began to define what I was doing by using that label holistic, because what that means to me is, of course, we re still honoring the powerful mind that we each have access to, though we re introing the body as part of our conversation.
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understanding how to care for the body.
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And really, I think that model gives us the opportunity to understand on a deeper level why it is that we re stuck.
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And it gives us then access to more tools in terms of being able to create the change that we re looking for.
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Well, thank you for that background.
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And today we re going to be going into a deep dive of your brand new book.
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If for those who are watching this on YouTube, you ll see it right behind Nicole s shoulders, but it s called how to be the love you seek break cycles, find peace and heal your relationships.
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Congratulations.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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I m super.
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And again, I just want to thank everyone listening.
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It really is the community who s interested in these conversations that gives me the opportunity to put out pieces of work in the form of a book.
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And for me, so much of my work, this one included is really informed by my own journey, my own struggles.
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And of course, all of the resources then that I ve picked up along the way that I hope can help and impact other people and create change in their own lives.
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For those listeners who might be familiar with your other two how-to books, can you explain how this book complements the other two in this three-book series?
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I think, again, like I was saying, this book for me was just an intuitive next step.
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I have the idea that many of us, when we re on a journey of self-awareness or exploration, and my first book, How to Do the Work, really talked about that, really becoming present to all of these unconscious habits and patterns that are defining this very habitual way of being.
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And of course, my hope is to empower
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empowering many of us to begin to make new choices and begin to create change.
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I saw in myself and again, in the clients that I was working with, I did a lot of work with couples, a lot of work with families, really observing and trying to help empower changes in dynamics between people.
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And I think that ultimately relationships becomes our point of focus, where many of us have created incredible change in our own individual experiences, yet we continue to struggle, as even the subtitle that you read aloud, right, to break the cycles that many of us have seen and lived within our families.
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And many of us continue to have many dysfunctional patterns within our relationships.
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So my own journey really reflected that continuing to see myself struggle subconsciously with moments of reactivity or disconnection in my relationships, continuing to feel not really connected, not really emotionally fulfilled in my relationships.
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Wanted to, of course, understand why and seeing the same in the clients that I was working with.
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conversation in the sessions was really helping the couples that I was seeing create change.
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So for me, it s again the next extension that many, I think, readers were looking for.
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Now that I m still struggling in my relationships, what can I ultimately do about it?
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Though I do want to say, because I get asked quite often in the context of a version of this question, well,
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Do you have to read them all or sequentially?
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And ultimately, the answer is no.
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I ve created all of the different works to be really standalone.
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So anyone out there who s struggling in any relationship or who is struggling alone in relationship with themselves or struggling to find and maintain a relationship, I think that within the book are a lot of helpful insights and awarenesses of why you might be struggling in those ways.
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And then, of course, many resources to begin to create change.
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Thank you for that.
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And I m going to start with chapter one.
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In it, you discuss the concept of unconscious choices that we make in our relationships, and you highlight how we often fall in love or surround ourselves with people based on unacknowledged needs, or as you were just talking about, familiar patterns from our earliest experiences.
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How can a listener today be more aware of their own subconscious decision-making process in their relationships?
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I think becoming even just aware of what your kind of wisdom that you re really sharing here, which is that there are patterns that are driving us in our relationships.
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That awareness I think is key because many of us, we feel disempowered, right?
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We feel very reactive.
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We feel like the world, others are happening to us, what they re doing, what they re not doing.
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And we don t have a sense of the role we re playing, the role, more specifically, those subconscious habits and patterns are playing.
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in our earliest relationships, in our earliest environment, right?
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We do become very habituated to whatever needs were being tended to consistently or not.
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And we, as very adaptive creatures, have learned ways to show up within those environments to maintain, to whatever extent they were available, the connections that we were physically dependent on in childhood.
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and emotionally dependent on it.
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Because again, our nervous systems in that kind of body-based part of the conversation are developing well throughout our 20s even.
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So we re driven, all of us are driven, our nervous systems in particular are driven to prefer the familiar.
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So really simply the way that we show up in our day-to-day life, from everything, from how we care for our own physical bodies, our nervous systems, how we learn how to soothe or turn to the support of others to help us navigate our stressful or upsetting emotions.
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And really just how we learn to be ourselves when in connection with other people really is based on the imprint of what it is that we had to do.
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And more often than not for most of us, how it is that we had to adapt
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in our early childhood.
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So once we have that understanding and we ll begin to become conscious and present to ourselves in our day-to-day life, beginning to observe how it is that I m caring for my physical body.
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Am I even connected to the fact that I m in a physical body to be in care of it?
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What about in terms of my emotional world?
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What do I do with my emotions?
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Do I suppress them and ignore them like they re not happening?
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Or do I erupt
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from them and become reactive?
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Or am I able to be grounded and to share them with another and to receive support from another person?
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Am I able to be who I am when I m in connection or in relationship for others?
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And imagining many of you listening might not be safe and grounded and connected to your body and in control or at least responsive to your emotions and being who you are, you re probably like the large majority of us.
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We re not tending to our physical needs.
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We re shoving our emotions.
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right under the table or trying to ignore them.
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Or as I talk about in the book, we re not showing up as who we are.
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We re showing up more based on our what I call a conditioned self, right?
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We might be the caretaker taking identity of this way of caring for others around us.
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For me, I know I became really achievement focused.
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I wasn t necessarily expressing who I was, I was expressing an aspect of my personality.
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And again, all of that came back to how I learned to feel safe and secure in my earliest environment.
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So as I ll always do, I ll break the stage of change.
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How do I change or transform what it is that I m doing, my dynamics and relationships, and the first step will always be become conscious.
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What are the habits and patterns that are coloring your current life?
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And then that creates the opportunity to begin to make some new choices.
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For many of us, those new choices mean reconnecting with my body, making sure that I m tending to its physical needs, its needs for nutrients, its needs for movement, its needs for rest, its needs for calming, grounding breath that helps us to be responsive in those moments to then care for my emotional needs, attuning to what s actually happening for me emotionally, not ignoring it, pretending it s not there.
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learning how to express those emotions to the world around us, and ultimately how to be who it is that we are, not the conditioning that we learned we had to be to keep ourselves connected to those around us.
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I have my own book coming out here in a few months, and in it, I go through my personal experience, and I m going to get into yours here in a few moments, but I discuss this concept that so many of us today are hiding behind a mask of pretense.
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We re pretending to be someone that we re not.
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And I found myself similar to the way that you re describing doing just that.
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I was absorbed in this achievement culture because I guess I never felt safe from the time that I was a kid of being authentically myself.
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And so I thought the way to prove that to myself was through constant achievement.
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And I remember reaching the pinnacle of at that point what I aspired to be.
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which was a sea level at a fortune 50 company.
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And I had achieved this yet felt this profound sense of emptiness inside and numbness and just disconnection to who I am.
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And I think so many
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of the listeners today probably feel that same stuckness.
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And it wasn t until I went to a career coach who happened to also be a therapist that he really brought forth this analogy to me that I had been living my life on a stool that had one pillar underneath it.
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And that was this constant
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pursuit of success, but I was ignoring other pillars that needed to be
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there as you were describing, such as your emotions and your physical health and your mental health and your spiritual health and your relationship well-being.
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Do you find this same scenario often comes up in people that you are helping?
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Congratulations, John, on your upcoming book and thank you for gifting myself and your listeners with your own journey.
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And I m sure as you did within the book as well, I think it s so helpful when we begin to pull our own mask off, especially in such a public way, as I know it s equally as difficult.
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And ultimately I m in gratitude to you because I don t know if you had the same experience.
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I know I did similarly coming to the end of this list of achievements for achieving the
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the greatest degree possible in my field, getting the PhD, having a successful practice, having the committed relationship, being living near my family, which was very important to me at the time.
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I felt a lot of shame when I didn t feel as I imagined the world felt I ought to feel, which is good about myself, right?
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When I felt that same sense of emptiness,
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and even disconnection from the life that I had spent so many years indebted to creating, I shamed myself for a bit of time.
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And I m saying that to say, because I think especially when we are achievement driven in a society, bringing in the larger context,
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that I believe, I call it urgency culture, because I think that there s a lot that is celebrated in society that is in opposition to our natural way of being, our natural emotional needs, our natural physical needs, though it s celebrated.
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to some extent.
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So saying that to say and simply answer your question, I think a lot of us, and I ve worked with individually with a lot of people now in my community membership self-healer circle, there are a lot of people that are feeling that same sense of emptiness.
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that might be shaming themselves, right?
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Because they re looking at the world around them or even what they ve created for themselves in their own individual lives.
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And they re not feeling that sense of connection or a fulfillment or joy or creativity, right?
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They re feeling that sense of emptiness that both you and I are.
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And I just wanted to mention the society piece, because a lot that s celebrated
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in our daily societies out there, the long hours that we work, the keeping ourselves endlessly busy, right?
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This idea that we re always needing to be driven toward output and not ever taking moments to rest, to recharge, to replenish, to plant the seeds, if you will, to use a metaphor, right?
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Let alone to grow and produce the seeds at some later time.
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which is our natural human existence, is to be much more on a creativity cycle, moments of rest, not just being driven by the hour of the day, because that s how, that s what I m due at work, or the amount of hours that some of us are required to work, or the amount of obligations that many of us have to tend to outside of the community support in which our ancestors, right, inherently living in groups,
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much more had access to support, not always needing to be the single sole physical caretaker, financial caretaker, right, and everything in between.
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Again, saying that to say, I think a lot of us are being driven by condition patterns that have been either have valued us within our individual families or even have valued us within our more societal
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families, so to speak, that are very much at odds.
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And I think for many of us, like I said, creating a lot of shame when we don t feel as we imagine we ought to feel when we re living in alignment with those values.
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I m going to jump into your own personal story and this again is right up in chapter one.
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You talk about your shifting perspective on romantic relationships and you start out with your first relationship in high school and then you go through a series of them culminating into you marrying Vivian.
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At the same time, you were undergoing intense psychoanalytical training.
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And during this time, you realized the emotional disconnect in your marriage and you started opening up to strangers about deep feelings and relationship dynamics.
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How did this really profound and I would have to guess at the time, very emotional experience for you, like open up your understanding of your own emotional connection and relationships and what advice from that experience would you give to others who find themselves in a similar situation?
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So since that first relationship that you re citing, which for me was in high school, I think I was on what we traditionally now call a serial monogamous, meaning I was more or less always in a relationship.
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I think there would be several months between a relationship ending and me finding another partner and then into the next committed relationship I would go.
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Ultimately in all of the relationships up until my more recent one, which was post Vivian,
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My number one experience and ultimately complaint that would often lead to the end of the relationship that I would have for all of my partners beginning with that first one is I don t feel emotionally connected to you.
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I don t have this depth that I felt like I was looking for and wanting.
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And I think what I was trying to say and meaning was right, a deep, emotional, authentic connection with you.
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And for decades before this moment in time where I was married to Vivian and undergoing in my own, not only training to be a psychoanalyst in my own psychoanalytics, laying on the couch with my own analysts, being in a group environment with other training analysts around me, exploring my own dynamics with others, which is when I began to share more of myself emotionally.
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I was complaining that I was disconnected from my partners and ultimately putting the blame on them.
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I must be picking the wrong person who can t connect with me the way that I m looking for.
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Off I would go to try to find a more perfect partner where I wouldn t feel that way.
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Inevitably, sometime down the road, I would end up feeling that way again.
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And it wasn t until this kind of moments, because it s still an ongoing process for me, where I began to look at the role I was playing.
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Right.
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Instead of saying, well, it s the wrong person I m picking, which I think is really natural as I kind of intro in the book.
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I think a lot of us are looking for this more perfect or ideal partner where we won t feel or where our needs will be met in a different way.
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and I wasn t necessarily looking at the role I might be playing.
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More specifically, my subconscious and habits and patterns might be playing in why I so consistently feel emotionally disconnected.
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And what I started to become aware of, because I think is all things, it s not, at least for me, it s not a light bulb moment of, oh, all this awareness, and I just knew everything I was doing or not doing, it was a gradual kind of shifting into, okay, what is this role I m playing?
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And I came to realize that if I really want to simplify it, the reason why I didn t feel emotionally connected with any of my partners beginning with that first partner was actually something that first partner told me near the end of our relationship.
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And he had said to me that he felt me to be emotionally unavailable.
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Now at this time, I was blown away because I didn t feel emotionally unavailable.
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I thought he was inaccurate in that assessment.
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It can t be me.
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It must be you.
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I m only emotionally unavailable because you re not able to give me what I need emotionally.
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And it took me up until
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I heard something similar in that group analysis that I was in.
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So again, we would sit around a room, we would explore and share our experiences of the other analysts in the room.
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And one of the colleagues that I very much respected at that time, one of the sessions described me as cold and aloof.
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Again, shook me to my core.
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I didn t feel cold, I didn t feel aloof.
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I had a lot of feelings, overwhelming feelings at the time.
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though I had the possibility now where I started to try on for size, the reality that maybe there was something in both of those assessments and the reality that I continued to create, which began in my first relationship with my mother, who wasn t able to be emotionally attuned to me to create the safe and secure relationship where I could be curious and explore my own feelings.
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And she wasn t able to attune to me in those moments where I was having big emotions.
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The reality that I continued to recreate was I was emotionally unavailable.
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I wasn t emotionally available to myself because I was so overwhelmed in my body and ill-equipped physiologically to deal with all of the upsetting emotions.
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I began to do what naturally all of our nervous systems will do if you re overwhelmed with stress consistently enough over time, which is you ll begin to disconnect or to dissociate.
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I call it in my first book, How to Do the Work, I call it living on my spaceship.
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So much like I was being told in my romantic relationships, I wasn t emotionally connected to myself, yet I was holding all of my partners responsible for the very real lack of emotional connection that I was feeling, not seeing all of the moments I was suppressing my emotions or disconnecting from my emotions.
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or not sharing what I really felt because I was so focused on pleasing you, keeping the relationship, not being needy as I, or a burden as my language in my mind.
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Just again, I felt in childhood when my mom of no fault of her own was unable to be emotionally
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present to me.
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So that was, again, a groundbreaking shift of awareness that the role I was playing in terms of my emotional disconnection was being emotionally disconnected, feeling unsafe, expressing myself emotionally, feeling unable to receive the support that was maybe available around me.
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And so as I began to come to that awareness and began to have those conversations, I was able to, of course, have very many difficult conversations in my marriage at that time.
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ultimately make the choice to end that relationship and continue on my journey of reconnecting with myself emotionally so that if and when, as I did, enter into new romantic relationships, I was actually someone who was available for emotional connection.
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As I was reading your book, I happened to be reading Gabby Bernstein s most recent book at the same time, and I found there to be a lot of parallels between them.
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I m not sure if you ve read her most recent book.
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One of the topics you both get into is worthiness.
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I will just talk about her.
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hers for a second because you were talking about how we often start finding ourselves living this life that s not our own and so because of that when we get disconnected like you and I felt and Gabby felt herself
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you end up starting to do things to self-comfort.
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That could be excessive work, it could be excessive eating, it could be drinking, it could be drug use, it could be whatever.
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But I think the point there is that we don t feel that self-love.
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We don t feel worthy of it.
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I think an important thing
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that you brought up is that you re not going to have this emotional availability until you love yourself because that self-love allows you to open up and expose yourself and all that you are to someone else.
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I m not sure how you think about that but that s how I have felt it and I know that s how Gabby expresses it in her book.
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When I think about or when I hear about or read about the concept of self-love, it can be quite a popular conversation.
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I think sometimes there s a bit of misinterpretation in terms of what is meant by self-love.
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I think naturally when we think of self-love, we think of all the positive feelings that we could have about ourselves.
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liking ourselves, being in celebration of ourselves, doing nice things for ourselves.
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Though what I ve come to learn is that self-love is much more than that.
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Self-love is grounded in the ability to be present to all of ourselves.
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inside and outside of those more positive feelings or positive moments or positive, loving gestures, if you will.
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And I m intentionally beginning there and just going to tie this into worthiness.
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In childhood, when we re completely dependent on someone else to physically care for us, to keep us physically alive and our nervous systems who are still in that state of development,
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are dependent on another nervous system to help us what s called co-regulate, or really simply to go from stressed or in distress, right, when an infant s crying and needs to be soothed, maybe because there s a physical need, they re hungry, they re thirsty, they re tired, there s no need to be changed, or whether there s emotional need, they re feeling stressed, they re upset, a toddler for whatever reason.
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So in that state of development, when we need someone else to show up to meet our physical needs, to help our body down-regulate or calm down when it s upset or in distress, our nervous system and our brain in particular, which is still developing, our nervous system s developing actually upward until our 20s.
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Mentally, we re in a developmental stage that s called egocentric stage, from birth until around age seven or age eight.
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And when we re in that state, which is a much more immature state of development, we really want to simplify what egocentric means.
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It means the world revolves around us, as our mind will always do, seeking to understand the world around us, make meaning of the world around us.
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Right.
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When a caregiver
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is not able to be physically or emotionally consistently present.
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Now, any parents out there, this isn t the one-off where you re sick and you re not able to be physically present because you re in your room getting better or where emotionally there s a few couple days where you re under stress from work or for whatever, and you re not able to be fully emotionally attuned to your kids.
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This is when more consistently than not, you re not able to be present to physically or emotionally meet the child s needs.
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the way their immature brain will make sense of it.
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They can t, like you and I can do right now, John, from a mature perspective, zoom out and understand that, oh, the parent is sick.
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This has nothing to do with me in the moment, or the parent is working for the family, or maybe something s going on in their parents  life emotionally, and their lack of availability has nothing to do with me, right?
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We gain that ability as we mature.
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In that childhood, the world revolves around me state,
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We assign a self-focused meaning.
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Meaning, again, I m going to simplify this.
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When my parent s not able to be consistently present to meet my needs, physically or emotionally, it must be something inherently wrong with me.
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Or, you beautifully brought up, I must not be worthy.
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of having those needs met.
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I must not be lovable.
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I must not be someone who is available or needing or can receive the love and the support and the connection, right?
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There must be something wrong with me.
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And then because we re dependent on getting our needs met and being in relation with these individuals, that s when we start to modify.
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who it is that we are, how it is that we re showing up, right?
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In this level of attunement, assuming that there s something wrong with me, I ll get really perceptive and aware of what I imagine caused mom or dad to be, or whoever the caregiver might be, to be unavailable to me.
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I will continue to assume there s something wrong with me and continue then to modify myself and my relationships to make sure that I m someone who s worthy of love and worthy of connection, even though at my core, I don t feel that way to be.
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And again, all of this belief,
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All of this habitual way of being gets wired into our subconscious, becomes familiar, that familiar zone as we age.
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And we do have that awareness to zoom out.
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Our mind still assumes or assigns those same filters.
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Our body still feels most comfortable in certain emotions, in certain habitual behaviors.
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And we continue to repeat these patterns, some of us taking them on as our identity.
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I m a caretaker who s always in care of others.
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It s the only way I know my identity.
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Right?
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I m a pleaser.
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I m always just here to service the world, right?
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Or I m an overachiever, or maybe I m on the other side of it.
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I m an underachiever.
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I m someone who s meant to be in the background of all of my relationships and not be a burden, right?
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Not need anything.
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And then that becomes how we identify and how we know ourself, which wrapping this conversation full circle is why we re so stuck.
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Because some of us aren t even aware of those very early adaptations, what we had to do.
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the beliefs now that we have about ourself.
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Most of us as adults, somewhere down the line, or kind of if you dive into or dig into our beliefs, do believe that we re unworthy unless we show up in a certain way, or unless we don t show a certain aspect of ourself.
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And then driven by those beliefs, driven by our nervous system s desire to be in those familiar neurobiological patterns, before we know it, we are stuck, even if we gain insight and awareness and desire to create change.
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Hearing you just talk about that brought up to me two other concepts that you bring up in the book that you alluded to in your answer.
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One is the ego story and the other is empowerment consciousness.
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I wanted to ask you about both.
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So how does that ego story from childhood influence our adult relationships if you could expand upon that?
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And then what is this empowerment consciousness and how can it help reshape our self-worth?
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I appreciate this question, John, because these two concepts are quite connected.
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So I believe at our core, when I cited that I m unworthy, I think most of us have that as our core ego story.
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There s a sense of unworthiness.
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There s usually maybe something that comes after that.
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As we begin to become more conscious or simply pay attention,
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to the way that we re narrating our life or the meanings that our subconscious mind is assigning to our daily events or our happenings or our roles in our relationship, we ll begin to get a sense based on how repetitively we do tell ourselves the same stories or we tend to assign the same meanings to the events or the happenings in our life, a sense of kind of what might come after that, right?
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I m unworthy if I m not achieving.
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I think, I don t know if you can relate to that one.
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I know that was a big one of my own.
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For me, another similar ego story.
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And again, I just noticed this, what was coming up in my mind as things were happening around me, particularly things that I was becoming upset by.
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And in my relationships, I started to pay attention to the meaning that I was assigning when partners would do or not do whatever it was that was happening or not happening in our day-to-day life.
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My mind, because our mind is always just like in childhood, trying to make sense of the world around us.
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us, the repetitive language that I would hear in my mind is, I m not considered.
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And I would say that and assign that meaning, right?
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My partner did this to me.
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Well, they did this because they re not considering me and my needs in this moment.
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Or they didn t do whatever it was they didn t do.
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They didn t do this because they re not considering me and my needs in the moment.
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And so our mind, again, the ego story is really based in those earliest interpretations.
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So from what I ve shared of my story right now, right?
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Having this emotionally unavailable mother who was only able to see me the moments my mom was most present
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was when she was in celebration of my achievements, whether it was academic or athletic.
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So there came that version of the core belief, right?
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I m only worthy when I m doing something that is being celebrated, that is being seen and celebrated by someone else.
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coupled with the next common narrative, equally as common, I should say, I m not being considered.
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Why?
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Because while my mom was very physically able, present, and able to care for my physical existence, emotionally, she, just like I developed the habit to be, was a million miles away on her own spaceship in her state of disconnection.
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She was not able to consider
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my emotional needs, or again, my more full self-expression outside of these moments of achievement.
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Almost confirming what I believe to be true in that very early immature developmental stage, I continue to put that filter even in the moments where it wasn t the case that whatever was done or wasn t done was not a reflection of my partner s lack of consideration for me.
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It might ve had nothing to do with me in those moments similar to as it had nothing to do with me in childhood.
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yet I was still assigning that filter.
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And what that causes segueing this into empowerment consciousness.
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So just sticking with ego story, our mind continues to make sense.
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More often than not continues to apply this filter over our daily happenings.
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And then if we continue to assign as I did, I m not considered
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then usually what happens is, to contrast it with empowerment consciousness, which I ll get into in just a second, we become reactive, emotional, upset in a state of what I call ego consciousness.
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all of those habitual reactions or things that I did, just to continue with my example, every time I felt not considered, which could look like either screaming and yelling.
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I call this erupter mood, right?
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When my nervous system dysregulated or went into that fight response, when I became upset outwardly, yelling that I m not being considered, saying things I don t mean to the people around me.
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I would do that, or I would disconnect myself emotionally, going into distractor or what I call the detacher mode, right?
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Either distracting myself by the thing that I have to do next, so I m not emotionally, right, present to the upset,
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the hurt of someone not being available or caring for me or considering me in that moment, or I would just shut down entirely, detached, be physically present and act like whatever it was happening that didn t bother me at all.
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In those reactive states, often as a connected to these deep beliefs of unworthiness, how our nervous system then goes into these
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kind of survival-driven modes where it can absolutely, as I just described, impact our relationships, and where, again, we re so very habitual, right?
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Those things happen.
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I say or do things that I don t mean.
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I feel shameful after the fact, even though I know I don t want to be saying or doing those things, right?
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I want to be open for connection, even though I m not.
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I m really driven in that state by my ego, by those beliefs.
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So now shifting, as I become aware of all of the different messages my body is sending me to let me know that it s becoming activated or that my nervous system, my heart rate beginning to elevate, my palms beginning to sweat, my jaw beginning to clench, my breath beginning to get really quick or me holding my breath.
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Those are all now physiological signals that I m dropping down to that survival mode.
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I m not in that more empowered state of conscious awareness and ultimately choice.
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And then I can see, as I was describing earlier, the more I paid attention to my thoughts or created a bit of separation so I could observe them, I began to see the filters that I was applying to my real life circumstances.
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which was then causing and creating that stuck cycle, right, of I m physiologically activated because I don t feel safe.
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I feel like what s happening to me is just what happened to me in childhood.
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Someone s not available or considering me.
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The filter that I m applying is exactly that.
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And then before I know it, my body has no choice.
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but to react in that survival-driven way.
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So as I become conscious, and it s very much a process, right?
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It doesn t happen in an immediate moment in time.
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But when I become conscious, I become more empowered.
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Because it s not to say that all of that wiring goes away, or the instinct or the compulsion to act in these ways goes away, because it doesn t.
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But what happens now is I have a more empowered state in that empowerment consciousness to say, okay,
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Is it possible that I can now physiologically regulate my body in a new way?
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Can I calm my breath?
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Can I release the tension in my muscles?
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Can I calm my heart rate down so that now my body is sending signals that it s safer in this moment than it once was when it was in that state of reactivity?
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Can I create more space between these subconsciously or unconsciously driven perceptions of what s happening?
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and make the possibility for myself that I can show up in choice, in conversation, right?
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Maybe it s possible that this person isn t not considering me in this moment.
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Maybe I can expand my awareness and have a more grounded conversation.
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about what s happening and explore for myself a new way to get my emotional need met.
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So that s what I am defining as empowerment consciousness.
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The more present we are to the habits and patterns, the more that we re aware that many of them live in our body and are dropping us back into that survival driven, habitual reactive state where we won t have control.
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the more I access that more grounded space of empowerment, different part of my brain entirely, now I can be a more active participant in my relationships.
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I don t just have to let those familiar patterns, those familiar identities drive the future of my relationships.
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I can show up in a more grounded presence and begin to make new choices, which for me meant being more emotionally vulnerable, opening myself up for a more emotional connection, entertaining the possibility
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that I am being considered in ways that I once wasn t.
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Thank you for giving that a great explanation and I thought it might be beneficial to go through two other scenarios of how things that happen in our early childhood could impact our relationships and our own self-love and what to do about it.
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The first is something I heard you talk about on an episode with Danica Patrick and
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This is what happens if you grow up in a household that is parentified, meaning you become the parent of your parent.
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I was hoping you could explore that one a little bit.
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Absolutely.
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That in childhood, I think happens out of a lot of different circumstances, more often than not out of necessity.
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Having a parent who s emotionally incapacitated for whatever reason.
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having a parent who is unable to show up in more kind of physical or practical care.
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A lot of times it happens in families where there s multiple children, where one of the children will need to show up almost in the role of parenting the rest of the family, their siblings, for whatever reason, because the parent is emotionally or physically unavailable for whatever reason.
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And again, out of that state of adaptation, maybe even sometimes
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connection, right?
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Having the parent who needs your constant emotional support when developmentally you re a child, but yet you re treated like a peer, right?
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Things are shared with you emotionally, maybe even about your other parent or maybe about your parents  own personal life.
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that are too much for you to emotionally handle.
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Yet in those moments, you have access to your parents  physical presence, to emotional presence.
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They re relying on you for their own sense of support, soothing, or comfort.
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I just want to continue to emphasize that all of these different kind of habit, habitual ways of being,
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are born out of necessity, right?
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As the child who was parentified, there was some circumstances that were happening or that weren t happening in your relationships or in the environment that your family was living in that required or necessitated you to take on that parentified role.
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And then when that happens in childhood, right, you tend to keep playing that role, which at its foundation, it s really a stage, multiple years of self-exploration, curiosity, of having the time and space through the consistent availability and presence of a parent meeting your needs, where you learn to be curious about your needs, identify your needs, and then ultimately learn how to show up in service of meeting your own needs.
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And when that doesn t happen because you re putting your parents or your family s needs
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because you had to in childhood before your own, then we become an adult who s unable to tend to their own needs, who doesn t know what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they need, and who is always habitually driven to show up in that same version of service for the whole world around us.
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And a lot of times we become, I think what a lot of traditionally have heard of being a
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people pleaser.
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I call it a yes person, one of the conditioned selves, which is no matter who needs what of me, I m always saying yes, right?
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Showing up.
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Because in childhood,
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I needed to be that, or I m the caretaker, because I very much was in care, physical or emotional care of my parent, maybe of my siblings.
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So now I m that role in all of my relationships in adulthood.
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Born out of necessity, continuing out of familiarity, ultimately though, problematically, which I think some of us have even learned to define that way of being, that outward sense of service as being selfless.
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Well, I m just showing up in service of other people.
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Though when we truly understand how our body works, how our nervous system works, the fact that we do have physical needs that need to be met, again, bringing up kind of the example of, I m sure many of us, those of us who have flown, right?
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Put your oxygen mask on first.
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I ve learned in my own life, we can t be of true service to other people unless there is space for our own needs to be consistently met.
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And what s born out of necessity in childhood, what might even be validated as this idea that I m just being selfless, right?
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And care of everyone around me, because that s what I had to do in childhood.
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The reality of it is I m not actually able to be in full service because I m not actually able to identify or meet the needs that I need to be meeting to be in that state of service.
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I m now going to jump to something completely different because I don t think I can do this interview and not touch on this.
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I recently released a podcast with brain expert, Jim Quick, where we talked a lot about neuroplasticity.
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And this is something you also cover in the book.
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Drawing from Dr. Daniel Siegel s research, someone you talk about in the book on interpersonal neurobiology, how does this neurobiology profoundly impact the social nature of our nervous system?
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both in our relationships that are platonic or romantic and what does this have to do with our well-being and physical safety in today s individualistic culture that we find ourselves in?
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Even just starting with this last, this concept, while I do think a lot of society is driven to celebrate the individual, a lot of our society is structurally set up to separate us from other individuals.
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The reality that began in our early existence when we re born and will continue throughout our entire existence here of being a human, which is that we need connections to other people.
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And I think a lot about.
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our ancestors and how not only was there physical safety that was gained when there was groups joining together, there was emotional safety and emotional support.
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And that really highlights Dr. Dan Siegel s work and every all of the those that came before that really spoke about the nervous system and how integral it is in terms of our entirety of our existence and really understanding the basic need of the nervous system, which is those points of co-regulation.
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the natural interconnectedness that exists between us always and what I mean when I say that is our nervous system is sending out and is assessing the electromagnetic signals vibrational energies that is in the environments and of course the relationships and
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of those around us.
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So we are always in a state of connection to other individuals and are always impacting the connections that we have and the nervous system states of those individuals around us.
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As I ve shared in the beginning of our conversation, beginning in childhood, when we need those points of co-regulation, when we re beginning to define who we are,
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in relationship based in the safety and security or lack thereof in our earliest relationships, it is this social brain driven by our nervous system that is at the core.
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When I didn t have safe and secure relationships, chances are I don t feel worthy, right?
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I ve adapted it by creating these habitual ways, oftentimes the roles that we re playing to maintain these connections that which I need.
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And as we continue to then go about life, if our nervous system is always in one of those nervous system responses that I went very quickly over earlier, or is sending out messages of stress or of threat, then the dominoes, I think of it like dominoes, the impact I m having
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on those around me is I m cranking up, I m turning up the volume of the stress in my relationships and in my communities.
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Who s across the room from me right now, if I m in a stress mode, I don t have to say anything.
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And I think many of us have had this experience where you walk in a room and you can feel the vibe.
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You maybe know when there was just an argument, even if there s quiet at this point.
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you just feel and what you re feeling is the state of stress and tension and threat in the nervous systems of those around you.
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Because in childhood, we had that co-regulation, the calm, grounded, peaceful nervous system with which to co-regulate, with which to discover ourselves so that we can feel safe, right?
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Just being who it is that we are.
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Now we re reversing those signals.
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So anyone I interact with, instead of feeling the tension that I m carrying, the stress, ultimately feeling threatened by a physiological being without me even saying anything threatening, now the signal that they re going to receive is one of calm, grounded presence.
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And I don t know, maybe some listeners have even heard people comment, oh my gosh, I just feel calm and grounded and at peace around you.
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So I just like to illustrate that kind of state of that social brain driven by our nervous system and its impact to the entirety of our being, right?
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Well, we re not safe to express ourselves as we were talking about earlier.
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I m only worthy when I m achieving, right?
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It s going to impact how I am in the world.
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when I m not feeling and or being truly who I am or if I m in that state of reactivity because I m upset personally because someone s not considering me.
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Now I m not only impacting myself because I don t feel safe to be who I am to express my real wants and needs to share myself vulnerably.
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Now I m impacting.
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all of my relationships and all of the world around me.
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And the empowerment, I think, and I hope that people take away from this conversation, from my book or any of my work, is going back to those two concepts of change, two steps of change.
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When I become aware of how I m wired, what signals I m sending to myself and to those around me, the more conscious I become,
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the more I can begin to make intentional choices to create that reconnection with my body, that calm, grounded presence, the ability to be who I am so that when I am interacting with other people, they feel safer to authentically express themselves, to emotionally connect.
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and really to join together in interdependent relationships, which is really simply, I m me with all of my different perspectives, wants, desires, interests, talents, and you re you with all of your different perspectives, desires, interests, and talents.
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And together, when we both feel safe and secure to be who we are in connection, we don t feel fearful that if we show or express some side of ourself, the person s going to leave us.
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then the signals we begin to send not only within that relationship, but to all of those that we will be in connection with over our lifespans will be those signals of safety and that security.
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This whole podcast is about intentional choice and you just nailed that answer.
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And I think something you talk about in the book, I refer to it as we live a pinball life.
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You call it, we live on autopilot.
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And to me, when you can learn how to use intentional choices, something that I call deliberate action, that is really the key to breaking these mindset and behavior cycles that people find themselves in.
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I know listeners are going to get a ton of value from this.
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If they want to learn more about you and the work that you re doing, where s the best place for them to go?
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Absolutely.
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I do hope they gain value for this conversation, though.
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I also do hope they come find me on whatever social media it is that is their preference to consume content.
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So much of my priority and my focus is making sure that these conversations are happening free, accessible.
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not only conversations, tools and resources.
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So across all the social media platforms at this point, there s some version of The Handle, The Holistic Psychologist, where you can find this information, these conversations, this community, even just ending on this idea of connection and how important it is to
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begin to hear from other people who are thinking about the same things, able to relate in the same ways.
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It s honestly, John, the reason why I created the social media account was twofold for me to begin to be more authentically who I was, sharing myself unfiltered with the world around me so that then I could feel more emotionally and authentically connected to the world around me.
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So I really want to emphasize again, the free accessible content that I m driven to continue to create.
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to put out there any information that you want about the books, where to buy them.
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I have a website up, howtobetoloveyouseek.com.
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I have a personal website, theholisticpsychologist.com that has information about my self-healer circle, my global membership, as well as an email list.
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I have a free resource out that s available right now.
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You just pop your email in and you ll get a journaling practice that s geared toward relationships.
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So again, even just tying this into deliberate choice and intentional action, this is a daily way, a daily habit takes about five minutes.
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You can build in to your day to day where it helps you become aware of some of these unconscious patterns within your relationships and then allows you to, of course, there s instructions and prompts and things like that.
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You can follow begin to create this deliberate actions or those conscious choices so that you can create change.
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And again, all that can be found on my website, the holistic psychologist dot com.
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Nicole, congratulations again on this amazing book.
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Thank you so much for joining us today and talking about all this amazing advice that you have.
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It s really going to impact the listeners.
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I appreciate that, John.
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Thank you for your presence and your curiosity, your interest in having a conversation with me and same goes to all of you out there listening.
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So inspired by communities like yours that are interested in these conversations about creating conscious choice, delivered action, really reconnecting with our passion, with our purpose.
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I believe it not only changes individual lives, I truly believe it helps change the lives of those around us.
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So thank you all for the work that you re doing day in and day out.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Nicole LaPera, and I wanted to thank Nicole and Harper Collins for the honor and privilege of having her appear today on today s show.
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Links to all things Nicole will be in the show notes at passionstock.com.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstock.com slash deals.
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please consider supporting those who support the show.
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YouTube videos are at both John R. Miles and our other station at Passionstruck Clips.
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Please check both them out and subscribe.
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You can sign up for my work-related newsletter, Work Intentionally, on LinkedIn.
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You can find me on all the socials at John R. Miles, where you can sign up for my personal development newsletter, Live Intentionally, off of passionstruck.com.
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You re about to hear a preview of the Passion Start podcast interview that I did with Lee Benson, a value creation expert who has over 30 years experience across the business world.
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He is the CEO of Execute to Win, a firm that helps organizations of all sizes to accelerate the value that they create.
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In our interview, we discuss Lee s brand new book, Value Creation Kid.
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which offers a roadmap for parents, helping them to equip their children with the superpower of turning every life experience into a valuable lesson.
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All these little choices we make throughout the day, if we have, and most people don t have an intentional set of values or an intentional purpose for their lives.
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But let s say you set a list of core values that are important to you.
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Nobody s perfect.
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So all these micro choices and the big goals that we have, it s a journey.
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And I think too many beat themselves up when they make a few small wrong choices, instead of continuing to cultivate to lead a life that creates more and more value in the world.
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and learn from those mistakes.
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The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting.
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If you know someone who could use the words and advice that Nicole gave on today s episode, then please share it with them.
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The greatest compliment that you can give our show is to share it with those that you love and care about.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Until next time, go out there and become PassionStruck.