Nicole Lepera Quotes

You may label these thoughts as ‘you’, but they are not you. You are the thinker of your thoughts, not the thoughts themselves.

Not everyone wants to get better. And that’s okay. Some people have an identity tied to sickness. Others fear true wellness because it is the unknown and the unknown is unpredictable. There is comfort in knowing exactly what your life will look like, even if that reality is making you sick.

Our practiced thoughts become our truth.

The familiar feels safe; that is, until we teach ourselves that discomfort is temporary and a necessary part of transformation.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. —James Baldwin, Remember This House

Our brain actually prefers to spend most of its time coasting on autopilot—it is best able to conserve its energy by knowing what to expect. This is why our habits and routines feel so comforting

I discovered that our genes are not destiny and that in order to change, we have to become consciously aware of our habits and thought patterns, which have been shaped by the people we care for most.

As we expand our level of conscious awareness, we can see that we are not our ego stories. Thoughts happen to us. They don’t mean anything about who we are. They’re simply our ego attempting to defend our identity and protect us from pain.

To truly actualize change, you have to engage in the work of making new choices every day. In order to achieve mental wellness, you must begin by being an active daily participant in your own healing.

Trauma occurred when we consistently betrayed ourselves for love, were consistently treated in a way that made us feel unworthy or unacceptable resulting in a severed connection to our authentic Self. Trauma creates the fundamental belief that we must betray who we are in order to survive.

Your inability to move forward or make changes isn’t about you, it’s an extension of the conditioned patterns and core beliefs you developed in your childhood.

You have to see yourself to love yourself—and you have to love yourself in order to give yourself what you weren’t able to get from others.

The part of you that knows this to be true is your intuition. It has always been there. We have simply developed a habit of not listening to or trusting what it says. Being here today is a step in healing that broken trust within ourselves.

How a parent-figure treated you as a child is not a reflection of who you are. Or even who they are. You do not need to be a reflection of their unprocessed trauma.

I wasn’t bad. I wasn’t damaged. In fact, those habits and behaviors were learned responses that my body used to keep me alive. They were survival mechanisms.

The familiar feels safe, that is until we teach ourselves that discomfort is temporary and a necessary part of transformation.

Once our immune system gets the signal that we’re living in a near-constant threat state, it repeatedly sends out chemicals that cause inflammation throughout the body.

Healing rarely comes without difficulty. It’s painful at times and terrifying, too. It means letting go of narratives that hold you back and harm you. It means letting a part of yourself die so that another part of you can be reborn.

There is tremendous freedom in not believing every thought we have and understanding that we are the thinker of our thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. Our minds are powerful tools, and if we do not become consciously aware of the disconnection between our authentic Selves and our thoughts, we give our thoughts too much control in our daily lives.

heal self-betrayal by rebuilding the trust you have with yourself,

Many of our core beliefs, unfortunately, are shaped by traumas.

Love, I have learned, is not about showing up in any particular way but about embodying the feeling itself, offering others the support and opportunity to be themselves, exactly as they are.

Emerging science tells us that the genes we inherit aren’t fixed; they are influenced by their environment, beginning in utero and continuing throughout our lives. The groundbreaking discovery of epigenetics tells a new story about our ability to change.

Healing is a daily event. You can’t “go somewhere” to be healed; you must go inward to be healed. This means a daily commitment to doing the work. You are responsible for your healing and will be an active participant in that process. Your level of activity is directly connected to your level of healing. Small and consistent choices are the path to deep transformation.

You are the thinker of your thoughts, not the thoughts themselves.

As a result of a lifetime of unmet needs, you may consistently feel resentful, unfulfilled, or needy.

There is tremendous freedom in not believing every thought we have and understanding that we are the thinker of our thoughts, not the thoughts themselves.

The first step to healing is awareness.

Trauma creates the fundamental belief that we must betray who we are in order to survive.

making space to allow each of us to be seen, heard, and authentically expressed.

When we don't consistently feel safe and secure or when we fear that those whom we rely on for our survival won't consistently be available to us, we experience a lack of certainty and control.

If parent-figures have not healed or even recognized their unresolved traumas, they cannot consciously navigate their own path in life, let alone act as trustworthy guides for someone else. It’s very common for parent-figures to project their own unresolved traumas onto their children. When even well-meaning parent-figures react under the influence of their own unconscious wounds they, instead of offering guidance, may attempt to control, micromanage, or coerce a child to follow their will. Some of these attempts may be well intentioned. Parent-figures may consciously or unconsciously want to keep the child safe and protected from the world so that the child will not experience the pain that they, themselves, have. In the process, they may negate the child’s wants and needs.

Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless . . . we become illuminated and enlightened to the Truth of who we are and where we are going . . . to the light while we live through love. —Jesus, about The Great Work

The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness. With objective consciousness it is possible to see and feel the unity of everything. Attempts to connect these phenomena into some sort of system in a scientific or philosophical way lead to nothing because man cannot reconstruct the idea of the whole starting from separate facts. —George Gurdjieff, The Fourth Way

In order to emotionally connect with another person, as I discovered years later, you have to be emotionally connected with yourself. And to be emotionally connected with yourself, you have to be able to authentically feel and express your emotions. Authentically expressing our emotions allows us to feel truly seen, known, and supported by others—core emotional needs we all share.

was detached, avoidant, and unresponsive. It was as if I learned not to love anything too much, because if I truly loved something, it could be taken away from me. It wasn’t just a feeling of loss and abandonment; it was a fear that without a certain person I would not survive.

This has been an issue in almost all of my romantic partnerships. It has kept me reserved and pathologically self-sufficient in my friendships and professional life; it can even rear its head when someone cuts me off in line, when the narrative in my head tells me: You don’t matter. Why? In that instant, I truly believe that a complete stranger doesn’t consider me, just as my mother couldn’t. I’m a ghost that they can walk right through.

These were tears of healing. I'm a living testament to this truth: Awakenings are not mystical experiences that are reserved only for monks, mystics, and poets. They are not only for "spiritual" people. They are for each and every one of us who wants to change, who aches to heal, to thrive, to shine. With your awareness awakened, anything is possible.

My mom, a wounded child herself, had never been shown the love she craved deeply. As a result, she was unable to express love to her own children, who she did love deeply.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

I want you to try to witness your body's sensations when you're feeling threatened. [page 34]

No one even asked her how she could take part in her own healing, because that was not a part of the vocabulary of care used by mainstream medicine.

I suddenly felt how hollowed out my life had become. I was energetically drained,

yourholisticpsychologist.com

Healing is a conscious process that can be lived daily through changes in our habits and patterns.

Holistic Psychology focuses on the mind, body, and soul in the service of rebalancing the body and nervous system and healing unresolved emotional wounds.

Today I am practising when I use my breath to ground my reactions and make space for new, conscious choices.

Putting others before myself wasn’t selfless; it was self-abandonment.

When we are stuck in fight/flight/freeze mode, we devote our resources to managing stress, and, to put it simply, our child brain suffers. Childhood is a time of great vulnerability. Unable to survive on our own, a parent-figure’s withholding of anything perceived to hinder our survival sends stress signals flooding through our bodies. The resulting ‘survival brain’, as I call it, is hyperfocused on perceived threats, sees the world in black and white, and is often obsessive, panic driven, and prone to circular reasoning. We can break down or shut down when faced with stress.

The habit of thinking a particular thought over and over again changes our brain, our nervous system, and the cellular chemistry of our entire body, making it easier to default to such thought patterns in the future.

Begin to practice being kind to yourself and your loved ones, regardless of what comes up. How a parent-figure treated you as a child is not a reflection of who you are. Or even who they are. You do not need to be a reflection of their unprocessed trauma.

The overwhelming pull of the subconscious mind makes it hard for us to change. We are not evolutionarily wired for change. When we do try to push ourselves out of our autopilot, we face resistance from our mind and body. This response has a name: the homeostatic impulse

Every time we make a choice that is outside of our default programming, our subconscious mind will attempt to pull us back to the familiar by creating mental resistance. Mental resistance can manifest as both mental and physical discomfort. It can take the form of cyclical thoughts, such as I can just do this later or I don’t need to do this at all, or physical symptoms, such as agitation, anxiety, or simply not feeling like “yourself.” This is your subconscious communicating to you that it is uncomfortable with the new territory of these proposed changes.

If parent-figures have not healed or even recognized their unresolved traumas, they cannot consciously navigate their own path in life, let alone act as a trustworthy guide for someone else. It's very common for parent-figures to project their unresolved traumas onto their children.

If this pattern continues, the child might “toughen up” or detach, ignoring their authentic Self and presenting a false self, which emerges from a core belief that parts of their identity are unacceptable. I see this a lot with my male clients and friends. For some who grew up with the model of toxic hypermasculinity, where men are discouraged or shamed for expressing emotion, even acknowledging that they have an emotional world may be challenging. In cases like these, we’re fighting not just the conditioning of our parent-figures and family unit but society at large.

A guide is largely nonjudgmental, allowing the child to exist as they are. A guide is more likely to observe and act from a state of awareness and wisdom. This allows the child to experience the natural consequences of their actions without intervention and laying the foundation for them to build self-trust. Think of the guide as a wise teacher, someone who has faith in the foundation they have provided and trusts that the student will be able to weather what life brings. The child then internalizes this faith. This doesn’t mean that the child avoids pain, loss, anger, or grief—the wide array of human feelings—instead, the guide or parent-figure has provided a base of security and resilience for the child to return to when hard times come.

The problem for many of us though is that our nervous system doesn’t return to a state of relaxed calm. Instead, our body gets stuck in a stress response, though not necessarily because we face stress all day long. Though many of us have stressful, busy lives, if our nervous system is regulated, we can toggle back and forth between a stress response and calm, everyday function. But many

For many of us, communicating our emotions is challenging, even in our long-standing relationships. We're so desperate to be loved by others and scared of "losing" them that we don't ask for support or set needed boundaries. This is especially true if our feelings were ignored or dismissed in childhood. And, when we believe our ego stories that we're unworthy of having our needs met, we continue to suppress or deny them.

This is not the “rom-com” depiction of love. Authentic love doesn’t always feel “good” or even romantic. The cycles of emotional addiction that we commonly associate with romance aren’t activated, so it doesn’t have the charge of excitement born of fear of abandonment or withdrawal of love and support. It is a grounded state. You do not need to perform in a certain way or hide parts of yourself to receive love. You will still feel bored or unsettled. You will still find yourself attracted to other people and may even mourn the loss of the single life. Conscious relationships aren’t fairy tales. There’s no “You complete me.” There’s no smile and poof!—living happily ever after. Like everything else you have encountered so far, authentic love requires work. The path forward is to become aware of the role of self-betrayal in your trauma bonds and the role that you can play in honoring your own needs.

This childlike part is free, filled with wonder and awe, and connected to the inner wisdom of our authentic Self. It can be accessed only when we are safely in the social connection zone of our nervous system, able to feel spontaneous and open. It is playful and uninhibited or so fully present in the moment that time doesn’t seem to exist. This same inner childlike part of each of us, when not acknowledged, can run rampant in our adult life, often reacting impulsively and selfishly.

In other words, traumatic experiences aren’t always obvious. Our perception of the trauma is just as valid as the trauma itself. This is especially true in childhood, when we are most helpless and dependent. Trauma occurred when we consistently betrayed ourselves for love, were consistently treated in a way that made us feel unworthy or unacceptable resulting in a severed connection to our authentic Self. Trauma creates the fundamental belief that we must betray who we are in order to survive.

Research shows that practices like yoga and meditation that help us to focus our attention on the present moment, are especially powerful in restructuring the brain. When new neural pathways are forged, we are able to break free of our default patterns and live more actively in a conscious state. In fact, functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans confirm this,23 showing tangible evidence that consistent consciousness practices actually thicken the prefrontal lobes, the area where our conscious awareness actually lives. Other forms of compassion-based meditation (or just closing your eyes and thinking about someone you love) help strengthen an area called the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain. All of this work helps to rewire our brain, disrupt our default thought patterns, and wake us up out of our subconscious-driven autopilot. From this foundation of consciousness we can then begin to witness the conditioned patterns in our thoughts, beliefs, and relationships. This honest self awareness shows us our pathway towards change and ultimately healing.

The wounded inner child carries all of these compulsions into adulthood. We carry this powerlessness, hoping that others will change our circumstances and make us happy, externalizing quick fixes and daydreaming of alternate realities. We seek approval from others so that we will feel good about ourselves. We choose the quick fix—drugs, alcohol, sex—to feel pleasure in the moment that will dull our pain. Our real long-term goal is to find that security inside ourselves. Our work is to internalize the feeling of being good enough—a state of okayness that is not reliant on others. How can we begin to get to that place? This is the question at the heart of our inner child work.

My awakening unfolded in phases. It occurred during a time of extreme physical and emotional stress when I was imbalanced in body, mind, and soul. It was a crisis of the Self. Life began to feel intolerable, old and new struggles compounding around me so that I had no choice but to address those that had gotten so far out of hand that they were my “normal.” It’s highly likely that if I had sought outside help again at this time, I would have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety, as I had been in the past. Instead I was intuitively drawn inward to self-witnessing that showed me how disengaged I had been. For the first time ever, I began to view these signs as messengers, not as something to repress or avoid.

they often emerge from a state of inner turmoil; they often occur in a natural setting; and they often connect us to some kind of spiritual (in the most expansive sense of the word) practice. Awakenings open us to the reality that we are more than simple creations of flesh, that we have a soul or spirit, that we desire connection to something greater than our individual selves. Awakenings show us that who we think we are isn’t necessarily who we are. Often, we gain these insights through suffering, living through confusion and sorrow on our way to finally becoming conscious. An awakening is a rebirth of the Self that involves tearing down parts of who you were when you lived in an unconscious, autopilot state of existence.

When we have poor vagal tone, we have higher sensitivity to perceived threats in our environment, which overactivates the body’s stress response and leads to reduced emotional and attentional regulation overall. Those of you who experience the discomfort of social anxiety might recognize this disconnect. Imagine walking into a party filled with strangers. You might have obsessed over what to wear to the party, planning every detail, every possible conversation topic, or you may have felt totally neutral about the party—no warning signs that you might feel uncomfortable and act accordingly. Either way, none of it matters once you actually walk into the room. Suddenly, all eyes are on you. Your face grows hot and red when you hear laughter, which you’re certain is about your outfit or your hair. Someone brushes past you, and you feel claustrophobic. All the strangers seem to be leering. Even if you know rationally that this is not a hostile place, that no one is looking at or judging you (and if they are, who cares?), it’s nearly impossible to shake the feeling once you’re trapped in it. That’s because your subconscious perceives a threat (using your nervous system’s sixth sense of neuroception) in a nonthreatening environment (the party) and has activated your body, putting you into a state of fight (argue with anyone and everyone), flight (leave the party), or freeze (don’t say a word). The social world has become a space filled with threat. Unfortunately, this kind of nervous system dysregulation is self-confirming. While it is activated, anything that doesn’t confirm your suspicions (a friendly face) will be ignored by your neuroception in favor of things that do (the stray laugh you felt was directed at you). Social cues that would be seen as friendly when you were in social engagement mode—such as a pause in the conversation for you to enter, eye contact, a smile—will be either misinterpreted or ignored.

Something brought you here. Something inside of you came here with a deep longing to heal. A longing to be the highest version of yourself.

The research is unequivocal: people with unresolved trauma get sicker and die younger.

It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and typically, if you had affectionate, supportive, and loving bonds in infancy, you are more likely to report having affectionate, supportive, and loving bonds in adulthood; if you had distant, erratic, or abusive relationships in childhood, there’s a good chance you will seek out the same kind of bonds in adulthood.

Moving, moving, moving. If you didn’t look too closely you might admire my type A efficiency. But dig in just a little bit, and you’d realize that I was moving my body to distract myself from some deeply rooted unresolved feelings

physiological dysregulation,

Once a core belief is formed, you engage in what’s called a confirmation of bias; information that does not conform to your beliefs is discarded or ignored in favor of information that does.

we tend to prioritize (and therefore value) negative information over positive. This is why you can see a glowing performance review and forget it shortly afterward, though you’ll never forget the sting of a colleague’s criticism.

The brain can sometimes use the RAS filter as a defense mechanism.

Infancy is a time of endless invention. We learn language, movement, social interaction, and cause and effect—all in service to our survival. Neurons, the building blocks of our brains, are communicating with one another through synchronized electrical impulses called brain waves.

Without our parent-figures, we will starve—not just physically but emotionally, too.

We look to our parent-figures for clues about how to connect, how to navigate the world, and how to cope with stress, which is called co-regulation

Co-regulation is not only a learning experience for the mind, it’s also a learning experience for the body. This is when our parent-figures teach us how to moderate our emotional reactions and return to the social engagement mode baseline.

When we are stuck in fight/flight/freeze mode, we devote our resources to managing stress, and, to put it simply, our child brain suffers.

As our brains develop, our needs expand from the basics of shelter, food, and love to broader, more complicated and nuanced requirements for physical, emotional, and spiritual wholeness. Spiritually, our individual souls have three basic needs: To be seen To be heard To uniquely express our most authentic Selves

Accepting that you have an inner child with wounds will help you remove your shame about and disappointment in your inability to change, the “stuckness” that we’ve discussed. Your inability to move forward or make changes isn’t about you, it’s an extension of the conditioned patterns and core beliefs you developed in your childhood.

The greater your presence and awareness grow, the greater your ability to distinguish between your inner child reactions and your authentic Self will be.

Trauma bonds are the results of relationship dynamics that are rooted in stories about our self, created in childhood and manifested in our adult relationships.

So, when you find it difficult to change your habits or behaviors, it’s not mere failure but rather it’s because you are living on the same script, a repetitive pattern that makes you run on autopilot.

In the second part, we will peel back a layer and enter “the mind.” We will explore the workings of the conscious and subconscious, learning how powerful conditioning from our parent-figures shaped our worlds, creating thought and behavior patterns that persist today.

In the final part, which I consider to be the essence of the work, we will learn how to apply the knowledge we’ve gained to achieve the emotional maturity that allows you to connect more authentically with others.

The ones who could see a way out expressed feelings of shame about their instinctual falling back into patterns of unwanted behavior. They felt ashamed that they knew better and still could not do better, which was why they had ended up in my office.

The CBT model is based on the premise that our thoughts affect our emotions and ultimately our behaviors. When we change our relationship with our thoughts, we change the cascade of emotions that floods our bodies and persuades us to act in certain ways, which is a cornerstone of the work in this book.

Biologist Bruce Lipton has been spreading the gospel about the role of epigenetics for years and calls its influence “the new biology.

We can provide ourselves with the nurturing we may not have received as children. We can learn to give ourselves secure bonds and the ability to create a sense of safety. We can change what we eat, how often we exercise, our state of consciousness, and the thoughts and beliefs we express.

The mind can create real, measurable changes in the body—and the placebo effect is mainstream science’s recognition of this fact.

But there is a flip side to this. It’s called the nocebo effect,16,17 and it’s the placebo effect’s “evil twin.” This occurs when our thoughts don’t make us better, they make us worse.

Healing is a daily event. You can’t “go somewhere” to be healed; you must go inward to be healed. This means a daily commitment to doing the work.

The first way to create change is to begin to practice imagining a future that’s different from your past and present realities.

Thoughts are electrochemical responses that happen thanks to the firing of neurons in the brain. Thoughts serve a purpose; they allow us to problem solve, create, and form connections.

As we grow older and fall under the influence of others, we tend to become disconnected from our intuition. Our sixth sense gets muddied. It’s not lost, just buried.

When we do try to push ourselves out of our autopilot, we face resistance from our mind and body. This response has a name: the homeostatic impulse. The

began to learn that the only relief from internal agitation would come from outside of me.

daily win of drinking her water. She paused after drinking her water to congratulate herself and reflect on how proud she was that she stuck to it. “OMG,” she would say to herself, “look at you go.” Thirty days later,

Our beliefs are incredibly powerful and continue to shape our daily experiences through our subconscious minds.