This week, Nicole LePera came back on the Dr. Leaf Show to talk about her new book, Reparenting the Inner Child, and she asked a question that I haven't stopped thinking about: when you reached for comfort or connection as a child, what happened?

Not what you remember happening. What your body learned happened. Whatever the answer was, your mind built a pattern out of it, and that pattern is still affecting your relationships today: the ones you choose and the ones you leave.

Here's the part that trips people up: your mind isn't built to chase happiness. It's designed to follow the familiar. So, if chaos was the water you grew up swimming in, a genuinely good relationship can feel wrong in your body, simply because it's unfamiliar. Unfamiliarity can be seen as risky, even when what's happening is the safest thing you've experienced in years.

We also talked about why attachment theory, on its own, can fall short. It's a good map of the territory — anxious, avoidant, secure — but it doesn't explain how fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and other stress responses can still impact someone who looks or feels completely fine on the surface.

What I loved most was that Nicole didn't leave the conversation there. She got into what the newer research on stress and epigenetics shows, and why it is so hopeful: our minds are a lot more changeable than most people are told.

And she was careful about something I think matters a lot: reparenting and healing childhood trauma doesn't ask you to sit down and build a case against your parents. It asks you to look honestly at the capacity they had at the time, and then do the work of working on skills you were not taught. We talk about how blame keeps you telling the same story, while capacity-building is what actually moves you somewhere new.

Dr. LePera's new book, Reparenting the Inner Child: The New Science of Our Oldest Wounds and How to Heal Them, is out now — get it here: https://theholisticpsychologist.com