With over six million Instagram followers – including the likes of celebs Sharon Horgan, Laura Whitmore, Florence Welch and more – Dr. Nicole LePera has built a community out of teaching people to self-heal, work on themselves and move on from their past.
She joined The Ray D'Arcy Show to discuss her work as a holistic psychologist and how her own challenging awakening led her to help others work through emotional and mental hardship.
LePera has garnered followers through her practical and straight forward explanations of experiences, often using scenarios to delve into what it's like to be raised by narcissistic parents, what it means to have an anxious attachment style in relationships, what having a supportive partner really looks like, and more.
The secret to her success, she theorises, is how she is "speaking to universal truths". "In terms of humanity we are more similar than we are dissimiliar and I think a lot of the content that I put out is really speaking to those similar struggles and pathways to healing."
LePera herself was raised by "an emotionally unavailable mother", which she says is what helps her connect to her followers and give them support. She experienced a wake up call in her 30s, a time when it seemed that everything was going swimmingly for her.
"I had finally reached the end of all of the boxes of achievements that I'd be so driven to check throughout my life", she said. "I had a very successful private practice, I was living in the city of my hometown, very close to my family, I was in a committed relationship and when I looked back on my childhood I would have described it as healthy and normal."
Codependency is a natural response to not getting our childhood emotional needs met. We learn to depend on unsafe people who are emotionally neglectful, abusive, or who continue to not meet our needs as adults.
— Dr. Nicole LePera (@Theholisticpsyc) April 19, 2023
Rather than end the relationship, we believe if we just loved them…
Despite this, LePera said she felt "so deeply alone, so deeply dissatisfied, unfulfilled and – being honest – not even really connected to that life that I was living". She set about trying to understand why.
Understanding her childhood was key, as LePera delved into how her mother – though present – was emotionally absent. "I was left largely alone", she said.
"In the field we've applied the label of trauma to certain types of events and when I look back and had an experience, I had assumed, quite mistakenly, that I wasn't carrying any trauma within myself.
"When we don't have that emotional safety, that point of connection with another consistently present caregiver who is able to consistently be present emotionally, we can still suffer that same trauma, because trauma really is the impact of our experiences. When we are overwhelmed with stress and under-supported emotionally, we adapt in ways and we continue to carry those childhood traumatic experiences with us into our adulthood."
LePera turned to achievements as a form of protection and a way of eliciting emotional support from her mother, which in turn led her to realising later in life that those successes didn't make up for a lack of emotional support.
A key part of her work is teaching others how to break the cycles of generational habit formed by growing up in environments that caused distress or difficulty. She explains that behaviours can be picked up in childhood to protect, self-soothe or endure in difficulty that are then carried into adulthood and often leave us feeling disconnected and alone.
She uses role playing on Instagram to explain how these dynamics play out in relationships.
"I think ultimately all of us as adults can become conscious to those patterns that don't serve us so that we can then begin to make new choices so that not only we can heal our relationship with ourself, we can heal our relationship with all others, our own children then included."
LePera's work is also dedicated to teaching people how to self-heal as adults, however she stressed that self-healing, in this instance, means healing with supportive relationships, not without them. She added that many people do not have the resource of therapy and learning how to self-heal can help them.
To listen to Ray's full conversation with Nicole, click above.
