“How to Be the Love You Seek” by Dr. Nicole LePera
The ending of this book is like a splash of water on my face. “You can do that?!” The author talks about falling into a loving polyamory relationship with her wife and a co-worker. Which in the context of a self-help book feels too unconventional to be real. But at the same time, with all the references to research studies and other books, this book’s scientific validity seems to carry truth. The truth about how feeling neglected creates lifelong trauma. Maybe my Catholic background has tainted my understanding of love. Maybe if I wasn’t raised from the Christian perspective, then I would be freer from shame and internalized guilt? Over things as pure as my body and its emotions?! The book doesn’t go into that, though…Anyway…I just put it down now and I’m still swirling in the experience I’ve had reading it these last couple of weeks. I definitely want to buy it now so that I can really let the most important ideas sink in and take hold. Off the top of my head these are the things that have stayed with me:
-A lack of emotional or physical needs met for a child, for a repeated number of times, creates conditioned behavior patterns in response to overwhelming stress. Stress which can traumatize an underdeveloped nervous system and body. These patterns can also become habituated as a child develops into an adult that cause the adult to be ineffective in their own abilities to emotional regulate. Which can cause repeated dysfunction in their adult relationships. As well as negatively affect their physical health from long term dis-regulation and stress.
-Regulate meaning actions to take to feel physically or emotionally safe, either by yourself or another person. Even while still dealing with challenges and life stressors or after a stressful event.
-There’s a handful of personal stories about how patients created subconscious desires to look for partners in their adulthood that could help them recreate their childhood dynamics and give them what feels like the earliest forms of being loved. I think the book said this is trauma bonding. It’s the cycle of dysfunction you see played out by your parental figures, but recreated by yourself in an adult relationship. If it’s not from your parents, it could be from the ways you coped from your environment. To cope with the stress, conditioned selves or roles are created even as children. Caretaker, Life of the Party, Rescuer, People Pleaser, Eruptor, Detacher are all of the roles, I think. These roles worked in getting physical or emotional needs met.
-These roles stem from stress responses experienced by the nervous system like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It’s a good idea to be aware of moments in relationships you can identify where you are performing these roles in an unhealthy way. I relate to the caretaker role which is about a confusing outcome that happens when I say I love someone, but love them in unhealthy ways to the degree at which they or myself feel unloved.
-Feeling a pet’s heartbeat, can help us emotionally regulate.
-The heartbeat has its own mind and memory and can be felt by others from a few feet away through its electrical pulses. It also doesn’t beat in a metronome way, it’s reacting to the world and other people and beats accordingly. HRV (I forget what it stands for) is the measure of your heartbeat and your heart’s ability to calm down after a spike from something stressful. The higher this number, the more resilient you are and quicker to reach a calm state after a stressed state. The lower it is, the harder it is for someone to calm down, even if what caused the stress has stopped. There’s even a difference in the way the heartbeats appear, electrical pulses may graph in more round, consistent waves with a high HRV, and in more jagged, sharp, or inconsistent waves with a low HRV. We can improve our numbers through self care and mindful meditation of the heart.
-Prayer has proven to be effective to help better another person’s health even if they’re far away. This means we can affect each other, in ways we can’t see, with the beat of our hearts. A baby can fall asleep faster by like 20% (I think) if its played a recording of its parent’s heartbeat. This means we can co-regulate or calm each other.
-If you have this background, childhood, etc. you may not be aware of your own body’s sensations as much as you think you are. A practice of being body conscious means literally feeling the sensations/listening to noises you hear from your body. People stuck in conditioned selves, always getting love and safety from external sources, may grow up without knowing how to listen to their bodies. Love has to come from within you and is infinite in its amount inside you. Your heart is communicating with your brain. To try to be aware of this experience, we have to think about the nervous system. Our nervous system has a sympathetic function and a parasympathetic function. One for energetic activities, the other for calm activities, respectively. There’s a vagal something-or-other about the nature of those activities and whether we process them as good or bad. Don’t remember enough to go too deep, but it’s important to remember that the nervous system is not fully developed when we’re born. So childhood has a big impact on how the nervous system develops. To cope with stress, the nervous system can get stuck or habituated in either the sympathetic or parasympathetic function. Meaning that you might be feeling physical sensations that dont match the situation you’re in, but match the stress response you experienced from the situation you were conditioned to as a child. If you froze in response to trauma, you might do the same as an adult. The book calls this person a detacher which is someone who mentally checks out. Even if there isn’t an actual threat. Playing dead is what I think the book mentions. But, most important to think about is the mismatch. When you’re stressed, your parasympathetic function might be lowering your heart rate when you need to get out of the way. Like a deer in headlights. Or you might be exploding with rage with a high heart rate when the situation doesn’t call for that. Someone cuts you off in traffic. This mismatch is also important when the reflex to react to protect yourself comes from your nervous system’s memory and not from anything actually happening in your current reality.
For me, this is helpful to remember because sometimes in a stressful moment, I think I can just remember to calm down, but actually, its more helpful for me to take a second to observe my body. If I’m jittery, my jaw is clenched, eyes looking around, racing thoughts, then its a good chance my heart is beating fast and I need to slow down my breathing and get in touch with my heart and body. I can mentally say to myself that the problem is manageable or it’s not really a problem, but it’s more helpful to literally stop to just feel the sensations of my body. Something the writer said, which I relate to, is that she was used to living in her head to escape the pain or problems she didn’t know how to deal with. It’s not great as a coping strategy because when I do that, my body is still stressed even if everything is “alright” in my mind. This mismatch of emotional reactivity and inability to calm quickly after a stressful event is a result of my trauma.
-Your mind isn’t an accurate source for understanding your reality. It’s just combing memory to know how to feel about its current experience.
-You cannot regulate your own emotions without taking care of your own health. Eat right, sleep right, limit technology, exercise, meditation. And you can’t always be regulated. You have to heal/work to get back to your own authentic self which is in safety and emotional availability.
If anyone is reading this, and has read the book, and wants to correct me please message me on this site or my Instagram. @RollingFerro
I hope you learned a little and are more intrigued by this book. Maybe you even have more facts to share with me which I can edit into this post. If you’re on the fence, then let me just say: Gabor Mate has a blurb on this book and he seems like he gets it. Anyway, that’s why I picked it up. Thank you for reading.
Rolling Ferro
