27. Rewiring Generational Patterns: The Brain and the Science of Emotional Healing

In this deeply reflective episode of Nourished with Dr. Anikó, Dr. Anikó Gréger explores the powerful intersection between neuroscience, compassion, and generational healing. Speaking from personal insight and professional expertise, she reflects on how her own journey as a parent has reshaped her understanding of her parents, revealing how empathy and awareness can help us rewire long-held emotional patterns.

Dr. Anikó unpacks the science behind how trauma and emotional experiences are stored in the body, drawing from the work of experts like Peter Levine, PhD and books like The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Paul MacLean’s Triune Brain model, and Dr. Francine Shapiro’s pioneering EMDR therapy. She explains how understanding the roles of the amygdala, limbic system, and neocortex helps us move beyond talk therapy into deeper somatic healing and emotional regulation.

Through this conversation, Dr. Anikó reminds us that healing is not about removing accountability, it’s about expanding compassion while embracing responsibility. She shares how shifting perspective, whether as a parent or child, allows us to see our family dynamics in a new light, transforming how we relate to ourselves, our loved ones, and even past generations.

Episode Highlights:

4:00 How generational trauma is passed down and how it can be transformed
8:00 The connection between the brain’s emotional centers and body healing
12:00 The role of therapies like EMDR, Brainspotting, and Somatic Experiencing
16:00 Why compassion doesn't excuse behavior but creates space for healing
18:00 How reframing your memories can change the way they live in your body

Dr. Anikó also shares a powerful reminder that even if those who shaped us are no longer here, our healing continues to ripple through time—changing how we remember, relate, and show up in the world. She closes with a reflection on mindfulness and presence, offering practical ways to respond with awareness rather than react from old conditioning.

Whether you’re a parent, child, or someone exploring your own emotional landscape, this episode will leave you with a profound sense of hope and possibility for rewriting your story, one compassionate moment at a time.

Episode Referenced: 17. Raising Tween and Teen Girls: Parenting Tips for Emotional Resilience, Healthy Boundaries, and Navigating Adolescence: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/17-raising-tween-and-teen-girls-parenting-tips-for/id1812511962?i=1000724701200

Connect with Dr. Anikó:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.aniko/

Website: https://www.draniko.com/

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Disclaimer:
The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your health or a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, you are listening to Nourished with Dr. Ani Regor. This podcast is all about the many, many ways you can support your health and your family's health. I'm an integrative physician and I am. So passionate about helping people find their pathway to their very best life. I hope you enjoy. Hello? Hello y'all, and welcome back to Nourished with Dr.

Aniko. Today I'm just feeling called to talk about this and sometimes my episodes are really, you know, researched and prepared and outlined and sometimes I just. Turn on the mic because something is coming to me that I really want to share, and today is one of the latter types of days, and the thing [00:01:00] that's been coming up for me today is how incredibly grateful I am to be at a point in my life where I have so much compassion for my parents and I truly.

At this point effortlessly, mostly Sometimes. Sometimes it takes some effort, but for the most part, effortlessly see them as whole human beings who were not put on this earth to be perfect parents. To me, they were human beings doing their best to parent this totally separate person, which was me and.

Certainly having my own children was a really straight shock kind of shortcut to that understanding because now I'm the person being responded to the way that [00:02:00] I once responded to my parents when I was younger and something about me. I don't know that it's interesting or not. I find it interesting, but I.

Really remember. My childhood and teenage years and tween years and all of that in a very visceral way. Like I can think back to interactions that I had when I was younger and it's like I'm back there. Like I still get it. I'm still like, that is a super reasonable response for being told someone doesn't like your outfit or something.

Right. And so. You know, now that I'm a parent, I'm having that experience of sometimes missing my kid in the sense that I will say something that doesn't land, doesn't resonate, they don't feel seen, or they feel the need to push back and be like, no, not this, but that. And [00:03:00] this morning it happened with one of my kids and I just thought, oh yeah, like.

This is how I used to respond too. Totally reasonably right, because you're wanting to assert yourself in the world. When your parent misses you in that way, in the sense that they're mischaracterizing you or they're saying something about you that doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel true to you if you have a safe enough relationship with your parent to be able to do this, because a lot of people don't.

But if you're feeling safe enough, or I guess if. The fight in you is so great that it doesn't matter how safe you are in the situation, then you will say, no, not that, but this, and that can be a really trying time as we spoke about in the tweens and teens, um, episode about raising tween and teen girls, that that can be [00:04:00] very trying.

For a lot of parents, and I'm not saying it's never trying for me, but because I have such an immediate and visceral memory of being in that place myself, my internal reaction is more like, oh yeah, now this is happening, but now I'm the parent and you are the child, and you certainly do not have to have children of your own to.

Start to understand where your parents were coming from or to have compassion for your parents. But it is a nice kind of shortcut in a lot of ways, right? It's like how a lot of people talk about how, you know, kids bring so much meaning to your life, to the point that they can't imagine their life without kids.

I was always somebody who really wanted kids and. I'm really grateful that I was able to have children. Um, not everybody can who wants [00:05:00] them, but having kids is like a shortcut to meaning in life, right? It's pretty obvious. There are so many other ways to find deep meaning in life. Having children is one of them.

And it's a shortcut 'cause you're gonna get straight there. You're like getting right into the heart of things. And I feel that way about having kids in terms of that being a shortcut to understanding and having true compassion for our parents because it takes you straight into the heart of it and now you are the parent.

And it really got me thinking about compassion and empathy. Without removing accountability, right? Because you can have great compassion for someone and they can still take actions and do things and say things that they need to be accountable for. Right? And we [00:06:00] all have agency and power and ownership.

And we also have not just generational patterns and generational traumas, but I kind of think of it as like the soup of things that you grew up in and beyond what you personally grew up in. Right? Because we know from epigenetics that. Family traumas are actually passed down through the genes. I mean, it's absolutely wild.

It makes intuitive sense. I think if you were to say that to somebody, they'd be like, of course. Yeah. People pass on their traumas. But when you see it happening on the genetic level, I just feel like that's pretty mind blowing. Right. The things that we know in our bodies and in our hearts and in our intuition actually are happening at the level of DNA.

That's pretty wild. But I'm not just talking about kind of the generational traumas that [00:07:00] are passed down through families, but the idea that we sort of all grow up in this soup of things, right. Your parents, the time in history, the practices during that time in history. Right, because when we think about parenting, there are parenting techniques that we now would consider actually.

Abusive that were just how people parented back in the day. That was just. Regular parenting, you know, so our experience of that, if you are the only one experiencing that, it can be experienced as traumatic. But if everybody else is experiencing that, it can still be experienced as traumatic. But typically when we share that experience, people report that they are experiencing it as.

Less traumatic. And an additional wrinkle to that is that sometimes. Our brain. So the cognitive part of our [00:08:00] brain isn't registering something as trauma. We don't remember it as a traumatic experience. We might not even remember it at all, but we know from the work of people like Peter Levine and the world of somatic experiencing that famous book, the Body Keeps the Score.

If you have not heard of this book or of Peter Levine. It's absolutely amazing work, and we now have trauma-informed therapy and body-based modalities because talk therapy is wonderful, but it's only really dealing with the cognitive part of our brains and the fear. Responses and the traumas often, for lack of a better term, kind of live on in our limbic system, which is pre-verbal.

That's. Before we have the capacity to speak, and some of [00:09:00] these experiences are stored in our brain from times when we were preverbal. And that part of our brain is a really old part of our brain. So we talk a lot about the amygdala, right? That's sort of the fight or flight alarm system, right? Um. And the main emotion that the amygdala controls is fear, but it does do other things, right?

So it plays a role in aggression. It plays a role in learning through rewards and punishment. It also plays a role in social communicating or understanding. Meaning that you can understand someone's intentions from how they're talking or acting. And interestingly, it also plays roles in emotions that relate to parenting and caregiving emotions.

We connect to memories and even learned behaviors related to addiction. So it's [00:10:00] more than just a fear center, but it certainly is a fear center. And also why it's a pre-verbal area is because it's a very. Old part of the brain. Some people call it the reptilian brain because that part of the brain is also found in reptiles, and the amygdala is actually not part of the reptilian brain.

It's part of the paleo mammalian brain, which is the old mammal brain, and then our neo mammalian brain, which is the new mammal brain, which is. What we have. So we have the reptilian, the old mammal, and the new mammal brain. And the new mammal brain is the neocortex, which enables language, abstract thinking, reasoning, and planning.

And that's the part of the brain, the new mammal brain that we are engaging when we use talk therapy [00:11:00] typically. And just to be complete, this concept of these three. Types of brains, essentially the older, the middle, the newer is from a neuroscientist and physician named Dr. Paul McLean, and he described this in his book in 1990, called The Triune Brain, an Evolution.

And even though we now know that some of the details might be wrong, I think it's still a really useful concept to. Conceptualize the brain as this older type. So the reptilian brain is involved with primitive drives like thirst and hunger and sexuality and being territorial, and then also habits and procedural memory.

So procedural memory is like putting your keys in the same place every day without thinking about it or riding a bike or [00:12:00] something like that. And then there's that second newer part of the brain, but not the newest part of the brain. And that's the center of our motivation, our emotions and memory, including behavior like parenting, like we talked about with the amygdala.

And then that newest part of the brain that, like I said, is involved with language and abstract thinking, reasoning and planning. And so it makes a lot of sense that because our amygdala and our sort of emotional centers, even our motivational centers and our memory centers are in places that we can't really access fully from intellect and from verbal reasoning, right?

That's one of the reasons that these more body-based therapies. So that could be anything from EMDR, which uses eye movement [00:13:00] and sometimes some other techniques as well. But it's named EMDR because it's eye movement desensitization and reprocessing,

Speaker 2: And it's a way to essentially help you unblock whatever is blocking your pathways to actually processing and healing from this trauma so that you can actually process and heal from this trauma and not be so exquisitely sensitive to those kinds of triggers and things anymore. 

Speaker: It's really, really powerful. It was originally developed to treat trauma.

It's actually also now used for a number of different conditions like depression, anxiety, dissociation, addictions, grief, phobias, and even chronic pain. Another type of therapy that is similar but different is brain spotting and brain spotting was [00:14:00] also developed to deal with trauma, and it was actually developed after nine 11.

EMDR was developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro, who is a psychologist and EMDR usually. Is used in concert with talk therapy. So you're talking and you're doing EMDR. In brain spotting though, there's very little to no talk therapy involved. And in brain spotting, you're kind of slowly following a pointer that your therapist is holding and in brain spotting, you're typically holding your.

Eye stationary in a certain spot, and that connects to a certain spot in your brain. Hence the name brain spotting. And both of these techniques can be really, really powerful [00:15:00] for essentially getting yourself unstuck. And Dr. Francine Shapiro. A quote from her is changing the memories that form the way we see ourselves also changes the way we view others.

Therefore, our relationships, job performance, what we are willing to do or are able to resist, all move in a positive direction. This brings me back to my thoughts and feelings about having a lot of compassion for my parents. And quickly, just for the sake of completeness, there's also somatic experiencing.

Which focuses a lot on sort of discharging the fight flight response. The idea is that we kind of get stuck in that fight flight response and we need to move through the fight flight response. That should have happened in the moment of trauma. There's more to it too. [00:16:00] Um, and then there's also something called a IT Advanced Integrative Therapy, and that is more of an energy psychology, but it's also a somatic.

Therapy technique. Anyhow, I just wanted to offer those two as well for the sake of completeness. But getting back to that, seeing the same situation from a different perspective, and how now as a parent, I'm the parent and the child, and it not only. Really softens me towards my parents, and it makes me just understand the situation so much better.

It helps me in the moment that I'm in now because it feels like I'm just part of this lineage, like this long line of moms that I've all gone through the same thing. Our offspring will maybe go through the same thing too, and [00:17:00] it is functioning to rework. The memory that I have of what I lived through when I was a kid, right?

Because you know, some of the memories that I have of being parented are unpleasant as all of us have unpleasant memories of when we were being parented. But now, somehow, because I'm able to see it from my parents' point of view, in addition to my own point of view, and again, we talked about the. Brain, right?

The different types of brains and how we know that the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in planning and all that executive function isn't fully formed until you're 25. My brain capacity. Is really different and a lot greater than it was when I was initially going through this experience as a kid or as a teenager.

And [00:18:00] being able to experience it from this adult point of view is allowing me to remember it differently. And so it lives on in my body, in my system so differently now. And it's just such a gift. Having this perspective is such a gift. It's such a gift that my parents are still around right now, and I can have this kind of rewired relationship with them, not just because of all the therapy I've done, because I've done quite a bit y'all, and I'm a big proponent of therapy.

I wasn't always, you can ask. People who are close to me. Growing up I had a real, like, I can get through it myself. I don't need to tell my problems to strangers kind of attitude. And then as I got older, I recognized again, what a gift it is that we can go to people [00:19:00] when we're struggling and say. What I've been doing hasn't been working.

What are other tools I can use? Right. It's no different than when we take our car to a mechanic, when you know it's out of our pay grade. Right. It's beyond our pay grade. And now I would venture to say now that cars are not mechanical in the same ways, everything's outta my pay grade. Like I don't know what to do with the cars anymore.

But anyway, it's a gift too. Not just have this rewiring have happened in me, but to then be able to experience that with the OG people, right? With the parents. Um, and my rewiring actually impacts them. And gives them a little bit of space to perhaps rewire their experiences with me, their memories of me.

And I want to be clear too, that [00:20:00] your attachment figures, whoever they are, don't have to still be alive on this plane of existence for you to do this healing. And sometimes. It can actually be easier to access that healing when they are no longer on this plane. And I do not say that lightly in any way.

Obviously, it can be incredibly devastating to lose an attachment figure with whom the healing work is unfinished, and yet sometimes it frees us to start doing that work on our own. On this kind of different plane where we kind of get to choose how we experience that person. Now, and don't get me wrong, I mean, when someone is willing to be a partner in healing work, I mean, that's incredible.

[00:21:00] A lot of us don't get that option. And sometimes they're not so much partners, but at least they're not kind of getting in our way in some ways. For me, it was a very freeing truth to realize that I not only didn't need anyone's. Her mission to do this healing work in a relationship. I also didn't even need their cooperation because so often we kind of sit around and beat at this closed door and try to get somebody to change or get somebody to participate in this repair or change making with us this healing work.

We actually don't need anyone else for it. We can do it ourselves and whether or not they participate, the ways in which [00:22:00] we change. Changes them. And this is true even if they're not on this plane anymore, because the ways in which we change affects how we reflect on them, how we remember them, how they live on.

So our changes reverberate throughout that relationship. Throughout our families or circles or whatever relationships we're talking about. But if they are still on this plane and on this planet in that same way, it can be really lovely to observe that different energy that that exists between us Now.

That's so palpable to me. I mean, not that I don't regress on some levels sometimes it's wild. I thought that at some point we grow out of this, but that's not [00:23:00] always how it works. But even that feels different and. In the way that we are all a link in the chain of our lineage, I can feel how the rewiring that's happened in me is changing the past for me because it's changing how I remember these events.

It's changing that for my parents and it's also changing that. For my kids. So it's this work that reaches far behind you and far in front of you in terms of your place in your generations, and it expands through everybody. And also, you know, we're focusing on family relationships here, but that rewiring.

Affects how I show up in the world. It [00:24:00] affects how quickly I can have compassion and understanding for people who are being reactive in a situation. Right. And then we bring in the mindfulness piece, which we've talked about in previous episodes, of having the presence. In your everyday moments when you're hit with somebody's, you know, trauma response, fight or flight, whatever it is, you don't have to automatically go into fight or flights.

You can see what's happening, and then you have that extra one or two seconds that allows you to choose what you're going to do instead of just act from your. Reflexive habit formed reptilian brain. You can act from a higher state and acting from that place that you're choosing instead of just the place that's kind of the knee jerk response to it.

That's coming from all the triggers, all the soup, everything that you've gone through and that came before [00:25:00] you. Those reverberations through the worlds. It can change the world in powerful and beautiful ways. So I hope this episode is leaving you with a sense of yourself, maybe about what you personally are carrying, what things could change.

What memories of yours you could process differently, and maybe you might be inclined to try one of these more body-based therapies or trauma-informed therapies if they apply to you. Maybe you might do a little bit of mindfulness today and just practice taking those moments of choosing how you will respond to the world instead of just simply reacting.

Based on the soup that we were all raised in and that we continue to exist in. So I hope this helps, and I'll see y'all next time. Thank you so much for listening to [00:26:00] Nourish Today. Your presence is truly felt and so deeply appreciated. I hope today's episode brought you some insight and also some inspiration to create an even better life and world for yourself and for your community.

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