How Your Favorite Parent Fucked You Up
Episode 257
In this thought-provoking episode, Dr. Nicole Rivera explores the psychological connections behind physical symptoms, diving into the dynamics of parental influence and how our perceptions shape our lives. She challenges listeners to rethink the roles of the "villain" and the "silent" parent, uncovering deeper lessons about balance, personal growth, and reclaiming power. As Dr. Nicole shares her personal journey and observations, she invites you to re-examine the dynamics of your past, urging you to shift your focus from blame to empowerment and to harness your energy for creating the life you desire. #MindBodyConnection #PersonalGrowthJourney #ReclaimYourPower #EmotionalHealing #ParentingDynamics #HigherSelf #SelfMastery #HealingJourney #ConfidenceBoost #TransformYourLife 3 Key Takeaways: The Hidden Influence of Parents: Learn how both parents play a role in shaping your beliefs and behaviors, even if one seems like the "villain" and the other the "angel." Body-Mind Connection: Understand how dominant handedness and physical symptoms correlate with unresolved emotional and psychological conflicts. Reclaiming Your Power: Discover how to stop giving energy to victimhood and triggers, and instead, confidently make decisions that align with your values and vision. Quotes: "Stop giving your f**ing energy to being a victim. Pain is a teacher, and shifting your perception turns challenges into opportunities." -Dr. Nicole "The quality of your life is dictated by the quality of your questions and the ability to make hard decisions confidently." -Dr. Nicole Find Integrative You Radio On: Website Youtube Apple Spotify 2 Doctors Committed to Innovating the Healthcare Experience. Integrative You Radio is hosted by husband-and-wife duo, Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers. With their voracious curiosity for Integrative Medicine, the Human Mind, Aligned Parenting, and Entrepreneurship, they bring a fresh perspective to the table. They aim to debunk the BS that is holding yo
Topics: integrative, parent, nicole, energy, unknown, medicine, physical, symptoms
Key takeaways from this episode
- ## Integrative You Radio: How Your Favorite Parent Fucked You Up
- Here are some key takeaways from this episode:
- The Dual Impact of Parental Influence:** Discover how both a seemingly "villainous" and an "angelic" parent can shape your core beliefs and behavioral patterns, often in ways you may not have realized.
- Parental dynamics and their psychological impact
- The mind-body connection and physical symptoms
Pull quotes
This is the place where you become limitless. **Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior.
We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs, so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare.
If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place. **Unknown:** But buckle up because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive.
Transcript
**Unknown:** Welcome to Integrative U Radio, hosted by Dr. Nick Carruthers and yours truly, Dr. Nicole Rivera. This is the place where you become limitless.
**Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior. We are also covering how those topics affect the human and family dynamics. We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs, so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare. If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place.
**Unknown:** But buckle up because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive. This is Integrative U Radio. What is up, guys? Dr.
**Unknown:** Nicole here. So I did a podcast, uh, more recently, and I was talking about how symptoms are not just physical and that there is a psychological connection to it. And this was based off of some of the work of a doctor that created Germanic New Medicine. And I wanted to preface with that as I start here because I had a theory.
**Unknown:** It is a theory, still a theory. So just a... So you guys know, this is a thought-provoking podcast, and this is not for me to say, "Oh, here's the scientific study behind it." This is something that is more thought-provoking. Really, everything I talk about is all about being thought-provoking because your interpretation of it and how it affects you in your life is, it's different.
**Unknown:** But I had a theory that we have a person in our lives from our past that we can peg and say, "They caused problems for me." And sometimes it's a parent. You know, we have one parent that we're like, you know, "He was a jerk," or, "She was never around." And sometimes it was a distant family member, it was one friend who we felt like betrayed us, abandoned us, et cetera. And we have a person that, you know, we have a, we have an emotional charge towards because of how we perceive how they, how they affected us or what they did to us in our lives. And I find that especially when it comes to the parent situation, that the parent that we peg as the problem is not really the root of the programs that hold us back.
**Unknown:** Woo. Yeah, we're gonna go there. So, this is really interesting. I'm, I'm gonna tell you some scientific stuff first.
**Unknown:** So the Germanic, uh, New Medicine, one of the things that he proved in his work, and this was through brain scans, is that the left and the right side of your body are synonymous with, uh, male and female energy. When you get into some people's work that is just, uh, it's a little bit more ambiguous, they will say that the left side of the body is correlated to the feminine, so this could be correlated to your feminine, it could be correlated to females in your life, feminine energy in your life, your mom, and then they say the right side of the body is more masculine. And this is, you know, this was rooted on the left and right brain hemispheres and how they operate. But the thing is, is that your handedness, your dominant side, your dominant hand actually plays a role in which side of the body is feminine versus masculine.
**Unknown:** And I thought that this was actually very interesting because this generalization of the left side of your body is correlated to feminine and the right side of your body is correlated to masculine didn't always add up. Because I've worked with thousands of clients, and I've inquired about this information, and it just didn't always add up. And so essentially, what he showed is that if you are right hand dominant, then you have the left side of your body which is going to be your feminine, which is, m- if you have a lot of symptoms on the left side of your body or symptoms in the l- the organs of the left side of the body, that is going to be correlated to mother-child, your mother and your child. It could be you as a child, or it could be also your own children.
**Unknown:** Um, this is all gonna make sense shortly. And then there's the right side of the body in someone who is right hand dominant, which would be correlated to partner. This could be business partner, romantic partner, uh, social partners, for aka friends, and this would be more partnerships. So if you had, you know, scars from ro- romantic relationships and things like that, that could manifest more on the right side of the body or the organs of the right side of the body.
**Unknown:** But if you're left hand dominant, it's the opposite. That means the right side of your body is going to be correlated to the feminine energy of mother-child, and then the left side of your body is going to be correlated to partnerships.So just wra-wrap your head around that for a moment, depending on if you're left-handed or right-handed. This is actually very interesting as well, is there are a lot of people, especially, uh, musicians, and I'm trying to think what was the other one. Like, musicians and some people in different technical fields that they will actually be left hand dominant when they're young, but they train themselves to be right hand dominant because of their, either their profession or their hobbies, et cetera.
**Unknown:** So this is actually something that's very interesting because you can get mixed information if that is you. Um, especially if you're a drummer, a percussionist, you can easily... I-it's hard to tell which is your dominant because you probably use both sides equally. So a couple of tests that you can do is, um, you...
**Unknown:** when you're... This is always hard to try to do it yourself. It's almost like you should tell someone, like your partner or someone you're with a lot, and just say, "Hey, the next time I clap, observe this," or, "Next time I pick up our kid, observe this." So, uh, one of them is clapping with whatever your dominant hand is. So if you're mo- like you...
**Unknown:** usually people have one hand that's sitting still, and then there's the active hand that's hitting the other hand. The active hand is usually a sign of the dominant. And then there's also, um, when you pick up a child, and if you tend to have your hand on one side of their back, or you use one hand consistently to, you know, pat their back, stroke their back, hold their head, hold the back of the neck, that's also another sign of your dominant hand. Um, it's actually interesting because my husband, um, he is quote unquote "right-handed", but when I started to...
**Unknown:** I didn't tell him. I started to observe, and he, he, he was def- he's, he was definitely left-handed when he was a kid but trained himself to be right-handed because we live in primarily a right side dominant world. Um, and when this happens, this can actually really compromise your hemisphericity, left and right talking to each other. And this is kind of interesting because he had a lot of, uh, developmental things when he was really young, for those of you that don't know, and, uh, in addition to that, he ended up having a lot of, uh, concussions as well.
**Unknown:** So it's kind of interesting because then his brother is the same, his middle brother. He, uh, was left hand dominant. They... he was very left hand dominant, they knew, and then he trained himself to be right hand dominant, uh, because he was, uh...
**Unknown:** specific things that he was into. So essentially, what this doctor proved is that when you are n- uh, if you're, you're actually left hand dominant and, uh, originally and you train yourself out of it, um, it can actually mess with the synchronization of your left and right hemispheres, which can create a lot of issues with, uh, mental health. So fascinating point. But overall, one of the things that...
**Unknown:** the reason why I was pointing this out is that, um, a lot of times I will, uh, observe this in clients, and they'll have tons of things on one side of the body. You know, "Oh, I always hurt this side of my body. I don't know what's going on. Why am I such a klutz?" Da, da, da, da.
**Unknown:** And, you know, the average physical therapist, chiropractor, um, osteopath would say, "Oh, it's, it's, it's cerebellum weakness," because, you know, g- the side of your cerebellum is gonna correlate to that side of the body, and if you have cerebellum weakness, then that's why you're gonna have all your injuries and all your issues on one side of the body. Yeah, okay. That, that's a possibility for sure. But when you start to ask better questions, you can find that there are these deeper layers that are going on from more of the psychological perspective.
**Unknown:** So in my life, my dad was the villain, you know. When we were young, he was the very strict, very intense and, you know, just the enforcer. He wasn't... he was, he was mean.
**Unknown:** Um, definitely very intense, uh, you know, from a perspective of, like, verbal abuse. Um, there was a lot of things. It was very easy to be like, "You're the problem. You're an asshole.
**Unknown:** You fucked me up," et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, if you ever asked me about my mom, I probably really didn't have much to say. And then even later down the line, you know, again, i- as I learned more, I was like, yeah, I, I guess with my mom, really it comes down to, you know, she shaped me in the perspective of I didn't wanna be weak because the way I observed her was just allowing her husband to be the dictator, allowing her husband to, um, you know, do whatever he wanted, and, and she just shut her mouth and didn't say a word. And so I looked at it as weakness.
**Unknown:** And so I ended up having a lot of things on the left side of my body, and I didn't understand why. I'm like, "I don't, I don't have any problems with my mom. You know? My dad was the one who was the jerk." And as I, I got deeper into it, I started really thinking about it, th- just for myself, and I'm like, what if, you know, he was the, the quote unquote "villain," but the behaviors that I observed in her was actually something that created a deeper scar in correlation toWhat I thought about femininity and what I thought about feminine energy.
**Unknown:** And so then, of course, my husband being the, uh, human behavior guru that he is, he says, "What's the first word that comes to your mou- to your mind when I say the word feminine?" And I was like, "Weakness." He's like, "Yep, well, it's safe to say that that's a deep scar." And so I just kind of sat with this for myself, and then I started to observe, and I started with observing in some friends and some family members. You know, some of my... I still have a lot of really close friends from childhood, and they have that one parent, you know? They have that one parent, they're like, you know, "They were this," or, "They were that," or, "They created all these problems," and, "They were unfair to me." And then they ended up having more psychological conflicts that were actually caused by how the other parent responded to the, quote-unquote, "villain." And of course, then I continued these observations and correlations into the clinical practice.
**Unknown:** So the main thing that I'm, I'm bringing to your attention today is, one, do you have more things going on on one side of your body? Do you have more issues on the left, more issues on the right? And depending on your handedness, your dominant hand, which is that correlated to? Is that correlated to mother, child, feminine, or is that correlated to more of partnerships?
**Unknown:** And from there, start to think. Start to think and, and, and open your eyes and open your perception to possibilities. And if it is a parent that you deem as, you know, they were the villain, or they were the jerk, or, you know, they did this to me, they did that to me, is it actually the other parent's response or lack of response the one that has created some of the programs in your life and in your mind that are holding you back? Because this idea that women or, or femininity was weak kept me...
**Unknown:** I-it-it was a driver, it was a motivator to become a successful businesswoman, um, but it also was, "I don't need you. I don't need anyone. I don't need a man." And there was a lot of ways that it was holding me back in my life. And then really, the, the biggest thing is that I-I-I was doing things and checking things off a list, but I didn't fully have my power as a woman because I thought being feminine was a, was a sign of weakness, so I was trying to be more like a man.
**Unknown:** This is one of the reasons why I started a family late in life. This is one of the reasons why I used to say, "I'm never getting married. I'm never having kids." Um, i-i-- there was a lot of ways that it was holding me back, and you don't know what you don't know in the moment. You know, it served me for a period of time.
**Unknown:** It served me to allow me to create something that people couldn't take away from me, to allow me to reach a, quote-unquote, "level of success." I'm saying quote unquote because I think our definition of success changes as we, as we grow, as we age, as we evolve. And so my version of success, what it was ten years ago with, you know, build a business and have all of these, you know, things on the outside, these superficial things, that is not what I classify as success now. I classify success as freedom and relationships and connections. That's, that's what I classify as success and wealth.
**Unknown:** If I don't have my freedom, if I don't have connections, network, relationships, family, what do I really have? That's for me, that's my opinion, and that's my evolution. So this isn't about going from, "This parent was the one that caused all my problems," or this person to now it's this person. That's, that's not the point of this.
**Unknown:** The point of this is for you to sit back and stop giving your fucking energy to being a victim to whatever you potentially have been a victim to. Um, you know, I had this conversation with someone the other day. I'm like, the amount of energy that you spend saying, "He did this, and the reason why I operate this way is because of him and because of what they did and what he said and this and that," I'm like, if we could reroute that energy to allow you to step into your power and to learn the lessons that you need to learn so that you can turn them into, to opportunity, we're gonna be way better off because giving energy away saying, "This person caused X," is not benefiting you. And really, at the end of the day, we should be thanking these people that have created hardships in our lives because they've essentially shaped who we are, and they shape who we are, and they allow us to have the opportunity to grow and surpass this and also to learn from it so that we don't experience it again in the past.
**Unknown:** You know, pain is something that is one of our biggest teachers, and you know, it's not that we need to go through pain, it's just we have to think about it for what it is. Pain is something that is presenting itself because your vision is tunneled. It's not looking at the big picture, and if you can look at the big, big picture and you can shift your perception around it, then you can learn the lessons and turn your challenges into opportunities.But also if you understand that there is no one person that caused the problem, that one, there is another counterpart, especially in a parenting situation, and then also you're a player in it. So it's either you and that person or it's you and both parents.
**Unknown:** There's no one parent who's the angel, and there's no one parent who was absolutely horrible. They both played a role. They both played an energy dynamic. They both played a balancing act.
**Unknown:** If one had to be the strict enforcer villain, and it's because the other one was just do whatever you want and, you know, uh, don't tell him or, or them that we... You know, I'm gonna let you do this. I-if both of them met in the middle, you wouldn't have to have one person on one extreme and the other on the other extreme. Everything is about balance.
**Unknown:** This is proven in physics. So i-it's just stop putting one person in your life on a pedestal and then the other one, you know, down in the shitter. And it's also just understanding, oh, okay, I see these observations that I made. I observed that, you know, this person was a jerk.
**Unknown:** This person was weak. I observed that this person was abusive, and this person was nurturing. I observed these things. Okay, great.
**Unknown:** What do you learn from it? What is the bigger perception when you zoom out? Is it really that that person was just abusive and this person was just a nurturer? Or was it that this person was compensating for this person acting a certain way because they didn't have enough confidence and strength to stand their ground to say, "This is not something that we tolerate in our lives"?
**Unknown:** What can you learn from that? Can you learn how to have your own confidence and your own strength and to walk away from toxic situations and toxic people? That's-- That has been my biggest lesson, is that it's not that my mom was weak and my dad was an asshole. It was the fact that it really came down to the, the balancing act.
**Unknown:** It was just he was gonna run around and act a certain way because he was lost and had a lot of his own deep-rooted emotional scars, and he didn't have anyone there to say, "This isn't, this isn't gonna be tolerated. This is not how you treat people. This is not how we're going to treat our kids, and this is not the standard we're gonna set for our kids." So I always say conflict avoided is conflict multiplied. So one parent just being docile and silent is not, is not the angel.
**Unknown:** They're not the nurturer. They're not the nice one. They're showing you lack of confidence, lack of security. Um, they're showing you what it looks like to tolerate bullshit and toxicity in your life.
**Unknown:** And so this person is gonna still be the bully, the asshole, the jerk until the other person rises up. And again, when you're in a parenting situation, of course, you're just surrounded by all of that energy. But all we can do as individuals, especially now grown up, is look at that and say, "Okay, I see it for what it is, but that's not what I'm gonna do anymore." And chances are, we all have toxic people in our lives right now because we've learned that it's okay to tolerate it through behaviors like this. So what are you gonna do about it?
**Unknown:** Are you gonna change it? Are you gonna raise your level of tolerance? This is a question that I ask myself, and I bring to my meeting with my husband every single week, and we do a check-in. What did you tolerate last week, and how are you raising your level of tolerance this week?
**Unknown:** And so this isn't just about him and I. This is just generally. Like, what did I tolerate in my personal life? What did I tolerate in my business?
**Unknown:** What did I tolerate in my mental health? What did I tolerate in my relationship? What did I tolerate in my friendships? What did, what did I tolerate in general, and how am I raising my level of tolerance?
**Unknown:** 'Cause guess what? You get to be the driver of your life. So if there's things about your life that you don't like, it, it's up to you to change it. Nobody's changing it for you.
**Unknown:** No one cares. Like, not to say that in a mean way, but no one's coming to save you. No one's coming to sit you down and say, "We're gonna change this." Like, it is up to you, and the quality of your life is dictated by how hard the decisions are that you can make confidently. This is something that you hear a lot in business is the most successful companies are ran by the CEOs that have the ability to make hard decisions every single day.
**Unknown:** But this isn't just about CEOs. This is about people. The quality of your life will be dictated by the quality of your questions that you ask yourself every day, but it's also dictated by the ability to make hard decisions confidently. So AKA, you make a decision, and you stand behind it.
**Unknown:** You don't backpedal because someone said, "Oh, that was mean," or, "Oh, you shouldn't do that." You, you have the ability to make the decision and stand behind it confidently and of course with humility. You know, this isn't about running around and steamrolling people and, you know, making really crazy intense decisions that potentially harm others. This is just about making a, a decision boldly that's going to allow you to be who you wanna be, live the life you wanna live, and then of course doing it in the most humble way possible. Um, but at the root of all of it is it's all about confidence.
**Unknown:** All right, guys. So I hope I didn't totally mind fuck you. Um, but again, this is really... Th-this was all about just being thought-provoking, getting you guys thinking differently about people in your life that still have a level of control on you, and I only say they have a level of control on you because they can take your energy really easily.
**Unknown:** They're, they're a quote unquote "trigger." And so if we could be free of those triggers, and we could be free of that, of, of giving our energy away, we have so much more energy to custom curate the life that we want and be the most present in our current relationships, you know, our children's lives, our relat-- or our romantic relationships, et cetera. And that's really most important, is being able to give your energy to the people that deserve it and not the people that don't. We thank you so much for being an avid listener of Integrative U Radio, formerly known as Integrative Wellness Radio. We appreciate all of your support.
**Unknown:** We love your comments. Please visit us on social media as well as our website to see all of the fun things happening behind the scenes and the new amazing content and courses that is being rolled out on a monthly basis. We hope to see you there.
Related episodes
About Integrative You Radio
Integrative You Radio is a root cause medicine and integrative medicine podcast hosted by Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers — two integrative doctors who build personalized wellness protocols from your DNA, minerals, hormones, gut, and nervous system rather than from a population template. Looking for an integrative doctor who reads your labs together instead of in isolation? This is the show.
Further reading
Listen and read the full episode →