1: Invisible Inheritance | Book Launch Chronicles
Dr. Nicole Thaxton introduces her debut book "Invisible Inheritance: A Guide to Healing Anxiety Across Generations" in this candid, unscripted episode. She shares the powerful origin story of how the entire book "downloaded" into her mind at 1:40 AM while rocking her infant daughter to sleep, explores the concept of befriending anxiety as a superpower, and walks through the book's four-part structure. This intimate conversation reveals how five years of journaling and ten years of clinical work with clients culminated in a deeply personal memoir blended with professional expertise on generational anxiety.
-
PRE-ORDER MY BOOK HERE: https://www.nicolethaxton.com/shop/p/preorder
RSVP For Book Launch Event: https://www.nicolethaxton.com/shop/p/an-evening-with-dr-nicole-thaxton-book-launch-event
FOLLOW:
Join my weekly newsletter for anxious achievers: https://www.nicolethaxton.com/blog/newsletters
IG: @drnicolethaxton
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drnicolethaxton
TikTok: @drnicolethaxton -
Disclaimer: Transcripts are AI Generated.
1: Invisible Inheritance | Book Launch Chronicles
Hello, [00:00:00] Nicole here. I'm currently recording this audio in the car on my iPhone using my. Apple plugin headphones. It's not going to be outlined, which is very unlike me if you know me. I like to be very prepared. However, one of my favorite sayings is done is better than perfect, so this is me living that out and saying that done is better than perfect.
If we have not met, which I'm sure we have either online or in person,
Introduction & Background
I'm Dr. Nicole Thaxton. I'm a licensed professional counselor. Certified professional counselor, supervisor, founder of Atlanta Wellness Collective, and I have my first book, my debut book, Invisible Inheritance, A Guide to Healing Anxiety Across Generations, in about four short weeks.
Book Launch & Pre-orders
That book is launching into the world as I'm recording this. It's a Thursday. And all of the pre-order copies [00:01:00] that have been purchased so far, about 200 copies, are in the mail on their way to you if you're listening to this. So my book, which I've spent about a year at this point plus writing, and about another five years working on before that, which I'll get to that in a minute.
It is going to be in hands for pretty much the first time, except for the beta readers who read it last summer and gave me fantastic feedback. So thank you, beta readers, if you're listening. But it's gonna be in your hands. It's gonna be in reader's hands for the first time, which is a little terrifying but very exciting.
Probably this Saturday, or by Monday at least. So I have been wanting to release a mini podcast. Series Four, Invisible Inheritance, as we are leading up to its launch. I am not a podcaster, although it's pretty funny. If you follow me [00:02:00] on any social media channel, you'll see that I am currently building out in our house what we're calling the studio, my creative sort of professional work studio in our house.
And my family is referring to it as my podcast studio, and I keep saying I don't have a podcast, don't intend to. We'll see. But I did want to create a fewer longer form ways of sharing a little bit more about the book, and these will be sort of some frequently asked questions. About the book, how the book came to be.
I'm gonna talk about over the next few episodes, each of the four parts of the book. The book is broken into four parts. Part one is the stories we carry. Part two is understanding the legacy of anxiety. Part three is breaking the cycle. You know, how we break three. And then part four ends with creating a new emotional [00:03:00] legacy.
Pretty powerful stuff. So I'm thinking about doing one episode per part. Each of the parts is very sort of unique in the way that the book is laid out. But for today, I thought I would just sort of introduce myself and give a little overview, a little behind the scenes, a little background about how Invisible Inheritance came to be.
And as I mentioned, I am not doing this with any sort of outline, which is very unlike me. But here we go. We're just gonna dive in anyway and see where we go. So as I mentioned,
The Origin Story
about five years ago, I bought, I guess it's almost six years ago now, in 2020, I bought this notebook. I'm calling this my book notebook.
Okay. I bought it at Target and I started taking notes in this notebook about this book idea I had, and I wanted to write a book about anxiety, and I write in Invisible Inheritance. In the [00:04:00] very first chapter, that I wanted to write this book before I had kids, that was the plan that I had in my head. I'm gonna write this book about anxiety.
At this point, I've been counseling in private practice for about five years, specializing in anxiety disorders, and I had all of this, all these stories, all this information, all this stuff that I did in my clinical work and that I was also experiencing in my personal life and my personal anxiety journey, as I call it in the book.
And I wanted to share that, and I thought, I want to do this before I have kids because I don't know, it was just some arbitrary deadline I made up in my head. Well, that obviously did not happen. I have two girls, little girls, and I also have, you know, an 18-year-old, almost 18-year-old stepdaughter. But I just thought that was going to be my goal and I bought this book notebook.
And just started writing things down. I started writing down chapter ideas, story ideas. I wanted to interweave [00:05:00] client, you know, stories and vignettes, um, that had happened. Ideas I had, um, loosely around what has become coined in the book as the anxious parenting archetypes. Just had all these ideas. I had conversations with published authors.
I had conversations with ghost writers and. And you know, people in that space, publishers, book marketers, and all of the notes from these meetings went into the book. I also did a lot of journaling about my own resistance to writing the book and just really collecting all my thoughts. So this was about six years ago.
Now I say five. It was about six years ago now, and
The Divine Download
around February. Of last year, so 2025, my daughter was three months old, my littlest, Reese, and I was rocking her to sleep. I shared this in the book. I was [00:06:00] rocking her to sleep one night, and all of a sudden it was like the entire book downloaded into my head.
It was the strangest thing ever. I believe it was God. But, and I have other stories I could share of why I truly believe it was God. But it was like in that moment, at 1:40 AM, the entire book, start to finish. Like, I had ideas, I had stories, I had concepts. I had some chapter titles. Okay. The entire book.
Now, I didn't know what the book was gonna look like. I didn't know it was gonna be purple. If you've seen any of the materials I've put out already, you know, purple is the dream. I did not have that yet. I can talk about that story of how I knew the book was supposed to be purple. I didn't even have a title.
So even when beta readers, even after writing the entire book, which I did in four months, frantically, over the next four months, even when beta readers read my book, it had a different title. So it had a [00:07:00] working title for a while. And it was honestly my book team that came up with Invisible Inheritance, and I loved it, and I used that term a lot throughout the book, so it really made sense.
But back to February 8th, 2025, when this book gets downloaded into my head. I believe it was an agreement that I had with God, where I said, "You have given me this." Liz Gilbert in Big Magic, the book Big Magic, which fantastic book, by the way. I've read it like three times in the past. With the book writing process, Liz Gilbert refers to these types of ideas as, you know, beings.
That's how she refers to it. And she says that they will come and visit you, and basically if you don't birth them, they'll find somebody else who will. And I don't know that I believe that, necessarily. But I feel like that is the commitment [00:08:00] that I made with myself, but also with God that night. And I said, you have given me this.
I have been wrestling with this for about five years, not knowing what's going on with this book. You've given me the entire thing, and I will be faithful to birthing this no matter what it takes. Well, it is now March of 2026, so it was about a year ago. And boy, oh boy, I had no idea. I had no idea what was in store.
And it was one of those situations where everything in my life, if, if you know me at all, everything in my life has been very planned. Okay, so I went to school for 10 years to become a counselor and a PhD. Three and a half of undergrad, three-ish of master's, three, four-ish of my doctorate program. And everything has been very laid out.
Even like counselor licensure, very laid out, you know, get the hours. Do [00:09:00] things. Um, it's always been very step by step for me, and I feel like this, I guess you could say, starting our business wasn't very clear. Like, I had no idea that when we started our company, Atlanta Wellness Collective, that we would be three locations, 30 plus providers.
So I guess that was not like planned either. But when it came to writing this book, I really did not know what I did not know. And at least when we started our practice, I had worked in private practice and RJ had worked in private practice and in the business world, and I had been around mental health counseling a long time, so it's a little bit more like I know what I'm in store for a little bit, not, not really, but that's a whole other story for another day.
Writing Process & Journey
Anyway, back to February of 2025. I commit to myself and to God that I will birth this idea, and as I mentioned, I started that next day. Frantically writing this book, which is about 70,000 words, which a pretty dense book, at least for nonfiction. [00:10:00] And it took me about four months to write. And again, like I said, I had the entire outline in my head.
So that's kind of what I did first, and that's how my brain works. I like to outline things first, and then it was just filling in everything. Okay, so here's the outline. Now I definitely moved chapters around and there was a lot of that. There was a lot of editing that happened. Um, you know, adding in stories as I went and as I experienced things.
But it was one of the most interesting experiences of creation that I've ever had, of inspiration. Um, never quite had anything like that that I've experienced. So that is sort of how this book came to be. I thought it was gonna be a book about anxiety, and it is a book about anxiety. I mean, the subtitle, you know, is literally A Guide to Healing Anxiety Across Generations, and I think that's the part that I was not fully prepared for, was how generational in nature.
This book is, [00:11:00] so that's what I think the missing piece of the puzzle was over all those five years, and what is absolutely wild. But of course, I believe God works this way and everything is connected. But the very first quote that I ever wrote in the book journal in 2020, very first quote, was the, the quote, the crux quote in the book.
Which is crazy, and I can't really tell you. I mean, I guess I could tell you what that quote is. It's a Virginia Woolf quote, but you'll have to read the book. I don't want to give too much away, but I just think that's wild that I knew it was going to be about anxiety, but I think what surprised me was how much it was going to require of my own vulnerability and my own journey.
And that's what I'm reflecting on now. I thought this was gonna be like a clinical anxiety guide, and it is that. It, it totally is that. This is [00:12:00] a culmination of 10 years of therapy work with clients specializing in anxiety disorders, but it's so much, um, me interwoven. And I write in the end of the book that so much of this work was done.
In conjunction with my clients, like, they had no idea at the time, of course, 'cause therapy is a one-way relationship and it should always be that way, ethically speaking. My clients had no idea at the time that my journey was very much sort of mirroring their own, in that I have experienced anxiety for as long as I can remember, and I didn't know it was anxiety, okay, until I was in my early twenties and I was sitting in a counselor's office.
Not for the first time. I'd been to several counselors, but I was sitting in my counselor's office at the time and she told me this word, anxiety. And I knew what anxiety was, but I didn't know that I had anxiety. But her giving me that word, it's like something went, [00:13:00] some light bulb turned on. Okay. And I realized, wow, this is what I've been carrying for a really, really long time.
This makes sense. I make sense. Nothing's wrong with me, you know, and it took me a while to kind of figure that out and journey through that. And that's sort of what the book is. The book is sort of a culmination of that winding journey. I share a lot of that journey in the book. There's definitely parts I don't share, which I'm hoping to sort of share in maybe like future books, but I'm getting ahead of myself at this point.
So the book is a clinical guide. It is a tool, it is a self-help tool guide for anyone experiencing anxiety. Your parents experienced anxiety, your children experience anxiety, and it is my memoir. I mean, you can expect that. And that was what surprised me about this book. I did not realize, you know, five years ago, four years ago, three years ago, that I was.
Going to be prepared or was being [00:14:00] prepared to share the stories that I share in the book. So I'll leave it at that. We are gonna have to read the book. I'm giving you like a little teaser. Okay. So I'm gonna talk more about each of the parts of the books specifically. But the book starts with sort of two introductions.
Okay? So I'll talk about that right now. Part one is start here, and it's really sort of introducing you to book. And then I have a separate introduction that is introducing you to what I call the anxiety journey. So the anxiety journey is a journey that we go on when we have anxiety. It helps it to feel, in my opinion, a little bit more like something we can sort of stroll along, mosey along.
You know,
Befriending Anxiety
consider me your hiking guide on the anxiety journey is how I sort of looked at it as writing this book. But the biggest thing in the book, second to anxiety being generational 'cause that's basically what the book [00:15:00] is all about, and creating a new emotional legacy for you and your family. The really big part of the book is this journey of befriending anxiety.
So I'm not entirely sure where I came up with that term, and as I was reflecting on my book journal over the past few weeks leading up to, you know, I'm creating all this content for the launch. And that's a whole other can of worms. I'm leading up to that and I'm reading the book journal. I'm reading back over, you know, five years of notes and there's also a quote on the first page about befriending darkness.
Okay? And it's a Sue Monk Kidd quote. And I'm gonna attribute, I don't know if that's where I got that term. I mean, I attribute that to Sue Monk Kidd who I just love all of her writing. That throughout the book I talk about and introduce this idea of befriending anxiety and really viewing anxiety as something that can be a superpower.
I'm sort of known to say that anxiety [00:16:00] is a superpower and can be a superpower, and I certainly feel like in my life I have both warred with anxiety. I have hated my anxiety, I have not understood my anxiety at times. And then there have been these moments where I'm like, oh. No, me and anxiety, like, we know what we're doing.
Like, we're friends, you know? And also, we can do great things together. Like, we can do hard things together. Um, and for me, I feel like anxiety truly is a superpower. But obviously, I've dedicated pretty much all of my adult life to learning about, talking about, writing about anxiety. Um, so yeah, for me it's a superpower.
But that's where I go in the beginning of the book. That's where we lead off, and I'll go into the parts a little bit in overview and then dig into them a little bit in maybe some future episodes. However,
Book Structure Overview
Part [00:17:00] One is the stories we carry. So Part One is unique. For Part One, I conducted two interview sessions.
Specifically for the book, and I was given consent to share the interviews in the book. So it really starts out with a rich narrative storytelling of, as the title says, five generations of anxiety. So we start out the book, very narrative heavy, starting to explore how generational anxiety moves through families.
And these interviews, I can talk more about them maybe in the next episode, but the interviews were emotional, they were powerful, and honestly, I just can't wait for you to read this section. It's just so good. The second part, after the stories we carry, is understanding the [00:18:00] legacy of anxiety. This is understanding how anxiety moves across generations.
Okay. From a clinical perspective, from a relational perspective, uh, from a trauma informed perspective, and I talk a lot in this section about the anxiety cycle, epigenetics, generational trauma. The anxious parenting archetypes are listed in this section as well, which is a completely new framework that I am coining for anxious parenting.
There are. Five anxious parenting archetypes that emerged throughout my work, my clinical work, and I write about them there. I talk a lot about roles and rules, and it's really just trying to understand your anxiety, understand where your anxiety came from, and then we move into part three, which for me is probably, I mean, they're all [00:19:00] good.
Okay. Probably one of the more fun parts of the book. To write because it's all about breaking the cycle. So this is how do we heal, how do we break the cycle? And this is rich with client stories, personal stories. Some of them are hilarious, some of them make you wanna cry. I, but it's all about how we break the cycle and heal.
And that's that third part. So stick it out, you know, get to get to part three. Finally, part four is creating a new emotional legacy. As I mentioned, this is all about what I'm calling parenting from enoughness, and this book is great even for non-parents. So among my beta readers, I had beta readers age 20, all the way up to age 82.
Okay, my beta readers. [00:20:00] And one of the beta readers who I specifically asked to be a beta reader, she is in her twenties, in school for mental health counseling. She is engaged, not a parent, and she wrote a review for me for the book that said, "This is a book that everyone who wants to be a parent needs to read."
And that meant so much to me, 'cause I specifically asked her to read this book for several reasons, and I won't share all of those reasons of why I asked her to be a beta reader. But one of them was because she's not a parent. And I thought, okay, am I gonna lose people, you know, in part four? Because it truly is about creating a new emotional legacy.
How do I parent my kids and not pass down? The things I don't wanna pass down, you know, how do I not pass down my anxiety, my stuff, my trauma, whatever. So it's very hands-on. It's very tactical. It's very tool-based for parents, [00:21:00] but also for non-parents. And I think that's what I was really trying to get, a great blend of, is it's just emotionally healthy legacies in general.
So hopefully you guys can give me feedback if you're not a parent and you read the book. Let me know if you still find it helpful, but that was my goal. But then for parents, this is a must-read, and I think that's what the feedback has been, is that every single parent needs to read this book. And that would be fantastic.
You know, if every single parent read this book, I would love that. But certainly anyone who has ever experienced anxiety or who loves someone with anxiety, I, I really do believe this book will be very life-changing. It was life-changing for me to write it. And certainly it was life changing for me to be living it out over the past 10 years, but I'm extremely proud of this book.
It has been an arduous learning [00:22:00] curve and process. I've had a lot of support, mainly in my incredibly supportive husband who goes along with all of my ideas. But I cannot wait for this book to be out in the world, for you to have your hands on it. And what's crazy is, as I am recording this, I'm already getting a few texts that books are making it to people today.
I shipped them a few days ago, so wow, that's a thrill, just to have this book in your hands. Just so you are aware,
Pre-order & Launch Event Details
pre-orders are still available on my website, nicoleaxton.com, and you can look there for book pre-orders. I have a page about the book. I also have Kindle pre-orders available if you are an ebook reader.
However, if you purchase a pre-order paperback, it will be signed by me. I ship all [00:23:00] of those out, hand ship those out. I love it. It's great. You can pre-order now through April 21st, when this book will be live on Amazon to purchase. So after April 21st, you're welcome to purchase from my website still. And I will sign your copy, or of course you'll be able to purchase it from Amazon.
I would love for you to pre-order if you haven't already, or if you have and you have the book in your hands as you are listening to this, I would love for you to share your feedback, share the book, post a picture of the book, anything, uh, you can just to get this message out means the world to me. And please, on April 21st, be sure to go and leave a review on Amazon.
That will help so much as I'm a first time author. I do not have any sort of commercial backing or support for this book. This is all. Just a [00:24:00] self-funded project, but I am just thrilled from any support, anybody who has purchased a book. It means the world to me. And if you would leave an Amazon review, that would be fantastic.
Of course, a five-star review, hopefully. Kidding, but that would be great. Second, pre-order the book. One second. If you have not seen, I am hosting a launch night event. I want you there. Every single person is invited. This is an event that we are putting on at RO in Roswell, excuse me, in Roswell, Georgia, at Social House, a fantastic event space that's giving back to the Roswell community in beautiful ways.
We are having an evening with the author, so you can purchase tickets on my website. They are $30, but you get a book, so it's really like free though. [00:25:00] But I would love for you to consider coming. It's April 21st, launch night, seven to 9:00 PM at Social House. You do need a ticket, you'll get a book. We'll do desserts, coffees, pastries.
Grab dinner beforehand, grab your girlfriends, come to this event. We'll have photo opportunities, book signing, and also an interview conversation about the book. So I'll be talking all about the book and probably some Q and A. It'll be fun. So grab a lot of, you have already been grabbing tickets and a lot of you are grabbing multiple tickets, which I just absolutely love.
I feel like this is a book that is meant to be discussed. It is meant to be shared with friends and family and your therapist, and it's going to get you thinking, it's going to get you working through some stuff, you know. [00:26:00] So bring some friends and we're gonna meet each other. I've never done a live event like this that isn't for like a company, you know, or a continuing ed.
So I'm thrilled just to be able to spend time with you and meet in person and celebrate this night together. It's really what I wanted out of this book launch day. Tickets for the event can also be found on my website soon. Go to nicolefaxon.com/invisible-inheritance, or if you just go to nicolefaxon.com or my Lincoln bio.
Pretty much on all my social media sites, you'll find, you'll find a button there, um, and purchase the ticket. Okay, I hope this has been fun. I did not outline this, so I think it went pretty well. And I'll plan to record a few more parts to dig a little bit deeper into the rest of the book as we lead up to launch [00:27:00] day.
Thank you so much for your support, whether you've been here for two minutes or since 2016 when I started posting online. You mean the world to me, seriously, and I'm excited to celebrate this milestone with you.
-
Preorder Invisible Inheritance and begin your own legacy work.