How Family Secrets Shape Us: Emotional Inheritance with Dr. Galit Atlas
May 19, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
Hello world. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Thanks for coming back and spending this time with us. We’re grateful as always. We are not only grateful this morning, but we are just fascinated by the idea that we are discussing today.
Glennon Doyle:
So many of us have this idea that when we’re born, we’re just blank slates and that who we become over time is just based on what we experience in the world. But the brilliant guest we have today says, no, that’s not true. She says that who we become is based on not just what we experienced, but what our parents and ancestors experienced, whether we know what those experiences were or not, just as if life wasn’t hard enough. Now just another freaking curve ball.
Abby Wambach:
A little wrinkle.
Glennon Doyle:
And so, to unlock the mysteries of who we are and what we want and why we do what we do, we can’t just look inward at ourselves or outward at our world. We have to also freaking look backward to the worlds and trauma of our parents and grandparents. So no problem.
Amanda Doyle:
We have an hour, so it should be fun.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Everyone will be fine by the end.
Abby Wambach:
We will be fixed.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. We have a four-step plan to cure yourself of the human condition. The fascinating and brilliant Dr. Galit Atlas calls the trauma that has passed down to us from previous familial generations our emotional inheritance. Today she is here to help us understand it so that we can get closer to understanding not just our families, but ourselves.
Glennon Doyle:
Dr. Galit Atlas is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in New York City. Her new book Emotional Inheritance was published in January and is already being translated into 17 languages.
Abby Wambach
Wow.
Glennon Doyle:
She is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis. A leader in the field of relational psychoanalysis, Dr. Atlas teaches and lectures throughout the United States and internationally. Hi, doctor. Thank you for being here.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Hello.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you feel like you can fix us all in the next 45 minutes? Is that too much to ask of you?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Absolutely I wouldn’t.
Glennon Doyle:
Absolutely I wouldn’t.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I’m sorry that I gave you the bad news, that it’s more complicated than you thought it is.
Glennon Doyle:
Damn it to hell. Okay. Doctor, you’re a therapist, which makes you kind of a detective. This is how I think about therapists. So you say that people go to therapy to search for unknown truths about themselves. That rings so true to me because I feel like every time I go to a therapist, which is low so many times, I am saying I still have not solved the mystery of me. Can you help?
Glennon Doyle:
It feels like through your recent work, you are saying that when we sit down with our detective or our therapist, we have not been working with all the clues and that we need to work backwards, because, as you said, “Every family carries some history of trauma that leaves its emotional mark on those who are yet to be born. These secrets affect our mental and physical health, create gaps between what we want and what we are able to have, and haunt us like ghosts.” Can you talk about that?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Yeah. So first of all, thank you for inviting me to talk with you. I feel that what we’re talking about when we talk about emotional inheritance is those experiences that our ancestors had. We can talk later a little bit maybe about the research, because the research was on mice and other animals that live short lives. It goes seven and sometimes even 14 generations.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
But with humans, we’re thinking about right now only our parents and grandparents and maybe great, great parents, which means that in therapy, I sit not only with you but with your parents and with your grandparents. So we have many generations in the room with us.
Amanda Doyle:
Wow. Can we talk about that research that you just referenced? Because I found this completely fascinating. So at the risk of necessarily oversimplifying it greatly, I’ll try to explain to you. Tell me if I’m corrected about this, because this blew my mind.
Amanda Doyle:
So every cell in our body has DNA. It’s exactly the same. But our DNA is covered in these molecules, which are markers that tell our body how to use the DNA, which is how we get one cell that’s an eye cell and another cell that’s an ear cell and so on. When we go through trauma, it changes us on a molecular level because it pushes those markers which results in different genetic expression.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
What epigenetics has shown us is that even if our descendants never experienced that trauma, our trauma is passed down genetically from generation-to-generation through that.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Exactly right. Exactly right. Through the expression of genes. It doesn’t change the genes, it changes the expression of the genes, which some people like to call it the memory. The genes have memory. I think my research and the Emotional Inheritance book, as you know, is about an intermingling of nature and nurture, because the epigenetic research can tell us something really important about the expression of genes and what we carry from generation-to-generation.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
But what we find in our clinical work that is fascinating is that we don’t only inherit the anxiety, for example, or the biological piece. But we also know something about the content.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
We know something about … We inherit things that sometimes seem amazing and incredible about different times in our ancestors’ life, dates, specific things. I talk in the book, for example, and I share my own experiences, my mother lost her brother when she was 10 years old. He was 14. In my family, there is a fear of water. That happens often if you are explicitly told about the trauma, but many times even if you have not.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
We can talk about how that happens, because it sounds like mysterious.
Amanda Doyle:
Your mother’s brother drowned. Now you have this unspoken fear of water. Wow.
Glennon Doyle:
I would like you to tell us how, because in my mind it’s like, okay, so your mother is nervous around water. Then when you go to the pool when you’re little, she’s trying to be brave, but her anxiety about you being near the pool is contagious. Is that the way or is there more-
Dr. Galit Atlas:
That’s exactly right. That is a part of a much more broad, implicit communication, because sometimes we think that we know what people tell us, but in fact we know everything. We know what they don’t tell us. I like to call it we smell the gaps. We smell the gaps. It’s something that you understand from a very young age.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
The research around that is mostly attachment research. It’s the research that talks about that unit, the parent-child unit, that is so essential for the child’s survival, and that from the minute of birth, the child monitors and registers everything. I like to think of it as the parent lives inside the child. That is because the child needs to survive.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
And so, all of that and all of the attention that we notice as children … And in the book, I describe a little bit the infant research from especially my dear friend Beatrice Beebe from Columbia University and how she talks about attachment and how babies and parents communicate. From a minute old, the baby is born and the baby responds through sucking through the pacifiers or sucking the breasts or heartbeats. We see that they respond to the parents’ nonverbal communication.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
So that is how communication is transmitted, and what you described is exactly right. My mother probably had some physical gesture, some questions she didn’t answer and that we registered.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It’s like a mother or father around the water, just we watch her nonverbal cues. A Mother or father who has had abuse, their body reacts in the presence of the opposite sex because they have trauma. They’re not telling us, but we can read by their body language that we should fear that situation.
Glennon Doyle:
So sister and I were talking about how there’s like the micro way to pass it down through behavior. But also there’s this macro way like you talk about. You say of your family, “I was their first child and their traumatic past lived in my body.” That had to do with not just the brother and the water, but also the Holocaust. You talk about being people carrying the trauma of an entire experience of a generation, like the descendants of enslaved people. That is-
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Exactly. Slavery, Holocaust. Like a whole generation that was traumatized. That trauma lives in the next generations, in the mind of the next generations. Somebody comes to therapy and … In the old days we, especially psychoanalysts, used to think about only the unconscious and how do we think about that person’s unconscious. We can talk about it later.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
But I think what this perspective adds really is the frame of intergenerational unconscious, which means that one generation lives inside the other and they share unconscious and then communicate with each other bidirectionally. They communicate with each other things that don’t pass through consciousness, that they’re not aware of, and often that they don’t intend to communicate.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s so fascinating. I mean sister was talking about … The other night when we were discussing your books, she was talking about, well, we have abuse back in our family, and sister has always wondered, “Why is she so passionate? She’s spent so much of her high school, college, post life working with people who were survivors of abuse.” But we never were told how was that passed out? Have you seen that over and over again where it’s something specific?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Yeah, absolutely. I see that over and over again, because what passes down is in fact the something specific. The specific thing is passed down. If it’s abuse … And I love that example because that is an example that has a lot of hope in it. The hope of repair. I think that’s what Amanda is probably doing without overly analyzing you. We all have that wish to repair and to heal also the people that came before us and, of course, to heal ourselves.
Glennon Doyle:
Doctor, since I’m just a perennial optimist, I’m looking at this and thinking, okay, so if we don’t tell our kids about our trauma, they’re traumatized. If we do tell our kids about our trauma, they’re traumatized. So once again, are we all just screwed?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
To some degree we are, but the answer to that, is are we all just screwed? Is that the hope is in the processing and reprocessing and reprocessing, because I do think we can tell our kids about our trauma, but we have to process it first.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Right? Because what we tend to do … And we all tend to do that. I mean we’re talking about the human mind. We tend to process experiences through other people. So I tell you something because I need another mind in order to process my experience. In therapy, that is my job. I sit with you and we process your experience.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
That is what you don’t want to do with your kids. You don’t want to process it through them. You don’t want to let them hold the pain with you. You want to tell them something … And, again, what I’m saying is completely idealized, as if we can do that in a clean way. But, ideally, we would like to tell our kids something that we already know, we already talked about, the abuse you’re talking about, that we already investigated.
Glennon Doyle:
Investigated. So I’m thinking about … Eating disorder trauma has been passed down in my family for generations. I thought when I was young, “Oh my god, I’m just randomly screwed up. Wow. Where did this come from?” When I was little, we didn’t know all of this. My parents didn’t know all of … Nobody knew all of this. So we just thought it was a brand new spanking thing out of the universe.
Glennon Doyle:
And so, when I think now about not being cured of that, the way I try to approach it with the kids is like mom has been working on this for decades. I’m working with a therapist, but you’re still going to see some weird things. But you don’t have to worry because I am working with this-
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
… with other people. But I don’t want you to watch me and think that every time I walk into a pantry and take a little teeny bite of a cookie and go back 40 times, that that’s normal, because it’s not normal. So is it-
Dr. Galit Atlas:
And I own it, right?
Glennon Doyle:
I’m owning it.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I’m owning it, it’s not normal, but you don’t have to try and fix me, because I do think that that’s what kids try to do. We all as kids try to do that. We want happy parents. That’s the thing we want the most. We want our parents to be happy so we can thrive and have our life. We don’t have to go and take care of them and be worried about them. So even in retrospect, we try to go and heal our parents. And so, I think Glennon, what you’re saying is that-
Abby Wambach:
I wonder, is there a way to stop that trauma from being passed down to that next generation? Because for this, that’s the idea is to talk about it. We’re just learning about this emotional inheritance. But is there a way to somehow block the DNA markers moving forward? Can we stop this once and for all, or is it with us forever?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
This is an amazing question, and I’ll tell you why. Because in the same way that if we talk about genetics, it could go one direction and it could also go the other direction. That’s the good news. The good news is that the environment … And when we talk in psychology about the environment, we talk about the psychological environment … can also change something back.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Everybody finds their own way to do psychological work. I do psychoanalysis. That’s what I believe in. But people go and find ways to heal. Psychological work, emotional growth, and everything that we know helps people feel grounded and process, reflect, be aware, and connect with other people, because it’s not an isolated experience. Those are the things that we do with other people, with communities, or with people we love. That psychological environment actually helps block it, as you say, or transform it into something else.
Amanda Doyle:
When Glennon said that she was … It was like, “Oh, we’re all screwed,” I had exactly the opposite read of your work, because it felt like, okay, we are trying to so desperately protect our kids from both the things that we can see and know we carry and the things that we don’t know what they are but we know we carry.
Amanda Doyle:
But it felt liberating to me to say, oh, the fact that they are unspoken is going to make them carry them more heavily. So since they’re going to carry it regardless, speaking it, speaking through it is a way to release it.
Amanda Doyle:
Stephen Stahl’s work where it shows that actually the psychotherapy can actually be thought of as a drug in that it changes the circuitry in our brain similarly to drugs. So the same way that the molecules are activated in trauma to be passed down, we can unpress those through our own work to pass down different materials to our kids.
Amanda Doyle:
That for me was so freeing because it’s like there is no hiding from any of this. So we might as well bring it to the front and talk it through and change it, because trying to hide it is actually doubling down on what they’re going to carry.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
It’s exactly right. I think you’re touching an important thing, which is what I call in the book the ghosts. The ghosts of the unsaid and the unspeakable is there to haunt us. Very often we become the gatekeepers of the unspeakable, as part of some family dynamic, family collusion, I’ll call it, where we also participate and become … Again, keep those ghosts alive and pass them down.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
So I think, Amanda, what you’re saying is really important because it really puts our magnifying glass on the ghostly experience. I’m thinking one of the stories in the book about Noah. When he comes to therapy and he thinks like … Obsessed with obituaries. He reads the obituary every day and he comes in, and I have no fucking idea, forgive me for my language … Why is he talking about that? What is he dealing with? Why is he obsessed with obituaries?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
He has fantasies and he tells me about his fantasies about that he had brother, every time, and then goes back to what you, Glennon, said before. I assumed that every time he went to his mother and said … He’s an only child, “I feel like I used to have a brother.” She would turn around or do something. He would read her body language. It becomes bigger and bigger and bigger for him. That is, in that story, the unspeakable.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Of course, at the end, I’m going to give you a spoiler, for those who didn’t read the book. His mother died and we find out that he in fact had a brother and he was named after that dead brother, which of course brings us to the topic of names and how parents name their children.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
But in that story, what we call these days gaslighting, of like, “Oh, you’re so crazy. Why are you so crazy? Stop talking about dead brother. You never had a dead brother. Why are you so obsessed with the dead?” And here we are. I think that brings us back to the ghosts. Finally, something comes up and you don’t feel like you’re crazy.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Then I love it in your work, all these little weird things about us that we just think are little quirks or whatever. Probably most of them are real … Like there’s a real reason for every bit of how we are. You say everything that we do not consciously know, because we know it somewhere, but we don’t consciously know is relived. It is held in our minds and in our bodies and makes itself known to us via what we call symptoms. Headaches, obsessions, phobias, insomnia can all be signs of what we have pushed away to the darkest recesses of our minds. So even our physical experiences.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Of course, especially our physical. Our body has like a secret contract with our unconscious, to hold things for our unconscious. So our body will help in that system to make sure that you keep secrets and that you keep secrets from yourself. All of those secrets and ghosts … And some of them we don’t know.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I’m talking in a book and we’re talking about things that we found out. But imagine how many things we didn’t find out and we don’t know about. I don’t know about myself. This illusion that we could fully know ourselves is an illusion. We’re never fully analyzed. As long as we have an unconscious, there are things we don’t know. There are so many things we do not know about our parents, about our grandparents, and even about things that happened to us when we were babies and before-
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Right? Do you know if your parents were happy that you were born or not. When things go wrong, secrets are born. People don’t necessarily know what happened, if their parents were upset when they were born, if their mother was depressed. All of those things are kept as secrets.
Glennon Doyle:
Then they wonder later why they can’t feel loved, or they feel like a burden. Somebody who constantly feels like a burden might be somebody who felt that in the first year of their life.
Amanda Doyle:
That line, you said when our minds remember, our bodies are free to forget. So we’re carrying all of that in our bodies because our minds won’t remember it because that’s too scary. So the burden’s on the body in the contract.
Amanda Doyle:
Something that was fascinating to me was that it isn’t just trauma, because we know if you’re a Holocaust descendant, you carry that in your genetic stress hormones. If you’re a descendant of famine, you carry it in your metabolism genes. We know that genetically. But it isn’t just traumas, it’s also the secrets, you call it, any untold story, unspoken anything.
Amanda Doyle:
That to me was fascinating because so much of the “secrets” are not actually secrets at all. They’re just things that in our families, we all agreed, we colluded to not speak about.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Yes. Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
That is something that in this generation, that is our generation, that we can do the revolutionary work of speaking it out loud, looking at it and speaking it. What kind of things do you see most often that are the unspoken non-secrets that we continue to collude to keep?
Glennon Doyle:
So they are conscious even. There’s conscious-
Dr. Galit Atlas:
The secret we know … I call it secrets we keep from ourselves in the book, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Right.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Secrets are many things. Some of them are things that we don’t know about and nobody told us, and some of it are things we keep in some isolated place in our minds. So we don’t remember. The psychologist is Christopher Ballas calls that the unthought known. It is known, but we won’t let ourself think about it or know it.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
It’s a form of dissociation. We put it aside and we don’t want to remember, which is pretty amazing, because I think that one of the experiences that people have reading the book that they tell me about is making links. They’re making links between their parents, grandparents, and their own emotional struggle. But most of these links are related to information they already knew, things that they already know about their parents, and that they already knew something but they never thought about it.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
And so, here we’re really talking about experiences that are part of the family story, but were never put together, because our mind will attack any link that might cause anxiety or pain.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
So to your question, Amanda, it could be a lot of secrets like that are actually secrets about trauma. Something happened in a family and everybody knows about it, but we don’t talk about it. It’s not something we are allowed to discuss. It’s not something we are allowed to have a dialogue about.
Amanda Doyle:
So when you say that, I’m thinking of our father lost his mother very, very early in life. It was never spoken about. He was a kid, a young kid. His mother died. They all came home to the house, never discussed. And so, is that the kind of thing you’re talking about where we all know, we don’t look at that. We don’t talk about it. That is an untold story that demands reenactment in future generations.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Right. I think that is exactly right. It is those stories that when I ask you about your family, you won’t say, “I don’t know. I’ve never heard that.” You would say, “Oh yeah, I heard that. I know that story. Now let me see how it is connected to my life.” In what way that experience touches my own or activates them or feeds them? In what way it is related to my own emotional struggle?
Glennon Doyle:
So there are secrets that we know are things that happened in our family, but nobody talks about, the familial emotional elephants in every room that we don’t talk about between us. Then there’s a different kind of secret, which is the secrets that we are even keeping from ourselves, not the known unthought but the unknown at all.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
That is related really to our defense mechanism. It’s related to the fact … And I think, Glennon, you talk about it a lot in Untamed, about the fact that we sometimes, or when we are unwell especially, we’d rather not fully live. We prefer to just … So we don’t feel everything. We don’t want to feel everything. I think switching it to, “I’d rather experience everything than miss everything,” is that feeling that is related to our defenses. Our defenses are our idealization, our denial, our repression. What do we do internally?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Projection. Projection is something we all can identify with. There is something about myself that I really don’t like. Then I look at Abby and I say … Let’s say I hate my aggression. I look at Abby and I say, “Abby’s such an aggressive person.” I just need to get rid of this. I need to find a good target, and Abby looks like a good target to me. I just take my aggression and I put it on her. That’s what we all do to some degree. I like to say I put it in her, because then she … In her, not just on her. She becomes the aggressive person.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Of course, in the book, when I talk about aggression and violence, I talk about paranoia too, how paranoia could be related to projection. It is the fear of the projected aggression. I think you are scaring me and I’m afraid of you now. Usually it’s because I’m flooded with my own aggression, and it’s very scary to be flooded with aggression.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
The truth is that when we talk about aggression, we all have some anxiety around aggression. To some degree that is healthier, because those of us who don’t, if you think about leaders that want to control other countries and destroy them, they probably don’t get anxious around their aggression. They get excited about aggression, and about their aggression, and destruction. We’re afraid of destruction.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
That is part of our defense mechanism that helps us. So I think that when we are afraid of our aggression, we do things to get rid of it, or anything we’re afraid of. You can talk about race. We can talk about anything that we think, “I’m not that. It’s them.” We create the illusion of separateness.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Now I’ve never thought of this before, this moment. But you’ll be shocked to know that I’m thinking about myself right now.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I’m glad. That’s what I want you to think about.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m thinking about this idea of eating in our family, the eating and all the fear about food. It’s just intense. I’m thinking about the micro of that, the eating disorder, and then, sister, do you remember when we were little and dad used to call us? He’d look at me and say, “She’s pre-famine,” and then he’d look at sister and say, “She’s post-famine,” because she’s seven inches taller than me. But that goes back to our ancestors. That goes back to Ireland and the famine. My-
Amanda Doyle:
There’s a study of the Netherlands where literally that is true. I mean generations removed from famine survivors and their bodies are still compensated for a famine that they never experienced.
Glennon Doyle:
But my fear of food with scarcity and the binging and all of that, I will never believe, doctor. I understand in my brain, but you will never convince me that there’s going to be enough food, ever. But that’s maybe some of our micro is connected to the macro and all of that. Does that sound like-
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I believe in that. I believe that is something that you inherited also in some ways and, unconsciously, there is a fear that there won’t be enough food. There won’t be enough food. I need to write a story or I need to … I don’t know what you do with that fear. Right. How do you keep yourself safe?
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I think, at the end of the day, it’s all about feeling safe. We all want to feel safe, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
So in that sense, if you feel that there is not enough food, you will have to find a way to feel safe, that you’re not going to starve.
Abby Wambach:
Maybe your dad losing his mother at a very young age is also dealing with safety issues and food issues, because maybe his mother was the provider of the food on some level. So there’s a lot of different elements here.
Glennon Doyle:
There sure is.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
That’s an amazing connection between mothers and food and how when the mother is gone … Especially in the old days, it was clear that the mothers was the source of food, not only breastfeeding but the feeding of the child. If the mother is not there, then maybe there is not enough food, emotionally.
Amanda Doyle:
Well, and also if food … You’ve always used food as self-love. If there’s not enough food … And in dad’s case, there wasn’t enough love after his mom left, there’s just a very … It’s fascinating. And if it’s the same age.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, actually it’s only been 30 minutes and she’s already fixed us. Okay. Can you-
Dr. Galit Atlas:
And abandonment.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, abandonment.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I think I have to add that just to add to the party, because when a parent leaves you in a young age, they abandoned you no matter what, even if you know consciously that they didn’t mean to. They didn’t want to leave. They left you. So that’s part of your emotional inheritance, I’m sure.
Glennon Doyle:
I just read somewhere that there’s a language … I don’t know what language it is, but there’s a language where the word for emotional hunger is exactly-
Abby Wambach:
German.
Glennon Doyle:
In German, is exactly the same word for fear of abandonment.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Is that right? Oh, wow.
Glennon Doyle:
Emotional hunger and fear of abandonment, they use the same word.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
But doesn’t it make sense, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
It makes sense. The hunger and the abandonment are related to each other. Again, it brings us back to attachment. Who feeds us? And we need the other person to not abandon us so we can survive, so we can get food.
Glennon Doyle:
One of the things that was so wonderful about your book is that you do all these case studies. So it’s like you’re reading a mystery. First of all, I think your book should be a show.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
It should for sure be a TV show. I can totally see it. They’re like little mysteries, and it would just help people. Anyway, can you tell us about Eve? Because Eve was a woman who was married with two young kids. She was having an affair with Josh. She was just entranced with this Josh because he was very dominating in bed and he drove her everywhere.
Abby Wambach:
Like literally.
Glennon Doyle:
Like drive around.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Literally.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. She said, “With Josh, nothing is in my control.” She kept saying, “He brings me back to life.” You said her mother and her grandmother both live in her love affair. Can you tell us about that and what unknown truths Eve had to discover?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
That’s the first chapter in the book, Life and Death in Love Affairs. I think what it brings us … Of course, sitting with a patient’s affair is very complicated. I know you had a lot of conversations about affairs from each perspective, from each side.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
For therapists, it touches our own fears and it touches our own morality and what we think is right or wrong, or even our unconscious fantasy. Maybe some of us want to run away with someone. It activates a lot. We sit with that complexity, and I sit with that complexity as I listen to Eve who tells me that she has a good husband. But people have good husbands. She started having an affair with Josh, and the affair includes her submission to Josh’s domination.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Of course, as I listen to it … And I always ask people, first of all, what’s their first memory is, and here we are going back to abandonment. Eve’s first memory is that she was forgotten, that she was sitting outside of school waiting for her mother to pick her up, and her mother didn’t show up. That’s her first memory.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
First memory for me … That’s something I always ask in this first session, “What’s your first memory?” It tells me something about why people come to therapy and what is it that they struggle with. For Eve, as she tells me her life story, I learned very slowly, because she didn’t have a lot of memories from childhood.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Slowly I learned that her mother lost her own mother when she was exactly the age that Eve’s daughter is. And so, the affair started exactly the same age, which was 12, where her mother was when her own mother got sick. Eve’s mother lost her mother to cancer. She told Eve that many, many, many times as if she’s afraid to be alone there. You could see, and I’m sure you remember, as you read this chapter, there is some ways in which she connects to the grandmother’s death.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
At some point, I ask her, “Is your mother dead?” Of course I would’ve known if her mother didn’t die. Then that’s the first thing that people tell us, which make me question my own question. I think what that opens up is … I’m not going to tell our listeners the whole details of how that happens, but really the connection between her mother’s loss, which left her dead from inside and did not allow her to be an alive mother.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I use that term, the dead mother. There’s a French psychoanalyst who coined that term the dead mother, which is a mother who is depressed and struggling with her own loss. So she can’t fully be alive.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
So you see that there is an intergenerational deadness in her psyche. She’s struggling to stay alive. Many times what helps us is we recruit our sexuality in order to stay alive, in order to feel alive, even in therapy. Sometimes people want to make sure that I’m there, that I’m fully there, that I’m alive, that I listen to them, that I’m totally there. They bring sexuality in, in order to enliven the other person.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Right?
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
In Eve’s story, that’s what she does. Around that time, she creates this affair. Of course, just to summarize from where you started about the submission, domination is not random, because her fantasy that he drives her everywhere, he takes care of her. Her mother forgot to come pick her up, if you remember, in the car. She has some … So some of it is conscious, some unconscious … early needs that this affair touches.
Glennon Doyle:
The dead mother thing just blew my mind, because we talk so much about motherhood and how that’s almost seen as a valorous thing, that if we just ignore ourselves. But you said … This just is amazing. The dead mother is somebody who is unavailable, depressed, emotionally absent. This is fascinating. You said, “When the child gives up on bringing their mother back to life, they will try to restore the connection through the renunciation of their own aliveness. They will meet the mother in her deadness by developing their own emotional deadness.”
Glennon Doyle:
So are you saying if I can’t connect with my mom, because she’s just there physically but gone emotionally, when I finally give up on her, I will become dead with her, almost in solidarity. That’s the last hope for connection I have. I will be as dead as she is.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
Whoa.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Connection is the most important thing. You would do anything to connect. So if I want to meet you and you don’t come to me, then I’ll come to you. I’ll meet you where you are. That’s my hope. You see, again, we always go back to hope and to feeling safe. It’s much worse for me to be without you. So I’ll meet you no matter where you are. If you’re dead, I’m going to deaden myself and meet you there. We’re going to be dead together.
Glennon Doyle:
So this is the idea … This is the Carl Jung. There’s no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent, because if what we’re trying to do down is just be alive, then a dead parent almost requires our deadness.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Exactly right. A dead parent, if we need to connect with that parent and we don’t give up on them … We can give up on them and hypercompensate, and go somewhere else and become super alive. But I think usually when we’re young, we want to connect with a parent, and it’s exactly what you’re saying, we’re going to have to deaden ourselves and meet them there.
Glennon Doyle:
With Eve, what was interesting is that, bless Eve’s heart, everybody’s just trying to be alive. But what you two discover … So many things, but one of them is we’re all trying to repair. So Eve thinks she’s trying to repair. She’s just trying to be alive. She’s trying not to be dead like her mother. But in her mission to aliven herself, she is now abandoning her kids. She’s becoming a dead mother to her children because she’s emotionally unavailable to them, because she’s hit the road.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
So you offer this beautiful idea that we think we’re repairing when actually we’re reliving or repeating.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
We’re repeating. Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Repeating.
Glennon Doyle:
So what the hell do we do? How do we know when to repair, or when we’re repairing and when we’re repeating?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
It’s amazing because the relation … And I would say it’s a dialectic relation between repeating and repairing. Our wish is always to repair. In order to do that, we often go to the same place where something went wrong. That’s what needs to be repaired. So I’ll go there and unconsciously I would say this time I’m going to do it better. This time I’m going to fix it and I’m going to fix all the hurt and the pain and the humiliation and the trauma. This time I’m going to do it better. That is the unconscious intention when you go there to repair something.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
But I think often our reparation or our attempt to repair becomes a repetition. In the book, I give a lot of examples of that because the truth is … And that brings us to another secret we keep from ourselves, maybe I’ll call it, that there is something a little omnipotent about that fantasy. That’s brings us to some very early defense mechanism, that we really believe that everything that happens wrong is because of us and we can fix everything.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
So I think where it brings us, it ties back is to the ability to accept our limitations and the fact that some things we can repair and some things we have to mourn.
Amanda Doyle:
That was it for me. Some things cannot be repaired, that’s crucial. We can’t heal our wounded parents. The problem comes when we keep trying. We need to identify what can be repaired and what should be mourned. “Mourning differentiates the past from the present and separates those who died from those who stayed alive.” You mean that literally, right? The people who are no longer living and the people who are living, but we also see it too in the people who are no longer living and those of us who believe that because we cannot repair, we do not have a right to live.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Exactly. Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
And so, we’re repeating and repeating because how dare we deserve to live when we can’t repair what the people came before us couldn’t repair? So mourning seems so important to actually acknowledge this I cannot repair. So this I must mourn if I am not going to carry it forward.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s exactly what you’re saying, that it is not just separates us physically. It separates us emotionally, that we can actually choose life for ourselves. You bring us back into that place where if you talk about survivor guilt, like how could I live if my family is not well? It’s not okay.
Glennon Doyle:
How do we know when something should be mourned and when we should try to repair it?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
It’s a good question and I think this question is related to a lot of other questions in therapy about how do we know, for example, what we should change and what we should accept? Because these are the two things. What could we change? You’re laughing, Amanda.
Amanda Doyle:
Could you tell us that real quick? That would be helpful.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I’ll give you the formula-
Glennon Doyle:
I know the prayer. I have a prayer every day. It has to do with serenity and accepting the things I cannot change.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m now wondering if I’m codependent on dead people, because I feel like that’s what you’re saying. I’m literally trying to control dead generations before me.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
You said you’re controlling not only this generation, even previous generations, which to some degree is what we all do. In the wish to repair, it’s totally related to control and to the ability to surrender and to the ability to say and to investigate, “Is that really something I can control? Can I control another person? Can I control a dead person? Can I control the trauma and fix it?”
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I think I like that tension between change and acceptance because they’re connected, because to some degree, accepting what you cannot change is a change.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, that’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, and it is-
Dr. Galit Atlas:
You change when you accept it, right?
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a huge change. It’s a huge change. It’s the most important change.
Amanda Doyle:
And it’s directly related to mourning. You say we mourn what is out of our control. So when we get to the place where we don’t know if we can accept it or repair it, and we acknowledge it’s out of our control, that is ours to mourn and to let go of, to free ourselves of.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
To free ourselves of. To free ourselves of.
Glennon Doyle:
So when you say mourn, yeah, we have to mourn-
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, this is definite.
Glennon Doyle:
… because then that will separate us, the living and the dead. To me, when people say that to me, I want them to tell me what they mean, because mourn can feel like just forgive. But what does that mean?
Abby Wambach:
How do you mourn?
Glennon Doyle:
How do we mourn? Is mourn something we can do? Because I feel like in our culture, we have no things or rituals. Do you see something that’s helpful for people? When I have realized, oh my god, this is my emotional inheritance and I can’t fix it, so I can’t repair it, so I have to mourn it, is there something people can do that is like an action that has to do with mourning as opposed to just being some vague idea that I have to have in my brain?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Yeah, beautiful, romantic, vague idea, not just vague idea.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
That’s what we don’t want. We don’t want things to become romanticized. “Oh, you have to mourn.” That is so beautiful, right? It’s a beautiful word.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I share it a little bit in the book because I’ve lost my life partner more than three years ago to cancer. So the whole issue of mourning and writing this book was around my time of mourning and thinking a lot about what mourning is and how the hell you do that.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I think what we find is that there is no right way to do it. It’s chaotic, it’s disgusting often, it’s scary, but it’s related to control. We bring back the idea of it is about knowing that something really messy is happening and I cannot change it. I can only have feelings about it, because part of what we’re trying to control is our own feelings. “I’m really sad,” “I feel ugly,” “I feel ugly physically,” “I feel ugly. I feel horrible. I don’t even know how I feel, actually,” all of those feelings that come and go and, “I hate that person who died. I love him. I feel like … What actually happened?” All of that is true for every process of mourning. It’s a messy process.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
The only, so to speak, advice I can say, like practical thing, is that I do think it is work on being out of control really, which is the hardest thing to do.
Glennon Doyle:
When you feel the waves of mourning, or whatever the opposite of mourning is, like the magical thinking that we do when someone’s lost, all of that, is there any practice … Do you do deep breathing? Do you go for a walk? Is there something that you have to do to get your mourning self back from your control self?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I love that question because I think that the control self part, a lot of it is about guilt. Guilt is often a defense against loss or against chaos, because if it means that everything that happened is because of me, something bad happened-
Amanda Doyle:
You make sense of it.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Yeah. If I were only better, or if I did something different, it means the world is not so scary. It brings us back to feeling safe. The world is not so scary because it was my fault. I can change and I can do it better this time. So don’t worry, the world is not scary. People don’t die just because they die. They die because something wrong happened or I did something wrong. Next time I can fix it.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
So I think that brings us back to guilt. When I wrote this book, it was my process of mourning. I think a lot of my tears are on those pages.
Glennon Doyle:
So that’s a way of mourning is making something of it.
Amanda Doyle:
You just said mourning, feeling all of our feelings. I feel like so often, at least for me, I think I’m feeling all these feelings, therefore I need to mourn so I can stop feeling all these feelings. All of my feelings are evidence that I need to go through the mourning, so I can get to the other side where there aren’t the feelings.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re saying the mourning, the messiness, the conflict, the grossness is the mourning.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Yeah. Yeah. I’m saying that because, otherwise, you will have the fantasy, like you go in a tunnel, and you go back and then you go on the other side and you finish the mourning. Hooray.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
That’s what you’re after. Of course, we all hope for that. The best thing is to think that we arrived. We arrived. Sadly … And I think that brings us back, Glennon, to how you started this conversation. There is bad news, and the bad news is that we never arrive. We always work. We always do the work. We always try to understand. We always try to reflect. We don’t arrive in a place where we’re like, “All right, I’m done. I know myself 100%.”
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
“Nothing is going to surprise me.”
Glennon Doyle:
Great. Thanks for that. For people who are not going to be able to go sit in … Psychoanalysis is really now … I think I may have understood it for the first time after reading and talking to you, but it’s really like an exploration of ghosts. If you’re trying to get to your subconscious, it’s because you’re sitting with a human being. If they’re just telling you what’s in their conscience, that’s not half of it. You have to get to their subconscious to figure out what secrets they’ve kept from themselves.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
It is always, always that exploration of conscious and unconscious, and the relationship between the two. So psychoanalysis, really, a lot of it is about the unconscious. In the book, I’m really talking about, yes, consciously mothers want only the best for their children. Many mothers want only the best for their children.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Unconsciously, it’s not that they don’t want the best for them. But in Alice’s case, for example, one of the chapters, her mother doesn’t want her to separate from her. So, yeah, she wants her to have a family, but actually she doesn’t. That’s unconscious. Or somebody wants to have a relationship or they want to have a career, it’s consciously. They’re not lying. That is true. They consciously want it. But there is another layer. Everything we don’t know has the potential to control our lives. That’s what psychoanalysis is about.
Glennon Doyle:
So what about for people who are listening to this, but will never be able to go sit with someone who will psychoanalyze them? What is amazing to me is that we don’t know what we don’t know. So what do people do who are sitting here thinking, “Well, I’m never going to know what I don’t know. So where do I begin?” If you were to give somebody-
Dr. Galit Atlas:
That’s a great beginning.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Right?
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, I already nailed that.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
That’s a great beginning. So many people will not even say that. It’s a great beginning to say, “You know what? I’ll never know what I don’t know,” which already means that you know that you don’t know. That’s where every investigation starts with, the decision to search. Psychoanalysis is one way to do it. There are many ways to do it. You have to start with the decision to search.
Glennon Doyle:
What’s another way? What’s another way besides psychoanalysis?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I think there are many forms of therapy. I think there are many forms of group therapy, which I love. These days, group therapy is really big and people really improve. Yeah, there’s EMDR. There are a lot of forms of therapy and communities that help you and help you think about who you are, and relationships.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I mean sometimes it sounds like part of a healthy partnership is about trying to help each other understand what you need, and reading books and watching movies and talking and processing and reflecting and always saying, “I’m sure there is something I don’t know about myself.” Does that make sense?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
For me, something practically I did after reading your book is I thought, “What are the things that I’m hoping that my kids just don’t notice, just don’t have?”
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Amanda Doyle:
I’m just really hoping we get through this and they’ll be like, “Oh, really? Was that a thing in my family?”
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Good luck with that.
Amanda Doyle:
So I just decided to say out loud the thing I was most worried that they were noticing, and that that would be passed down for them.
Glennon Doyle:
What is it?
Amanda Doyle:
So I talked to them about how my anxiety around just daily life things … Like we were sitting on a plane recently coming home from a place and there was a kid behind me who didn’t have his earphones on, was just playing the music on his pad.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, yikes.
Amanda Doyle:
I had to do deep breathing the entire flight because I was constantly vacillating between you are so anxious and need to hypercontrol everything around you, that my rage was flowing up and down. I didn’t know whether a reasonable person would say, “Excuse me, can you please turn that down?” or whether we … And my tension becomes their tension-
Glennon Doyle:
Of course.
Amanda Doyle:
… becomes they’re worried about what is happening around them. We just had a conversation about it, how that is a thing-
Glennon Doyle:
Amazing.
Amanda Doyle:
… that I struggle with, that I don’t know the right answers, that I often don’t know if it’s me or if it’s something that we should ask to be better around us. But it’s something that I know that they feel from me, that I’m working on, that it’s something I don’t want them to carry forward in their life and be constantly besieged by everyday things in the world. It just felt like a relief, because it felt like this is the thing I’m most afraid they’re going to carry from me. So I just never, ever acknowledged that it’s true.
Glennon Doyle:
I love that.
Abby Wambach:
That’s so good.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s a good next right thing. Think about the things you’re hoping that no one notices about you-
Abby Wambach:
Especially your kids.
Glennon Doyle:
… because 100% they’re noticing.
Abby Wambach:
Yes, for sure.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Yeah. I love that because that means you go towards what you’re afraid of. You don’t just say, “Oh, I’m afraid of that, so I’m running away. Nobody sees me and I hope nobody knows.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. You’re like the Joan of Arc, straight towards the scary thing instead of away. So that’s the next right thing for the day.
Glennon Doyle:
I have 40 more questions. So could you come back sometime, because I want to talk to you also about your work in this idea that we have toxic people in our life and we have to cut them out completely and how we’ve overdone that a little bit. There are things that we can repair and work in imperfect families. I would just really be honored if someday you would come back and talk to us about that.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I would be honored to come back and talk to you about that. It’s, of course, related to the whole work of not telling people who shouldn’t cut off. People that cut off people from their lives, it is a hard, hard, hard decision for them that they made. And so, I respect that, first of all. But I guess this work is really also saying you can cut people off your life. They live inside you in so many ways, and that’s the work. The work is not just to cut off people. The work is really to understand how they live inside us. What do we carry and how do we help ourselves heal?
Glennon Doyle:
You are just absolutely wonderful.
Abby Wambach:
I love this conversation so much.
Glennon Doyle:
Me, too. I love it so much. I just want to say before we leave that I just remembered my first memory, which I told you about.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Oh, yes.
Glennon Doyle:
I was in the grocery store and I had forgotten my snack at school, elementary school. I told my mom that I had forgotten my snack and I was hungry, and she let me buy a turkey sandwich from Giant, like the fancy kind that was in the plastic. In my family-
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Pre-packaged things.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. In my family, we did not go off the grocery list.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Wow.
Glennon Doyle:
We were raised by two teachers. We had a budget. My mom let me have this turkey sandwich. I think it was $3.84. I think I freaking remember how much it was.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Glennon Doyle:
When I think about when we were first together, you used to feed me … Like you way over-order. Now it drives me batshit crazy and I can’t stand it, but I loved it in the beginning. But this idea of what makes us safe, right?
Dr. Galit Atlas:
You see? Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s the food. Oh, it’s so good.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
And Food. You see? It’s right out. It’s interesting because the first memory that I ask in the first session is usually the beginning of our investigation. Here in my conversation with you, it is the end of our conversation, which is interesting. We end with the beginning.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
Well, we’ll have you back so that we could restart the conversation.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
I would love that.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you for the work you’re doing in the world.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
You are just an absolutely delightful detective and brilliant.
Glennon Doyle:
Everybody go get Emotional Inheritance. It’s good.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Fascinating stuff. It should be a TV show.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Dr. Galit Atlas:
Thanks so much. I loved this conversation with you.
Glennon Doyle:
Me, too. Okay, you all. We Can Do Hard Things, like never solve the mystery of ourselves, but have a good time trying. We’ll catch you back here next time. Bye.