Galit Atlas, PhD: Understanding Emotional Inheritance
“When we talk about thoughts of the unsaid, we're talking about the inherited feelings of our parents, unprocessed trauma, and the phantoms that lived inside them. We're talking about traumas that our parents and grandparents could not process, and they are transmitted to us in some raw way. I quote in the book, Holocaust survivors, Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, who said, “What haunts us are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.”
So says psychotherapist Galit Atlas, who has spent her life and career both witnessing and unraveling the ways that the lived—and unlived—experiences of our ancestors can show up in our own lives. Galit—who is Syrian/Iranian by way of Israel—grew up in the midst of trauma, violence that continued to unfold around her against a generational tapestry of pain. We talk about the direct transmission of trauma in our conversation, as well as these “gaps” or secrets, that show up in her practice again and again. We also talk about this idea of what Freud called “Afterwardness,” which is the way that we reprocess traumatic memories again and again from our new lived perspective. We explore what healing looks like for clients who suddenly become aware of how these hidden forces and patterns are informing their lives—and what it looks like to clip those threads and set yourself free. And perhaps most poignantly, we discuss the idea of victims and aggressors, and how so many of us, in the grips of our victimhood feel justified in lashing out—this is a phenomenon we can trace from our personal lives to the global stage, and it deserves our awareness.
MORE FROM GALIT ATLAS. PhD:
EMOTIONAL INHERITANCE: A THERAPIST, HER PATIENTS, AND THE LEGACY OF TRAUMA
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity)
ELISE:
Amazing to be with you. Thank you for joining me. Your book is beautiful, and thank you for sharing so much about yourself. I love seeing into the minds of psychotherapists. I think it scratches an itch so many of us have.
GALIT:
What you always wanna know right?
ELISE:
Exactly. My therapist, he's an Israeli guy actually, which probably won't surprise you. And I’m like, oh, can't we be friends? Like, don't you want to tell me about you? It's such a strange thing to be in therapy, to be in a one-sided relationship. So I liked reading about your life.
GALIT:
Thank you. Thank you for liking the book and for inviting me to talk to you.
ELISE:
Well, emotional inheritance and this sort of foundational idea that you weave throughout the book of how we live the unconscious, we live out the patterns of our parents' lives in ways that are direct and also amorphous. It feels like one of those ideas. I know that people have been doing work on this for a long time, but that is now really starting to be understood in a wide way, that people are recognizing, oh, that like systemic racism, I understand how we pass these patterns on and those patterns and of themselves, right are ancient, going to the beginning of patriarchy. Will you tell us about Rachel Yehuda's research, which I'm sure some people have heard of, but maybe not everyone is familiar.
GALIT:
And so the epigenetics is the research and genetics is the biological mechanism by which trauma is transmitted from generation to generation. So what it means is that really, it looks at the impact of the environment and when we psychologists or neuroscientists talk about the environment in this context, it's the psychological environment, and especially trauma on the expression of genes. What that means is that it doesn't change the genes. It changes the expression of genes. And what Rachel Yehuda does is amazing research on the way trauma is transmitted from generation to generation. And what I add to it and talk about in Emotional Inheritance is the intermingling of nature and nurture, and how Rachel Yehuda really talks, especially about the nature part. And I add to it, the nurture part, which means that the way that we see the transmission is not only in symptoms like anxiety or in the physical expression, but actually also in content. That one generation really knows in some unconscious ways what the other generation went through, and the previous generations struggles become in some maybe mysterious ways, but actually not as we talk about it, we'll see how, how that works part of the next generation's emotional struggle.
ELISE:
Right. And so the biological part is when they look at Holocaust survivors that they have lower levels of cortisol, right? Like lower levels of stress hormone that allow the body to bounce back, and that that's what's being transmitted. And that includes enslaved people, war, veterans, parents who experience major trauma. That this is, as you mentioned, a biological marker, and then your book is sort of out, I loved how you wrote:
Like many other families, our family colluded, and shared the unspoken understanding that silence was the best way to erase what was unpleasant. The assumption in those days was that what you don't remember, won't hurt you.” And your book is essentially a refutation of that, that those, that, that idea of suppression or what goes, unnamed goes unnoticed. These are terrible myths.
GALIT:
Right, right. The unsaid and the unspeakable, right? So the book talks about traumas and how they pass down about secrets. And then we see that we're actually talking about two kinds of secrets. One of them is the omission, everything that we felt, but nobody actually told us about it, but we know it, somehow. And the other part is really those secrets that we know and talked about, but we never let ourselves actually remember. And so those are the two aspects of the secrets I'm talking about. And of course the part that talks about secrets we keep from ourselves.
ELISE:
Do you wanna talk about the secrets we keep from ourselves, or the secrets that are bear in our familial lineage first?
GALIT:
Maybe let's talk about what you started talking about really about the unspeakable, the ghosts of the unsaid and the unspeakable. All those things that I think people are really interested in. And I think what they are interested in is about the mechanism of: how does that work? How is it possible that if something happens in your history, even something you don't know about, the next generation, right. You know, about it somehow, or you have fears of phobias or dreams. There are a lot of reports of dreams and nightmares related to our ancestors and trauma. And so I think that is a, a big part of what I'm talking about in the book.
ELISE:
And when you work with people, and they present, and maybe they are exhibiting a pattern or a behavior, and they don't understand why. They've struggled throughout their lives to attach it to an event. Is that where you start, sort of this inquiry deep into the family lineage, or I know for you, you, you used to work with children and you, you talk about how children are often the ones on whom the pathology is projected. And so they sort of emerge as the carrier of the truth, even though they have no idea what’s happening.
GALIT:
So, you know, let me take you to the beginning, right? When we talk about the ghosts of the unsaid, we're talking about the inherited feelings of our parents, unprocessed trauma, where, uh, and the phantoms that lived inside them. We're talking about traumas that our parents and grandparents could not process, and they are transmitted to us in some raw way. And I quote in the book, Holocaust survivors, Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham, who said, “What haunts us are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.” And there is a whole section in the book that really speaks about those gaps, those things that we feel, but don't know what it is. A lot of that research actually started with Holocaust survivors, as you mentioned, a lot of the psychoanalysts and later on, even Rachel Yehuda is a second generation of Holocaust survivors. Children of Holocaust survivors who grew up with the feeling that something is wrong.
But in that generation, and especially the second generation, people at the beginning after the war, actually, didn't talk about what happened. And many Holocaust survivors, as many parents, you know, do try to protect their children from knowing, and from the devastation of what really happened to them. And so they didn't tell the kids anything sometimes. And the children carried some feeling that something happened. The children started having what they call symptoms. And once I heard in an interview with Rachel Yehuda saying that that's what led her to do that research. And in the book, I call that “me-search.” For me, almost every chapter in the book was my own research is me-search, you know, looking under the surface that, what is it that I try to understand? What is it that we try to to know the, and so there are many examples in the stories, in the book, of those incidents, where the grandchild knows something about his grandfather, right?
And we talk about Leonardo's chapter, for example. Leonardo feels that he's processing something and he doesn't know what it is, and slowly in the therapy, we understand where he leads us. And that leads me to your question about where do we start? Because the truth is that we almost never start with our grandparents or our parents' history. We always start, first of all, with what we all the presented problem. The presented problem is, why are you here? Why did you come to therapy? What is it that you need? That's where we begin. We begin with the here and now, and then, and especially as a psychoanalyst, I'm very interested the unconscious, in what happened to people, their own history. I opened my first sessions asking people, what their first memory was, which gives me some idea about the presented problem. With what is it that you are actually looking for?
What is it that you carry, and of course, thinking about people's childhood. And then I add to that, those ideas about the unconscious, the intergenerational unconscious, which means that one generation lives inside the other, and they share an unconscious, the communicate with each other. And parents share with children material, emotional material that they don't necessarily are aware of or in intend to communicate. And I think that that actually comes a little later, but I'm always aware that when I sit with a patient, I sit with more than one generation. And sometimes I sit with two or three generations in the room.
ELISE:
And your own history is, is fascinating. It reminds me of a friend of mine who believes…you're Syrian, right?
GALIT:
I’m half Syrian, half Iranian.
ELISE:
Okay. Half Syrian, half Iranian. And then you, your family went to Israel before you came to the U.S. You grew up, you know, spending recess and bomb shelters, right. Like not dissimilar to what's happening in the world now. And so you also felt acutely the collision, not only of your current experience, but the experience of your family now. I mean, do you, when you look at where we are collectively, do you feel like now, at least we have the awareness to start to address some of these issues, culturally, collectively, et cetera, or do you feel like we're gonna be ringing this out for endless generations?
GALIT:
It is a very complicated time now, right? It's not a time where we actually process things. In fact, it's a time when we act out things more than process them. And I think part of what we talk about when we talk about to of awareness is reflection as opposed to acting out. And so of course there is so much acting out of aggression, and so much splitting in the culture, and so much trauma. And I'm thinking even about COVID and, and the implications, and to some degree, thinking about the relation between what's happening in the world right now in the last three years, and the aggression that accumulated and that's pretty devastating to think about. And to think about how many years it will take us to process that. You know, I think I read somewhere that for a nation to be able to process a war and, you know, some people like to say to fully process, I don't believe that we could ever fully process, but to even process a war takes 50 years. And so it is very easy to destroy, and it's very, very hard to repair.
ELISE:
Yeah. Oh, that's so true. I mean, processing in general is such an interesting concept, right? If you think about our bodies and minds and their indelible connection, and then the way we have to move the experiences sort of through this matter. It's pretty wild. But when you think about these, these young kids who are experiencing forced migration, watching this all unfold on whether they're participating in, you know, whether they're sitting at home with their parents or not. How do we parent kids now in a way that we aren't sort of damning them with stuff that we should be taking care of ourselves? Like, how do we, what is the appropriate modulation? How would you have changed your own childhood?
GALIT:
You know, if I go back to my childhood and there is no doubt in my mind that I grew up in a generation that were all traumatized. I grew up in Israel where there is, there are terror attacks and where there were explosions. When in my twenties there was, you know, explosions on the street. I think we created some kind of dark humor about that, about where we never had, for example, like when we met with friends, nobody wanted to take responsibility of where we go, because if there is an attack, it’s not my fault. There was something very complicated and very dark in the way we grew up. And I do think, and it brings me back to Emotional Inheritance that some of that is related to the Holocaust and to, to the, the shadow of the Holocaust.
And a lot of the things that happened in the middle that are related to that shadow of trauma. And it creates generation after generation of traumatized people on both sides. Because the minute you are a victim and you have an identity of a victim, it's very hard to see when you become an aggressor. And I think that is true everywhere. And it's true about even in the United States, when you think about aggression: Every aggressive person has a narrative of a victim. And that is based on some kind of splitting, and some kind of inability to see ourselves as both. And to, and to know that we, all of us have the potential to be both victim and aggressor.
ELISE:
I was just talking to Terry Real, and he's a marriage therapist, and one of his mentors is this woman Pia Mellody. And she calls that “offending from the victim position.” So that's sort of the most benign version of it in a relationship, but certainly we see it on a global scale. Like, I, you hit me, I'm gonna blow your head off, you know?
GALIT:
So you can never hit me again. I think everything that we see in relationships, we can translate to wider systems: families, a system and countries are systems. And we can translate the same psychological awareness of, I think it goes back to feeling safe and feeling like you need to protect yourself. And if somebody hurts you, as you say, you feel like a victim. And if you feel justified to hurt them back, and if somebody scares you, you have a narrative that you need protect yourself. And sometimes it's true. Sometimes you do need to protect yourself. And I think it's hard to sometimes know where the line is. And we fall back into a very, very, very primitive defense,of splitting, splitting between good and bad. You know, splitting is a very, very basic childhood defense mechanism, right.
That, uh, allows us to feel that the world is safe. So if there are good people think about fairy tales, if they're good people and bad people, then we know where to go. We know who is good and who's bad. And in the book, when I talk about,my chapter of sexual abuse for example. Where I talk about confusion of tongues, right? What is the confusion of tongues of the sexually abused people. It is the fact that a good person did something to you. Somebody you like touched you, and that's very often the situation. Somebody that you know, your uncle that you liked, your neighbor you liked, or you know someone you don't know, but who was really, really nice to you and gave you candy and told you how special you are. And so here, there is a confusion of tongues between the language of tenderness that the child is speaking and seeking and the language of perversion and sexual abuse.
ELISE:
I thought that section of the book was really powerful. And with the way that you talked about your own experience with the man who owned the candy store, and sort of what you observed at the time, and whether he actually crossed a line, or didn't. The emotional entanglement maybe, or the emotional lines that he crossed with you in making you feel special. And then ultimately icky, was very relatable for me as a child. I had that experience in different ways, multiple times. And then I loved how you went into Freud's view. I'm not gonna pretend to say it, but this idea how…
GALIT:
It’s galled natraglichatlik. In English, it is translated to “Afterwardness” or differed translation.
ELISE:
I thought that was such a powerful idea, this idea that as adults, we start to reproces these memories as adults with new perspectives. Can you talk us through that and what that is means?
GALIT:
Thank you for asking that this, the, the whole idea of Natraglinacht is really, really important idea. And it’s the idea that means that early traumatic experiences are layered with new meaning throughout life. Freud was actually focused on sexual abuse when he wrote that, and he was talking about sexual abuse in childhood, and that an experience that the child does not always register as traumatic. If you think about what we said before about your experience, or my experience, and I have to tell you, the sexual abuse chapter is the chapter that most people told me, they relate to, especially women. And I think the reason is that I want to say every woman, and I'll say almost every woman, even though deep inside, I think that it's actually really, really close to every woman experienced some, some thing that it was related to sexual boundary violation.
And, and I think some of those experience were very, very confusing. And so I think oing back to that idea of the “afterwardness,” Freud was saying that really, when that happens to you, you know, you feel that something is wrong, but, and you are overwhelmed with something, but you, but you can't really process it or even make sense of it as a child. And I think that brings us, of course, to the idea of how do we think about memory? What is memory, how do we process? Well, how do you remember? In the chapter I say, I, you know, I didn't even know, did it actually happen? Did it not happen? What happened? And as time passes, the traumatic experience is actually reprocessed. And in every developmenta; phase, the child revisits the abuse from a different angle, and with different understanding, of course, because they're in a different age.
So for example, when you become a teenager, and then an adult, or when you have sex for the first time, or when you have a child, or when your child gets to the age that you have been sexually abused. All of that. Every time you reprocess it, again and again and again. In each moment the abuse will be reprocessed from a slightly different perspective. I think that's a really important idea that applies not only to sexual abuse, to every experience we have in life. People go over their divorces, their separations, their traumatic birth. Even things that are small T traumas. We reprocess and reprocess, and reprocess throughout life.
ELISE:
I think for women, for that sort of sexual boundary crossing,when it can feel a overwhelming to quote Freud, or confusing, or dirty, but it also creates this idea of over responsibility. I think for children, that you liked it, or you inspired it, or you wanted that to happen in some way. Often the healing can really maybe only come like for me as an, a parent now, and I don't have a daughter, but I think about my children, I'm like, oh, oh, like, wow. Like they are little, like, they are not capable of, um, appropriately. They're not responsible for what they compel in adults.
GALIT:
From their perspective, you look at them and you say, oh, so it's not possible that I was responsible.
ELISE:
Not possible. Exactly. Right. Yet, as a young child, you feel incredibly powerful, inappropriately, powerful, as sort of this siren or this object.
So, right. And you mentioned, you know, within the candy store, and this has been my experience too, where I'm conscious of what happened. I didn't, it didn't really come to my awareness until I was an adult. When I did MDMA actually. And, I was aware of this individual and I was aware, very conscious of another encounter that we had. But it emerged for me and I was like, oh, shit, like that happened. And I don't know exactly what happened. And I've kind of decided with my therapist that it doesn't really matter. That important part is that idea of over responsibility, um, and working with that.
GALIT:
And, and guilt. Right?
ELISE:
Do you feel like it's important in your work with patients that they really understand exactly like the truth or as, as boy says, the “afterwardness” right. Changes the perception and the story anyway.
GALIT:
I think that there is never one truth in our mind, there are truths, you know, and many kinds of truths. And every time we'll meet a different angle of our truth. And I think that in general, I think it is important to create narratives and tell stories. But I think when it comes to sexual abuse, I think one, the most common experiences is that is the confusion, right? The confusion of tongues, the confusion of reality, the confusion of did it happen, did it not happen? Maybe I made it up, maybe I wanted it. So that is the thing that is much more important in that specific situation than creating one specific narrative. I think for some people, the narrative is important just because it allows them, like what you do with through your children, you look at it and you say, oh, so I wasn't responsible and this is what I felt. But the narrative is not a narrative about what happened. The narrative is more a narrative of how I feel, how I felt, right. How like something happened to me.
ELISE:
No, it's interesting. Just in the context too, it's talking about what doesn't get processed, getting moved onto future generations. So it's also this question of, as we clean up our own emotional lives, what are we telegraphing? Is it just the stuff that we refuse to touch, or that we feel like if we just let moss over it, it goes away.
GALIT:
Listen, nothing goes away, nothing goes away. That's a bad myth, nothing goes away. I think what we want, what we hope is that the transmission is of something that is processed and not some, again, some raw material. That first of all, you, the children need to start to processing. And, and second, they sometimes feel that they're crazy, that they feel that right. It's like, what is it that I feel, I don't even know. I don't even have narrative related to that. And so I think those are, and, and at the same time, you know, sometimes our own trauma is, is too painful for us to, to process in ways that. Or let's say our, our parents' trauma was too painful for them to process in ways that will satisfy us, and we’ll say, you know what? My mother processed her trauma so well, and I am liberated. That is never the case.
ELISE:
Never gonna happen. Our children would have nothing to work on and life would be boring. No, but, and it can skip generations, you know, not to dwell too long on that chapter. But that was a fascinating and very sad story about the child. Speaking of the child who becomes the sick member of the family representing what's happening in the family, and that, and then you reconnected with her decades later and found out exactly what had happened, but that was the grandmother, right, sowing this idea that she had been molested that this little girl had been molested by her brother. And then it ended up being her grandmother's completely concealed story. She wasn’t conscious of what she was creating in this family, but ended up tearing the family apart.
GALIT:
Exactly. I think that is a story that speaks to people all, for many, many reasons. And I think one of them is the gap between the conscious and the unconscious, right. The feeling is that. And I think that gap is about, is everywhere that gap between the conscious and the unconscious is everywhere. It is in that chapter, that the grandmother and I don't if you remember that part, when she says to her granddaughter, “I don't want you to carry my pain. I don't want you to carry my trauma.” But in fact, unconsciously, what she does is that she pushes that trauma into her granddaughter's mind. And so we see, and it's interesting, because I think that what I focus on in that chapter is the unique intergenerational aspect of sexual abuse, which I do think is unique in the way that each generation overwhelms the next generation, and inflicts the drama of boundary violation of their own boundary violation and their own sexual trauma.
And I think that's what happened to Lara in that chapter. And going back to what you said before about the identified patient. Thinking about families, and who comes to therapy. And so the identified patient really is the one member of the family that usually comes to therapy. And it seems is like the sick member of the family. And I think those very often, those are one of the children, but not always, sometimes it's one of the parents, but usually it's one of the children. And those children carry and express the symptoms of the problems. They express the problems of the family as a unit. So you see, we project as families, we tend to project our problems into one member of the family, project the pathology of the family. I will even exaggerate and say, right. And that person, we would usually be the one that comes to therapy. And the parents will say right to, I used to work with children. And I describe it in that chapter, that before I had the first session, even before I meet the child, I met the parents and I talk to them. And usually there is something that you see that the parents tell you that there is in the family. And that child—and it's often the, the most sensitive child, right. Carries that problem. They become the problematic, the problematic member of the family,
ELISE:
The symptom carrier, which is an amazing idea. I mean, not, it's not great obviously, but it, it is like a fascinating way to sort of get under the hood of what's actually happening and showing up. And it speaks to our profound interdependence and the fact that no child is created anew, right. Like we're all part of this much larger tapestry and carry really long lines of story and unconscious matter.
GALIT:
That's what you said before, you know, about you know, there is an illusion of separateness. Like we people are separate and each member is separate. And when you think about families and again, not only families, cultures, countries, and people in general. We're not as separated as we seem. And so, and you could see that in the system of the family, that we're not separate. We carry things for each other. We project things onto each other. We express things for each other. We work as a system, right?
ELISE:
I don't know who said this, and maybe multiple people have said this, but there's that idea too, that if you can really heal something, maybe process something big, that you were healing it seven generations in both directions, that there are ways to knit together some of these painful holes.
GALIT:
Yeah. You certainly change something in other people in your family when you change. I think often when people say I need to change my mother, I need to change my father. What we see is that when you change yourself, we are like a puzzle. They have to adjust and people change in response to other people's change.
ELISE:
Which is also kind of scary, I think. I'm sure people have had this experience in therapy when, when your partner starts to react to this different version that you've, or this, this shedding I'd almost call it. Right. Because I think for many people, both therapy can be a process of getting closer to who you are. And you're exposing that new velum or that new skin. And it's a little disconcerting. And do you feel like the reaction from the family primarily is like an urge for homeostasis? Like what can we bring, go back to how we were in our dysfunction? There are so many interesting stories in your book about children who are living either the sadness of their parent, or they've been controlled by sadness of their parent, potentially weaponized against the other parent, et cetera. And so as they start to undo that, is it just an internal process of finding the strength to be like, I love you, mom, and I can't carry your depression anymore. I need to have a relationship with my father?
GALIT:
That's a good, that's a good, it's a good question. You're talking about Alice, right.
ELISE:
Yes. The one who doesn't wanna have, you know, has been alienated from her father doesn't wanna, is very ambivalent about having a child. And essentially excommunicated her dad at the behest of her mom's victimhood. I don't know if that's appropriate.
GALIT:
First of all, you know, the book is really about families and about attachment. So in every, in every story, there is a different angle on, on a attachment and how we are connected. And again, different perspectives on how we are connected to our family members. And sometimes, and many times there is a lot of pain in that connection. So for example, I think the Alice story is a story of loyalty. It's a girl who is loyal to her mother and her mother's pain is what she is trying to heal. It brings us back to the idea that we all want to have happy parents, right. And Alice's mother, I would say that her way to control everybody in her life, but especially Alice is with her pain through her pain. She's traumatized. And Alice really loves her.
And, and she loves Alice. So it's not right. We don't question the love. And I think that's what you differentiated. And I think you differentiated it for a good reason, because we could look at love and attachment and trauma and they coexist. They don't come instead of each other. So this is a story about love and connection between a mother and a daughter, and the mother really doesn't want her daughter to separate and she doesn't want the daughter to belong to anyone else, including the father. So you see, if we go back to that idea that we talked about before, about the gap between conscious and unconscious, consciously the mother wants her daughter to have the best life right. And grow and have her own family and fall in love. But unconsciously, every other, every person out there is a threat.
Everything symbolizes the daughter choosing the father instead of the mother. So she doesn't really want unconsciously the daughter to have anyone else. And that brings us back in this, and this story actually talks also about envy and about topic that we tend not to talk about because it's very painful and against the cultural idea that mothers are only good. It doesn't mean that mothers are not good. And again, there is a conscious wish that the daughter will have the best life, but the mother is actually envious of her daughter. And the reason she's envious of her is that she has her as a mother. That mother never had a good mother. And I think those brave mothers who come to therapy, those are mothers who are not mothered. And when they come to therapy and able to really, really touch and discuss the deep pain around not being mothered, and how difficult it is for them to see that their daughters have a mother, they have them as a mother, they have a good mother. And the envy that actually spoils the good mothering.
And I think that is a very complicated concept, but it is so forbidden right. In so many ways to actually discuss mother's envy of their own daughters.
ELISE:
I think it's such a, a powerful and important idea. And I think that it's something that we imbibe subconscious, you know, again, going to that gap and then feel there's guilt. This is something that my mom and I talk about openly, which I think is both of those things. She certainly was not mothered. She had an abusive negligent mother. So she doesn't really understand what that would've felt like, certainly, but, and then it comes down to sort of the unlived lives of many women. Like we're, we're really shaking this out. We're almost set a point where we're recognizing how arbitrary these choices are. I didn't have that opportunity that whatever we do might be an indictment on the choices that our own mothers made because daughters are supposed to stay attached. I mean, this is all, I think a cultural delusion that daughters are supposed to stay attached and be like their mothers and little boys are supposed to separate and be like their fathers. These are dangerous ideas, I think.
GALIT:
Yeah, these are dangerous. Exactly. These are dangerous there's and they're really based on some gender binary.
ELISE:
And it’s patriarchy. Yes, totally. It's, it's, it's really, but it is insidious and it's hard to, to break those patterns, right. On all levels, even on those ideas, this idea of good mothering. Right. And the pressure that's put on mothers.
GALIT:
That a is a really good point, you know, because when we talk about our parents's trauma, we don't mean that our parents were bad parents. Right. And because, and especially, I mean, when you and I speak, we are parents too. Right. And we know, and I know iin the book, I referenced the research that says that a good enough parent is tuned in to their child. 30% of the time, only 30%. That means that 70% of the time we are misattuned and the rest of the time we try to correct. And we to repair. And I think for so many of us that is such a relief that we could do that. And that what is important, what's important is really not to be perfect. But the ability to repair, the ability to come back, the ability to talk, the ability to re-find each other.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, but it's interesting. It's such a, it's incredible research. Tronic, right?
GALIT:
Yeah.
ELISE:
Tronic & Cohen and, and the videos and, and people have probably seen this, even if they're not aware of it, but the baby who's who sort of loses the mother looks away and the baby becomes very upset.
GALIT:
That’s Beatrice Bebee, which is like amazing research from Columbia University on usually most of her research is mothers and babies.
ELISE:
Obviously applies to fathers, but I think that what's been lost or where we're sort of stuck. Culturally, is this idea, as you mentioned, the perfection or the, that we have to be completely attuned to our children, but the research, when people know it isn't opposite, but it is like, no, the actual power is the breaking connection and the reconnection and breaking connection and the reconnection and the durability and resilience of relationships where you realize, oh, I can fall away from this person and come back. And that it is not dependent on this unsevered, perfect alignment and attunement, which is obviously impossible.
GALIT:
Right. And you know, when the videos themselves, I don't know if you, if you've ever seen the, the Beatrice Beebee videos of the infant research, it's incredible. And what you see because it's a split screen. So you see in one half the baby and one, half the mother, you see the moments of attunement and misattunement, and you see those parents who are really, really, really anxious about being bad parents and really easily feel rejected by the baby. And baby, I mean like three months old baby, that turns their head away and the parent looms in and tries to bring the baby back. But the truth is that the baby moves their head away because the baby becomes dysregulated at times.
ELISE:
Overwhelmed, right?
GALIT:
Yeah, so they need to regulate, so they move their heads away. And the parent could experience that because a good enough parents is a parent. They believe is a parent that is the baby loves. They feel that as a rejection. And they feel like, oh, no, I'm a bad parent right now. So they go back into the baby's face, which disregulates the baby even more. And then the baby becomes even more distressed. And so then you see the vicious cycle that we could see, we see that in romantic relationships. I mean, you could imagine that, that somebody moves their head away and you're like, no, don't leave me. He doesn't like me. Right. And then you loom in, in ways that becomes even more dysregulating. And that is something that we as parents, and I think what they do when they help parents in therapy is to really say, the baby will come back. The baby has only you. They can’t survive without you. Right. They'll come back. Wait.
ELISE:
You know, as so often happens, research it doesn't get into the, into people's minds with sort of the speed that it does. And so I think so many parents are left feeling like if I don't meet all of my children's needs, if I am not there, if I mess this up and get it wrong, my child will be in therapy for the rest of their life. I think everyone should be in therapy. I think life is really hard and complicated and there's no version of avoiding pain or needing help processing. But it is, I don't know, maybe who were past that cultural perception of therapy and pathology stigma, but there's some, the stigma,
GALIT:
Something really special happened. And maybe that's the silver lining of, of COVID, in the culture where, you know, mental health and trauma and all of these used to be things that are loaded with, with stigma. And I think they're less and less. I think there was something about all of us experiencing something so horrific together, and a lot of conversation about mental health. And, and I think obviously there is something very devastating about the fact that so many kids are, are anxious, and depressed, and there’s a huge mental health crisis. And at the same time, the only one, one little you know, piece of hope in that is that it allows us to really, to talk about mental health yeah. And process our previous traumas as well.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, I think it's done an incredible job too, of reminding people that these are all interwoven complicated systems that start sort of with that interior relationship with yourself and then move out family, neighborhood, you know, culture as mentioned to, to world. This interconnectedness and how you can't, it's like one butterfly flaps its wings, right? And it affects us all. But that in a way, when we heal ourselves and process that it's our work for the collective. It is our responsibility to the wider world. Even though it feels insular or selfish or self-involved.
GALIT:
You know, it sounds like there is a conflict between I'm going, I'm gonna fix the world or I'm gonna fix myself. And to some degree, those are interconnected. And I think that's what you're saying, right. That it's not just, we are activists. We wanna, we wanna make this world a better world for our children, and we want to fix everybody else and everything else. And to some degree, we have to start with ourselves. We have to start with saying, you know what, I'll do both. I don't do only that and everything that happens out there might be related to me, too. And I'm gonna start here.
ELISE:
And I think that it goes to that really beautiful idea that I now is hard for us to admit or personalize, but in some ways I'm a victim and in some ways I'm an aggressor. And so how do I start to understand that and parse that and integrate that so that I get the healing that I need and deserve, and then simultaneous stop projecting my wounds, my open gaping wounds onto other people, and can engage with the world from well-healed scars, right. And understanding and empathy rather than hurt.
GALIT:
I love that. I love that because I think this is exactly it, right. That's split between I'm only a victim and not owning the parts of us that is angry. Victims are always angry. Right. When something happens to me, it makes me angry, too. So I'm never just good or bad. Right. And I think that's what you're saying that we really need to think about how we project our badness onto other people.
ELISE:
Right. And how we assign it, because I think one of the really powerful and beautiful parts of your book is, is even thinking of that sexual abuse story with the grandmother, who manages to not intentionally tear apart her child's life and her grandchild's life. But she loves her grandmother. Her grandmother didn't do it out of malice or malevolence or quote unquote badness. These binaries don't exist. And so I think too, for us to be able to hold those nuanced ideas and throughout the book to not see like, oh, that that father who had an affair and abandoned his daughter is bad, but to recognize that was bad behavior, there's love there, there's a lot of goodness, et cetera. Um, I thought the book was really powerful in its telling of people's full humanity.
GALIT:
Thank you.
ELISE:
I was thinking about this because I was talking to a friend who was an unwanted child. She was 10 years younger than her siblings. And she was an accident. I don't know if she was, I don't know, she was actually unwanted, but she struggles with depression. And in some ways, sort of this like failure to thrive, failure to launch. And I thought it was really beautiful that you named that, that was such a painful story.
GALIT:
The unwelcome baby.
ELISE:
The unwelcome baby. And you talked about this paper from 1929, the unwelcome child and his death instinct. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about how that can manifest, because that's obviously like quite pervasive. There are a lot of babies who were accidents, right.
GALIT:
You know, that that's a paper that S. Farenczi, who was that's the guy that wrote “Confusion of Tongues,” he was Freud’s student. And he was very controversial at that time. And what he was talking about is that he noticed in his patients who were unwelcome children, that they had an urge to die and more suicidal thoughts and more connection with death wishes, death wishes and what he was really talking about. And I elaborate that in that chapter. And I wanna say, this is not a chapter about, I don't believe that every, every child that was unwelcome would have suicidal thoughts, but we do see that sometimes children, babies who were unwelcome keep being unwelcome later in life. And John's story. That specific story is about a boy who really, his mother did not want him.
She already had four children. He was the fifth and she really considered having an abortion. And she didn't. And ah, then he was born and he was born into a very unwelcome world, unwelcoming world, and felt unwelcomed everywhere he went. And in therapy, we're really talking there. Remember there is a, a scene there where he comes to therapy and he by accident comes 30 minutes earlier. And he started feeling unwelcome. Like I'm not opening the door. He sits in the waiting room and I don't come out to welcome him into my office. And when I opened the door, he says, did you expect me? And I hear it, as I see you’re smiling, I hear it as like, am I think about expecting a baby? Did you expect me? And we start talking about that. And of course, one of the things that we focus on and the book is focused on is secrets from before we were born.
He didn't, he never knew the story as many, many other people who do not actually know that they were an accident. The truth is that I believe that those who do know, and know that they were unwelcome, are doing worse than though that don't right, because it does mean that that unwelcome baby thing continued throughout life, and that they have not only the feeling, but sometimes families actually tell the people, you know, we didn't actually want you, you were an accident and an unwelcome one, you know. And I think that is very damaging. Obviously. But there is still even those who were unwelcome for the whole pregnancy or the beginning of their lives. And especially the beginning of their lives. We know how important the beginning of their life is. In John's stories. It's very clear that his mother ignored him and really, really didn't want him.
And then there was this horrible accident and in his family, and think about accidental pregnancy and accidents that happened after where his oldest sister dies. And he is unconsciously really blamed for that because the mother wanted only four kids. And now she has four kids, but it's not the four kids she wanted. And there is a feeling that he should have been the one who dies and not her. And of course there are a lot of nuances to that story. And it's a very dramatic story that explores and unpacks the idea of him being unwanted.
ELISE:
Yeah. But I thought what was so beautiful about the healing that occurred there was when he talks to his brother and his brother validates him, you know, because in part of this unwantingness or feeling unwanted, John takes complete responsibility for all of his emotions throughout his life and over responsibility for other people's emotions. And then his brother says, oh, you know, and he was like, I was too young. I was a baby when the sister died. So I didn't experience the grief. And he was like, no, his brother was like, no you were the one, you were the one who was abandoned and you are the one who your experience breaks my heart.
GALIT:
Right. He said, I think that, you know, some people have some things and they were taken and some people never have. And he tells his brother, you actually never had anything, which is much more devastating than having a losing.
ELISE:
Yes. And I thought that was, is really beautiful. And the complexity of what's happening in people's lives: So not only was he an unwelcome baby, but then his parents who are in grief, and aren't available on any level. So think thank you for your book. I thought it was really beautiful. And, and as mentioned, I love reading about your life, too. I hope you write more books.
GALIT:
Thank you so much.
ELISE:
I wanted to leave you with a line in Galit’s book, Emotional Inheritance, that is so beautifula nd really is the promise of what happens when we do this work. She writes: “It is only when we process our own sorrow that we can offer a truthful space of mutual vulnerability and emotional honesty. A place where we can recognize the other and don’t try to know better, or fix, or give optimistic advice. Instead, we are availabile to be with, listen, and bear our own pain with the pain of another human.”