Understanding Emotional Inheritance (Galit Atlas, PhD)

"When we talk about the ghost of the unsaid, we're talking about the inherited feelings of our parents, unprocessed trauma, where the Phantoms that lived inside them, We're talking about traumas that our parents and grandparents would not process, and they are transmitted to us in some raw way. And I quote in the book, Holocaust survivors Maria Toric, Nicholas 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:

EMOTIONAL INHERITANCE: A THERAPIST, HER PATIENTS, AND THE LEGACY OF TRAUMA

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