We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - 97. How Family Secrets Shape Us: Emotional Inheritance with Dr. Galit Atlas

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

1. How we are each haunted by our family’s secrets and trauma–whether we know them or not–and how to break the cycle for future generations.  2. The astounding new research on generational trauma showing that our personal trauma is passed down genetically to our children and grandchildren.   3. Our unconscious need to heal what our parents could not–and how to mourn what we cannot control.   4. Why our bodies carry what our mind won’t remember–and how to release that burden.   5. Dr. Galit’s new book Emotional Inheritance and the incredible new way to understand ourselves.   About Dr. Atlas: Dr. Galit Atlas is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in New York City. She is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Dr. Atlas has published three books for clinicians and numerous articles and book chapters. A leader in the field of relational psychoanalysis, Dr. Atlas is a recipient of the André François Award and the NADTA Research Award. She teaches and lectures throughout the United States and internationally. Her new book Emotional Inheritance was published in January 2022 and is being translated into 17 languages. IG: @galit_atlas

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. 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 experience, 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 curveball. A little wrinkle.

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. We have an hour, so it should be fun. Everyone will be fine by the end. We will be fixed. Yes, we have a four-step plan to cure yourself of the human condition.

Okay. The fascinating and brilliant Dr. Galit Atlas calls the trauma that has passed down to us from previous familial generations are emotional inheritance. And today she is here to help us understand it so that we can get closer to understanding not just our families, but ourselves. Dr. Galit Atlas is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice and York City. Her new book, Emotional Inheritance, was published in January and is already being translated into 17 languages. She is on the faculty of the New York University postdoctoral program

in psychotherapy and 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. Do you feel like you can fix us all in the next 45 minutes? Is that too much to ask of you? Absolutely, I wouldn't. And I'm sorry that I gave you the bad news, you know, that it's more complicated than you thought it is. Damn it to hell. Okay, doctor, you are a therapist, which makes you kind of a detective.

This is how I think about therapists, right? So you say that people go to therapy to search for unknown truths about themselves. And that rings so true to me because I feel like every time I go to a therapist, therapist, which is low so many times, I am saying, I still have not solved the mystery of me. Can you help? And 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? Yeah, so first of all, thank you for inviting me to talk with you. And I feel that what we're talking about when we talk about emotional inheritance is those experiences that our ancestors had, and 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, right? 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 parents. So we have many generations in the room with us.

Wow. Can we talk about that, that research that you just referenced because I found this completely fascinating. So at the risk of necessarily oversimplifying it greatly. Yeah. I'll try to explain and you tell me if I'm correct about this because this blew my mind. So every cell in our body has DNA, right? 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 in ear cell and so on. And when we go through trauma, it changes us on a molecular level because it pushes

those markers, which results in different genetic expression. And what epigenetics has shown us is that even if you're not, our descendants never experience that trauma, our trauma is passed down genetically from generation to generation. Exactly, right. Exactly. 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 like the memory, right, the genes have memory. And 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 how what we carry from generation to generation. 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, We also know something about the content. Wow. We know something about, we inherit things that sometimes seem amazing and incredible about different times in our ancestors' life, dates, specific things.

Like I talk in the book, for example, and I share my own experiences. My mother lost her brother when she was 10 years old and he was 14. in my family there is a fear of water and that happens often if you are explicitly told about the trauma but many times even if you have not wow and we can talk about how that happens because it sounds like mysterious your mother's brother drowned right now you have this unspoken fear of water wow is it because i would like you to tell us how because in my mind it's like, okay, so your mother is nervous around water. And 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. And is that, is that the way or is there a more sight? That is exactly right. And that is a part of a much more broad, implicit communication. Because sometimes we think that we, 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, right? It's something that you understand from a very young age. 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 like the parent lives inside the child. And that is because the child

needs to survive, right? 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 Baby 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 the pacifiers or sucking the breast or heartbeats. we see that they respond to the parents' non-verbal communication. So that is how communication is transmitted, and what you described is exactly right, right? My mother probably had some physical gesture, some questions she didn't answer. Yeah. And that we registered.

Yeah, it's like a mother or father around the water, just we watched her nonverbal cues. A mother or father who has had abuse, their body. reacts in the present of the opposite sex because they have trauma. And they're not telling us, but we can read by their body language that we should fear that situation. 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 kind of macro way like you talk about, you say of your family, I was their first child and their traumatic past lived in my body. And that had to do with not just the brother and the water, but also the Holocaust, right?

You talk about being people carrying the trauma of an entire experience of a generation, like the descendants of enslaved people. Exactly. Slavery, Holocaust, like the whole generation that was traumatized, that trauma lives in the next generations, in the mind of the next generations. And somebody comes to therapy. And, you know, in the old days, use, especially psychoanalyst, used to think about only the unconscious and how do we think

about that person's unconscious. We can talk about it later. But I think what this perspective adds really is the frame of intergenerational unconscious, which means that one generation, right, lives inside the other and they share unconscious and then communicate with each other bi-directionally, 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. It's so fascinating. I mean, Sister was talking about the other night when we were discussing your book, she was talking about, well, you know, 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 are survivors of abuse. But we never were told, how was that passed down? Have you seen that over and over again? Where it's something specific? Absolutely. I see that over and over again. Because what passes down is in fact the something specific, right? The specific thing is passed down. If it's abuse and you know, I love that example because that is an example. it has a lot of hope in it, right? The hope of repair.

And 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. This show is sponsored by Midi Health. Parymenopause and menopause aren't personality flaws or phases. They're medical transitions. And yet nearly three out of four women who actively seek

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100 school districts in the U.S. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get I-XL now. And we can do hard things listeners can get an exclusive 20% off I-XL membership when they sign up today at www.IXL.com slash we can. Visit IxL.com slash we can to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Dr. 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? You know, to some degree we are. But the answer to the answer to that,

that, if the question is, are we all just screwed, is that the hope is in the processing and reprocessing and reprocessing and reprocessing. Because I do think we can tell about our kids, about our trauma, but we have to process it first. Yes. Right? Because what we tend to do, and you know, 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, right? And in therapy, that is my job. I sit with you and we process your experience.

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. Investigated. So when I'm thinking about eating disorder trauma has been passed out in my family for generations. I thought when I was young, oh my God, I'm just randomly screwed up. Like I just, wow, where did this come from?

When I was little, we didn't know all of this. And my parents didn't know all of it. Nobody knew all of this. So we just thought it was a brand new spanking thing out of the universe. 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. This I'm working with a therapist. I've worked, but you're still going to see some weird things. Right.

But you don't have to worry because I am working with this with other people. 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. Right. But so. And I own it. I'm owning it. It's not, 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. And 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, right?

And so I think, Landon, what you're saying is, right? But I wonder, is there a way to stop that trauma from being passed down to that next generation? Because, like, for this, like, 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? You know, this is an amazing question, and I'll tell you why.

Because in the same way that even if we talk about genetics, it could go one direction and it could also go the other direction. And 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. 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.

And 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, 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. I block it, as you say, or transform it into something else. When Glennon said that she was, it was kind of 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 what we carry. But it felt liberating to me to say, oh, if they, the fact that they are unspoken is going to make them carry them more heavily. So, so since they're going to carry it regardless, speaking it, speaking through it, is a way to release it. And 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. to pass down different materials to our kids.

And that for me was so 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. It's exactly right. And 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. And very often we become the gatekeepers of the unspeakable, right, as part of some family,

dynamic family collusion, I'll call it, right, where we also participate and become, again, keep those ghosts alive and pass them down. So I think, Amanda, what we'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, I obsessed with obituaries. And 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?

What is he dealing with? why is he obsessed with obituaries? And he has fantasies and he tells me about his fantasies about that he had a brother. And every time, and that goes back to what you Glennon said before, I assumed it every time he went to his mother and said, he's an only child. You know, I feel like I used to have a brother. She would turn around or do something. He would read her body language. Right? And it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger for him. And that. That is in that story, the unspeakable. And 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 named their children. But in that story, right, what we call these days gaslighting. Yes. Like, are you 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. And I think that brings us back to the ghosts. Finally, something comes up and you don't feel like you're crazy. Yes. And then I love

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 all. 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. Of course, especially our physical. right? Our body has like a secret contract with our unconscious to hold things for our unconscious.

So our body will help in that system, right, to make sure that you keep secrets and that you keep secrets from yourself. And all of those secrets and ghosts and some of them we don't know, right? I'm talking in a book and we're talking with 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, right? 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.

And 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. Yeah. And before, right? Like, do you know if your parents were happy that you were born or not? Those things, 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. And 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. 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 burdens on the body and the contract, 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 secrets, you call it. Any untold story, unspoken anything. And that, to me, was fascinating because so much of the quote unquote secrets are not actually secrets at all. They're just things that in our families, we all agreed, we colluded to not speak about. Yes. Yes.

That is something that in this generation, that is our generation, that we can do the revolutionary work of speaking it out loud, you know, 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? So they are conscious even. Yeah. The things that we know. I mean, I call it secrets we keep from.

ourselves in the book, right? Right. 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 psychoanalyst, Christopher Ballas, calls that the unthought known. It is known, but we won't let ourselves think about it or know it. And it's a form of dissociation, right? We put it aside and we don't want to remember, which is pretty amazing. you know, 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, thinks that they already know about their parents and that they already knew something, but they never thought about it.

And so here we're really talking about kind of 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. So to your question, Amanda, it could be a lot of secrets like that are actually secrets about trauma. right? 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. So when you say that, I'm thinking of our father lost his mother very, very early in life. And 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 it's, 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 generation. 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. And now let me see how it is connected to my life. In what way that experience touches my own and our activates them or feeds them, right? In what way it is related to my own emotional struggle? So there's secrets that we know are things that happen in our family, but nobody talks about.

the familial emotional elephants in every room that we don't talk about between us. And 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. That is related really to our defense mechanism. It's related to the fact, and I think, Glenn, and you talk about it a lot in untamed, about the fact that we sometimes,

or when we are unwell especially, we rather not fully live. We prefer to just so we don't feel everything. We don't want to feel everything. And I think switching it to, I rather experience everything than miss everything, right? Is that feeling that is related to our defenses. Our defenses are our idealization, our denial, our repression, right?

what do we do internally? Projection. Projection is something we all can identify with. There is something about myself that I really don't like. And then I look at Abby and I say, let's say I hate my, my aggression. And I look at Abby and I say, Abby's such an aggressive person. I just need to get rid of this. I need to look. 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. Right. And that's what we're. all do to some degree. I like to say I put it in her. Yes. She, right? She in her, not just on her. And she becomes the aggressive person. Right. She's like, of course in the book, I also talk when I talk about aggression and

violence, I talk about paranoia too. How paranoia becomes, is, could be related to projection. It is the fear of the projected aggression. I think you are scared. carrying me and I'm afraid of you now. And I'm afraid. And usually it's because I'm flooded with my own aggression. And it's very scary to be flooded with aggression. And the truth is that when we talk about aggression, we all have some anxiety around aggression. And to some degree that is healthy 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, right? We're afraid of destruction. And 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 it about race, we can talk about anything that we think, I'm not that. It's them. We create the illusion of separateness. This time of year, I am always looking for my sweaters. Luckily, Quince has all of the staple sweaters covered

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whatever helps you feel understood. Nearly everyone who finds a therapist through Alma, 97% say they felt genuinely seen and heard. Better with people, better with Alma. Visit helloalma.com slash we can to schedule a free consultation today. That's hello-a-l-m-a-com slash W-E-C-A-N. Okay, now I've never thought of this before, this moment, okay. But I'm thinking about, you'll be shocked to know that I'm thinking about myself right now. I'm glad. That's what I want you to think about. And I'm thinking about this idea of eating in our family, the eating and all the fear about food and the, it's just intense.

And I'm thinking about the micro of that, the eating disorder. And then, sister, I'm remembering, do you remember when we were little? And dad used to call us, he'd say she's, he'd look at me and say she's pre-famine. And then he'd look at a sister and say she's post-famine because she's like seven inches taller than me. But that goes back to our ancestors. That goes back to Ireland and the famine. There's a study of the Netherlands where literally that is true. That, I mean, generations removed from famine survivors and their bodies are still compensated.

for a famine that they never experienced. But like the fear of my fear of food with scarcity and the binging and all of that of like, I'll never, I will never believe. Doctor, I will, I don't, I understand in my brain, but I will, you will never convince me that there's going to be enough food ever. Yeah. But that's, maybe some of our micro is connected to the macro and all of that. Is that, does that sound?

I believe in that. I believe that that is something that you inherited all. 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, right, story to where I need to. I don't know what your form of, what do you do with that fear, right? How do you keep yourself safe? You know, I think at the end of the day, it's all about feeling safe.

We all want to feel safe. And, right? 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 stay. Tar. And 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. That's an amazing connection between mothers and food. And how when the mother is gone, especially in the old days, it was clear, right, that the mothers was the source of food,

not only breastfeeding, but the feeding of the child. And if the mother is not there, then maybe there is not enough food emotionally. Well, and also if food, you've always used food as self-love. And if there's not enough food, and in dad's case there wasn't enough love after his mom left. Like there's just a very, it's a, it's fascinating. Well, actually, it's only been 30 minutes and she's already fixed us. Okay. And abandonment, you know, I think I have to add that just to the party.

Because how could, when a parent leaves you in a young age, they abandon 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. I just read somewhere that there's a language, I don't know what language it is, but there's a language that where the word for emotional hunger is exactly the, in German, it's exactly the same word for fear of abandonment. Oh, wow.

Emotional hunger and fear of abandonment, they use the same word. But doesn't it make sense, right? Yes. It makes sense. The hunger and the abandonment are related to each other. And 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.

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. Like, first of all, I think your book should be a show. Yes. It should for sure be a TV show. I can totally see it. Like, 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 and she was having an affair with Josh. And she was just kind of entranced with this Josh because he was very dominating in bed And he drove her everywhere Like literally Like drive around Literally Yeah and she said with Josh

Nothing is in my control She kept saying he brings me back to life And you said Her mother and her grandmother Both live in her love affair Yeah Can you tell us about that and what unknown truths Eve had to discover?

That's the first chapter in the book, Life and Death in Love Affairs. And I think what it brings us, of course, sitting with a patient's affair is very complicated. And I know you had a lot of conversations about affairs from each perspective, from each side. And 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, you know, maybe some of us want to run away with someone. Right, it activates a lot. And 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, you know, that people have good husbands. And she is really started having an affair with Josh.

And the affair includes her submission. to Josh's domination. And 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. And that's her first memory.

First memory for me, it'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. And for Eve, as she tells me her life story, I learned very slowly, because she didn't have a lot of memories from childhood, slowly I learned that her mother lost her own mother when she was exactly at 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. And Eve's mother lost her mother to cancer. And she told Eve that many, many, many times, as if she's afraid to be alone there.

And you can 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. And at some point I ask her, is your mother dead? And of course, I would have known if her mother didn't die, right? And that's the first thing that people tell us, which make me question my own question. And 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. And I use that term the dead mother.

It's under your screen as 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. So you see that there is an intergenerational deadness in her psyche. and she's struggling to stay alive. And many times what helps us is we recruit our sexuality in order to stay alive, right, 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, and they bring sexuality in order to enliven the other person.

Wow. And in Eve's story, that's what she does. She becomes, around that time, she creates this affair. And of course, just to summarize from where you started about the submission domination is not random. Because her fantasy, 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, some of it has conscious or some unconscious. early needs that she needs, that this affair touches.

The dead mother thing just blew my mind because we talk so much about martyrdom motherhood and how that's almost seen as a valorous thing that if we just ignore ourselves. But you said this just is amazing. You know, the dead mother is somebody who is unavailable, depressed, emotionally absent. Yeah. 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. So are you saying like if I can't connect with my mom because she's just there physically but gone emotionally, I will, when I finally give up on her, I will become dead with her. Yes. Almost in solidarity. That's the last hope for connection I have. I will be as dead as she is. Connection is the most important thing. You would do anything to connect, right? 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. Yes. And 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. Wow.

We're going to be dead together. So this is the idea, this is the Carl Young, there's no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent because if what we're trying to do down here is just be alive, then a dead parent almost requires our deadness. 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, right, 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 make them there. And with Eve, what was interesting is that bless Eve's heart, she's just, 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. Yes. So you offer this beautiful idea that we think we're repairing when actually we're reliving or repeating. We're repeating. Yeah. Repeating.

So what do the hell do we do? How do we know when to repair or when we're repairing and when we're repeating? You know, it's amazing because the relation, and I would say it's a dialectic relation, right, between repeating and repairing. Our wish is always to repair, right? And 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 make 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, right, to repair something. But I think often our reparation or our attempt to repair becomes a repetition. And in the book, I give a lot of examples of that. And because the truth is, and that brings us to another secrets we keep from ourselves, maybe, I'll call it, that there is something a little omnipotent about that fantasy. And that 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.

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. That was it for me. When 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. And 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. And so we're repeating and repeating because how dare we deserve to live when we can't repair what the people who 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. Yeah. Yeah. And 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 you talk about survival guilt.

Like how could I live if my family is not well? It's not okay. How do we know when something should be? be mourned and when we should try to repair it? You know, 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, right? Because these are the two things.

What could we change? You're laughing, Amanda. Could you tell us that real quick? I have a prayer every day. It has to do with serenity and accepting the things I cannot change. 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.

Yeah. You said you're controlling not only this generation, even previous generation. Yes. Which to some degree is what we all do. In the wish to repair, it's totally related to control, right? 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? And 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. Yes. Oh, that's good. You change when you accept it, right? It's huge change.

It's a huge change. It's the most important change. And it's direct. Correctly 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, right? To free ourselves off. To free ourselves off. To free ourselves off. It's a new year. And instead of trying to reinvent my. I've been asking a simpler question. What would actually support me right now? And honestly,

a big part of that answer is my home. I want my space to feel calmer, more functional, and a little more like a place that can reflect my goals and energy for this year, which is why I've been turning to Wayfair. It's truly a one-stop shop for everything your home needs this season. What surprised me most was how easy it was to find exactly what I wanted in my style and within my budget. Whether you're organizing kids' rooms, upgrading your work from home setup, tackling clutter, or just trying to make weeknight dinners easy. Wayfair really does have everything. Your home doesn't have to be perfect.

It just has to support the life you're living right now. Get organized, refreshed, and back on track this new year for way less. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all. things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. So when you say mourn, we have to mourn because then that will separate us the living and the dead, okay? 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? I'll do. How do we mourn? Is mourn something we can do? Because I feel like in our culture, we have no, no things or rituals. Do you see something that's helpful for people? When I have realized, oh my God, this is my emotional heritage 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 like have to have it?

A beautiful romantic vague idea, not just vague idea. Exactly. That's what we don't want, right? We don't want things to become romanticized. Oh, you have to mourn. That is so beautiful, right? It's a beautiful word. 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 morning is and how they have. hell you do that. And right? And 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. And 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. And 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. I feel, right? All of those feelings that come and go and I hate that person who died and I love him. And I feel like, like, what actually happened? And all of that is true for every process of mourning.

It's a messy process. 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 when you feel the waves of mourning or or whatever the opposite of mourning is like the wanting that the magical thinking that we do when someone's lost the all of that is there any practice do you do deep breathing do you go for a walk like is there something that you have to do to get your mourning self-backed? from your control self. I love that question. Because, you know, I think that the control self part is a lot of it is about guilt, right? Guilt is often a defense against loss or against chaos. Because if it means that everything that happened is because of me.

You make sense of it. Yeah. And if I were only better or if I did something different, it's me the world is not so scary. it brings us back to feeling safe, right? The world is not so scary because it was my fault, right? And 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. Or next time I can fix it. 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. So that's something, that's a way of mourning, is making something of it. You just said mourning, feeling all of our feelings.

And 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. Like, all of my feelings are evidence that I need to go through the morning so I can get to the other side where there are the feelings. Yeah. And you're saying the mourning, the messiness. the conflict, the grossness is the morning. 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 morning. Hooray. And that's what I was hoping. That's what you're up. Of course, we all hope for that. That's the best, right? The best thing is to think that we arrived.

Right? We arrived. And sadly, and I think that brings us back, Glenn, to us. 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%. Nothing is going to surprise me. Great. Thanks for that. For people who are not going to be able to go sit in psycho. Psycho analysis 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. And 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. It is always, always that, that exploration of conscious and unconscious and the relationship between the two. So psychoanalysis really a lot of it is about the unconscious. And 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 the children.

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. You know, and 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. And that, everything we don't know has the potential to control our lives. And that's what psychoanalysis is about. So what about for people who are listening to this, but we'll 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 do. 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 we were to give somebody... That's a great beginning. Oh. Right? Okay.

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 and that's where every investigation starts with the decision to search. And psychoanalysis is one way to do it. There are many ways to do it. You have to start with a decision to search. What's another way besides psychoanalysis? I think there are many forms of therapy. I think there are many forms of group therapy, which I love. And these days, group therapy is really big and people really improve. There are, yeah, there is EMDR. There are a lot of forms of therapy and communities that help you and help you think about who you are and relationships.

I think a lot of, 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? It's yes. 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 pick up. I'm just really hoping we get through this and they'll be like, oh, really? Was that a thing in my family? Good luck with that. So I just decided to say out. loud the thing I was most worried that they were noticing. What is it? That would be passed down for that.

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. And I had to do deep breathing the entire flight. because I was constantly vacillating between you are so anxious and need to hyper-control 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 or me?

And my tension becomes their tension. Of course. Becomes they're worried about what is happening around them. And we just had a conversation about it, how that is the thing 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. And 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 acknowledge that it's true. I love that. That's a good next right thing. Think about the things you're hoping that no one notices about you because 100% they're noticing. Yes, for sure. Yeah. I love that because that means you go towards what you're afraid of. Yeah. And you don't just say, oh, I'm afraid of that. So I'm running away. Nobody sees me. And I hope nobody knows. 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. I have 40 more questions. So, you know, Did you come back sometime? Because I just, I'm so, 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. And there are things that we can repair and work in imperfect families. And I would just really be honored if someday you would come back and talk to us about that. I would be honored to come back and talk to you about that. And it's of course related to the whole work,

right, 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? Oh, you are just absolutely wonderful. I love this conversation so much. I love it so much.

And I just want to say before we leave that I just remembered my first memory, which I've told you about. Yes. I was in the grocery store and I had forgotten my snack at school, elementary school. And 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. Like in my family. The prepacket. Yes.

And in my family, we did not go off the grocery list. Like, we were raised by two teachers. We had a budget. And my mom let me have this turkey sandwich. And it was like $3. I think it was $3.84. I think I freaking remember how much it was. And when I think about when we were first together, you used to, like, feed me, like, you'd go way over order.

And now it drives me that shit crazy. And I can't stand it, but I loved it in the beginning. But this idea of. What makes us safe, right? It's the food. Oh, it's, oh, it's so good. And you see, right, it's right on. And you know, it's interesting because the first memory that I asked 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. Yes. Well, we'll have you back so that we could restart the conversation. Thank you for the work you're doing in the world. You are just an absolutely delightful detective and brilliant. Everybody go get emotional inheritance.

It's good, fascinating stuff. And it should be a TV show. Yeah. Thanks so much. I loved this conversation. 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. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence 13th studios. Be sure to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn't, don't worry about it. It's fine.