Recorded on February 16, 2022.
Trauma is a universal human experience and yet, most of the time we remain blissfully unaware of its existence in our own family history, much less how it can be carried silently across generations to impact our daily lives. In her new book, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma, internationally-acclaimed psychoanalyst Dr. Galit Atlas draws on her patients’ stories, her own life experiences, and decades of research to help us understand how loss and suffering from the past can continue to haunt us in the present. As she explains, events that occurred in our families many lifetimes ago continue to live inside us, and they can have a profound impact on everything from our medical symptoms to our habits to our confidence. The key, Dr. Atlas argues, is to first recognize what those traumas were in the first place and to then work to understand their connection to the present. She believes that only by doing so are we able to transcend the past and reach our full potential.
