Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

Award-winning psychoanalyst Dr. Galit Atlas draws on her patients' stories--and her own life experiences--to shed light on how generational trauma affects our lives in this "intimate, textured, compassionate" book (Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of The Healing Power of Mindfulness).

The people we love and those who raised us live inside us; we experience their emotional pain, we dream their memories, and these things shape our lives in ways we don't always recognize. Emotional Inheritance is about family secrets that keep us from living to our full potential, create gaps between what we want for ourselves and what we are able to have, and haunt us like ghosts.

In this transformative book, Galit Atlas entwines the stories of her patients, her own stories, and decades of research to help us identify the links between our life struggles and the "emotional inheritance" we all carry. For it is only by following the traces those ghosts leave that we can truly change our destiny.

ISBN-13: 9780316492102

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Little - Brown and Company

Publication Date: 04-25-2023

Pages: 288

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

Galit Atlas, PhD, 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 & Psychoanalysis. She is a faculty member of the National Training Programs (NTP) and the Four Year Adult training program of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP). Dr. Atlas has published three books for clinicians and numerous articles and book chapters that focus primarily on gender and sexuality. Her New York Times publication "A Tale of Two Twins" was the winner of a 2016 Gradiva Award. A leader in the field of relational psychoanalysis, Dr. Atlas is a recipient of the Andre Francois Research Award and the NADTA Research Award. She teaches and lectures throughout the United States and internationally.

Table of Contents

A Trace in the Mind 3

Part I Our Grandparents: Inherited Trauma in Past Generations 17

1 Life and Death in Love Affairs 19

2 Confusion of Tongues 44

3 Sex, Suicide, and the Riddle of Grief 72

4 The Radioactivity of Trauma 87

Part II Our Parents: The Secrets of Others 111

5 When Secrets Become Ghosts 113

6 Unwelcome Babies 122

7 Permission to Cry 147

8 Dead Brother, Dead Sister 176

Part III Ourselves: Breaking the Cycle 185

9 The Taste of Sorrow 187

10 The Cycle of Violence 206

11 The Unexamined Life 230

A Door Opens 263

Acknowledgments 269

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