Growing Up in a Family That Never Talked About It — How That Silence Became Your Anxiety

The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi · Dec 1, 2025 · 1h 4m

Nobody explained it to you. There were things that were not discussed, doors that stayed closed, a heaviness in the house that had no name. You grew up in that silence and somewhere along the way it became your anxiety, your hypervigilance, your sense of never quite being enough — and you could never trace it back to anything that actually happened to you. Willie Handler is the son of Holocaust survivors and an author who has spent his life connecting exactly those dots — how unspoken family trauma from war, persecution, and family secrets gets wired into the next generation's nervous system…