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Episode 815: There is No Family Without Trauma with Dr. Galit Atlas · The Trauma Therapist

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Trauma Therapist Podcast. Plus listeners can listen to episodes early and ad free right
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now. Become a Plus listener by going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma
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Therapist Podcast and signing up today or welcome back to the Trauma Thepist podcast.
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My name is Gamiferson. My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible
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selves, to be human, to be real, not just a clinician.
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I'm a big believer in who we are is more important than what we know,
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and this requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires
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intention. Can learn more about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma
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Therapist project dot com. That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get
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started, all right, Here we go sovive for two and one, Our
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folks, welcome back to the podcast. I am very excited to have as
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my guest today, doctor Galite Atlas. Galite, welcome, Hi. I
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am so happy to be here and thank you for inviting me. You're welcome.
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So. Doctor Atlas is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in
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Manhattan. She's a clinical assistant professor on the faculty of the New York University
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post Doc program and Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and faculty at the National Training Program and
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the four year Adult Training Program at the National Institute for Psychotherapies in New York
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City. As an essays and author, Galite has published numerous articles and book
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chapters that focus primarily on gender and sexuality. She's the author of the Enigma
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of Desire, Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis and Dramatic Dialogues, co
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authored with Lewis and Aaron, published by Rutledge. Gleed is the editor and
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contributor to the upcoming book When Mine's Me, the work of Lewis Aaron.
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Her last book, Emotional Inheritance, Therapists, Her Patients and the Legs if
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Trauma, is an international bestseller, was translated into twenty three languages and won
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the twenty twenty two Gudiva Award for Best Book that advances Psychoanalysis. Not too
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shabby, very interesting. Yeah, But welcome to the podcast. All right,
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So before we get go in here, Glee share with the listeners where
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you're from originally and where you are currently, and then we'll dive in.
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So I live in the last twenty three years in New York City, I
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teached NYU. I'm originally from Tel Aviv and my parents came from Iran and
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Syria. Wow, in that way, a little bit international, but especially
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in the most you know, Middle East. So awesome. So how did
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this this interest starts for you in psychology and and then broadly and then more
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specifically gender and sexuality? Do you know? I think that for me,
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like for many other therapists, becoming a therapist starts with being a patient and
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as we discover that world of therapy, this beautiful and fascinating world of the
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mind. And so in my twenties I started my own psychoanalytic journey as a
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patient, and then I started studying psychology. I did my PhD. And
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most of my writings were actually originally on sexuality. And I remember it.
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Originally people used to ask me that question, how did you start writing about
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sexuality? And even back then it was a little bit more embarrassing to admit
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that research is a mesearch, right. I talked about it in Emotional Inheritance,
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when I talk about how I came to the idea of talking about intergenerational
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trauma, talking about trauma and about emotional inheritance. So my whole journey as
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a clinician, as a writer on psychoanalysis, as a teacher really was a
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missearch looking for answers, what kind of answers for what purpose? I think
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that originally, and I'll start with my writing on sexuality a little bit,
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which would lead us to writing on trauma. And you know, Freud said
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there are two areas that there are there is the most hypocrisy about, and
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it's sex and money. I found that since I started writing about trauma,
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that trauma one of those areas where people have a lot of secrets and a
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lot of shame. And we can talk about the relation between between shame and
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trauma, but for me, I think a lot of the things that I
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was looking into were shameful things. Sex sexuality. I came from a very
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you know, as I said before, my mother was born and raised in
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Syria and my father in Iran and the immigration. And one of the first
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articles I wrote years ago for clinicians was titled Sex and the Kitchen, talking
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about all of the sexual conversation in the female's kitchen and my family and all
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of the secrets around sexuality around the body and inhibitions so a lot of my
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early interest was in family secrets. And in the last few years and I
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started writing about family secrets and about the secrets of intergenerational trauma and our emotional
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inheritance. Wow, very interesting. So secrets, I mean that can mean
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a lot of things, but secrets secrets around sexuality and trauma specifically, I
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think that interestingly, a lot of my book is on sexuality and trauma,
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but the broad perspective is actually on the idea of emotional inheritance, and that
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is the idea that experiences and especially raw and unprocessed ones, inevitably passed down
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from generation to generation. Emotions, memories, feelings, traumatic experiences are transmitted
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from one generation to the next, which means that a lot of our parents
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and grandparents experience is become our own emotional struggle. Right. So, for
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example, there are many, many, many examples in emotional inheritance in the
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book. Each chapter is on a specific kind of angle on that topic.
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But I mean I talk about many, many kinds of trauma from you know,
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abuse, attachments, give us, give us one example, I mean
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one example when I talk about you know, the research on intergenerational trauma started
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with the Holocaust. So I opened the book with talking about research on the
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Holocaust and the cases about how the trauma of the Holocaust lives in the mind
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of the grandchildren's third generation. These days we already have third and fourth generation.
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And one example, for example, briefly, is that I had a
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patient and I named him Benjamin in the book, who was classophobic, and
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only years later we find out that his grandfather was actually buried alive, And
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of course it brings us back into this mysterious question of how does that happen?
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How does one generation live inside the other, which is a question we
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can talk about, of course, but in the book, I really talk
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about things that are more obvious or things that are more mysterious. How early
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laws creates later issues for the next generations related to laws. How of course,
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how abuse emotional abuse and physical abuse. And I have a certain specific
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chapter on sexual abuse and the very specific phase of intergenerational transmission of sexual abuse.
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And so there are many, many aspects of our emotional inheritance. Some
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of them are more conscious and others are more unconscious. What I want to
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talk specifically about that generational trauma transmission. But how did you become fascinated and
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interested in that specifically, do you know, I felt that in my clinical
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work, when I sit to the patient, there was always more than one
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generation in the room. I felt that I sit with the patient and when
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I sit with their parents and grandparents, and something about that really fascinated me.
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Of course, read my mesearch piece started with my own family trauma and
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my own and my own traumas that I talk about in the book very openly.
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So because the book is divided to three parts of three generations. We
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all carry our parents, you know, traumas, but if we are parents,
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and those of us who are parents also transmit our own trauma. So
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I was interested in both. I was interested in my parents trauma, and
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I talk about my parents immigration and racism and both of my parents. Interestingly,
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I found out only when I started writing the book that both my parents
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were very very ill as babies and almost died, and both of them lost
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a sibling. Each of them lost a sibling. And I have a whole
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chapter about loss of siblings and as an emotional inheritance that comes from my own
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family trauma. Right, And I'll tell you something interesting. I have a
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chapter in a book that is describing a young woman who comes to therapy with
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me, and she walks in, and she tells me that her brother,
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her older brother, died a few years earlier. And she tells me that,
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and I sit and listen to her, and I am very aware that
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this is I write in this chapter, and it sounds like the most horrible
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trauma I ever heard in my whole life. And I sit there and I
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think to myself, I've never heard of something like that. This is so
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intense. And only after a while I remember, so to speak, that
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actually my mother had lost her older brother. So I in that chapter I
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focus on that overlap and the dissociation, my own association that at the beginning
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I don't actually don't put it together until a little later in the treatment that
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I suddenly realized, Oh, this patient is actually my own mother that I
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am treating. Right, she has my mother's experience. And I really describe
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in details what it means when when when a patient's trauma awakens our own ghosts.
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I call that, you know, the ghost of the unset and the
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unspeakable. Wow, this book sounds fascinating. Let's discuss the transmission of energe
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intergenerational trauma. You know you talked about that one example of the grandfather being
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buried alive and this young guy being clothtyphobic. How does that happen? We're
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talking cellular transmission here or what. Thank you for asking this. I think
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this is the most fascinating question of all and there obviously because of that,
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there are a lot of debates about that, right, nature nurture. There
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are two main researches that are dealing with that, of course, and I'm
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skipping the idea of unconscious communication, which sounds too mysterious. Let's let's go
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to to research. Okay. One of them is the research of epigenetics.
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On epigenetics, I don't know if you heard of that. Yeah, listeners,
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Yeah, give them, give them the thumbnail. You know what.
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I got to put on a sweater because I'm really cold. Yeah, excuse
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a second here. I hope it's not that trauma. It made you feel
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so cool. It's the snow. The snow. Where are you. I'm
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in Bend, Oregon. Yeah, okay, excuse me, so go ahead.
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So let's let's go back to I'm talking about two kinds of research that
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is actually it does not contradict each other. We think about both areas and
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how they impact each other. And so one body of research is the research
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on epigenetics, which is the biological mechanism by which trauma is transmitted from generation
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to generation and the impact of the environment, especially trauma. When we talk
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about environment, we talk about psychological environment on the expression of genes. So
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this is really the environmental memory the you know, and that research talks about
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the memory of the genes and how they impact the expression, you know,
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how trauma impacts the expression of genes. Rachel Ebuda from Mount Sinai has a
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whole body of research on that. The other research that I'm talking about,
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which I write about much more in my book, is attachment research, which
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I know you're very familiar with, and the idea that children feel their parents
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from the moment they are born, they know them from inside and the en
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All of that is related to contemporary infant research. I'm referencing in the book
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doctor Beatrice Rieby from Columbia and new the research on parents and babies and how
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when you analyze moment by moment interaction you realize that they respond to each other
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cues, to unconscious cues and to answer your original question about Benjamin and his
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family history. The assumption really is that there is something in the unconscious communication,
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something in the nonverbal communication between parents and children that especially young children and
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even babies pick up on. So, for example, like, let's make
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it really really easy to think about, there is let's say that this specific
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patient there is a you know, it's interesting because when I talk about my
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mother's history, I'm talking my mother's brother drowned in the sea when he was
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fourteen years old. Wow, it was never a secret in our family,
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but somehow the fear of water is transmitted from generation to generation. My children,
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who obviously didn't know that person, I didn't know him, hardly heard
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the stories. They have their own legacy of talking about how people could actually
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drown in the ocean. How does that happen? Right? And I think
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it's that is something that I assume I communicated with him without even being fully
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aware of it, because you know, as a mother, I try not
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to scare my kids about, you know, about going to the beach,
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but it might be in my body language, it might be right in everything
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I communicate with them non verbal. Wow. So in terms of trauma,
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in terms of treatment, what does this mean, what kind of information does
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this mean? Both for yourself as a therapist and for the client. I
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mean that there's this intergenerational possibility here. I think what you to means is
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that if we look at it from the intergenerational perspective, that there is something
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about understanding or making links. The work here is the work of making connections,
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of making links that will allow us to to have more freedom in some
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ways. Right because we are we can actually work through whatever belongs to us
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and what belongs to our ancestors if we carry with us. You know,
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it's interesting. I'll tell you a story about that. For example, I
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gave it talk not too long ago to a group of therapists, and at
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the beginning I always ask people who who thinks they have intergenerational trauma? And
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usually half of the people raise their hands. And at the end, after
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we talk about all kinds of I ask again who has international trauma? And
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that, of course there is no person in the world who doesn't have an
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intergenational envirram, because there is no family without trauma. Every family has some
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history of trauma. And then one person, one woman, raises her hand
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and she said, you know, only now I realized that in my previous
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career I was a midwife. And as I listen to your talk, I
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suddenly made the connection, right, and we're talking about the work of making
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connection that hum moment of saying, huh, Suddenly I realized my grandmother died
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when she gave birth to my mother during childbirth, and I chose to become
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a midwife because all my life I was aware that my grandmother died, and
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my mother carried it the trauma of losing her mother during birth, and you
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know, and suddenly she she realized what it was for her that she was
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trying to repair. Because what happens often in the intergenerational trauma is that we
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try to repair what happens in the past. We try to not writ,
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we try to repair the people who are wounded, We try to repair the
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history. We try to and we try to hear our parents. I mean,
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you know, a lot of people claim that many of us therapists are
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in this profession because we try to heal our parents. So I want to
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This is fascinating to me, and it's just so interesting to learn about you
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and to learn how this topic has come into your life and your work,
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and it seems, you know, given your history and your background and where
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you're from, it almost had to happen. It just feels very natural that
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this is the way you work and what you focus on. You mentioned shame
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and trauma. Let's talk about that. How do they interact? Why do
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they interact? You know? One of the most shameful things is being a
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victim. And I think that one of the reasons why people keep trauma as
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a secret is because they are shamed of the position of being a victim.
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You know. I think there are other reasons and that people keep trauma as
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a secret, and some of them are related to the need to protect our
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psychic from being too overwhelmed by thinking about the trauma, and especially if you're
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not in therapy. But I think that there is something about the shame of
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being a victim that is is really one of the main reasons why people don't
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want to talk about it. It's too shameful. I'll add something else,
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you know. I think what we talk about survival, guilt and guilt and
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shame are cousins, as you know, and I think that sometimes related to
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the shame of being a victim, guilt becomes a defense mechanism, a strategy
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to avoid the shame of being a victim. And why because if I believe
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that it's my fault, it means that I believe that I could do something
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right, that I only if I were only right, and I only did
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it right, and that protects me from the fragmentation, from the chaos,
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from the helplessness of being a victim, of being a helpless victim. And
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I can relate to that when I was younger, I was bullied and when
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I was like eleven twelve, and it really impacted the trajectory, negatively impacted
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the trajectory of my life, my self esteem, how I showed up in
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relationships. And I have a lot of shame about admitting that that I was
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bullied by this person. It's crazy, you know how this impacts us.
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You know how people blame themselves for me. Maybe I was weird, maybe
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I was right. We So I think it's so interesting that you're that you're
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mentioning bullying, because that's a fascinating topic, especially around shame and guilt and
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how we blame ourselves for parents blame their children when their children are bullied and
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they say, maybe you did something, maybe and why is that? Why
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are you blaming your child? You're blaming your child. It is you feel
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horribly helpless that there is nothing you can do, and that is the way
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you try to cope with that. It's interesting and I don't know if you
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heard that, but there was a research that shows that therapists who were bullied
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are having a hard time. They have a hard time working with people who
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are bullied. Oh yes, I totally When I was seeing clients, I
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totally did. I would get so activated evated, right, oh yeah,
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and I I was triggered and I have to calm myself and like, this
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is not I was saying to myself, right, and the moment, this
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is what am I doing? This is not good. I'm like, I
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was like advocating for this client in a particular way, and yeah, I
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was like, oh yeah, And I think that's what it does because it
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really evokes a lot of helplessness and you want to you want to tell the
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person what to do, and you want to tell them do this, do
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this? Is that, because it's otherwise you have to sit with the vulnerability
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being bullied, right, It's still painful. So you I mean, I
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was reading your bio and it's it's I mean, you're doing a lot of
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things here. You're also seeing clients and you're teaching, and you're right,
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how the heck are you doing all this? You've got like all these balls
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in the air. How serously you're teaching. I'll tell you the real secret.
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Yes, I don't do anything else but that. So I don't know.
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My kids make fun of me and they're like, you don't know.
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You don't do anything. You don't go to movies, you don't go to
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this. You always work, work, work, work, work, So
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I think there is always a price, and once in a while I take
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a break. But yeah, it's it's what I love. So the last
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book, Emotional Inheritance, A Therapists for Patients and Legacy of Trauma. The
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Therapist is you, Yes, they're okay, who's this book for? This
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book is for everyone. It's my previous books were for clinicians. This is
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my first book for They call it for the public. And it was translated
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into twenty six languages all around the world. And it's interesting. It's a
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fascinating journey for me to really see the cultural piece. Also, which culture
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is more related to that culture likes it? More where it became a best
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seller, where it didn't like when all that and the reactions of different people
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to that, and my goal was really to take you with me into an
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emotional journey that will teach you something about yourself, right And I talk a
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lot about myself in the book as the therapist, as a human, as
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a right a teacher, as a mother, as a trauma survivor. But
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my goal is really to take you as the reader into your own emotional journey.
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When you first start, I mean, you have glead this kind of
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amazing warmth and openness about you that I I'm sure it translates the work you
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do with your clients. When you first started seeing clients, was that there
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for you or was that something that you had to cultivate? You know,
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I don't believe that you could have a you know, a fake persona.
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It's not the fake persona. But there's an openness that you have. There's
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a willingness to almost like a humanness to you that is very palpable, you
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know. And I think for a lot of people they need to get to
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a point where they're able to, you know, share that, and for
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some of us it's we need to hold that close closer to us, and
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maybe we learned to open up that I'm curious about your journey. I had
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to learn at the beginning to hold it back, you know, because when
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you were in analytic especially psychoanalysis and psychological training, you learn about neutrality.
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You learn about being a blank screen, right, You learn about really holding
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back no self disclosure, which those are values that I still not only practice,
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also teach you know, I don't go and you know, and share
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with my patients my life. And well, that's that's the extreme, right,
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and being the blank slate is the other extreme. Where do you and
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granted everyone's different, all your clients are different, but where do you fall
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on that continuum? Do you self disclose when it's appropriate? It really depends
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where I stand theoretically, is that my patients have the right not to know,
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and then that's where I start, and from there it really depends.
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I think every every therapy is a relationship. It's a real relationship, and
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I am a little different in each relationship. I'm not the same person,
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and so I feel like I meet, we meet, and we create something
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that is very unique to the diet as we call it. Okay, right,
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well awesome, all right, Galat. So the name of the book
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is Emotional Inheritance the therapists or patients and the Legacy of trauma. Will have
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this linked up at the show notes page here at the Trauma Therapist podcast dot
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com. How can people get in touch with you, learn about you,
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find out what you're doing. I'm on Instagram and I post you know,
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my talks or news on Instagram. And also i have a website under my
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name Www. Galt Atlas dot com and that's where you can find me.
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Okay, we'll have those linked up here again, Galat, pleasure talking to
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you. Love to have you back so much. Yeah, it's great,
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great meeting in talking to you too, all right. Take care at the
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day at a round loading