Emotional Inheritance Quotes

“The people we love and those who raised us live inside us; we experience their emotional pain, we dream their memories, we know what was not explicitly conveyed to us, and these things shape our lives in ways that we don’t always understand.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Beatrice Beebe, one of my mentors and an infant researcher at Columbia University, is known for saying “Research is me-search.” By that she means that all psychological research, even when we are not aware of it, is our quest to understand and heal ourselves and the people who raised us.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Their inherited feelings of the parents’ unprocessed trauma were the phantoms that lived inside them, the ghosts of the unsaid and the unspeakable. It is those “ghostly” experiences, not quite alive but also not dead, that we inherit. They invade our reality in visible and actual ways; they loom in, leaving traces. We know and feel things and we don’t always recognize their source.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“When it comes to talking about trauma, we always walk the delicate line between too much and not enough, between what is too explicit and what is secretive, what is traumatizing and what is repressed and thus remains in its raw, wordless form. We are usually caught in that binary between the two extremes because when it comes to trauma, regulation is always a challenge.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Any child whose most devastating fear is abandonment will insist on connecting with their mother and do anything to feel close to her, including compromising parts of themselves. When they give up on bringing her 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 and thus will develop their own emotional deadness.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“We carry emotional material that belongs to our parents and grandparents, retaining losses of theirs that they never fully articulated. We feel these traumas even if we don’t consciously know them. Old family secrets live inside us.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“The secrets of the mind include not only our own life experiences but also those that we unknowingly carry with us: the memories, feelings, and traumas that we inherit from previous generations.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Those truths, although not consciously known to us, shape our lives.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“How do we inherit, hold, and process things that we don’t remember or didn’t experience ourselves? What is the weight of that which is present but not fully known? Can we really keep secrets from one another, and what do we pass on to the next generation?”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Childhood attachments shape the therapeutic relationship in the same way that they form other relationships outside therapy. Those who expect to be loved often make sure others love them, while those who expect to be neglected might evoke neglect.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“The assumption in those days was that what you don’t remember won’t hurt you. But what if what you don’t remember is in fact remembered, in spite of your best efforts? I was their first child, and their traumatic past lived in my body.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“In ways that often feel mysterious, emotional material left unprocessed tends to appear and reappear in our lives. The unexamined life repeats itself and reverberates through the generations. The untold stories clamor for reenactment - they insist on being told. That which cannot be consciously identified forces itself into our reality and repeats itself.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“The psychological need to work through old injuries brings us back to the original scene, where we hope to transform the passive into the active, where we try to do it all over again, this time differently. We wish to relive and this time do it better, do it right, to heal ourselves through the act of reparation. Too often the attempt at reparation instead ends as merely a repetition. In our need to heal old trauma we in fact retraumatize ourselves.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“When we are ready to unpack our inheritance, we are able to confront the ghosts we carry within.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“It is only when we process our own sorrow that we can offer a truthful space of mutual vulnerability and emotional honesty, a place where we can recognize the other and don't try to know better, to fix or give optimistic advice. Instead we are available to be with, listen, and bear our own pain with the pain of another human.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“When their stories are told, we recognize how that history has shaped their present lives.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“One significant reason why people come to therapy is to search for unknown truths about themselves. That investigation starts with a wish to know who we truly are and who our parents were, and it always includes the dread of knowing.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“It is those traumas that are unspeakable and too painful for the mind to digest that become our own inheritance and impact our offspring, and their offspring, in ways they cannot understand or control.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Those experiences that were too painful for us to entirely grasp and process are the ones that are passed down to the next generation.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Rachel tells me that she wishes she knew more. Her family story was silenced and her unprocessed family trauma became a repressed secret with no words or symbolic thinking associated with it. Those kinds of secrets live as strangers within our minds, ones that we can’t identify, touch, or change, that are passed to the next generation as phantoms, felt but not recognized.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Life goes on and we visit and revisit our separations and losses. We mourn them again and again, every time from a different place. We think about them, discover new layers, process from different angles. We accept them and give these losses new meanings.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Feelings are always the motivations for intellectual investigations, even as we rationalize the world around us.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“One of the goals associated with growth is the ability to integrate positive and negative feelings: to hate lovingly, to love while recognizing moments of disappointment and anger. The more we can know and own our destructive urges, the more able we become to love fully.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Every memory hides within it previous and also subsequent repressed memories.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“A first childhood memory often conceals within it the main ingredients of future therapy. It frequently illustrates the reasons the patient seeks therapy, and portrays a picture of the patient’s view of herself. Every memory hides within it previous and also subsequent repressed memories.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“I discuss Professor Yolanda Gampel’s idea of “the radioactivity of trauma,” which is the emotional “radiation” of disaster that spreads into the lives of the generations that follow.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Emotional Inheritance is about silenced experiences that belong not only to us but to our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and about the ways they impact our lives. It is these secrets that often keep us from living to our full potential. They affect our mental and physical health, create gaps between what we want for ourselves and what we are able to have, and haunt us like ghosts. This book will introduce the ties connecting past, present, and future and ask: how do we move forward?”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“Emotional Inheritance is about silenced experiences that belong not only to us but to our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and about the ways they impact our lives.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma