Psychoanalyst Galit Atlas has a therapeutic practice in Manhattan and is a faculty member of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. In her new book “Emotional Legacy” (Dumont, 2023, 24 euros) she deals with the effects of traumatic experiences on her own offspring. And how important it is to find a way of dealing with these feelings.
SZ: Your previous books have dealt with gender and sexuality, how did you come up with the topic of emotional heritage?
Galit Atlas: They belong together. My experience is that when you talk to people in a therapeutic setting about their sexuality or their gender identity, there are usually influences from several generations in the room. I focused on this emotional family legacy for the book.
The trauma of our parents or grandparents can manifest itself in our sex life?
When we talk about inherited trauma, a lot is about denial and secrets. Secrets are often associated with shame. Then the connection to sexuality is not far away. Like the case in my book where a woman throws herself into an affair with a man and in the act of making love experiences existential feelings so strong that her whole life spirals out of control. In a long process, we worked out what this affair has to do with her childhood and the death of her grandmother, which accompanied her own mother at the age of 14. We explored the connection between sex, death and redemption, and pondered the secret way it all ties into her family history.
How strong does trauma have to be in order to be passed on to future generations and cause them emotional distress?
We distinguish between the so-called “Big-T-Traumata”, which are threats resulting from the effects and threats of violence such as assaults, sexualised, physical and psychological violence, terror and torture, but also catastrophes such as accidents, natural disasters, serious illnesses or the loss of loved ones People. For subsequent generations, however, “little T traumas” can also play a role, i.e. stressful events that do not fall into the first category, but were nevertheless experienced traumatically. These include emotional abuse, the death of a pet, bullying or harassment, and the loss of important relationships. A lot of trauma has to do with attachment and the loss of attachment. Every family carries a story of trauma.
What defines trauma for you?
Traumas are events that leave traces deep in our system, in our whole body. The scars of these marks can be felt in the next generation, even if the original traumas have become mysteries. Uncovering these inherited scars is a lengthy therapeutic process, but it can solve a lot.
As an experienced psychoanalyst, was there anything new you learned about yourself while working on this book?
My father was born in Iran, my mother in Syria. Both grew up with many siblings in very modest circumstances and later emigrated. All of this has bothered me all my life. One story I found out relatively recently, however, is that my parents were both very ill when they were young children. My father almost died as a baby, and after one of his sisters had previously died, his mother, my grandmother, became very protective of him through this early illness and stayed very close to him throughout his life. And my mother was terminally ill when she was a small child. I believe that part of my parents’ close bond to each other has to do with these early experiences of the illness. I can feel the closeness of the family relationships that developed from this in myself. The emotional process one goes through when thinking about emotional legacy is making connections.
Can’t you imagine a lot of things that might not have been the case in reality?
Yes, but that is not crucial. It is crucial to understand that things that happened in the lives of our parents and grandparents play a role in how we feel and how we are. And that their traumas can give us nightmares. So it’s not about collecting sad stories from the past that we can feel sorry for ourselves. Rather, it is about gaining freedom in the present by dealing with the past.
What are the mechanisms behind these processes?
Research on the intergenerational transmission of trauma is not particularly old, it began after World War II, and in the decades that followed attempts were made to better understand what the Holocaust did to subsequent generations. Many therapists, analysts and psychologists involved were survivors, and their patients were survivors as well. They, too, began with the Me-Search. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that neuroscience confirmed what psychiatry had long observed clinically: a person’s trauma can be an epigenetic modifier that affects cortisol receptors. The genes are not changed, but modified. The trauma leaves chemical traces in the DNA, which in turn are passed on to the next generation.
The trauma of the survivors had a real impact on the lives of the children and grandchildren.
The most famous research on this comes from Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, who was able to measure that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust had different stress hormone profiles than the respective control group. This may make them more susceptible to anxiety disorders, for example.
Why is it important to deal with the emotional legacy?
I like to use the metaphor of ghosts. Everything we don’t know about ourselves has the power to control us. But of course it’s only important to deal with it when you’re in emotional distress. That means there is little danger that people will go in search of their emotional heritage without needing to and then break something. Therapy is incredibly exhausting. And people come with symptoms such as nightmares, headaches, stomachaches, fears, anger, the pain of separation or a death wish.
Can you know everything about yourself?
No. There’s the subconscious, and there’s a lot we don’t know. But there are many things that are close to consciousness and you can pull them out and look at them. Knowledge can trigger new pain, and much remains hidden for fear of pain. Often we say “I don’t want to know” or “I already know” – which are basically the same thing and mean: I already know how much I can take.
What happens when the problem is exposed in the therapeutic process?
We try to pay attention to it and to draw a connection between the past and the present. Attention brings change. If you carry feelings from the history of your parents or grandparents, then these feelings only belong to you in part. You can give it back or continue writing it in a different way, i.e. develop your own version of this story.
So in the end it’s about freedom of choice?
Exactly. We can get stuck when we feel something that interferes with our freedom of choice, but we don’t know where that feeling is coming from. If we bring it out into the open, we can start a conversation with it. That gives us creative power back. The freedom to shape our own lives is the goal. Because that’s how we grow.
Are there traumas of the ancestors that one should rather not look at?
In the case of multigenerational trauma, the risk of re-traumatization is relatively low, but one still wants to avoid it. Therefore, this work is a slow process that should be accompanied by a therapist.
Why is it so difficult for many people to look into the emotional past of their parents and grandparents?
There are two reasons. The first is that we want to protect our parents from pain. The second reason is that we are afraid of being too like our parents. But the truth is: Our parents live on in us, even if we never gave them permission to do so. You can get rid of their trauma, but not the parents themselves.
How many generations can you go back in such a therapeutic process?
Since research only started in the 1950s, there are three generations that we can see, and the fourth is now beginning to age. Epigenetic traces have been found in animals going back as far as 16 generations. But we don’t know all these things exactly yet, the research is still so young.
If you start researching your own family and ask your parents: What should you pay attention to?
You should start your search with honest curiosity, then not much can happen. It’s not about guilt or judgement, nor is it about investigating or the correctness of content details. Everyone loves to tell their life story – if the audience is right. You have to be careful when the elders fend off you or don’t want to tell secrets. Details are often forgotten. We don’t probe, but listen to what they say – and what they don’t tell us. In the therapeutic process, the gaps are often important.
Because that’s where the secrets are buried?
Exactly. And the content of the secret is not what matters, but the feeling that its existence triggers in us. People can be very ashamed of things they have never done themselves. We inherit the feeling, like the shame, not the secret.
When you observe the current crises and wars, what do you think of all the emotional legacy that is being created for the generations to come?
It breaks my heart. It takes at least 15 years for a nation to at least be able to formulate the traumata. It takes very little time to break and as much time to heal. Many people live in great fear right now. We try to understand old traumas while creating new ones. The same goes for mysteries: we track the mysteries of the past and create our own mysteries. We always think we’re better than the generations before us, but of course we’re not. But it’s part of believing that.