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

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Israeli-born and raised psychoanalyst Dr. Galit Atlas draws on the emo­tion­al pow­er of her patient’s sto­ries and her own life expe­ri­ences to illu­mi­nate the extra­or­di­nary ways in which inher­it­ed fam­i­ly trau­ma affects our lives.

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, Dr. Atlas entwines the sto­ries of her patients, her own sto­ries from her Jew­ish fam­i­ly and her grow­ing up in a coun­try under threat, 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.

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