Top highlights from Emotional Inheritance
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.
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Those truths, although not consciously known to us, shape our lives.
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The assumption in those days was that what you dont remember wont hurt you. But what if what you dont remember is in fact remembered, in spite of your best efforts? I was their first child, and their traumatic past lived in my body.
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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.
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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 dont always understand.
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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 dont always recognize their source.
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How do we inherit, hold, and process things that we dont remember or didnt 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?
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When we are ready to unpack our inheritance, we are able to confront the ghosts we carry within.
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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 dont consciously know them. Old family secrets live inside us.
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When their stories are told, we recognize how that history has shaped their present lives.
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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.
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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 cant identify, touch, or change, that are passed to the next generation as phantoms, felt but not recognized.
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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?
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I discuss Professor Yolanda Gampels idea of the radioactivity of trauma, which is the emotional radiation of disaster that spreads into the lives of the generations that follow.
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Those experiences that were too painful for us to entirely grasp and process are the ones that are passed down to the next generation.
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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.
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What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.
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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 patients view of herself. Every memory hides within it previous and also subsequent repressed memories.
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Every memory hides within it previous and also subsequent repressed memories.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Feelings are always the motivations for intellectual investigations, even as we rationalize the world around us.
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