All stories were written with the patients’ permission, and details

have been altered to protect their privacy.

Early versions of chapters 5, 9, and 10 were originally published in

the New York Times as “A Tale of Two Twins,” “Grieving My Patient’s
Friend,” and “Was My Patient Stalking Me?” respectively. They are
reprinted here with permission.

Copyright © 2022 by Galit Atlas

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 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
A Trace in the Mind

PART I
OUR GRANDPARENTS:
INHERITED TRAUMA IN PAST GENERATIONS
1 Life and Death in Love Affairs
2 Confusion of Tongues
3 Sex, Suicide, and the Riddle of Grief
4 The Radioactivity of Trauma

PART II
OUR PARENTS:
THE SECRETS OF OTHERS
5 When Secrets Become Ghosts
6 Unwelcome Babies
7 Permission to Cry
8 Dead Brother, Dead Sister
PART III
OURSELVES:
BREAKING THE CYCLE
9 The Taste of Sorrow
10 The Cycle of Violence
11 The Unexamined Life

A Door Opens
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Galit Atlas
Praise for Emotional Inheritance
This book is dedicated to the memory of Lewis Aron.
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

Tap here to learn more.

In those days people will no longer say,
“The parents have eaten sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”
—JEREMIAH 31:29
 A Trace in the Mind

E some history of trauma. Every trauma is held

within a family in a unique way and leaves its emotional mark on
those who are yet to be born.
In the last decade, contemporary psychoanalysis and empirical
research have expanded the literature on epigenetics and inherited
trauma, investigating the ways in which trauma is transmitted from
one generation to the next and held in our minds and bodies as our
own. In studying the intergenerational transmission of trauma,
clinicians investigate how our ancestors’ trauma is passed down as
an emotional inheritance, leaving a trace in our minds and in those of
future generations.
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?
From a very young age, my siblings and I learned to recognize
what wasn’t acceptable to talk about. We never asked about death.
We tried not to mention sex, and it was better not to be too sad, too
angry or disappointed, and absolutely not too loud. My parents didn’t
burden us with unhappiness, and they believed in optimism. When
they described their childhoods, they were painted in beautiful
colors, hiding trauma, poverty, and the pain of racism and
immigration.
Both my parents were young children when their families left
everything behind and emigrated to Israel, my father from Iran and
my mother from Syria. Both grew up with six siblings in poor
neighborhoods and struggled not only with poverty but also with the
prejudice that came with being from an ethnic group considered
inferior in Israel in the 1950s.
I knew that my father had two sisters who got sick and died when
they were toddlers, before he was born, and that as a baby he was
very ill himself and almost didn’t survive. His father, my grandfather,
who was blind from birth, needed my father to go to work with him, to
sell newspapers on the street. As a child I was aware that my father
hadn’t gone to school and had worked to support his family since he
was seven years old. He taught me how to work hard, as he longed
for me to get an education that he could never afford for himself.
Like my father, my mother had also struggled as a baby with life-
threatening illness. She had lost her oldest brother when she was
ten years old, an enormous trauma for the whole family. My mother
didn’t have many childhood memories and therefore those are
unknown to me. I’m not sure my parents ever realized how similar
their histories were, how their bond was silently tied with illness,
poverty, early loss, and shame.
Like many other families, our family colluded and shared the
unspoken understanding that silence was the best way to erase what
was unpleasant. 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.
There were wars where I grew up, and so often we, the kids, felt
frightened, not fully aware that we were being raised in the shadow
of the Holocaust, and that violence, loss, and endless grief were our
national heritage.
The Yom Kippur War, by then the fifth war since 1948, broke out
when I was only two years old. My sister was born on the first day of
that war. Like all the other men, my father was called to serve in the
army. I was left with a neighbor while my mother went alone to the
hospital to give birth to my sister. The massive attack on Israel took
everyone by surprise, and many wounded soldiers were rushed into
the hospitals, which then became too crowded for women in labor.
The women were moved to the hallways.
I don’t remember a lot from that war, but as it usually is with
childhood experiences, it was all perceived as pretty normal. For
years to come, the school had a monthly “war drill.” We children
practiced walking quietly into the shelters, happy that instead of
studying we were playing board games in the shelter and joking
about the missile that might hit or the terrorists who would come with
weapons and take us hostage. We were taught that nothing should
be too difficult to handle, that danger was a normal part of life, and
that all we needed was to be brave and keep a sense of humor.
I was never afraid at school; only at night did I worry that a
terrorist might choose our house from all the other houses in the
country, and then I wouldn’t be able to save my family. I thought
about all the good places people used to hide during the Holocaust:
the basement, the attic, behind the library, in the closet. The secret
was to make sure to always keep quiet.
But I wasn’t so good at being quiet. As a teenager, I started
making music, wondering if all I needed was to make noise and be
heard. When I stood on stages, music was the magic. It gave voice
to what I could not otherwise speak out loud. It was my protest
against the unspoken.
Then, in 1982, the Lebanon War erupted and I was old enough to
recognize that something terrible was happening. To the school’s
memorial wall were added more and more names, this time of young
people we knew. Parents who had lost their boys came to the school
for the ceremony of Memorial Day. I was proud to be the one singing
for them, looking straight into their eyes and making sure I didn’t cry
because then I would ruin the song and someone else might have to
take my place behind the mic. We ended the ceremony every year
with “Shir La Shalom” (“A Song for Peace”), one of the most well-
known Israeli songs. We sang for peace from the depth of our
hearts. We wanted to have a new beginning and liberate our future.
I grew up on our parents’ promise that by the time the children
were eighteen and had to serve in the army, there would be no more
wars. But that, to this day, has not happened. I served in the army as
a musician, praying for peace, traveling from one army base to
another, crossing borders, singing for the soldiers. I was a nineteen-
year-old soldier when the Gulf War started.
We were on the road and the rock-and-roll music we played was
loud, so loud that we had to make sure we didn’t miss the sound of
the sirens and could run to the shelters to put on our gas masks in
time. At some point, we decided to give up on the masks and the
shelters and instead ran to the roofs every time there was a siren so
we could watch the missiles from Iraq and try to guess where they
would fall. After each thunderous explosion, we would go back to our
music and play it even louder.
We sang for the soldiers, who were also our childhood friends,
neighbors, and siblings. And when they teared up, as they often did,
I felt the power of touching another heart with my own, voicing the
unspeakable. Our music expressed so much of what no one could
say out loud: that we were scared but were not allowed to admit it
even to ourselves, that we were still too young and wanted to go
home, fall in love, travel far away. That we wanted normal lives but
we were not sure what “normal” meant. Making music and singing
out loud were meaningful and liberating. It was the beginning of my
journey of a search for truths, the unveiling of the emotional
inheritance within me.
Eventually, some years later, I left my homeland, moved to New
York City, and began studying the unspeakable—all those silent
memories, feelings, and desires that are outside awareness. I
became a psychoanalyst, exploring the unconscious.
The analysis of the mind, like a mystery story, is an investigation.
We know that Sigmund Freud, the great sleuth of the unconscious
mind, was a big fan of Sherlock Holmes and maintained a large
library of detective fiction. In some ways, Freud borrowed Holmes’s
method: gathering evidence, searching for a truth beneath the
surface truth, seeking out hidden realities.
Like detectives, my patients and I try to follow the signs and listen
not only to what they say but also to their pauses, to the music of
that which is unknown to both of us. It is delicate work, collecting
reminiscences of childhood, of what was said or done, listening to
the omissions, to stories untold. Looking for clues, piecing these
together into a picture, we ask, What really happened and to whom?
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.

I after World War II when psychoanalysts first began

examining the impact of trauma on the next generation. Many of
those analysts were Jews who had escaped Europe. Their patients
were Holocaust survivors and later the offspring of those trauma
survivors, children who carried some unconscious trace of their
ancestors’ pain.
Starting in the 1970s, neuroscience validated the psychoanalytic
findings that survivors’ trauma—even the darkest secrets they never
talked about—had a real effect on their children’s and
grandchildren’s lives. Those relatively new studies are focused on
epigenetics, the nongenetic influences and modifications of gene
expression. They analyze how genes are altered in the descendants
of trauma survivors and study the ways in which the environment,
and especially trauma, can leave a chemical mark on a person’s
genes that is passed down to the next generation. That empirical
research emphasizes the major role that stress hormones play in
how the brain develops, and thus in the biological mechanisms by
which trauma is transmitted from generation to generation.
A large body of research done at the Icahn School of Medicine at
Mount Sinai Hospital by Dr. Rachel Yehuda, director of traumatic
stress studies, and her team reveals that the offspring of Holocaust
survivors have lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps the
body bounce back after trauma. It was found that descendants of
people who survived the Holocaust have different stress-hormone
profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety
disorders. Research indicates that healthy offspring of Holocaust
survivors as well as of enslaved people, of war veterans, and of
parents who experienced major trauma are more likely to present
symptoms of PTSD after traumatic events or after witnessing a
violent incident.
From an evolutionary perspective, the purpose of those kinds of
epigenetic changes might be to biologically prepare children for an
environment similar to that of their parents and help them survive,
but in fact they often leave them more vulnerable to carrying
symptoms of trauma that they didn’t experience firsthand.
This research is not surprising for those of us who study the
human mind. In our clinical work we see how traumatic experience
invades the psyche of the next generation and shows itself in
uncanny and often surprising ways. 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.
We inherit family traumas, even those that we haven’t been told
about. Working in Paris with Holocaust survivors and their children,
the Hungarian-born psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas
Abraham used the word “phantom” to describe the many ways in
which the second generation felt their parents’ devastation and
losses, even when the parents never talked about them. 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.
Emotional Inheritance interweaves my patients’ narratives and my
own personal stories of love and loss, personal and national trauma,
with a psychoanalytic lens and the most recent psychological
research. It describes the many ways in which we can locate the
ghosts of the past that hold us back and interfere with our lives.
Everything we do not consciously know is relived. It is held in our
minds and in our bodies and makes itself known to us via what we
call symptoms: headaches, obsessions, phobias, insomnia, can all
be signs of what we have pushed away to the darkest recesses of
our minds.
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?
Those and other questions are explored on the path to setting
free the parts of ourselves kept in captivity by the secrets of the past.

T born on the couch, in the intimate dialogue between

my patients and me. With their permission, it introduces their
emotional inheritance, unthinkable trauma, and hidden truths, as well
as my own, as we move beyond the legacy of trauma. I explore
feelings that are forbidden, memories that our minds forget or
trivialize, and pieces of our history that our loyalty to those we love
doesn’t always allow us to truly know or remember. Each story
presents its own unique way of examining the past while looking
forward to the future. When we are ready to unpack our inheritance,
we are able to confront the ghosts we carry within.
In the book, I describe the many faces of inherited trauma, its
impact, and how we move forward. Part I focuses on the third
generation of survivors: a grandparent’s trauma as it presents itself
in the grandchild’s mind. I look into the secrets of forbidden love, at
infidelity and its relation to intergenerational trauma. I investigate the
ghosts of sexual abuse, the effects of suicide on the next
generations, and the remnants of homophobia in the unconscious
mind. 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.
Part II focuses on our parents’ buried secrets. It explores
unspeakable truths from the time before we were born or from our
infancy. Those truths, although not consciously known to us, shape
our lives. I discuss how one can become frozen from the loss of a
sibling, I introduce the idea of “unwelcome” babies and their death
wish as adults, and I analyze a soldier’s trauma and masculine
vulnerability as revealed in the therapeutic relationship.
Part III searches for the secrets we keep from ourselves, the
realities that are too threatening to know or that we can’t fully
process. These are stories of motherhood, of loyalties and lies,
physical abuse, friendship and painful loss, demonstrating how often
something is, in fact, known to us even as it is kept in a hidden place
in our minds.
The secrets we keep from ourselves are meant to protect us by
distorting reality and to help us hold unpleasant information far from
our consciousness. In order to do that, we use our defense
mechanisms: we idealize those we don’t want to feel ambivalent
about, identify with the parent who abused us, split the world into
good and bad in order to organize the world as safe and predictable.
We project into the other what we don’t want to feel or what makes
us too anxious to know about ourselves.
It is the emotional defense mechanism of repression that
trivializes our memories and strips them of meaning. Repression
protects us by splitting a memory from its emotional significance. In
those cases, the trauma is held in the mind as an event that is “not a
big deal,” “nothing important.” The disconnect between ideas and
feelings allows us to protect ourselves from feeling something too
devastating but also keeps the trauma isolated and unprocessed.
Our defenses are important for our mental health. They manage
our emotional pain and design our perception of ourselves and of the
world around us. Their protective function, however, also limits our
ability to examine our lives and live them to the fullest. Those
experiences that were too painful for us to entirely grasp and
process are the ones that are passed down to the next generation. 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.
Most of the personal stories that I tell here are accounts of buried
traumas from the past that were held silently between people, life
events that were not fully conveyed but still were known by others in
cryptic ways. It is the stories that have never been told, the sounds
that have often been muted, that leave us undone. I invite you to
come with me to break the silence, to trace and discover the ghosts
that limit our freedom, the emotional inheritance that prevents us
from following our dreams, from creating, loving, and living to our full
potential.
 PART I

OUR GRANDPARENTS
Inherited Trauma in Past Generations

W our phantoms. But as the psychoanalysts Maria Torok

and Nicolas Abraham once wrote, “What haunts are not the dead,
but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.” They were
referring to intergenerational secrets and unprocessed experiences
that very often don’t have a voice or an image associated with them
but loom in our minds nonetheless. 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.
This section focuses primarily on the third generation of survivors.
It turns a lens on the aftermath of the Holocaust, where repressed
trauma often turns into nameless dread and untold stories are
reenacted again and again. It explores the effects of early loss on
the next generations, looks into the ways a grandparent’s sexual
abuse might impact their grandchild’s life, and presents the secrets
of a grandfather’s forbidden love as they appear in a grandson’s
mind. When set against a backdrop of life and death, it is sometimes
the erotic that offers a lifeline, a way into the land of the living. That
which we don’t have permission to know haunts us and remains
mystified, rendering us inconsolable.
 1

LIFE AND DEATH IN LOVE AFFAIRS

E hour, twice a week, to get to her session with me.

She tells me that she hates driving, and how much she wishes
someone would drive her, wait for her outside my office, and then
drive her back home. She doesn’t need that person to entertain her;
they don’t even need to talk. It would be more than enough for her to
just sit next to the driver and listen to the music in the background.
I feel a wave of sadness listening to Eve describing herself sitting
silently next to the driver. I picture the little girl she used to be, trying
to be good and quiet, not to interrupt anyone, not to get in trouble,
pretending she doesn’t exist.
I asked her in one of our first sessions what her earliest childhood
memory was. She said, “I was five years old, waiting outside school
for my mother to pick me up, and she forgot. I figured that I had to sit
there and wait until my mother remembered. ‘Be patient,’ I told
myself.”
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.
Eve’s first memory conveys to me the experience of being
forgotten. Slowly it becomes clear that she was often left alone with
no parental supervision and that she grew up, the oldest of four
children, in a family where there was much neglect and emotional
deadness.
 I feel drawn to Eve. She is in her forties, her long brunette hair
flowing onto her shoulders, her green eyes usually covered with big
dark sunglasses. Eve takes off her sunglasses as she walks into the
room, then quickly sits on the couch. She greets me with a shy
smile, and I notice the dimple on her right cheek. She takes off her
high heels and stays barefoot, sitting crossed legged on the couch.
Eve is beautiful, and in some moments, when looking at me with the
eyes of a young girl, she seems lost.
I wonder if Eve’s mother eventually picked her up, and I try to
imagine how Eve felt waiting there for her, hiding her fear that her
mother might never come.
I ask, but Eve is silent. She doesn’t remember. In our sessions, she
often becomes dissociative, gazing out the window as if she is with
me but also not with me. Something about her is breathtaking, but at
times she seems flat.
Eve is frequently distant; she is careful about expressing intense
emotion, and she lapses into long silences.
I look at her and wonder if I, too, am assigned to be her driver, a
grown-up in her life, someone who will be there on time, take control,
and drive her to where she needs to be. I sit quietly, aware that it
might take a while for her to look at me or say anything.
“I was with him again last night,” she opens the session, referring
to her lover, Josh, whom she sees a few times a week.
Around 8 p.m. when his colleagues leave, he opens Line, the
Japanese app they use to text each other, and sends her a message
to come to his office. Eve explains to me that they needed a safe
way to communicate.
“When Josh first suggested we use this app, I thought he said
‘Lying’ instead of ‘Line,’ and I said to myself, ‘What a strangely
inappropriate name for an app.’” She laughs and then adds
sarcastically, “I think there should be a network for cheaters, maybe
a chat room where they share information and give each other
advice, like the groups they have for new mothers. Someone should
have made a business out of it, don’t you think? Millions of people
are lost and confused, not sure how to survive adultery.” She smiles
but seems sadder than ever.
 She doesn’t look at me. “Josh and I bought a membership to
SoulCycle as an alibi for meeting each other in the evenings. It’s a
good excuse to come home sweaty and go right into the shower.”
She pauses and adds, “Washing his smell off my body always
makes me sad. I would rather go to sleep with it.”
Eve takes a breath, as if she is trying to calm herself, and then
adds with a smile, “Josh thinks SoulCycle can make money from
selling an ‘alibi package,’ where people can buy false memberships
at a discount price.”
I smile back, even as I know that none of this is funny. There is so
much confusion, guilt, and fear in her witty way of telling me things.
Suddenly she is fully present and I feel the intensity of her pain. She
is alive, I think, and I wonder out loud if she wants to say more about
her love affair.
During our first session Eve told me that she was married and
had two children. Her daughter had just turned twelve and her son
was nine. She told me she had decided to start therapy because
something terrible had happened, something that made her realize
she needed help. Then she told me about Josh.
Eve spends a few evenings a week in Josh’s office. Josh is a
creature of habit and they have a routine: first they have sex, then
they order food, and when they have finished eating he drives her
home.
Eve tells me about their sex, first hesitantly and then in detail.
“With Josh, nothing is in my control,” she says, looking to see if I
understand what she means. She explains that in her submission to
him she feels held. She feels that he knows everything about her
and about her body, and that she can lose control under his
domination.
“He brings me back to life, do you know what I mean?” She
doesn’t wait for an answer.
Life and death, from the start, are strong forces in Eve’s narrative.
We begin exploring the links between sex, death and reparation, and
the uncanny ways these are related to Eve’s family history. Her
mother, I learn, had lost her own mother to cancer when she was
fourteen years old. For two years Eve’s mother took care of her
dying mother but a part of her died with her. Eve and I will slowly
realize how through sexual submission she gets in touch with her
longing to be taken care of, to stay alive and to repair a traumatic
past.
Eve looks at her watch and starts putting on her shoes, preparing
for the end of the session. Then she leans back and says quietly:
“When we are done and Josh drives me home, I become
emotional. I love having sex with him and I love when he drives me.”
There is another moment of silence, and she says, almost
whispering, “I look at him holding the steering wheel, a serious look
on his face, and I think that he is the most handsome man I have
ever met. And I want to kiss him but I know it’s not a good idea; after
all, we are not in his office anymore, and we make believe that he is
my car-service driver.
“He drops me off a few blocks from my building, and when I say
good night my heart breaks a little. I really don’t want to go upstairs,
back into the highway of my life. Josh knows exactly how I feel, and
without me needing to say anything, he tells me, ‘Don’t forget how
much I love you. I’ll see you on Wednesday. It’s very soon; it’s
sooner than you think.’
“I make a face and he knows that I think Wednesday is years
from now and that I will have so many feelings and thoughts that he
won’t be a part of until Wednesday, and he says, ‘I’m on our app. I’m
here, even if I’m not physically with you.’”
She puts on her sunglasses. “This is usually when I stop feeling
anything and leave the car.” I see that she becomes disconnected in
order to leave him, and that she does it again right before my eyes
as she tells me about it. I lose her to a long silence before she
leaves.

M patients come to see me because of my professional

writing and teaching on the subject of sexuality. I see men and
women who feel destroyed by a partner’s affair, others who had or
are having affairs, and those who are lovers of married people. Their
stories are different and their motivations are diverse, but all these
people reveal themselves to be tortured as they struggle with their
own secrets or with the secrets of the people in their lives.
While I am aware of the transactional aspect of every relationship,
I also believe in love. I believe in the power of attachment between
two people, in loyalty as one of the basic foundations of trust, and I
consider destructive and creative forces to be part of every
relationship. We love and at times we also hate the people we love;
we trust them but are also afraid of the injuries and hurt they might
cause us. 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.
Life, to some degree, is always about that tension between the
wish to destroy—ruin the love, goodness, and life itself—and Eros,
which represents not only sex, but also the urge to survive, create,
produce, and love. That tension exists in every aspect of our lives,
including in our relationships.
Psychological awareness helps us to identify and bring those
urges and wishes into consciousness, and to question our choices
and the choices of the people who came before us. When it comes
to affairs, that work is multilayered, and the distinction between
destruction and death, and survival and life isn’t always obvious.
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. Why does Eve have this
relationship with Josh? Why now? What part of it is about a need to
survive and bring herself back to life, and what part is attached to
death and destruction? In what way is her present life a reflection of
the lives of the women who came before and an attempt to heal not
only herself, but also her wounded mother and her dying
grandmother?
Infidelity is destructive in the sense that it always causes damage
to a relationship, even if that damage is at first invisible. But people
have affairs not only because they want to destroy or get out of their
relationships; paradoxically, infidelity is sometimes an effort to stay in
a marriage. Cheating is often a way to balance power in the
relationship or to fulfill needs that are not met. In many cases, while
the affair is a sexual acting out and an indirect way to express
negative feelings like hostility and anger, it is also a way to protect
the marriage from those feelings while maintaining a status quo
within the relationship.
Through sex, feelings that are not allowed in the relationship
itself, particularly aggression, find their expression. It is not unusual
for people to describe sex outside the marriage as more aggressive,
and sex in the marriage as more gentle and “civilized.” As partners
unconsciously protect each other from aggression, they numb the
relationship. When there is no room for aggression, there is usually
no sex either.
The same dialectic tension between life and death exists in
sexual desire and especially in long-term relationships. In his book
Can Love Last?, American psychoanalyst Stephen A. Mitchell
discusses the clash between adventure and security in sexual life.
Mitchell emphasizes that romance, vitality, and sexuality are factors
that make one’s life not only worth living but also worth cultivating
and savoring. Romance, he suggests, has a great deal to do with an
existential excitement about being alive. Over time, sexual romance
easily degrades into something much less enlivening or maybe even
deadening, because it thrives on danger, mystery, and adventure,
not the safety and familiarity of a long-term relationship.
Can we continue to desire the people we feel most safe with?
Mitchell asks. He suggests that it is the delicate balance between
security and danger, the familiar and the novel, that is the secret for
long-term love. In her innovative book Mating in Captivity,
psychotherapist Esther Perel elaborates on that paradox of
domesticity and sexual desire and works to help couples open a
playful space for adventure and therefore sexual excitement in their
relationships. Perel further develops those themes and others to
examine the complexity of infidelity.
A psychoanalytic investigation is a complex and nuanced journey
into one’s delicate heart. Danger and security, destruction and
construction, life and death, and the plight of multiple generations
appear, in different ways, in each and every one of those journeys.
During our first session together, Eve doesn’t take off her
sunglasses. She sits on the couch with her legs crossed and sobs.
“I messed up my life,” she says. “I don’t know, maybe I already
destroyed it. I’m not sure what to do.”
She tells me that her husband is a good man and that she has a
satisfying marriage.
“I actually love my husband,” she says. “We have such a sweet
family, my kids are so wonderful, and they are everything I have
always dreamed of. I have everything I wanted and maybe I’m just
too greedy.” She then tells me about the night that made her realize
that she had lost control of her life.
“We usually meet in his office, but that weekend was different
because both his wife and my husband were away, and we thought it
was a good opportunity for us to spend the night together. We never
did that before and I think both of us were excited but also anxious.”
She asked her babysitter to stay the night with the kids, and Josh
reserved a room in a hotel across the street from his office. Eve tells
me that if her husband looks at the app where they can see each
other’s location, he could easily find her. They had installed the app
earlier in the year so they could keep track of their daughter, who
had just turned twelve and had started walking to school on her own.
“The app became a huge problem, as I was aware that my family
could always see where I was. I know this doesn’t sound believable,
but I really hate lying,” she says, almost apologizing. “I would rather
not give any explanation than to have to lie. I decided to turn my
phone off that night, so I wouldn’t have to lie about where I was.”
She sighs. “Oh God. What a mess.”
Eve pauses, tears in her eyes.
“My night with Josh was even better than I had imagined it would
be. It is hard to put into words how I felt because I didn’t know a
feeling like that even existed. We were finally in a peaceful place,
just the two of us, and we had what seemed like an endless amount
of time. It felt like we were a real couple, completely devoted to each
other, completely in each other’s bodies and minds. We had sex for
hours and I kept whispering in Josh’s ear, ‘I love you. You make me
so, so happy.’
“‘I know, baby, I’m happy too,’ he said.
“‘Do you think we can make this place our home?’ I asked him,
referring to the small hotel room that seemed so perfect in that
moment.” Eve lifts her head and looks at me, “As I tell you this now, I
realize that I just projected all my wishes on that stupid hotel room. I
feel like such an idiot. When we were lying down and I put my head
on his shoulder, I didn’t think about anything. Nothing else existed in
the moment. I was truly happy.”
Eve pauses briefly. She doesn’t look at me and continues. “There
is something unusual about being in Josh’s arms. Something about
his touch. It’s like he is both strong and gentle at the same time and I
feel that I totally lose myself when I’m with him. It’s a feeling I’ve
never had before. But I guess that was the problem. That’s why the
night ended so badly.” She sighs.
“I woke up at 6 a.m. and when I left the hotel I turned on my
phone. I had ten voice mails and many texts from the babysitter
saying that my son had had an asthma attack and that they were at
the hospital. I started sobbing, trying to reach the doctor on the
phone. I just couldn’t believe that I had let that happen. That was the
moment when I realized that I had lost control of my life and was in
big trouble. That’s when I decided to see a therapist.” She turns to
me and asks in a desperate tone, “What am I going to do? Tell me. Is
it crazy that I love him?”
Freud wrote that one of his least favorite things to do was to work
with patients who were in love. For Freud, love was an irrational
feeling and the person in love was in a semi-psychotic phase, out of
touch with reality. He believed that this phase did not allow the
patient to be in touch with any emotional reality other than their love
and erotic feelings, and thus genuine awareness was almost
impossible.
Irvin Yalom opens his book Love’s Executioner by saying that he,
too, doesn’t like to work with patients who are in love. He assumes
this is because of envy. “I, too, crave enchantment,” he writes with
honesty.
 No doubt the therapist, almost like the child who peeks into his
parents’ bedroom, is an “outsider” witness of his patient’s love affair
and might feel left out and jealous. However, the therapist doesn’t
identify only with the excluded outsider, meaning the child, but also
with the insiders, the ones who fall in love.
It becomes more complicated, though, when that love is an illicit
one and when there are many moral and ethical components to it.
Like most people, therapists can have many feelings about that kind
of love; they can have a moral conflict, feel guilty, or identify with the
betrayed partner; they can feel envious of the patient who is able to
do something they themselves may want to do; they might want to
make the patient a “better person” and help him or her end the affair;
they may even have a romantic fantasy about the patient running
away with her lover.
I sit with that complexity as I listen to Eve, aware that the search
for truth is always painful. It forces us to slow down and examine our
lives, to replace action with reflection. What is the real meaning of an
affair? Can Eve tolerate knowing the forces behind her infidelity?
Can she bear recognizing the pain she carries from childhood and
that her affair promises to soothe? Can she identify the ways her
mother and grandmother both live in her love affair? Will she be able
to survive?

E minutes late to our next session.

“I woke up late and hardly made it here,” she says as she walks
in. “There was so much traffic and I couldn’t find parking. I thought, ‘I
need a miracle to make it.’”
I listen to her and wonder if she wishes she hadn’t made it to my
office so she wouldn’t have to start the painful process of self-
reflection. But I also hear her surprise about the fact that she actually
made it, not just to our session, but maybe also to her life.
“It might be surprising to you that you made it to where you are—
becoming a functioning adult with a successful career, with a loving
husband and two children—maybe it seems like a miracle,” I say.
She smiles. “Sometimes I’m not really sure how that happened. I
can’t believe that this is actually my life. I know it might sound
superficial, but even the way I look surprises me sometimes,” she
says. “I was an ugly little girl, ‘strange-looking,’ as my parents used
to say.” She looks at me and adds, “But the truth is that now I don’t
know anything anymore. I feel like I’m turning myself back into the
girl I used to be, the girl who had nothing and no one. I feel that I
destroyed everything that I created and that I won’t have a second
chance. This time I won’t make it.”
Eve doesn’t remember much from her childhood. She remembers
being alone a lot, playing by herself under the desk in the bedroom
she shared with her three younger brothers. She used to make little
people out of paper and play family with them. They were the big
family she hoped she would have one day, a family with many
children who love and protect her and one another. The space under
the desk was their home and she covered it with a blanket and hid
there so she could play her imaginary games without interruptions.
“There was one scene I used to play again and again,” she tells
me.
“It was the girl’s birthday and none of the family members would
say ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. They ignored her, insulted and attacked
her. It was the worst day of her life and she would sit in the corner of
the house and cry silently.”
The scene always ended with a transformation: suddenly, in one
minute, everything changed. The rejected girl discovered that it was
all a mistake, a way for the family to hide a big surprise party that
they had planned for her.
“She realizes that it was just a trick,” Eve says in a childish tone,
and I know she is telling me about how as a child she hoped it would
all end up being a mistake, how she wished everything would
change one day. The wish for transformation was an important part
of her childhood fantasy. She dreamed of how she was going to
transform her ugliness into beauty, her desperation into hope, her
helplessness into power, hate into love, and everything that felt dead
into life. And it happened. The little girl was transformed into a
beautiful, powerful, and successful woman. She created the family
she’d always wanted. But when her daughter was twelve years old,
she suddenly felt empty, as if she were dying inside.
“And then I met Josh,” she says. She is silent for a moment,
turns, and gazes out the window. “He takes care of me as if I were a
little girl,” she says quietly, as if talking to herself. “He takes care of
me the way no one ever did, the way I imagine my mother took care
of her mother.”
I follow Eve’s associations and walk with her into her family
history, into the bedroom where her sick grandmother lay, Eve’s
mother, Sara, then twelve years old, lying next to her. I note that this
is the exact age of Eve’s daughter when her affair with Josh began.
Eve’s grandmother had been sick with liver cancer for two years.
She went through radiation treatment and chemotherapy and was in
a short remission, and then the cancer came back. She suffered
through more rounds of chemo but only became sicker and sicker.
Sara was fourteen years old when her mother died.
“My mother, like me, was the oldest of four children and the only
girl. She was her mother’s main caretaker and a responsible and
devoted daughter. She told me that for months her mother would lie
in bed all day with a high fever, and she would try to help, bringing
her ice and wet towels to control the fever. But nothing worked. As
time passed the fevers started earlier in the day and lasted all night.
My grandfather moved to sleep in the living room; my mother would
wake up in the middle of the night to check on her mother and would
run home after school to see if she needed anything.
“In the last few weeks her mother hardly opened her eyes. When
she did, it seemed like she was staring into space, not really able to
see anything. My mother wasn’t sure if her mother even knew she
was lying next to her anymore. Her skin became yellow and her
mouth was a little open all the time, as if she couldn’t hold it closed.
As toxins from the liver went into her brain she became confused
and once in a while whispered something that didn’t make any
sense, for instance, that they needed to feed the dogs, but they
never had dogs. My mother wondered if she was referring to a dog
she’d had as a child, but she never knew if that dog existed.
 “I don’t think she ever got over her mother’s death,” Eve says.
“She told me about the last days of her mother’s life many times, as
if telling me would help her process it better or as if she needed me
to know every detail so she wouldn’t feel so alone.”
In the last few days of her mother’s life, Sara didn’t go to school.
She would crawl into bed with her mother and try to listen to her
breathing. It comforted her to know that her mother was still alive,
that her mother could hear her. But Sara knew she couldn’t touch her
mother anymore; her body had become so sensitive, even a gentle
touch could hurt her.
A nurse from the hospital came to visit their house every day, and
one day she called Sara to the other room and told her that her
mother was going to die soon, in weeks or maybe days. She gave
her a little green book that described what to expect. But Sara didn’t
really believe it. She thought that if she stayed in bed with her
mother, she could keep her alive; that if she made sure she
synchronized her breaths with her mother’s, they would breathe
together forever.
On Sara’s fourteenth birthday, her mother took seven deep
breaths, each of them sounding like a sigh, and then one last breath.
She had a little smile on her face, but she wasn’t alive anymore.
Eve tells me this as if she is telling me about her own dead
mother. I have tears in my eyes but she doesn’t. She looks at me
and takes a deep breath herself. Is she making sure she is still alive?
She moves uncomfortably. “You mentioned before that my mother
was twelve years old when her mother got sick, and my daughter
was twelve years old when I started seeing Josh. I never made that
connection. When we have sex I always cry. Once in a while I ask
him to save my life, to take me somewhere, drive me far away.”
“It is not unusual for sex to become a desperate attempt to heal
our wounded parents and ourselves,” I say, and Eve starts to cry.
“It’s so awful,” she whispers. “If mothers get sick when their
daughters are twelve years old, and then they die, then of course I
had to save my life,” she says. I ask if she has a memory from that
age, from when she was around twelve years old.
 Eve looks at me, surprised. She doesn’t have many childhood
memories.
“How strange,” she says. “After all, my mother was the one who
raised me, the one who was home with the kids, but I don’t have any
real memories of times with her.” She pauses and gazes out the
window. I feel that she is suddenly gone again and I wait silently for
her to come back. It is in that moment that I identify the relationship
between her moments of numbness, her grandmother’s death, and
the impact this had on her mother.
I hear myself asking, “Is your mother alive?”
Eve looks startled. We both know that I would have known if her
mother, Sara, had died—she would have told me—but still I asked.
My question implies that her mother is in some ways dead, that she
died there in that bedroom with her own mother and could never be
a functional mother herself.
“I suddenly remember something,” Eve says. “When you asked
me just now if my mother was alive, I had the most disturbing image
from my childhood. I’m not even sure how it is related. An image of a
dead dog.
“When I was twelve years old I found a little puppy in the street,
right near our house. I petted it, and when I put it back in the street
and turned to go home, the puppy followed me. I remember feeling
so happy. I felt that the puppy loved me and I picked it up again and
decided to take the chance and bring it home. I knew my mother
wouldn’t be happy about it—she never wanted to have pets in the
house—but I made up my mind to do anything to convince her to
adopt this puppy.
“I remember walking into the house, giving the puppy some water
that I poured into a glass, and looking for my mother. She was in
bed. When I’m thinking about it now, she was always in bed,” Eve
says. “Ha, I never thought about it,” she adds, and continues. “I sat
next to her in the bed and whispered, ‘Mom, I found a puppy.’”
I listen to Eve and remember the dogs her grandmother
mentioned before she died. Eve continues.
“My mother didn’t open her eyes and just mumbled, ‘What do you
mean you found it?’
 “I said, ‘It followed me on the street and I felt bad leaving it there
alone. I thought we could take care of this puppy and—’
“My mom stopped me; her eyes were still closed. ‘We won’t,’ she
said firmly. ‘Bring it back to where you found it.’
“‘But, Mom’—I started to cry—‘I can’t. The puppy doesn’t have
parents; she doesn’t have anyone to take care of her. I promise you,
you won’t have to do anything. I will do everything. I’ll take care of it
myself. Please, Mom, please.’
“My mother opened her eyes.
“‘Eve, don’t make me angry,’ she said. ‘Did you hear what I just
said? Bring it back to where you found it. We won’t have dogs in this
house.’”
Eve looks devastated. She starts to sob. “I had no choice and
took the dog outside and left it on the street. The next day I found the
puppy dead across the street from our building. Someone told me
that she was hit by a car. I thought it was all because she tried to
follow me back home.”
Eve is weeping and I try to hold back my own tears. I feel her
anger and helplessness as she identifies with the abandoned puppy,
who, like her mother, doesn’t have a mother, doesn’t have anyone to
take care of her. That dog, which was thrown back to the street, was
also like herself as a child, abandoned again and again, walking
alone in the world, and hoping that someone would adopt her and
transform her life.
The dead dog represented all the deadness Eve carried inside
her: her dead grandmother, her traumatized and emotionally dead
mother, and her dead self.
The French psychoanalyst André Green coined the term “dead
mother,” referring to an unavailable, usually depressed, and
emotionally absent mother. Green described a traumatized mother
who is distanced and emotionally dead. He explained that it was
usually loss that caused the mother to die emotionally, and that the
child then became invested for the rest of her life in trying to connect
to the mother, in an attempt to revive and bring her back to life. 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.
The intergenerational aspect of deadness is everywhere in Eve’s
psyche. She carries that emotional inheritance and identifies with her
dead mother. Deep inside she, too, feels broken, deadened,
ashamed. As a child, she tried to transform that feeling in the
moments when she dreamed about creating life, about becoming a
mother, having a hundred children. She calculated that if she gave
birth ten times and each time she had ten babies, then a hundred
kids could be a pretty realistic number of children. They would be like
a family of puppies, snuggling together. She fantasized about a life
filled with love, as she was struggling with layers of death.
The wish for reparation colored Eve’s sexual desire. Sex served
as a way to actively bring herself into the heart of her family trauma.
Through the act of sex, we can touch the abyss, our sorrow, our
desperation.
“I need Josh to pin me down. And then I want him to touch me,
gently, all over,” Eve tells me. “I want him to hold me as tight as he
can, tie me to the bed so I can’t move, so he has all the power and I
have no other choice but to trust him to treat my soul with care. I
want him to make me feel better.”
Eve had sex with Josh, looked death in the eye, and fought it.
She insisted that this time she would win, this time she would fix all
the damage and the humiliation, she would revive and repair the
deadness in herself, in her past, in her present, and certainly in her
future. Her unconscious fantasy was that everything would be
reparable and forgivable and she could end the cycle and stay fully
alive as her daughter turned twelve.
Reparation is an impulse of Eros, of life. It is the strongest
element of creativity and is based on the wish to fix the damage and
to heal the people we love. Therefore it creates hope and helps one
feel more alive and mourn one’s losses. “Manic reparation” is a form
of reparation that is more defensive than productive. It is action
oriented and endlessly repeated, and it never achieves its goal
because it aims for triumph and absolute repair. It ignores the fact
that there are no new complete beginnings and that forgiveness and
recovery include pain.
Josh could not repair the losses in Eve’s life. In fact, every time
they said goodbye she felt helpless and relived those losses. In
therapy Eve realizes that the exact battle she believed she was
winning was a form of repetition of the past she was trying to avoid.
She became aware that the same thing she thought was saving her
life in fact made her an absent and dead mother to her own children,
and so instead of repairing her history she was repeating it. When
she realized that her son could have died, she had to stop the manic
cycle and face reality, the painful truth that what has been done
cannot be fully undone; it can only be processed and mourned.
At the end of our session, Eve puts on her shoes, opens her bag,
and grabs her keys, but she doesn’t put her glasses on right away.
Instead, she sits a minute in silence and then smiles.
“You know, I think I’m actually looking forward to driving myself
today. I’m not sure why I never realized this before: that being the
driver means I can choose where to go. I can go home. Or not. It’s
up to me.”
I watch Eve as she leaves my office, feeling hopeful for her for the
first time since we met.
 2

CONFUSION OF TONGUES

I’ when I get an email from Lara, who was my

patient nineteen years ago. Lara was only ten years old when her
parents suddenly ended her treatment and moved the family to the
West Coast. In the years since, I have thought about her often,
remembering her unusual story, wondering how she is doing. When I
see her name in my inbox it is almost as if I am expecting it.
“I’m writing to see if we could meet,” Lara writes. “I’m twenty-nine
years old now and there is so much I would like to talk to you about.
Do you even remember me?”
It is hard not to remember Lara. She was one of my first child
patients when I opened my private practice in New York City. I saw
her for two years and often felt uneasy thinking about her unresolved
family situation, which I have revisited in my head over all these
years.
Lara’s was one of the most confusing cases of sexual abuse that I
have treated, and as time passed and I studied the nature of the
intergenerational aspect of sexual abuse, I felt that I was able to
make better sense of it. Maybe it was my ongoing desire to share
those thoughts with Lara that made me hope that she would contact
me.
I was researching the topic of sexual abuse in childhood when I
started seeing Lara.
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.
Starting this research, I was not sure what I was looking for. What
was it that I really needed to know about myself and about the world
around me? What was my “me-search”?
That is the question I have asked every student I have mentored
since, with the genuine belief that deep inside we continuously try to
resolve the mysteries of our own minds. Feelings are always the
motivations for intellectual investigations, even as we rationalize the
world around us.
I started my research interested in what the Hungarian
psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi called “the confusion of tongues.”
Borrowing from the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Ferenczi
refers to the confusion between the language of tenderness that
children speak and the language of passion that abusers introduce.
The paradox of affection and exploitation is one of the most
prevalent confusions related to sexual abuse, one that leaves
children bewildered and tormented. Abusers don’t just threaten and
scare children; they often provide affection, promise security, and
make the child feel special. I focused my research on what children’s
play could teach us about their emotional experiences and
vulnerabilities, and I was particularly interested in documenting the
playing out with children of fairy tales, stories that contain emotional
material that carries universal meaning. I chose one fairy tale to
research with my young patients: “Little Red Riding Hood.”
About a week after my research proposal was approved, Lara
walked into my office. She opened the session by saying, “Today I
have an idea of what we could do.”
She and I usually played “family” together. She would ask me to
play the daughter so she could be the mother, and through that role-
play I not only learned but also felt how painful it was to be a
daughter in her family. Playing a daughter who, like herself, lived
with her parents, Hanna and Jed, and with her half brother, Ethan,
who was nine years older, allowed me to know what no one could tell
me in words: that they were all confused and scared and that Lara
was holding a family secret for all of them.
 “What is your idea?” I asked, and Lara surprised me with the
answer: “Can we play Red Riding Hood together?”
I was stunned by the coincidence. How did she know that this
was the fairy tale I had chosen for my research and that I had gotten
the approval to start only the week before?
The more experience I have with patients, the more I learn how
unconsciously connected we are to the people around us. With Lara,
it was the first time I’d experienced that, but it wouldn’t be the last.
Since then I have had many uncanny coincidences with my patients.
Through our dreams, reveries, and synchronicities we realize that we
know more about one another than we are aware of.
Lara smiled. “You are the daughter and I am the mother,” she
said.
I opened the closet. There were the new puppets I had just
gotten: a girl with a red dress, a mother, a grandmother, and a wolf.
“What about the grandmother and the wolf?” I asked. “Who plays
them?”
Lara paused. “We don’t need a wolf,” she said. “There are no
wolves in our story.”

A before my first session with Lara, I had met with her

parents, Hanna and Jed.
When working with children I always meet first with the parents, to
gather information about the child and the family and to discuss the
goals and process of therapy. Although the child is the one in
therapy, very often it is the parents who need the most help. Children
frequently express the reality of the family and become what we call
the “identified patient,” which means the one who seems like the
“sick” member of the family. Those children usually carry and
express the problems of the whole family as a unit. Most families
have one member who is unconsciously assigned to carry the
symptoms, that is, the family member on whom the family projects
the pathology. That person, often one of the children, will be the one
sent to therapy. When treating families as a system, we explore the
role of the child as the symptom carrier for the family.
 Lara was the “identified patient” in her family. She was in second
grade and would wake up in the mornings nauseous, holding her
stomach and crying that she didn’t want to go to school. Her parents
believed she suffered from social anxiety. After meeting with Lara, I
understood her anxiety a little differently, realizing that she was
worried about her mother, and therefore it was hard for her to
separate from her. It wasn’t that Lara didn’t want to go to school, but
rather that she wanted to stay home with Hanna, whom she
experienced as distressed and felt she needed to protect.
During that first session, Hanna and Jed told me an unusual and
frightening story. They explained that when Lara was only five years
old, her grandmother, Hanna’s mother, Masha, filed a complaint
against Ethan, Jed’s son from his first marriage, for molesting Lara.
Ethan was fourteen years old then, and social services were called
to the house to investigate. But no signs of sexual abuse were found
and the file was closed. Since then, Masha had filed eight more
complaints against Ethan. Each time there was an investigation but
no evidence was found and no charges were filed.
“Our family is torn. We don’t know what to do and whom to
believe,” Hanna told me during that first session. “I haven’t slept well
since it happened.”
Jed looked at Hanna and told me that Hanna was the one who
had raised Ethan. Jed’s first wife had died when Ethan was only
seven years old, and when Hanna had married Jed, she had
become a mother to his son. Hanna loved Ethan.
“Since her mother accused Ethan of molesting Lara, everything in
our family has changed,” Jed said. “We all became suspicious of one
another, not sure who lies and whom to believe, whom we need to
protect and whom to blame.”
Hanna started to cry. “I don’t believe he did it,” she said. “I really
don’t believe it. I know him so well and I know my mother; when it
comes to these things she can be a little crazy.”
“What are ‘these things’?” I asked.
Jed reached out and held Hanna’s hand. She didn’t answer.
“This situation has created a lot of tension between us,” he said.
“Hanna became depressed. She blames herself.”
 “What are you blaming yourself for?” I asked.
“I’m her mother,” Hanna said, sobbing. “I’m the one who should
know what the truth is.” She grabbed a tissue from the box and
looked at me. “I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong and my mother is right
and something terrible happened right in front of my eyes. I don’t
know how to protect my daughter.”
There was a long silence and then Hanna said, “I realize that
maybe it’s my mother that I should protect my daughter from. My
own mother, whom I love. But why would she blame him? Why
would she do that?”
Hanna and Jed hoped that someone would tell them what had
really happened. They yearned for the truth.
“What does Lara know about this situation? Is she aware of
anything?” I asked before we ended the session.
Jed looked at Hanna and they were both silent for a long minute.
“About a year ago, my mother came to visit and told Lara that
Ethan had sexually abused her.” Hanna sighed. “She told Lara that
all those years she had been trying to help her, ‘to scream her
scream’ she called it. But that no one listened to her. She told her
that she should never be alone with Ethan.”
Jed nodded. “From then on, Lara didn’t want to go to school
anymore. We thought she had become afraid of people and that’s
why we decided to bring her to therapy.”
The first session ended and my head was spinning. I felt
nauseous and realized that those were exactly the symptoms Lara’s
parents described Lara as having. I was curious to meet her.
The next day Lara arrived at her first session accompanied by
Jed. She held her father’s hand, her long black hair tied in a ponytail,
and didn’t look at me.
“I like your office,” she said quietly, looking around, a shy smile on
her face. I liked Lara from the first moment.
In that initial session, Lara told me about her family and described
nonchalantly how Ethan was accused of touching her
inappropriately.
“My grandmother doesn’t like my brother,” she said. “Maybe she
even hates him and she wants him to go to jail.”
 Lara talked about these facts without emotion, as if none of this
was about her. She turned to look at the dolls in the corner of the
room and asked if she could play with them.
For a year, during every session we played while we talked. I
observed the play and tried to listen to what she was teaching me
about her world, her emotional experience, and her vulnerabilities.
Since it was not clear whether Lara had in fact been sexually
abused, I decided not to include her in my research. It was surprising
then when she suggested that we play Little Red Riding Hood.
“It’s my favorite fairy tale.” She smiled. “Except there are no
wolves in our story, remember?”

Y was adapted by the Grimm Brothers, “Little Red

Riding Hood” made its debut in a version written by Charles Perrault
in 1697. Perrault’s story was adapted from the folktale, and in it he
described the moment the child met the wolf, referred to as “Mister
Wolf,” implying that the wolf stood for a human being.
In Perrault’s version, when Little Red Riding Hood arrives at her
grandmother’s house, the wolf is lying in bed and asks her to
undress and join him. Little Red Riding Hood is alarmed to see his
disrobed body and says, “Grandmother, what long arms you have,”
to which the wolf replies, “The better to hug you with.” Perrault’s
version ends with the wolf devouring Little Red Riding Hood,
followed by a short poem that teaches the moral of the story: that
good girls should be cautious when approached by men. As for
wolves, he adds, these take on many different forms, and the nice
ones are the most dangerous of all, especially those who follow
young girls in the streets and into their homes.
Perrault presented his readers with a somewhat refined version of
the popular folktale, which was originally filled with sexual seduction,
rape, and murder. His version speaks to the deceiving nature of nice
wolves, who hurt their victims while pretending to offer something
special, presenting sexual perversion as a form of love. It was to
become even more highly refined over the years to the point where
the sexual innuendo was entirely omitted and the story transformed
into a children’s fairy tale.
While fairy tales usually differentiate between good and bad
people in ways that help children organize their world and feel safe,
“nice wolves” leave children confused, unsure of what is dangerous
and what is not. Abused children end up feeling that they themselves
are bad, that they have done something wrong. That confusion of
tongues between love and perversion will haunt them for years.
“You are Little Red Riding Hood,” Lara says, and hands me the
puppet of the girl with the red dress.
“She is going to visit her grandmother,” she says and then
whispers, “The girl thinks the grandmother is an old lady but she is
actually a wolf.”
“A wolf?” I repeat her words and remember how she kept stating
there were to be no wolves in our story.
“You will see.” She smiles as if hiding something. “You will see
what I mean soon. The grandmother has a lot of secrets.”
But we don’t find out what the grandmother’s secrets are, nor do
we ever get to her house. Instead Lara instructs me, as Red Riding
Hood, to sit under a tree and wait for her to come pick me up.
“I will be back soon,” she says firmly.
She turns her back to me and starts playing on her own.
I am left to sit there for a long while, knowing that I have been
assigned to be the girl that Lara has been, lost alone in the woods,
overwhelmed by the secrets of others.
Sitting there in silence, waiting for Lara to come back, I feel like
the little girl I used to be, when I was left to wait for my parents to
come pick me up from the candy store. My “me-search” enters the
room and I realize what I am looking for. I suddenly remember what I
always knew.
I was seven years old, younger than Lara. I had started second
grade in a new school far from our home. During the first week of
school my parents had told me that we were planning to move to a
new apartment, closer to the new school, but until then I should wait
at the candy store after school and they would pick me up from
there.
 Every day, I walked to the candy store on the corner and waited,
exactly as they’d told me to do. Moses, the owner of the store, was a
kindly old man with a white mustache and a big smile. I liked him. I
believed that he liked me too, and I especially liked that he gave me
candy.
As a little girl, there was nothing I loved more than candy. My
mother, in an attempt to feed us healthy food, did not allow it in the
house. She used to serve us plates with sliced apples and dried fruit.
“Candy made by nature,” she called it.
When Moses offered me candy for the first time, I was thrilled and
ate it as fast as I could. He looked at me and smiled. “I see that you
really love it.”
The following day he offered me ice cream that he kept in a
freezer in the back of the store. “What kind do you like?” He had a
cone in each hand. “Vanilla or chocolate?”
I pointed to the vanilla one.
“Why did I know you would choose that one?” he teased, and
then asked if I wanted to come pick out something from the back of
the store.
“I will let you choose whatever you like,” he said.
Moses always smiled, and his kisses were ticklish and wet. Once
in a while his wife would come to the store and he would put a little
chair for me in the front and ignore me until she left.
When my dad arrived to pick me up, Moses would tell him what a
good girl I was and wave goodbye. “See you tomorrow.”
I liked waiting for my parents there, but as time passed I started
feeling nauseous.
“Moses gives you too much candy,” my mother would say. “That’s
why your stomach hurts.”
But that wasn’t the reason. I wasn’t sure why; I just knew that I
didn’t like it when he hugged me so tight. I still liked him even when I
didn’t.
In third grade I stopped liking Moses. We moved to our new home
and I tried to avoid walking near his store. Only years later was I able
to put it all together and understand what had really happened in the
first few months of second grade. I never told anyone, and I wasn’t
always sure if it had actually happened or if I’d imagined it.
Freud viewed memory as a fluid entity that was constantly
changing and being reworked over time. He referred to this dynamic
as nachträglichkeit, translated into English as “afterwardness,” which
means that early traumatic events are layered with new meanings
throughout life. Freud was especially focused on sexual abuse as an
event that would be reworked retrospectively as the child got older
and reached certain developmental phases. Sexual abuse in
childhood isn’t always registered by the child as traumatic. The child
is overwhelmed with something they cannot process or even make
sense of.
As time passes, the traumatic experience is reprocessed. In every
developmental phase the child will revisit the abuse from a different
angle and with different understanding. When that abused child
becomes a teenager and then an adult, when they have sex for the
first time or have children, when their child reaches the age they
were when the abuse happened—in each moment the abuse will be
reprocessed from a slightly different perspective. The process of
mourning keeps changing and accrues new layers of meaning. Time
will not necessarily make the memory fade; instead, the memory will
appear and reappear in different forms and will be experienced
simultaneously as real and unreal.

N I first met Lara, it is a gloomy day in mid-

September and I’m about to meet her again. It is also my birthday.
In the intervening years, I’ve had three children. I have stopped
working with children and am now only seeing adults. My office is in
the same neighborhood as it was nineteen years ago, in downtown
Manhattan.
I open my door and look at the tall young woman who stands
there. I do not recognize her.
“I grew up quite a bit.” She smiles as if reading my mind. “Thank
you for answering my email so quickly, and for agreeing to see me.”
She sits on the couch and looks around.
 “I like your new office.”
I recognize her smile and these first words.
“Those were your exact words when I met you for the first time,” I
say, trying to learn something about her from the way she looks: the
black T-shirt, the black long silk skirt, her sneakers and blue nail
polish, and her long straight hair, which I think used to be curly. I’m
trying to read what has happened to her in the years since then.
Where has she been? Is she happy? Did she find out what really
happened?
“I know it’s your birthday today,” she then says to my surprise.
I nod and smile. Some things don’t change. She still knows more
about me than I expect.
“Don’t worry, I can’t read your mind,” she adds as if reading my
mind. “When I tried to find you, I googled you, and one of the first
things I found on your Wikipedia page was your birthday. I was
happy you scheduled our session for today. I really wanted to give
you a gift.”
Traditionally, therapists do not accept gifts from patients. The
contract with our patients is clear; there is no dual relationship, no
exchanges other than our professional services for an hourly fee.
Psychoanalyst and patient share a joint goal of trying to explore the
unconscious; therefore, it’s interesting to understand when and why
a patient brings a gift and what that gift represents. But in reality
nothing can make a gift feel unappreciated and dismissed more than
analyzing it.
Lara opens her bag and hands me a small puppet. It is a girl
wearing a red dress. Our Little Red Riding Hood.
She surprises me again.
“Do you remember?” she asks, and she suddenly sounds like the
little girl she used to be.
“Of course I do. I never forgot,” I say.
We look at each other. I like her as much as I did all those years
ago, and I wonder what has made her look for me now.
“I came to see you because I need your help.” She answers the
question I haven’t yet asked out loud.
 We start where we stopped years before. Lara tells me about her
family’s move back then to the West Coast. It was sudden; she didn’t
even have a chance to say goodbye.
“In retrospect maybe we were running away,” she says. “Running
away from the unhappiness my family lived in. But the unhappiness
followed us and in fact only got worse.”
The tension between Lara’s parents, Hanna and Jed, became
intolerable, and four years later, they got divorced. Jed lost his job
and had to move to work in Denver. Hanna grew even more
depressed and was hospitalized. Lara found herself alone, and at
the age of fourteen she had to move yet again, this time to live with
her grandmother Masha.
Lara talks and I feel sad and worried. How was it for her to move
again, to separate from both her parents? To live with her
grandmother, whom she used to have mixed feelings about?
“At that point things actually got better,” she continues. “My
grandmother was wonderful and my life with her was so much
easier. I realized why my mother loved her so much. She supported
me and understood how hard this new living situation was for me.
She was caring and gave me everything I needed. Once a week we
traveled together to visit my mother in the hospital, and once a
month we visited my father. At some point, after my mother was
discharged, I made the decision to stay and live with my
grandmother permanently.”
I listen to Lara and remember the way Hanna used to talk about
her mother, defend her, describe how in spite of the fact that she
believed her mother was responsible for the break in their family, she
loved her and could never fully blame her. When Jed expected
Hanna to cut her mother out of their life, she refused. Now Lara
expresses the same feelings about her grandmother. Something has
changed since her grandmother was our bad wolf.
“My grandmother grew up in Russia with eight siblings,” Lara tells
me. “She is the youngest and the only one who is educated. She
values education and encouraged me to go to graduate school. In
fact, she’ll be paying for my doctoral degree,” Lara says and then
smiles shyly. “I decided to study psychology. I was just accepted into
a PhD program.” Then she starts giggling. “Maybe I want to be you. I
mean, as a child, therapy was the only time I didn’t feel alone. I felt
that you really wanted to know me.”
Lara takes a deep breath. She looks tired and I see how hard she
tries to be likable, easygoing, not depressed like her mother. She
was always tuned in to others, making sure she was not a burden on
them and instead taking care of those around her.
“You said you needed my help.” My voice sounds softer than
usual as I ask, “Tell me, what brings you here today, Lara?”
Lara stares out the window for a long time.
“Your old office used to have big windows looking at Grace
Church, I remember,” she says, still gazing outside. “There was a
coffee place across the street and I used to sit there with my father
every week after therapy. He would order fresh mint tea and a
croissant, and I would get a baguette and use all the chocolate
spreads that were on the table. Every week we would sit there
silently, eating and not looking at each other. He never asked me
how therapy was. Maybe he was too afraid to know. And I didn’t
think about anything else but the sweet spreads that my mother
didn’t like me to eat and that made the end of a session less bitter. I
never liked separations.
“I remember sitting across the street, staring at the entrance of
your building, hoping to see you walk out and wave to me. I didn’t
want you to meet anyone else after I left. I wanted you just for
myself. And I wished that my father would say something, ask me
something, it didn’t matter what. Even one question would have been
enough, so we wouldn’t have to sit there in silence. I wished that he
would wonder out loud if I liked the spreads and which one I liked
most. I would point to the hazelnut chocolate, and maybe then I
could tell him about Little Red Riding Hood’s basket that we packed
just before the end of the session and how I put unhealthy candy in it
and nothing else. I wished that he would smile and say that he knew
I loved sweets because he noticed that I ordered the spreads after
therapy every time. But he didn’t ask anything, and I wasn’t sure that
he noticed what I was eating or anything else about me.”
Lara pauses and looks straight into my eyes.
 “There are many questions from my childhood that were never
asked. There was no grown-up who could know the answers. There
is a mystery that I wasn’t able to resolve on my own,” she says, and I
know what she is talking about.

L I start meeting again once a week. She begins her

doctoral program, trying to find the topic for her dissertation, her “me-
search.” Her mind will lead us to the questions that were never
asked. Her research question will be born in that void and so will the
truth.
It is a winter day when Lara comes in holding an old picture; in it
she is thirteen years old, with a backpack on her shoulders. She is
wearing gym clothes and is smiling at the camera.
“This is from the time before my parents got divorced,” she says,
and I recognize the girl in the picture; she looks very much like the
girl I knew.
“I will never forget that day; it’s when I got my period for the first
time. My mother took this picture and then called my grandmother to
tell her that the ‘aunt was visiting’ or something funny like that.” She
pauses.
“I heard them fighting for the first time. My mother was crying and
yelling at my grandmother. I couldn’t hear what my grandmother was
saying but I knew it was bad. I knew she made my mother very upset
and I felt terrible. I thought it was all because of me.
“It was the one time I remember asking directly: ‘Mom, what
happened?’
“‘It’s nothing; it’s between me and Grandma,’ my mother said, but
I didn’t give up. ‘What did she say? Why are you crying?’”
Hanna told Lara that her mother had asked her to cut Lara’s hair
short.
“My mother told me that and started crying again. She thought it
was the meanest thing one could do to a girl. She thought it was
crazy. She told me that when she was about my age and got her
period for the first time, my grandmother took her to the barber and
without further explanation had her hair cut short. She remembered
looking in the mirror and the tears running down her cheeks. ‘I look
like a boy,’ she sobbed.
“‘Why did she do that?’ I asked, but my mother didn’t answer. I
asked again, ‘Mom, why did Grandma do that to you when you were
my age?’
“‘Sometimes it’s hard to understand Grandma,’ my mother
answered. ‘She brought strange traditions from her country, from her
own childhood, who knows.’”
Lara and I are silent. I wonder if she has the same thought I have.
Does she realize that her grandmother was trying to protect her
daughter by making her look like a boy and not a girl? Did she try to
protect her daughter, and now her granddaughter, from sexual
abuse?
No one wanted to know. No one ever asked.
I remain silent, asking myself if Lara is ready to question her
family history.
Our wish to know everything about our parents is a myth.
Children are in fact often ambivalent about learning too much about
their parents. They don’t want to know about their parents’ sexuality
and often try to avoid knowing intimate things from their history.
“I need to know what really happened,” Lara says decisively and
points her finger at the girl in the picture.
The girl in the picture smiles a fake smile.
“My grandmother,” she says, touching her long straight hair, “was
always so protective of me. She accused Ethan of abusing me, but
then after my parents got divorced that was all forgotten. No one
talked about it anymore. That was strange.”
Lara looks severe. She suddenly seems much older than her
twenty-nine years. She takes a brief glimpse at her watch,
calculating how long we have until the end of the session. I know she
needs time to think through her history.
“When I lived with my grandmother she used to scare me,” she
says. “She used to repeat that I had to be careful. She would tell me
strange things, for instance, that I needed to wear underwear to bed,
otherwise worms would get into my vagina. She would whisper it and
I remember feeling nauseous. Every time she talked about my body
she would start whispering. When it came to sex her boundaries
were strange. She talked about inappropriate things as if they were
normal and about normal things as if they were perverse. Her
whispering made me feel dirty, as if she had dark secrets that came
out at night, and then in the morning she would be my loving
grandmother again.”
“When you were ten years old and we played Little Red Riding
Hood, you told me that the grandmother in the story had a lot of
secrets,” I say. “‘You will see,’ you used to repeat, ‘you will see.’ But
we never found out what those secrets were. Maybe you are ready
now to ask the questions that were never asked.”

L meet with her grandmother Masha. She wants to

learn about Masha’s childhood and hopes to find her own answers
there.
Masha grew up in a chaotic household with very few resources.
Her parents went to work early in the morning and came back late at
night. Her oldest sister, who was thirteen, became her main
caretaker. Masha told Lara that she always felt her mother didn’t
want her, that deep inside, her mother regretted having so many
children. Masha was a shy girl and a good student. Excelling at
school was her way to feel special and worthy.
One night, when Masha was ten years old, she had a bad dream.
She often had bad dreams but knew she couldn’t wake her parents
up or they would be upset with her. She sneaked into her fifteen-
year-old brother’s bed. Her brother was the smartest; he was funny
and brave and the one she admired the most.
He kissed her.
From then on her brother came into her bed every few nights. She
would make believe she was asleep and wouldn’t make any noise.
He would touch her gently and never hurt her. In the morning they
behaved as if nothing had happened.
It was when Masha was about thirteen and got her period for the
first time that her mother told her in a very matter-of-fact way that
she shouldn’t let her brother in her bed anymore.
 “Do you mean her mother knew?” I can’t stop myself as I interrupt
Lara, who is still shaken by what she learned.
Lara nods. “Yes, but they never talked about it. She never told
anyone.”
Unprocessed experiences always find ways to come back to life,
to reenact themselves again and again. Masha’s repressed memory
came to life in the typical way repressed memories do. It snuck into
the mind unexpectedly, triggered by later events. For Masha, Ethan
and Lara were a reminder of her and her older brother. That close
relationship between a brother and a sister awakened her own
repressed memory, and she felt the urge to give Lara the protection
she never had, to be the parent she herself had always wanted. Her
request that Lara’s hair be cut short was an attempt to protect Lara,
in the same way that Masha believed she protected her daughter,
Hanna, when she became a woman. Through Lara, Masha relived
her own sexual abuse, which she could never fully process.
Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing traumatic experiences
that we know. The intergenerational aspect of sexual abuse is
unique in the way that each generation overwhelms the next and
inflicts on it the drama of their sexual trauma.
The next generation’s world is often sexualized in the same way
that the victim was sexualized as a child. They feel flooded by the
parent’s unintegrated sexuality and perplexing boundaries. As Lara
describes, innocent, trivial things, such as the underwear she wore
when she went to sleep, were filled with sexual meanings. The adult
—in this case Lara’s grandmother—who tries to make sense of her
own feelings often communicates to the child the confusion about
what is safe and what isn’t. The original confusion between
innocence and perversion is played out through the next generation,
with seduction, promiscuity, and prohibition all intermingled. The next
generation usually describes growing up with a constant, vague
feeling of violation that only later in therapy is understood to be
related to the original break of boundaries in their family’s history of
sexual abuse.
In her article “Enduring Mothers, Enduring Knowledge: On Rape
and History,” Dr. Judith Alpert describes how sexual abuse can
present itself in the mind of the next generation. Using her own
childhood experience, she discusses the way traumatic thoughts and
“memories” can be transmitted from parents and grandparents and
present themselves in the child’s mind as their own. That
phenomenon leaves everyone, the child and her caretakers, with the
confusion that is at the core of sexual abuse. As in Lara’s case, our
challenge is to hold all generations in mind—grandmother, mother,
and child—as victims of either sexual abuse or the intergenerational
inheritance of sexual abuse.
Masha, who was reliving her own unprocessed trauma,
devastated her family with the idea that Lara’s brother sexually
abused her. Lara became more and more overwhelmed. It was as if
she were reliving her grandmother’s repressed feelings. Through the
family’s ongoing rumination and the premature introduction of sex,
Lara felt the intrusion into her body and thus the scene of sexual
abuse was reenacted.
“When I was sitting with my grandmother last week and she told
me about her childhood, I cried. She didn’t,” Lara says, and tears
drop down her cheeks. “I tried to listen to her the way you listen to
me, and to help her understand that she could tell me anything and I
wouldn’t judge her, that I really wanted to know her.
“At some point she stopped and said she didn’t want to talk about
it anymore. But she kept talking and I didn’t say a word. She started
blaming herself, saying it was she who went into his bed first. Then
she started to question her memory and said that it all sounded
much worse than it actually was, that things were different then.
“Before we went to sleep she made me a cup of tea and served it
with a slice of the chocolate cake she had baked for me.
“‘I know how much you like chocolate,’ my grandmother said, and
hugged me. Then she held my shoulders, making sure I looked at
her. ‘Lara, please don’t take my problems on you,’ she said. ‘I don’t
want you to be sad because bad things happened to me. Worse
things happen to people. That’s life; my life isn’t so special.’
“‘You had to keep a secret for so many years, Grandma,’ I said,
and hugged her as tight as I could. But she just kept nodding. ‘I
didn’t keep a secret. It was something I didn’t always remember. The
secret kept itself.’”
“I think I found my ‘me-search,’” Lara tells me as she wipes her
tears.
She will go on to study the tormenting and deceptive impact of
incest and sexual abuse on the next generation, those aspects that
are hard to research, as they are seemingly irrational, puzzling, and
unformulated experiences, but that Lara lived through in her own
childhood. We both recognize that one way to face that transmission
from generation to generation is to process those experiences and
help others process and own them, too. Demons tend to vanish
when we turn on the lights.
 3

SEX, SUICIDE, AND THE RIDDLE OF

GRIEF

“I’ ,” L whispers, looking straight into my eyes.

“Do you know what I mean?” He then concludes decisively, “You
know what I mean. Of course you do.”
Leonardo started coming to see me two years earlier, right after a
breakup with his partner, Milo. In the first months, he couldn’t stop
crying. He said that although he knew he and Milo never got along,
his pain was intolerable.
Two years have passed and his agony has not diminished. He still
feels paralyzed, lost. He tells me that he is not ready to meet anyone
else and fears that he will remain sad forever.
“Somehow I’m stuck,” he says, and we agree that at this point it
seems like his grief is not just about Milo anymore. We try to
understand what it is that he lost when that relationship ended.
Separations are emotional deaths that we have to mourn. In
breakups, we always lose more than just the person we love. We
lose a life, a future, everything that we have dreamed about and
hoped for. And while we know whom we have lost, we might not
understand what we have lost.
Leonardo and I try to figure out what it is that he keeps mourning.
“I want to move on,” he says. “Milo and I were together for only a
year and I have been grieving for two years already,” he says,
irritated. “I wish you could program my brain and delete parts of my
memory so I could forget my past and move forward.”
 I understand that the ongoing pain makes him wish he could
erase the past and never look back. He feels haunted by the past.
But it is not yet clear to either of us why.
“I don’t love Milo anymore, and still, I feel like I have lost a part of
myself, and now I’m supposed to function without it. And it hurts so
much,” he says. “How do people ever recover from a loss without
feeling that a part of them is gone forever? Do they ever fully
recover?” he asks, diving right into the riddle of grief.
Freud went back and forth in framing and reframing his thinking
on loss. One of the questions he kept investigating was how much
people can let go of their loved ones, or whether they always keep a
part of themselves connected to the love object.
Freud’s thinking was influenced by his wish to understand his own
grief. He suffered painful losses, including the death of his daughter
Sophie from complications of the Spanish flu and the tragic death of
his beloved four-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Heinele. According to
his biographers, the death of his grandson was the only occasion in
Freud’s life when he shed tears and described himself as depressed.
At first, Freud explained that the grief process was about letting
go and breaking the tie to the one we have lost. From that
perspective, a healthy process is when the drive to live is stronger
than the wish to reunite with the dead (what he called “the death
instinct”), and so we slowly detach and loosen our “cathexis,” the
energy invested in the lost person.
Later, Freud developed his thinking to differentiate between
mourning and melancholia. He described that in mourning the world
feels poor and empty, while in melancholia, the person herself feels
poor and empty. She loses interest in the outside world, she loses
the capacity to love, and her self-esteem is diminished. That
melancholia, according to Freud, is an unconscious process in
which, instead of detaching and withdrawing the emotional
investment from the lost person, the melancholic preserves and
keeps that person alive inside them through identification with the
dead. If the person is me and I am them, then there is no loss.
Keeping the lost person caged inside denies the loss, but at the
same time it holds the melancholic person forever captive to it. As a
result, she loses parts of her own investment in life and vitality.
Whereas Freud’s two categories of mourning and melancholia
were defined as opposites, in reality both conditions take place in
different ways for different people. The process of mourning is
multilayered, and a certain identification with the person we have
lost, either to death or in a separation, will always take place. Like
Leonardo, many people feel that they have lost a part of themselves
with their loved ones. Many feel that they are dying with the dead,
and they struggle with melancholic identification with those whom
they have lost.
The question Freud and many after him kept trying to explore was
what a healthy mourning was, and how much we can actually let go
of our loved ones.
In 1929, Freud wrote in a letter to the Swiss psychiatrist and
founder of existential psychoanalysis, Ludwig Binswanger:

We know that the acute sorrow we feel after such a loss will
run its course, but also that we will remain inconsolable and
will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap,
even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains
something else. And actually, this is how it should be. It is the
only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to
relinquish.

Here, Freud emphasizes that the loved one is always present,

even as we slowly fill the gap of her or his absence. A part of us
moves on, and another, more hidden part remains “something else,”
connected and loyal to that love.
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.
The process of separation requires slowly letting go of the
attachment to the other person. In many cases, what is called
“melancholic grief” results from a loss that we are unable to fully
comprehend and therefore to let go. Leonardo and I wonder in what
way he has tried to grieve something he is still unable to fully know
or identify. It is impossible to grieve an unrecognized loss, yet
without the process of mourning, one’s life is imprisoned by death.

“Y I always tell you that I feel cursed?” Leonardo

begins the next session annoyed. “Now Milo chases me even in my
dreams.”
He tells me that he has dreamed about Milo again. In the dream
Milo was knocking on the bathroom door, calling his name.
“I don’t know what this dream even means,” Leonardo says. “He
knocked on that door, decisively, trying to force me to open it.” Now
he sounds angry. “He is trying to force me to come out.”
“To come out.” I repeat his words and both of us recognize the
association with being gay.
“You know that in my family being gay was never a big deal. I
always thought my mother was actually happy about me not bringing
girls home, and my father, until his last day, was so accepting. He
used to say that as long as I’m happy, that’s what’s important.”
Leonardo thinks for a moment and then adds, “I honestly think that it
was because his own father committed suicide when he was a child.
He just wanted me to be happy. He was afraid of sadness.”
I know what he is referring to. Leonardo’s grandfather had died by
suicide when his father, Jim, was a child. A few days before his
fortieth birthday, he had locked himself in the bathroom and hanged
himself. His nine-year-old son, Jim, knocked on the door and then
ran crying to his mother, who found his father after it was too late.
“For years this was our family secret,” Leonardo says. “My
grandmother never told people the truth. She would say that he died
suddenly. If someone pushed her, she would lie and say that he had
died from a heart attack that he’d had in the bathroom and drowned.
They were so ashamed of it, as if it meant something terrible about
us.”
 “What a secret to carry,” I say, and Leonardo nods. “What do you
think this dream means?” he asks me.
“In your dream, it is Milo who knocks on the bathroom door,” I say.
Leonardo looks a bit puzzled. “Yes, he begs me to open the door,
exactly the way I imagine my father, as a child, had. How strange.
What do you think it is? How is my breakup from Milo related to my
grandfather’s suicide?”
I don’t know the answer yet, but like Leonardo, I, too, recognize
that in this dream his father is replaced by Milo knocking on the
bathroom door. I ask him to tell me more.
“I think my father knew deep inside that his father was unhappy
and didn’t want to live,” Leonardo says. “I’m not saying he thought he
would kill himself, but the truth is that for years my father felt very
guilty, as if he could have saved him. He told me that story many
times; even in the last years of his life he still talked about it. Unlike
my grandmother, or maybe in reaction to her hiding it, my dad
refused to keep it a secret. I think I was maybe five years old when I
asked him how his father died, and he told me the truth. I guess he
didn’t want me to grow up with secrets.”
“Can you tell me that story again?” I ask. “Tell me what your dad
remembered about that day your grandfather died.”
“My dad told us this story so many times that I visualize it in my
mind as if it is a movie I’m watching,” he says. “I imagine him
pounding on the door, calling his father’s name, begging him to open
the door. And I see him crying into his pillow at night, blaming himself
for not saving his father’s life: if only he had been stronger he could
have broken down that door, or if only his father loved him enough
he would not have left him.”
Leonardo’s eyes fill with tears. “It is a pretty extreme thing to do,”
he says, “killing yourself when you have three young children at
home. I don’t know. I want to feel bad for my grandfather, but then I
mostly get so angry with him.”
Suicide, and especially a suicide of a parent, has serious
implications for the surviving family members. The immediate
survivors are overwhelmed with conflicting feelings of devastation,
sorrow, anger, and shame. It leaves them with so much guilt that in
order to cope they project it outside. The guilt turns into blame, and
the question—whose fault was it?—is often the main pathway to
releasing the intolerable guilt.
Suicide is traditionally explained as a redirection toward the self of
a murderous impulse originally aimed at others. That act of
destruction leaves a loaded inheritance for the next generations, who
will remain to hold the ghosts of suicide. They will struggle with the
darkness of the soul, with buried secrets from the past, and often
with their own suicidal wishes. Many of them will excessively invest
in the well-being of others as a way to compensate for the
unprocessed guilt. Their fantasy might be to save others in ways
they couldn’t save the person who killed himself.
Suicide can become a family myth, usually filled with unanswered
questions.
I wonder out loud, “What is the story behind your grandfather’s
suicide? Why did he do it?”
“I often ask myself that question,” Leonardo answers. “I’ll tell you
the craziest theory I have,” he says, but then he pauses and falls into
a long silence.
“It feels like you are holding a secret,” I say.
Leonardo smiles. “I wouldn’t call it a secret. It’s something I used
to joke about with Milo, a wild thought that I always had, that
Grandfather was actually gay and that his suicide was not the real
secret my family kept, but his sexuality.”
Leonardo leaves and I am left with the feeling that there are
layers of truths unrevealed, unspoken facts from his family history as
well as a hidden identification he has with his grandfather and with
what he believes led to his death. That underlying identification sent
Leonardo on an unconscious mission, which I locate in his dream—
to liberate the family from shame and from a destiny of self-
destruction.

I sessions, Leonardo and I dive into his family

history, trying to explore his secret identification with his grandfather:
the feeling that his dead grandfather lives in him and that Leonardo
needs to live out something for him and for the whole family.
There are many unanswered questions, but I realize that the
more we talk about his grandfather’s sexuality, the less space Milo
takes up in his mind. As time passes and his symptoms of
depression slowly subside, Leonardo becomes certain that he has
figured out his family secret, and he decides it’s time to find out the
truth.
“I didn’t want to feel that I was crazy and that I made up all these
theories about my family,” he tells me one morning, describing how,
at his cousin’s wedding the previous night, he decided to ask his
aunt.
“My whole family was there, my two aunts, my father’s younger
sisters, and their children. I really like my family and I was happy to
see them, and you know, I love weddings.” He smiles. “The pathos of
forever and ever until death do us part, isn’t that romantic?”
Leonardo is playful and I recognize his fantasy about romance and
death.
“My aunts were very close to my grandmother, and I figured this
was my chance to learn something about the years before my
grandfather died and know what’s only in my head and what is real.
Let me tell you, the good news is that I’m not crazy. The bad news is
that it’s worse than I imagined.
“After the ceremony, one of my aunts came to me in tears and
said how sad she was that my father hadn’t lived to celebrate that
day with us. She told me she was thinking about him the entire
evening. That gave me an opening. I asked if she was also sad that
her own father hadn’t lived to see her children and grandchildren.
“‘May he rest in peace,’ she answered. ‘I was a baby. I didn’t
know what it was to grow up with a father. You know, your father, my
older brother, was like a father to me.’
“And then I asked her, directly, ‘Why did he kill himself, do you
know?’ My aunt didn’t hesitate. ‘Leo, these were different times.
There was a big drama. He couldn’t live his life the way he wanted,
like you.’
 “I was so glad that you and I had talked about this for so long,”
Leonardo says to me. “Because I got it right away. I knew what she
was talking about. At first it irritated me because I thought she meant
gay people now are free to be who they are, which is obviously
totally not true. I tried to say that, but she cut me off.
“‘He had this secret and then my mother found out. She was
pregnant with me when they discovered that he used to have sex
with men. My mother never told me how it all came out. I only know
that there was a scandal. A few months later I was born and then my
father killed himself.’”
Leonardo pauses. “Can you believe that?” he asks. “My first
feeling was relief. I thought, ‘Thank God, I’m not crazy.’ But then I
thought, ‘Oh my God, my poor grandfather, how awful for him,’ and it
made me feel angry with my aunt for saying that he used to have sex
with men. What a dismissive thing to say, as if he was not a full
person with feelings.”
Leonardo pauses again. He doesn’t look at me, and we sit in
silence for a long minute before he continues.
“Now I understand why it was so important for my dad to make
sure I knew that he accepted my gayness. I always felt that it was
related to his father’s suicide but I didn’t know how. And I’ll tell you
something else. I think my grandfather was in love with a man and
that’s why he killed himself. I think he was in a relationship and that
he was forced to end it. The family devalued it by making it only
about sex, making it sound dirty so they could frame it as bad. But it
was about his identity. It was about love and loss. Can you see
that?”
Leonardo raises his head and looks at me. I notice the tears in his
eyes.
“This is what my dream was about,” he says. “My father’s wish to
save his father from a breakup that felt like death.”
“From a death your grandfather couldn’t fully mourn,” I say.
Philosopher Judith Butler describes the idea of “grievability,” the
notion that some things, lives, or relationships are not considered
valuable, and therefore if they were to be lost, that loss wouldn’t
register as such. It is only lives that were acknowledged by the
culture as having a value that we consider worthy of grief. Some
lives, some loves, some races, sexual orientations, and identities,
are seen as less valuable or are not recognized as lives at all. Butler
writes, “Grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.”
There is no way to grieve what is not considered lived. When love
isn’t recognized as such, it is not grievable, and one is left mystified
and inconsolable.
As in Leonardo’s case, the loss that couldn’t be fully mourned
lives in its raw form in the unconscious of the next generation. They
are left to process old losses that don’t fully belong to them and to
mourn what originally was ungrievable.

L I begin to piece together a picture of the context of

his loss of Milo: his grandfather’s struggle with his homosexuality
and his identity; his inability to mourn the loss of his illicit love; his
suicide, leaving behind a devastated little boy, Jim, who believed that
if his dad had only loved him enough he wouldn’t have left him.
Many layers of unprocessed loss. A known secret that shelters
another secret, a forbidden one.
For years, Leonardo’s father kept the gift he had made for his
father for his birthday, just a few days before he died. He had
created a small ceramic vase in the futile hope of making his father
happy for a day and keeping him alive. Jim had clung to this vase as
a child, and then for the rest of his life. When Jim died, Leonardo
inherited it, and he kept it on a shelf in his clothes closet.
But it wasn’t only the vase that he had inherited. It was also the
trauma and the losses of earlier generations, unprocessed losses
that were held in his closet and in symbolic ways lived with his own
belongings, until it was too hard to differentiate what was his and
what wasn’t.
Leonardo picks up his bag. “Maybe I’m not cursed after all,” he
says as he heads to the door. “Maybe this is just a sad story with a
hopeful ending.”
H the next session looking pleased. “I had a good week
and I even met someone,” he says. “I feel encouraged.”
He opens his bag. “Also, I brought something to show you.” He
pulls out a small box wrapped in layers of newspaper. “I had to bring
it in, just to show you how amazing this is.”
There it is, a small blue ceramic vase: his father’s vase.
“For years,” Leonardo says, “I imagined my father as a boy,
holding in his hands this gift he made at school for his father’s
birthday in his favorite color, blue. That gift that I saw so many times
as a child, and that I kept in my closet after my father’s death.”
Leonardo pauses and then exhales deeply in relief. “Only after
our last session,” he says, “did I realize what I’ve been using it for.”
He hands me the vase and I peek inside, where I see three
single, mismatched cuff links.
I look at Leonardo, puzzled.
He explains that he stored each of them there when they lost their
mate.
We look at each other and Leonardo shrugs and smiles. “They’ve
been waiting all these years for their loved ones to come back.”
 4

THE RADIOACTIVITY OF TRAUMA

I I , H Remembrance Day, Yom Ha’Shoah, is a

national holiday.
Each year, in mid-April, everyone observes two minutes of
silence. By 10 a.m. all children are standing in a circle in the
schoolyard waiting for the sound of the air-raid siren, signaling that
the silence is to begin. Everyone pauses whatever they are doing.
Pedestrians stop walking, diners in restaurants stop eating and stand
up, and on the busiest highway, every single car pulls to the side and
people step out to stand still. It is time to remember the six million
who were murdered during the Holocaust.
As children, we learned that terrible things can happen to people.
This wasn’t an explicit statement but a fact that—like a hot spice
added to our food—had become a regular ingredient in our lives. In
almost every apartment building there was someone from “there,”
the Europe of World War II, a Holocaust survivor. We usually knew
who those people were, even if we didn’t know their history, even if
we didn’t see the numbers tattooed on their arms, even if we were
often afraid of them, devastated by their life stories.
In the schoolyard, when the siren began, we tried not to catch
each other’s eyes, imitating the teachers, who kept their heads
down. We tried as hard as we could to stay serious, to feel sad, to
think about the concentration camps, the gas chambers, to imagine
our own families being there. It was important, we learned, never to
forget. But as hard as we tried, inevitably as the siren began one of
the kids would start giggling, and we would cover our faces, trying
not to burst into laughter.
 Nervous laughter during the Holocaust Day siren is a familiar
childhood memory of people who grew up in Israel, where horror
stories shape part of the national identity and a special form of dark
humor characterizes the younger generations.
Years later, in New York City, far from my homeland, I am
surprised by how many of my patients are second- and third-
generation descendants of Holocaust survivors. These high-
functioning, successful, and productive people all have something in
common: the ghosts of persecution who show themselves in
unpredictable ways and at unexpected times. Under the surface they
carry the trauma and guilt of the survivors.
I learn that from childhood, images and daydreams of the
Holocaust have been frequent visitors in their minds, even and
especially for those whose parents never talked about what
happened to their families during the war. The memories of the
Holocaust live inside them even as they are unknown to them, and
those invasive thoughts and images are often trivialized. Sometimes
I learn about them only years into the therapy.
When their stories are told, we recognize how that history has
shaped their present lives. We identify the ways in which the past
continues to play itself out in the present and how they live and relive
their families’ untold stories.

R ’ a Holocaust survivor. She mentions

this briefly during our first session when I ask about her family
history, but she doesn’t feel it is relevant to her current life. It
certainly isn’t the reason she came to therapy.
“So many things have happened in my family since. So many
good things. There is nothing else to say.” Rachel smiles and
apologizes. “Every family carries some trauma. This is our story, and
it happened so long ago. How many years since the Second World
War?” She looks at me and immediately answers, “More than
seventy, I think. A long time. My grandparents have already passed
away,” she says.
 Rachel’s grandfather was born in Budapest and he survived
Auschwitz. When the Second World War ended, he immigrated to
America, where he met Rachel’s grandmother, who came from a
Jewish family that had escaped Europe when the war started. They
fell in love, and a year later Rachel’s mother, their only child, was
born. Her grandfather never talked about what happened during the
war, and her mother described her childhood as a normal suburban
American one.
On the surface their family trauma ended when her grandfather
left Europe and left the past behind. Rachel came to therapy to talk
about other issues, to discuss her ambivalence about having
children, a topic that was a source of tension with her husband,
Marc.
I am always curious to understand my patients’ life choices—why
they choose to have, or not to have, sex, relationships, a family, a
career. As the narrative unfolds, the gaps between what people want
to have and what they can tolerate having become apparent. Why do
so many people want love but can’t find it? Want a career but can’t
succeed? Want to move forward but get caught in the same cycle
over and over again?
It is not unusual for people not to be able to handle or tolerate
having what they think they want. Beneath the urge to have or not to
have is usually another layer that navigates our lives. There is an
unseen, unconscious part of us that might go against our conscious
goals and even attack and undermine them. In fact, everything we
don’t consciously know about ourselves has the power to control and
run our lives, in the same way that the riptides below the surface of
the ocean are its most powerful forces.
We are especially conflicted when it comes to change. Behind the
wish to make money, have a career, or have children, we might
locate resistance to change, a hidden ambivalence about growing
up, and a struggle with separation and loss. We might want a
romantic relationship but at the same time resist or reject it, often
because we need to protect ourselves from being vulnerable,
abandoned, out of control, or consumed. Some are unconsciously
loyal to their original families (particularly if they perceive that family
as superior to other families), which makes it hard for them to belong
to anyone else. Others feel emotionally responsible for one of their
parents and therefore anxious about separating and leaving them.
They maintain their childhood structure and worry about changing
their position, being loyal to their family myths and legacies.
A change is a slight goodbye to our past: to our childhood, to our
familiar roles, to our known selves. To develop, to create, is to
separate and live the future as opposed to cherishing the past. An
unprocessed past will not allow us to move forward. It will hold us as
the gatekeepers of our history.
The search for her truths brings Rachel to question her dilemmas.
She wants to know who she really is and what the hidden forces are
that run her life. We wonder which parts of her feelings about having
a child are authentic and which are defensive. When it comes to the
topic of having children, we therapists need to be very careful not to
confuse social norms with psychological goals. Our aim is to free
people to make decisions. The freedom to choose is a therapeutic
achievement.
“Why would I want to bring a child into this world?” Rachel
answers a question I didn’t ask and thus advances a profound
dilemma that we fully understand only later.
At this point, the argument about whether or not to have a child
seems to exist solely between Rachel and her husband. Marc thinks
they should have a child and she feels uncertain, confused,
ambivalent. But quickly Rachel’s internal conflict shows itself, and it
becomes clear that both the positive and the negative voices belong
to her and that she is arguing with herself. To have or not to have?
Rachel talks about her fears. “This world is a terrible place to
bring babies into,” she says. Her voice becomes loud. “Seriously,
what can I promise a child? A world of wars? A planet that will be
destroyed? Racism, hate, and violence? What will my children
promise their children? It’s just so selfish to think that this universe
needs more children when so many of them live in misery.”
She tells me about her plan to leave New York and move to a
different country. She thinks maybe she and Marc will be happier
somewhere else.
 “Where would you like to move?” I ask.
“To Israel,” she immediately answers. I must look surprised,
because she adds, “I know you are originally from there. It’s not
because of you that I want to move there. I always wanted to live in
Israel, since I was a young girl. I’m not sure why.”
Rachel tells me that the homeland I have left behind is the
promised land of her fantasy.
“If I had a child, I would like to live there. Did you know that every
young child in Israel learns about the Holocaust?” she asks.
There is a moment of silence. I remember the schoolyard and
how we all stood there waiting for the siren. I remember the
Holocaust survivor who visited our class when I was in second
grade. She told us about her childhood, that when she was our age
she walked barefoot in the snow for hours, a story that we
referenced every time someone complained that they were cold.
“You would never survive the Holocaust,” we would tease one
another.
I remember that in fifth grade, during recess, the kids made a list
of all the places where people hid from the Nazis. We discussed
where we could hide, and I thought of the stories of mothers trying to
quiet their babies so they wouldn’t expose the hiding places. That
night I couldn’t sleep. I imagined my baby brother crying as the Nazis
came to our apartment. The next day, I decided to practice hiding
with him. I packed his pacifier and some baby toys, and I took him
with me into our bedroom’s closet. We stayed there for what seemed
like a long time. Every time I heard a noise, I shushed him, making
sure he didn’t expose our whereabouts. When I heard my mother
coming, we got out and I put him back in his crib. It was a secret that
only many years later, when my brother was a grown-up, I shared
with him.
The Nazis were always in our nightmares, and as children we
were afraid that the bad guys would find and kill us.
“Yes, every child in Israel knows about the Holocaust,” I say to
Rachel. “Do you wish you had known about it when you were a
child?”
 “Yes. I really do. As a child I heard about it but I didn’t learn about
people’s lives and their personal survival stories. I didn’t see the
photos, like those I saw years later of kids in striped uniforms. I just
knew that something bad had happened to my family in Europe.”
Rachel’s family tried to protect the children from their own trauma
and therefore never talked about it. Rachel was left with the
knowledge that something terrible had happened but she didn’t know
what exactly. She had a bad feeling that she couldn’t put into words.
Rachel wishes there were a family story she could tell, or a concrete
picture that would help her know what was real and what was only in
her imagination.
An important question comes to the surface. Is it better for the
next generation of trauma survivors—the inheritors—to know, or not
to know? Does it even matter, assuming our ancestors’ trauma finds
its way into our minds anyway?
This dilemma preoccupies many parents, who worry about the
impact of their suffering on their children and try to minimize the
damage. Parents want to protect their children from carrying their
pain, and children try to protect their parents from having to reveal
and relive their traumas. The unconscious collusion between parent
and child is one that aims to avoid pain, and it contributes to the
repression of those experiences, which become unspoken secrets.
Descriptions of traumatic events are overwhelming and might
create a “secondary trauma,” an emotional distress that happens
when we are exposed to another person’s trauma. Disturbing reports
or images inflict cruelty: they reenact the traumatic event and
traumatize those who didn’t directly experience it.
In Israel after World War II, survivors didn’t talk about the
Holocaust. Being a survivor was a source of shame, and it was only
years later that talking about the Holocaust became normalized and
an inherent part of the culture. However, being exposed to the
horrors of the Holocaust from such a young age doesn’t only
educate but often also traumatizes Israeli kids. Without fully knowing
it, they live and relive the history of the Holocaust.
Remembering and reenacting suffering is part of the Jewish
tradition, and it is threaded through many rituals, such as the
Passover seder, where the “memory” of slavery and liberation is
relived through our senses and our actions. The reenactment of
trauma links the past and the future, our history and our destiny. It
turns passive victims into active agents, victims into victors.
The identity of the Israeli state, founded only three years after the
Holocaust, is based on the ongoing Jewish trauma of persecution
and on the dream of creating a safe home for the Jews. It is that
dynamic of turning passive into active, which I discuss at length in
Chapter 7, that aims to liberate victims from defeat and helplessness
while denying their own aggression.
The dilemma of memorializing of trauma on the one hand holds
the need to honor the victims, to cherish an identity and a legacy,
and to try to prevent crimes from happening again. On the other
hand it binds together past, present, and future as one. The next
generation is called to identify with the previous one, and it will be
entangled with the trauma and losses of those who came before.
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.
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.
“As a little girl, I used to be afraid of everything,” Rachel says.
She pauses for a long while.
“You know, when I was six years old I started sleeping with a knife
under my pillow,” she says softly. “My parents didn’t know about it. It
was my secret. I remember the first time I did this. It was midnight
and everyone was already asleep. I went to the kitchen. I looked in
the drawer, found an orange knife, and took it to my room.”
“What were you afraid of?” I ask.
 “That night I’d woken up from a scary dream. In my dream I’d
been holding a baby, and someone was chasing us. I was supposed
to protect that baby, and I ran with it in my arms.” She looks at me
and adds, “I remember this well because after that night I had that
dream almost every night, for many years.”
“Did you hide with the baby?” I ask, remembering hiding with my
baby brother.
“No, I couldn’t find a place to hide, so I just ran and ran. There
was no shelter, no place I could feel safe.”
I imagine Rachel running for her life, a baby in her arms. She was
just a child when she started to have this recurring dream. As we
talk, many questions come up: Who is that baby? Is it Rachel
herself, who feels unsafe in the world? What and whom was she
running from?
There was nowhere to hide and babies were not safe in that
world.
I ask her to share any associations that came to mind when telling
me the dream.
“The Nazis.” She nods. “It’s the only thing that comes to mind.
Maybe I’m in Budapest, running from the Nazis. I slept with the
orange knife every night. In the mornings, I would hide it in my desk,
then I’d put it under my pillow again before I went to sleep. I never
told anyone about it until now.”
“You felt unsafe then and you are afraid to bring a baby into this
unsafe world now. You don’t want the baby to feel the way you did as
a child,” I say.
“I want my child to be able to tell me anything. And if she or he is
afraid, I want to hold the baby tight and help it feel safe.”
Rachel starts imagining her own child. The more she talks about
her childhood fears, the more she realizes why she couldn’t bear the
idea of having a baby, assuming it would experience life the way she
did. Not having that baby is her way of protecting it.
Rachel sighs. “I had to hide my panic. I couldn’t tell anyone about
it. I didn’t want them to think that something was wrong with me. My
fear was the biggest secret of my childhood,” she says.
 For years Rachel felt as though she carried a forbidden secret,
but perhaps, I wonder out loud, her secret was a way to keep the
secrets of others.
“What was your grandfather’s secret?” I ask.
Rachel doesn’t answer. She looks at me seriously.
“Who knows,” she whispers.

A later Rachel gets pregnant. She gives birth to a baby

girl, whom she and her husband name Ruth.
I’m excited when she comes to my office with Ruth, a tiny baby
with a sweet face. Ruth looks at me and smiles.
“Of course you are smiling.” Rachel holds her baby and speaks in
a gentle tone. “You remember her voice from when you were in my
belly.” She points at me. “Yes, you know that she helped your
mommy have you. She made me realize that I can create a bubble
of safety for you in my arms.”
Rachel puts Ruth on her chest and Ruth falls asleep. She tells me
that her mother chose the baby’s name. She told Rachel and Marc
that this was the name she had wanted to give Rachel when she
was born, a name that was written on the candle her parents used to
light every Holocaust Day, but her parents strongly objected to that
idea.
“Ruth was a family member who was murdered at Auschwitz,”
Rachel explains to me. “So when my mother wanted to give me that
name, my grandparents argued that it was a bad idea. ‘There is no
need to burden a baby with the name of one who died,’ my
grandmother said to my parents with tears in her eyes. She looked at
my grandfather, who stood there silently. My mother told me that her
parents used to say that Jewish babies are the most important
evidence that the Nazis didn’t win, that they didn’t destroy us. ‘Here
is our next generation, right here,’ my grandmother said. ‘She should
have an optimistic name.’”
Rachel’s mother tried to convince her parents, but the more she
argued, the more upset they became, and at some point Rachel’s
grandfather got very angry.
 “A new baby should be connected to the future, not to old worlds.
Our granddaughter should be associated with happiness, not with
horror. What is wrong with you?” he shouted at Rachel’s mother, and
left the room.
“This was the most emotional my mother had ever seen him,
before or after,” Rachel tells me. “He was a pretty steady, rational
guy. She almost never saw him cry. She told me that when she was
sad as a little girl, her father would pick her up and hug her until she
could hardly breathe. Then he would look at her and ask, ‘Are you
feeling better now?’ And when she nodded, he would set her back
down and, without looking at each other, they would each go to their
rooms. They never talked about emotions, and my mother didn’t
know anything about his past. She only knew that he came from
‘there’ and that his whole family had been murdered at Auschwitz.
She didn’t know how he had managed to be the only one who
survived, and none of us dared to ask.”
The past, Rachel and I now realize, was required to be forgotten.
After that fight, her parents gave up. They named their baby Rachel.
In the Bible, Rachel was the love of Jacob’s life, and Rachel’s
parents knew she would be the love of theirs.
Rachel’s grandparents died when she was young. Years later,
when her mother suggested the name Ruth for their newborn,
Rachel and Marc immediately loved it.
“I want my baby to be connected to our family history. I want her
to know who we are,” Rachel tells me. “I researched and found that
Ruth was a popular name in Hungary in the 1930s. I’m sure my
grandparents didn’t want to be reminded of that, but as the next
generation, I want not only to face the past but also to cherish it.” Her
face lightens as she looks at Ruth, who is sound asleep.
At this point Rachel and Marc begin exploring the possibility of
moving with Ruth to Israel.
“I’m going to fulfill my childhood dream,” Rachel tells me with a
smile. “I feel so lucky that Marc can get a job there. Did I tell you that
he has family there? I grew up with very few relatives around. My
grandmother was an only child; she had an aunt who she was not in
touch with. And there was no one on my father’s side. But in
Jerusalem we had one family friend, a man who had survived the
Holocaust with my grandfather and who was like a brother to him.
After the war my grandfather immigrated to America, and his friend
went to Israel. We used to visit him during the summers, and I
remember his daughter and his granddaughter, who was more or
less my age. I’m sure he has died by now, but I wonder if his family
is still in Jerusalem.”
Rachel opens her phone and swipes through her pictures. She
finds one from her childhood album and hands me the phone. It is a
photograph of Rachel at the age of eight with another girl; they are
holding hands and smiling for the camera.
“This is in the old city market of Jerusalem,” she explains. “I don’t
even remember the girl’s name. We are planning to visit this spring,
to work out the details of moving there. Maybe I should look for this
family. It would be really special if I could find the granddaughter,
don’t you think?”

A before their planned visit, Rachel wakes up covered

with sweat. From that night forward, she starts having sleep terrors.
Right after she falls asleep, she suddenly jumps out of bed,
screaming in fear. She is confused, worried about what is happening
to her.
Sleep terrors are caused by the overarousal of the central
nervous system, and research shows that the majority of people with
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffer from those terrors.
Unlike nightmares, which are bad dreams with story lines, sleep
terrors usually involve a strong feeling of fright without a clear
narrative or story attached to that feeling. The person wakes up
screaming and doesn’t have a dream to report. Because people
don’t usually remember these events in the morning, it is not
surprising that historically, sleep terrors have been attributed to
demon possession or other ghostly activities.
Rachel is upset. As in her childhood, at night she feels that she is
in danger, that she is about to die. Something frightening is
happening that she can’t explain. Her symptoms are clearly
connected to emotional material that she doesn’t have access to. We
assume this is related to her upcoming trip.
As we begin exploring the nature of her night terrors, they begin
to change, and a familiar nightmare reappears instead.
“I’m running for my life, a baby in my arms. It is exactly the same
dream I had when I was six, the dream that made me put the knife
under my pillow.” Rachel looks confused and frustrated. “I stopped
having that dream maybe fifteen years ago. Last night I was back
there again, only now I have a real baby at home, and the baby in
my dream looked like Ruth. It is so upsetting,” she cries in
frustration.
The trauma that no one in her family talked about has invaded her
mind.
Professor Yolanda Gampel of Tel Aviv University identified what
she calls “the radioactivity of trauma,” a metaphor borrowed from the
domain of nuclear physics. It describes the monstrous and
destructive effects caused by sociopolitical and horrifying violence.
We cannot be protected from the impact of events that took place
many years ago and in places far away, even when we didn’t
experience them ourselves or don’t know their details. Like a nuclear
fallout, the emotional and physical radiation of disaster spreads into
the lives of the generations that follow. It shows itself in the form of
emotional and physical symptoms, a reminiscence of trauma, of an
attack on one’s life.
The traces of the past are everywhere. Repressed secrets
become nameless dread. They live in our psyche, like radiation, with
no form, color, or smell. The mind cannot prevent the psychological
invasion of destructive aspects of the past, and in Rachel’s case, her
family trauma plays itself out over and over again.
“I don’t know anything about what happened then,” Rachel says.
We look at each other and she adds, “My grandfather mentioned
once that they arrived at Auschwitz on a beautiful spring day. The
place looked green and peaceful but one thing bothered him: a
strange, overwhelming smell, kind of sweet and unfamiliar. In
retrospect, the scent of death.”
We are both silent.
 “My grandfather was a young man when the war started. He lost
all his relatives. He was the only survivor.”
“Who did he lose?” I ask.
“I have no idea.” Rachel sounds frustrated. “He talked about the
weather at Auschwitz. He talked about his best friend, who survived
with him. But he never told us about the family he lost.
“I want to know who Ruth was,” she adds, and there is a new
spark in her eyes. “I understand that my nightmares are being
triggered by this trip, but I think I should not cancel it. I should look
for my grandfather’s friend’s family and find out. I owe this to myself
and to all of us.”
Rachel had planned the trip for mid-April, without realizing she
was going to be there for Holocaust Remembrance Day. She was
going to look for traces of her family history and try to put a narrative
to the disturbing images she has carried inside her since she was a
child.

N significant part of one’s identity. In first sessions, I

usually ask people about the meaning of their names, inquire who
chose the names for them and why, and wonder if there are specific
meanings or stories associated with their names. Names are
connected to emotions, the hopes parents have for their child, who
they think the child will become or want the child to become. A name
reflects the parents’ feelings about having that child. It contains
remembrances from the past as well as a vision of the future.
Babies are often named after relatives or others who passed
away. A child might be given the name of a person the parents
loved, admired, or attributed certain characteristics to. The child’s
name might reflect certain expectations, responsibilities, or roles. For
example, one of my patients was named after his mother’s father,
who died just before my patient was born. In therapy we connected
his name to the role he was assigned at birth, as his mother’s
caretaker. His mother described him as a mature and responsible
baby, wise from a young age, whom she turned to for advice.
Another patient was given a name by his mother that meant “mine.”
It turned out that his father was ambivalent about having a child; she
felt this baby was hers alone.
As I describe in Part II, there is a profound meaning in naming a
baby after a person who died in tragic circumstances, for example, a
child or a person who died by suicide or was murdered. Doing so is
often an expression of a wish not only to revive what was lost but
also to repair the past and heal trauma.
In mid-April Rachel, Marc, and baby Ruth go to Israel—to look for
their future, to search for the past, to find out who Ruth was. What
they discover is unbelievable but in fact also quite believable.
Suddenly everything makes sense.
In Jerusalem, Rachel, Marc, and Ruth meet the family of her
grandfather’s friend from Auschwitz. His friend had died years
earlier, but the man’s daughter and granddaughter are happy to see
them. They invite them to the daughter’s house in Jerusalem.
“We met them on a Sunday morning,” Rachel tells me. “I had
never felt such a breeze as on that day in Jerusalem. We walked into
our hosts’ home, with Ruth sleeping in the sling, and were invited to
sit on the porch. As we sat down, Ruth woke up, and I introduced her
to the family. ‘This is Ruth,’ I said, and the daughter looked at me,
startled. She didn’t say a word and went to the kitchen to bring tea
and cookies. When she came back, she said, ‘How meaningful that
you named her Ruth. My father used to talk about Ruth. He said that
your grandfather never recovered from her death. That a part of him
died with her.’
“I didn’t know what to say. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I
had no idea who Ruth was. That I only knew from my mother that
she was a relative who had died at Auschwitz and that her name
was on the memorial candle my grandparents used to light every
holiday. I couldn’t breathe and instead kept silent. Marc looked at me
and knew what I needed. He turned to our host and asked if she
could tell us everything she knew about Ruth.
“And then we discovered my grandparents’ secret. She told us
that when the war started, my grandfather was married and had a
daughter named Ruth. She was still a baby when they arrived at
Auschwitz. His wife and daughter were separated from him and
taken to the women’s section. He never saw them again. Someone
told him they were taken to the gas chambers and murdered just a
few hours after they’d arrived.”
Rachel tells me that while they were talking, a siren sounded.
Their hostess apologized for not preparing them. “What a symbolic
moment,” she said. “Today is Holocaust Day. The tradition is to stand
in silence in memory of the six million who were murdered.”
They all stood for a long moment until the siren ended. Then the
granddaughter said, “I’m sure that was strange for you; it is never
easy for us either.” Her voice was tender. “I work as a teacher, and
kids here tend to giggle during the siren. I remember this from my
own childhood. Coming from a different country you probably
understand that it’s a lot for children to handle, that it’s hard for them
to process the horror.”
Rachel looks at me and starts to cry.
We feel the ground shift, realizing that this secret nightmare has
been her way to live the memory of an unimaginable trauma. As the
narrative of the past takes shape, we watch Rachel’s ghost turn into
an ancestor. She finally has a story that she can tell rather than
relive again and again.
The room is quiet but for the muffled sounds of her tears and
breath, less labored now.
 PART II

OUR PARENTS
The Secrets of Others

T our parents’ secrets and hidden realities

from the times before we were born and from our infancy. It explores
known as well as unknown losses of siblings and the impact those
have on the surviving children and on their offspring. It describes the
enigmas of unwelcome babies—children of unwanted pregnancies
and their constant struggle to stay alive. It looks into the eyes of
fathers and fatherhood and further discusses the relationship
between reparation and repetition: our wish to heal our parents’
trauma, to cure their wounded souls, which instead can lead us to
reliving and repeating their painful histories.
It is the ability to accept that which cannot be changed or fixed
that allows us to start mourning. That permission to grieve for our
losses and faults, as well as for our parents’, connects us with life
and welcomes the birth of new possibilities.
 5

WHEN SECRETS BECOME GHOSTS

M N has been preoccupied with death for as long as he

can recall. When he was eight years old, he read the obituary
section of the newspaper daily. “I wonder who this person was,” he
would say, as he tried to share his interest with his mother. But she
would shrug. “You can never really know.”
Noah wanted to know; he needed to know. He was searching,
investigating. Who had these dead people been? Whom had they
left behind? How old were they when they died? Could Noah die?
Could his parents?
Decades later, Noah comes to see me with what he calls his
“obsession with dead people.” He wants to know everything about
these people in the obituaries, and I want to know everything about
him. With each obituary that Noah brings into the consulting room,
we piece together our respective puzzles, hunting for what is
missing.
“I got it,” Noah reports after hours of painstaking research at
home, googling, filling in dates and details of the latest obituary. “I
think I know everything. Now I can let it go.”
Unlike Noah, I don’t get it. Missing many parts of Noah’s personal
history, I try to wait patiently for them to enter the room. I know from
experience that sooner or later the missing pieces will appear. I just
have to silently listen and invite them in.
Noah becomes irritated when he is missing something in his
puzzle. He holds the newspaper and reads aloud to me from the
obituary of a woman named Marie, then rolls his eyes. “Listen to how
annoying this is,” he says. “How come they write that ‘Ronald’ was
her second husband? If you google him, you find this same Ronald
was also the translator of a book she co-authored many years earlier
with her first husband—who was also named Ronald.”
I am confused and jokingly think, Maybe she only liked people
named Ronald. My reaction is a result of the fact that I have trouble
following the details, which makes me anxious. I don’t yet fully
understand Noah’s interest in these facts about the dead.
“Both of her husbands were called Ronald—is that possible?”
Noah wonders. He counts the Ronalds again, as if he needs to make
it clear that there is something behind those names.
He holds in his mind those who have died, and he refuses to let
them go. He embraces their stories as if they belong to him, and in
that sense those people are neither alive nor dead but rather exist as
ghosts between two worlds, never fully seen but present in his life,
and now in mine as well.
As I join Noah on his search, I become aware that ghosts—the
ghosts of the dead, the ghosts of his history—haunt us both. We
always know less than we want to.
“How old was your mother when you were born?” I ask him one
day, trying to imagine his family.
Noah answers: “Forty-four, I think. Old, right?”
He is almost forty-four and doesn’t have children of his own.
“Are you old?” I ask.
“I guess so,” he says. “Growing up as an only child to parents in
their mid-forties wasn’t easy, and for some reason, I always
imagined I had a twin brother who died at birth. My mother used to
get annoyed when I joked about it. She thought it was another of my
crazy ideas about death. I secretly imagined we were both Noah.
Noah One and Noah Two—like Thing One and Thing Two from the
Dr. Seuss story.”
“And you, are you Noah One or Noah Two?” I ask.
“Of course I am Noah Two; do I look like a Noah One?” he replies
playfully and adds, “It reminds me of Ronald One and Ronald Two
from Marie’s life. Do you think she loved them equally? Don’t you
think she married Ronald Two only because she missed her first
Ronald and wished he were alive?”
 I listen to Noah and think about the lonely little boy that he once
was, preoccupied with the idea of the death of his parents and what
he calls his “bizarre fantasies” about a lost brother. There are so
many gaps in his narrative, and in therapy we try to fill them in: to
imagine who he used to be; to consider the meanings of his dreams
and fantasies; to understand his childhood yearning for a brother and
the anguish he constantly felt but couldn’t quite name.
As time passes, Noah stops investigating obituaries and begins to
talk more about his own psychic losses, his symbolic deaths. We talk
about the imagined dead brother as representing the “dead” parts of
himself, including his depressive withdrawal from the world, and the
emotionally deadened aspects of his parents, both of whom are still
involved in his life. His mother, especially, has always struck him as
disconnected, as if she is emotionally invested in something she has
left behind.
One Saturday night, I receive an email from Noah. “Dr. Atlas,” he
writes. “This morning, two shocking things happened. I couldn’t wait
until our session to tell you.” The first is that his mother died early
that morning. The second is that he has found his dead brother.
“This morning,” his email continues, “as I hugged my father, he
told me that there was one thing they never wanted to burden me
with. He said, ‘We decided when you were little that you would never
find out the secret until one of us died.’” The secret is that there was
another son, about a year older, who died before Noah was born. His
name was Noah.
“My parents have reserved their burial plots next to a very small
grave,” Noah goes on. “We will bury my mother there tomorrow
afternoon. Noah One was buried there forty-four years ago, at the
age of eight months, just a few months before I was born and named
after him. They did not want to weigh me down with that, to cause
me pain or devastation.”
After decades of searching, Noah Two can now complete the
obituary.
A Noah’s discovery seemed to me at the time, when
I published his story in the Couch section of the New York Times in
April 2015, neither of us expected the response it got. In the hours
after the column was published I started receiving emails from
people who wanted to share similar experiences.
What Noah believed was his own esoteric story turned out to be
the story of many people, each of whom in turn had assumed it was
a cryptic and unusual thing that had happened only to them. People
shared their stories of lost siblings, secrets they only uncovered later
in life, and the ways those secrets showed themselves in their
minds. Several wrote about discovering they had a twin who had
died at birth and the impact of that trauma on their lives. Those
coincidences between the secret reality and the way it appeared in
their minds were often experienced as seemingly irrational, and
sometimes hard to believe. All of these people were left with a
powerful link between their past and their present, between a feeling
that they initially couldn’t explain and family trauma. Most didn’t know
how to make sense of the strange synchronicity between those
family secrets and the way their minds and bodies responded to
information they didn’t consciously know.
I heard from a man I’ll call Benjamin, who said that for years,
since he was a little boy, he had a dream in which he was buried
underground. He would wake up frightened in the middle of the night
and he would tell his parents that he was afraid to go back to sleep
because he couldn’t breathe. His parents hoped that this dream
would fade as he grew up but in fact things got worse, and at the age
of thirteen Benjamin developed claustrophobia. His panic would be
especially severe when he needed to take the subway. No one
understood why he had developed these fears.
Benjamin always knew that his mother’s family had been
murdered in the Holocaust. He knew that she didn’t have her
parents, grandparents, or uncles; that she had immigrated to the
United States as a little girl survivor; and that she had met his father
when she was sixteen years old. It was only when Benjamin was in
his forties that he learned about the way his grandfather had died—
he had been buried alive. His parents, unaware of the features of
their emotional inheritance, had never made the connection between
his nightmares and other symptoms and their family’s traumatic
history. As in Rachel’s story in Chapter 4, as horrifying as it was,
learning about his grandfather’s brutal death allowed Benjamin to
stop experiencing and carrying that fact in his body. When our minds
remember, our bodies are free to forget.
I also heard from Amy. Her story involved nightmares, too, and a
memory that was processed through the body. One day in her early
twenties Amy woke up from a horrible nightmare. In her dream, she
had been on an airplane that crashed, and she was burning alive.
Amy hadn’t known her father. He had died in an airplane crash when
her mother was pregnant with her, and Amy grew up with the fact of
his tragic death but never thought it had affected her life. Why was it
that she had suddenly experienced his trauma as if it were her own?
Why, in her dream, was she the one who was burning to death? The
nightmare recurred, and for a month Amy couldn’t go to sleep
without feeling that she was about to die. She started to have panic
attacks, and the traumatic image of the burning plane didn’t leave
her. She went to see a doctor and to her surprise found out that she
was pregnant.
It was Amy’s pregnancy that brought her family trauma to the
surface: the trauma of her father who had died while expecting a
baby, the trauma of a pregnant woman who had lost her husband,
and the trauma of an unborn baby who would never meet her father.
Her body knew what her mind couldn’t remember.
The idea that people are connected to one another beyond the
conscious mind and communicate with one another in nonverbal
ways has always been a topic of psychological investigation. Unlike
in popular culture, psychologists do not attribute those aspects of our
minds to magical thinking or to supernatural phenomena, but to a
basic concept: the unconscious.
Unconscious communication is the idea that one person can
communicate with another without passing through consciousness
and without intention or even awareness on either person’s part. The
implications of this are profound—we are interconnected in ways we
don’t fully recognize and cannot control, and we know more about
one another than we are consciously aware of.
Amy lost that pregnancy and for the first time got in touch with the
grief she carried underneath: mourning a baby never born, a father
never met. As it had with Noah, unprocessed family tragedy kept
Amy unconsciously connected to the past, identified with the dead,
whom she had never known. Unburying their family traumas,
processing the losses and the profound impact those losses had on
their lives, allowed each of them to untie their invisible bond to the
past and free themselves to create their own future.
 6

UNWELCOME BABIES

J ’ his sister, Jane. She died when he was

only a few months old. Throughout his childhood, he heard stories
about her tragic death. He knew that she had been riding her bike in
the suburban neighborhood where they grew up, on her way to visit
a friend, when she was hit by a car. She died right away. Jane was
twelve, the oldest and the only girl in a family of five children.
Each of Jon’s three older brothers has his own recollection of that
morning in mid-May. His middle brother remembers the dress their
mother was wearing. His third brother says he can’t forget the sound
of the siren, but he isn’t sure if it was from the ambulance or the
police car that came to inform them of Jane’s death. His oldest
brother, Jake, swears that his mother dropped the baby, Jon himself,
as she was running out the door, but their father insisted that had
never happened.
They all feel that their parents were never the same after Jane’s
death.
As if bound by an unspoken agreement, the family members
avoided talking about Jane. They knew that mentioning her name
might cause their mother to blame them for something.
“Why did you leave the cabinet open?” she would say angrily.
“How many times have I told you to not eat with your mouth open?”
The brothers all remember the day they asked their father to buy
them bikes and how their father tried to convince their mother that it
might be a good idea.
“Especially because of what happened,” he said. “The boys
shouldn’t be afraid of riding bikes. All the experts will tell you that it’s
the right thing to do,” he argued with their mom.
That same evening, their mother packed a bag and announced
that she was leaving. She told them she was planning to throw
herself under a train. Jon remembers the boys chasing her,
screaming and sobbing.
“Mommy, please don’t leave.”
They ran after her to the street, and the farther she walked the
louder was their weeping.
They never asked for bikes again.
Every year, in May, the family went to visit Jane’s grave. They
would stand there for a few minutes, the boys observing their
parents washing the gravestone, and then they all left in silence.
Jon remembers the bad feeling in his body, the pain in his
stomach, and a sense that he had done something wrong. But he
never understood why he felt that way.
At the age of thirty-five, Jon had what he described as a nervous
breakdown.
Six months later, he decided to start therapy.
On the first day we meet, he says of his breakdown, “It came out
of nowhere. One day I was okay and the next I fell apart.”
I ask him to tell me about his life before the breakdown. I want to
know more about who he is.
Jon tells me that he married Bella a few years ago and that they
have a little girl.
“Her name is Jenny,” he says and pauses for a long moment. “I
had a sister who died when I was a few months old. Her name was
Jane.” He continues, “When my daughter was born, I wanted to
cherish the memory of my sister, but I didn’t want to name her after
my sister. I was afraid my sister’s name might bring her bad luck or
maybe, God forbid, it would impact her life in other bad ways. You
know, some people say that it’s not a good idea.”
Jon looks embarrassed. “I hear how I sound,” he says. “Bella and
I decided to choose a name that starts with the letter J.”
I realize that his own name starts with the letter J. I hear his
conflict about his daughter’s name: on the one hand, the fear of
hurting Jenny, and on the other, his unconscious wish to bring a part
of his sister, Jane, back to life.
I ask him to tell me about his sister.
Jon seems hesitant. “I don’t remember anything,” he says. “I
mean, I was just a baby so it’s not my memories that I’m telling you
but things I heard from other people. I just know that my siblings
experienced a real trauma. They knew her; I didn’t. So it didn’t
impact me as much.”
“It was hard for everyone but not so much for you, is that what
you mean?” I ask.
I see him thinking.
“A different kind of hard, I guess,” he answers. “Everyone around
me was obviously sad. Sad is not even the right word. They were
broken.
“And me, I don’t know what my story was, to tell you the truth. I
was just left alone. To my own devices, as they say.” Jon smiles and
adds, “I don’t even have a story of ‘this and that happened to me,’
except for what I already told you. That’s it. Honestly, I have almost
no childhood pictures. My brother Jake told me about my mother
dropping me on the floor when she heard about my sister’s accident,
but that probably didn’t even happen. I don’t want to make things
up.” He looks troubled. “People tell me that in therapy you can build
a whole story about your childhood. Not that I mind doing that, but a
story about what? It’s like having empirical research without any
data; it can’t work; that’s all I’m saying.”
Jon is worried about making up a false life story. Instead, he
builds a narrative filled with emptiness. He doesn’t seem to appear
as a character in his own childhood, and I’m left wondering about his
ability to take part in life. It’s as if Jon wants to make sure he doesn’t
fully exist.
While most people have some childhood stories and memories, it
is not unusual for people not to know much about their early life,
especially about the time of their birth and early infancy. We don’t
always know if our parents planned the pregnancy or if it was an
“accident.” In fact we don’t always know who our biological parents
are. Postpartum depression and other crises from the time we were
conceived or from our early life are often covered up with romantic
myths. When things go wrong, secrets are born.
While the first year of a baby’s life has an enormous impact on
their future, exploring a patient’s infancy is especially delicate, as we
rely on the narratives of others and on what they let themselves tell,
know, or even remember.
The secrets of infancy are unformed events that leave traces in
our minds but have no narrative attached to them. They are,
therefore, the skeletons of our existence. They remain hidden inside
us even as they give shape to our forms.
Jon and I begin with the present moment and with the little that
we know: he has a baby daughter, and trauma happened in his
family when he was a baby. His sister, Jane, and his baby, Jenny,
are connected in ways that we don’t yet fully understand. His
childhood is clouded by his sister’s death. He never stopped to think
about the past and instead marched forward, as far as possible away
from his history. Until the day he fell apart.
Jon takes me all the way back to the beginning of his life, and I’m
aware that those journeys are usually the most puzzling of all.
After he leaves my office, I realize he has left a pacifier on his
chair.

A and I meet Jon again.

“I felt good after our session,” he says. “I told Bella, my wife, that I
was relieved you didn’t ask me about my breakdown. I’m ashamed
that I fell apart the way I did, especially given the timing, right after
we had a baby and when I needed to be strong. I wanted to be as
strong as my father, who, even after my sister died, was the steady
one. And here I am, instead of being a man, behaving like my mom.
Or, even worse, I’m not an adult but a baby who falls apart. I felt so
much shame and self-hate for that. So I guess I was happy that you
let me talk about the beginning of my life instead of the…”
Jon pauses. He looks troubled.
“Instead of the end of your life? Is that what you were about to
say?” I ask.
 “It feels that way,” he answers softly, not looking at me.
“It feels like the end of your life,” I repeat his statement.
“Yes, since Jenny was born I’ve been thinking about death,” he
says.
I realize that the beginning of Jenny’s life might feel like the end of
Jon’s life, in the same way that the beginning of his life was the end
of his sister Jane’s life.
“When one is born, the other dies,” I say, almost whispering, and
Jon raises his head to look at me.
“That’s how it feels.” He nods. “But it’s wrong, I know. There
should be enough room for everyone.”
I feel a wave of sadness. Is it possible that in Jon’s mind only one
of them could stay alive? Does he believe that Jane died because he
was born? Is this the hidden narrative of his family?
“I’m here, in therapy, because I feel guilty,” he says. “And I’m
devastated by the idea that my daughter is now having the same
experience that I had as a child. I’m worried that like me, she now
has a sad parent who can’t function. I don’t want to be like my
mother.”
I’m curious to hear more about his mother. I imagine her sadness,
her guilt, her emotional withdrawal.
Jon tells me that his mother died about five years ago and that his
father died a year after that.
“Both of my parents have died, and now I have no one to ask
about my childhood.”
“Do you have any memories at all?” I ask.
Jon hesitates. He thinks for a long moment, then says, “I
remember the porch of our house. I remember the entrance. I would
come home from school and it was dark and I couldn’t tell if anyone
was home. I never liked that house.”
“There are no people in this memory, did you notice?” I ask.
“We were four boys but I mostly grew up alone,” he answers. “My
brothers were older, and they left home one after the other. I left
home relatively late, when I was in my mid-twenties. It’s like I felt
responsible for my parents and had to stay with them. And then,
when my mother got sick I took care of her. I remember the last few
days of her life, when she was in the hospital. It felt like she was
waiting for death. I would sit next to her bed for hours, and it was the
first time I heard her talking about Jane. It sounded like she couldn’t
wait to reunite with her.”
“What did she say to you?” I ask.
“It wasn’t me she was talking to,” Jon clarifies. “I sat there but she
ignored me and kept talking, maybe to herself, or maybe to Jane. I’m
not sure, but it was okay,” he says nonchalantly, “I didn’t mind that
Mom ignored me.”
There is something touching about the way he describes himself
sitting next to his mother and listening to her talking. I feel his love,
his longing, his loneliness, as well as his acceptance of being
invisible. He is the one who is there, but it’s as if he doesn’t exist, as
if he is the dead child, and his dead sister is the one who is still alive
inside his mother.
We sit in silence for a long minute and I realize that in my silence
I might become Jon’s neglectful mother, of whom he asks nothing.
Very often and without awareness, the therapist joins the patient’s
childhood scenario, taking the role of one of their caretakers.
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. Our goal as
therapists is to examine those patterns; to ask ourselves in what
ways our patients relive their early relationships with us, to question
who we become to them, and to process those old attachments
while creating new, different ones.
As with his mother, Jon doesn’t ask me for much. He shrugs his
shoulders and says, “I have a baby now, and I know how hard it is.
Since Jenny was born, I constantly think about my parents. They had
five kids. One of them died, can you imagine? They had to take care
of three young children and a baby in the aftermath of her death. No
one can do that,” he concludes. “Mom was broken. So yes. She
ignored me.”
Jon isn’t angry with his mother simply because, even after she
died, he still longs for her. The more neglectful she was, the more his
need and longing for her increased. As a child, he had no other
source of security. He tried to see her as “good” because he
preferred to have a neglectful mother than no mother at all. I realize
that it is easier for him to identify with his mother and with her loss
than to imagine himself as a child and recognize his own pain.
Unconsciously, however, he keeps repeating the pattern of neglect:
fighting his unsatisfied needs and worrying about all the other ways
the world might reject him.
Jon searches the room. Suddenly he points at my desk and says,
“I think I forgot Jenny’s pacifier here last week.”
“Yes,” I say as I look at my desk and recall placing it there so I
would remember to give it back to him.
Jon seems unsatisfied with my one-word answer, as if he was
expecting a different one. It is the first time I see him a little
disappointed.
“Tell me more,” I respond to the expression on his face.
“Don’t you think there was a reason that I forgot it here? There
must be a reason, right?” I see that he invites me to look deeper, to
search for more.
“What do you think the reason is?” I ask.
Jon smiles. “That I’m a baby?” I smile back and he continues. “I
feel like such a baby. Maybe what I wanted was to forget the pacifier
here and go home like a grown-up.”
“That makes sense,” I say. “But is it possible that you wanted to
both forget and also remember?”
He is intrigued, and I continue. “Maybe you wanted to forget the
baby part of yourself here, but also to come back in order to dig and
discover it. Maybe you want those lost parts to be found, to uncover
your own life story.”
Jon nods. “And what if it’s not so interesting?”
I pause. I hear how afraid he is to remember how uninteresting
and rejected he felt as a child. He doesn’t want to feel the injury of
his childhood and to get in touch with how much he needed his
mother.
I think about the word “pacifier,” recognizing that as a child Jon
tried to pacify himself rather than cry for his mother. As an adult, he
presents as an easygoing guy who doesn’t need anyone to take care
of him or even understand him. He doesn’t get upset or express
feelings of frustration, but instead tries to manage his feelings on his
own and push down any emotions. Jon feels that he shouldn’t
depend on anyone. In his sessions, he makes sure to not feel too
dependent on me, too.
Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote
that one of the most meaningful maternal functions is “emotional
holding.” He related that function, in parents of any sex, to the
significance of the physical aspect of holding a baby. Emotional
holding is the steady emotional arms and available presence of the
parents that allow the baby to feel safe and protected. The parent
holds the baby in his or her mind, available to tolerate the baby’s
emotions, tuned in to her signals. When a baby feels safe both
physically and emotionally, she develops a sense of a safe world,
where she can rely on the parent and trust that her needs will be
met. But when emotional holding collapses, the baby usually stops
turning to others and instead turns inward. When the baby feels
dropped she might experience what Winnicott called “falling forever.”
It is the feeling of emotional collapse, an endless downfall with no
bottom.
Jon learned not to reach out to his parents for soothing and to
hold himself emotionally. I sense that he protected himself by giving
up on his parents’ comforting and responsiveness. He became a boy
and later on a man who didn’t ask for much. He was able to manage
his feelings until one day it all broke and he fell apart.
Jon leaves my office, and I am aware that we haven’t yet talked
about his breakdown. I notice that he has left the pacifier on the
armchair again and wonder if he keeps leaving it behind because he
is the one who feels forgotten and dropped. Is he worried about me
not remembering him when he is gone?

J the next session thirty minutes early. He rings the

bell while I’m still in a session with another patient.
 I buzz him in, wondering if he is confused about the time for our
session.
I find myself worrying about him. I picture him sitting there, in my
waiting room, speculating about why I haven’t let him in. I’m afraid
that he will conclude that I have forgotten about him, and I imagine
him trying hard not to feel hurt or angry at me.
When I finally open the door, I see Jon sitting on the edge of the
chair, playing on his cell phone.
“Hey.” He looks at me. “Did you expect me? I didn’t mean to
surprise you.”
He slowly walks into my office and sits in the armchair.
“Were you worried that maybe I forgot about our session?” I ask.
“No,” he answers immediately. “I just thought maybe I came at the
wrong time. Maybe you were not ready for me yet. Did we say 11:15
or 11:45? I guess 11:45, right? I hope I didn’t intrude. I mean, you
were with someone else.”
Jon moves uncomfortably on his chair and then adds, “It’s not a
big deal. I just thought maybe I should leave and come another
time.” His eyes fill with tears. “Embarrassing,” he whispers.
“You thought that I wasn’t expecting you. That you were rushing
to come here but I totally forgot about you,” I say and think about him
using the word “expect” and its relation to pregnancy. I find myself
wondering if his birth was planned, if his parents wanted to have
another baby.
“Don’t worry, it’s fine,” he says, both to me and to himself. “You
don’t have to look forward to seeing me. You are my therapist, not
my mother,” he adds firmly, making sure both of us know that he
remembers that.
“But maybe you feel hurt because in that moment I do become
like your mother, a woman who doesn’t expect you, whom you think
might reject you or prefer to be with someone else.”
Jon looks serious. “That’s possible,” he says. “You know, right
before I had that breakdown, I used to have those kind of thoughts
and it was crazy.
“At night, before I went to sleep, I used to ruminate, thinking that
my boss wanted to fire me and hire someone else. I told Bella that I
had a bad feeling, a feeling that he didn’t want me. In retrospect that
wasn’t true but for some reason I was sure that he was planning to
drop me.”
“To drop you.” I repeat his words and point out that this is a
reminder of the only story he heard about his childhood.
“You thought that your boss wanted to get rid of you, or was
maybe planning to drop you, like your mother did,” I note.
Jon looks at me, fascinated.
“I see what you mean,” he says. “It’s like I repeated the feeling
that I’m not wanted, even now, with you.”
I nod and Jon continues, “I swear to you, I was such a hard
worker. I was the first one to come to the office in the mornings and
the last one to leave at night. I thought I was a good employee but
then I started to feel that they didn’t like me and were planning to get
rid of me. It all started right after Jenny was born.” He pauses and I
see him thinking, making connections.
“What do you have in mind?” I ask.
Jon looks sad. He explains to me how important it was for him to
feel appreciated by his boss but that as time passed, he felt more
and more rejected and frightened.
“I woke up every morning scared, feeling that I wanted to die. It
was awful, but it became even worse on that morning, when
something really traumatic happened.”
Jon takes a deep breath. He looks hesitant, as if not sure he is
able to keep talking.
“Can I tell you what happened?” he asks, and I am aware that it’s
not me he is referring this question to, but, again, himself. He doesn’t
wait for my answer.
“I had just arrived at the office when my phone rang. It was Bella.
I heard her crying.
“‘I need you to come home,’ she said, weeping. ‘It’s Jenny. She
fell and I don’t know what to do.’
“I left everything and started running home. Like a maniac. I ran
and ran, I don’t even know for how long. My head was spinning with
a million thoughts. I thought, ‘Here it comes. She is going to die.’ I
thought, ‘Why did I let that happen? What an idiot I am.’” He looks at
me. “Don’t ask me why, I have no idea. I don’t know why I felt like it
was all my fault. But I kept running. I heard the siren of an
ambulance behind me and I panicked and tried to run even faster, to
get there before the ambulance. When I finally got home I found
Mom on the floor, Jenny alive in her arms.”
I hear him referring to Bella as Mom, but I don’t interrupt him.
“She was sobbing: ‘I got so, so scared. I didn’t know what to do.
Jenny fell from the high chair and she didn’t move. She didn’t even
cry. I thought she had died.’
“I looked at Jenny. She seemed okay but I couldn’t calm myself
down. I sat on the floor next to Bella and felt my body shaking. It’s
like I lost control of it and I cried and cried and couldn’t stop. From
that moment on, I stopped functioning. I couldn’t get out of bed. I
cried all day. I considered killing myself.”
Jon pauses. He looks at me and repeats, “I felt that it was all my
fault. The voice in my head said that I should be the one dying, not
her.”
There is so much guilt in being the one who stays alive. I think
about Jon’s sister, Jane, and about his wish to bring her back to life
in his daughter, and this time, to kill himself instead. Jenny’s fall was
traumatic because it represented both his sister’s accident and also
his own childhood trauma of being emotionally and physically
dropped, of being the one who stays alive but unconsciously
believing that the accidents were his fault, then and now.
Jon experiences the feelings he couldn’t put into words, process,
or even remember: the tragedy of the baby who stayed alive, the
baby who fell apart. His breakdown isn’t only about his sister’s death;
it is, in fact, the ongoing experience of disconnection between the
baby he used to be and his mother. The feeling Jon grew up with—
but that he never let himself know—was the profound injury of
maternal rejection. His unconscious anxiety was that she had
dropped him because she didn’t want him. That is the reality that
was too devastating for Jon to let himself know. His solution was to
please his mother and to make sure that he would disappear from
his own life. Jon struggled to engage in life, constantly confronting
suicidal thoughts and feeling conflicted about his right to have
anything. It was through his daughter’s accident that the traumatized
child within him was awakened. He had to get in touch with his
deadened self to be able to start the process of living.
Jon and I understand that the experience of his early childhood
reappeared in his breakdown, and we are determined to go back to
that time to find out what that early experience felt like, to live
through it so Jon can rejoin the world.

W Jon feels a little stronger. We meet every Tuesday

at 11:45, and he now arrives exactly on time, sometimes a minute or
two late, but never early. He makes sure I am the one who is waiting
for him, and not the other way around.
When I open the door, Jon walks in and always makes the same
joke, “Hey, did you expect me?” he says. We both know that he is
referring to the anxiety that knocking on my door might evoke in him,
the worry that I won’t remember the session, that I have forgotten
about him or maybe even hoped that he wouldn’t show up.
But that is never the case. In fact, I look forward to seeing Jon.
I’m aware of how protective of him I feel, imagining him as a baby in
light of what I know about his past and about the effect of the early
interactions between parents and infants on the child’s later life.
At the Hampstead Nurseries in London, during the Second World
War, Anna Freud was the first-known researcher to initiate careful
and systematic observation of infants and children. But only much
later did a revolution in understanding infants’ minds begin. In the
1980s, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Daniel N. Stern brought
contemporary infancy research into psychoanalysis and changed
many old assumptions about child development. One of the most
important corrections he made was to the mainstream theory from
the 1960s that babies initially have an “autistic mind” and are
therefore unable to interact with the world around them. Current
infant research overturns this assumption; in fact, babies
communicate with others right from birth. They are aware of their
surroundings; are responsive to gazes, vocalizations, pauses, and
facial expressions from the people around them; and engage in a
constant dialogue with others.
Interactions between babies and their parents are the focus of
current infant research. Video microanalysis is one method used to
study and code their moment-by-moment communications. In her
laboratory, researcher Beatrice Beebe and her team at Columbia
University invite the parent to play with the infant as they do at home.
Using two cameras—one filming the baby, who is placed in an infant
seat opposite the mother, and the other focused on the mother’s
face and upper torso—they generate a split-screen view of both
parent and infant.
The research focuses on a few aspects of the verbal and
nonverbal interactions, such as their gaze toward and away from
each other (parents typically look at their infants while the infants
cycle between looking and looking away, which allows them to
regulate the intensity of arousal created by the eye contact). It
detects their facial expressions, as well as their vocalizations, and
analyzes how coordinated their facial expressions and movements
are. The researchers listen to and code the vocal back-and-forth
communication and the turn taking between parent and infant in that
exchange.
Watching the split screen, Beebe points out that caregivers tend
to tune in to the infants’ movements, gestures, gazes, and
expressions, and that the babies are responsive to every nuance of
the mothers’ behavior. There is a rhythm co-created between the
infants and their caretakers. The parent usually looks happy when
her infant smiles and appears concerned when the infant cries. She
reduces the intensity of her behavior when the baby turns its head
away; she lowers her voice when the infant seems distressed; and
she tries to excite the baby when it looks back to her. The parent
talks to her baby and then gives the baby a turn. The baby responds
vocally in her own way. They each follow the other’s rhythm of taking
a turn.
Ideal exchange between parents and their infants doesn’t mean
absolute synchronization or “perfect” matching and superhigh
responsiveness. Rather, a dynamic communication evolves that
includes moments of mismatch and potential misunderstanding,
followed by moments of re-attunement and repair.
These studies highlight the fact that ruptures are an inevitable
part of every relationship. In fact, in 1989 Jeffrey F. Cohn and
Edward Z. Tronick indicated that imperfect interaction and
mismatching of communication are the rule rather than the
exception. They show that a “good enough” parent is slightly
mismatched and desynchronized with their infant 70 percent of the
time and in synch with them only 30 percent of the time. They
suggest that a good relationship is the result not of a perfect level of
attunement, but rather of successful repairs. The moments when the
parent re-attunes to the baby are important. They are the foundation
for future trust, where both parent and infant learn that they can go
back to a rhythm that allows them to be seen and understood by the
other.
More than five decades of research highlight the implications of
the early baby-parent interaction for future development, attachment,
and mental health. Those studies predicted some of the difficulties
that infants would experience later in life as children and as adults,
based on the very early attachment to their caretakers. For example,
a large body of research focuses on parental responsiveness, which
is one of the key qualities for secure attachment. Research indicates
that low maternal responsiveness at three and nine months predicts
insecure attachment at twelve months, negative feelings and
aggressive behavior at three years, and other behavioral problems
from age ten on.
I try to picture Jon as a baby, recognizing his withdrawal as an
adult. I try to imagine what he saw in his mother’s eyes: her pain, her
anger, her guilt, and her lack of responsiveness toward him. I wonder
what he sensed even when it wasn’t directly communicated to him. I
am aware that there is much I don’t know and may never know.
Some of those early experiences are forever sealed.

J the room and sits on the armchair.

 “Last night I had a conversation with Jake, my oldest brother,” he
says. “I told him about my therapy. I told him that a lot of things from
my childhood are coming up now, especially from the time I was a
baby. It was surprising, I have to tell you. I never thought I would be
able to talk to him about these things, and I was shocked when he
told me that he has been in therapy for years now. ‘We had a lot to
deal with, as kids,’ Jake said, ‘especially you.’
“‘Why me?’ I was kind of confused. ‘You guys knew Jane, I
didn’t.’”
Jon pauses and looks at me.
“My brother Jake said that in his therapy he realized that there are
two kinds of people: those who have lost and those who never had
anything to begin with. ‘I struggle with that idea,’ he said, ‘and I
always tell my therapist that you, Jon, unlike the rest of us, who had
lost, you never had. I tell her, “This is why he is the most wounded
one of us all.”’
“You can imagine how confused that made me,” Jon says. “I told
him, ‘Jake, I’m not sure what you are saying.’ And then he basically
told me that he was eight years old when my parents found out Mom
was pregnant with me, and that she was very upset and angry. She
didn’t want another baby, and she blamed my dad for that pregnancy
and wanted to get an abortion. There were a lot of fights and they
didn’t talk for a while.
“‘Then you were born and a few months later Jane died,’ Jake
said, and I felt a kick in my stomach. Everything you and I talked
about suddenly made sense. They didn’t want me to begin with.” He
looks straight into my eyes. “My parents never wanted a fifth child.
Four was enough for them. They ended up with four after all. But not
with the four they wanted.”
We are both silent.
I’m stunned but not surprised. It is often easy to recognize those
people who were not fully invited into this world. They seem like
visitors, outsiders who might leave at any minute. Like Jon, many
such patients don’t have a coherent existence, and therefore in
therapy it is harder for them to create a clear narrative of their early
life.
 In a seminal 1929 paper titled “The Unwelcome Child and His
Death-Instinct,” the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi
described people who came into the world as what he called
“unwelcome guests of the family.” Ferenczi made the direct link
between being an unwelcome baby and having an unconscious wish
to die. He portrayed those patients of his as pessimistic, skeptical,
filled with mistrust of others, and having suicidal fantasies. He found
that they shared a common history: they were all babies of unwanted
pregnancies, whether this was known to them or kept as a family
secret. Ferenczi describes them as people who die easily and
willingly.
Jon takes a deep breath. “I’m okay,” he says. “Isn’t it funny? The
worst was confirmed for me, but instead of feeling bad, I’m feeling
better. You know how you always used to say that I’m a baby without
a story? So now I have one. Maybe it’s not a happy story, but it’s
true, and it’s mine.”
I know that Jon still has a lot to process. Many questions to ask,
much to mourn, to be angry about, and to forgive.
These days, when Jon walks into my office he no longer asks if I
am expecting him. The mother, his mother, the one who didn’t expect
him, is no longer hidden and so we can now talk about her instead of
reliving his relationship with her. Jon loves his mother, but now he is
free to feel the insult and humiliation of rejection and of never
actually having had her.
The freedom to think and to feel even the most disturbing
thoughts and painful emotions brings with it the experience of being
alive. It is the birthright—previously denied—that allows Jon finally to
be able to choose life.
 7

PERMISSION TO CRY

A woman I was familiar with the army unit that my patient

Ben had served in; some of my friends had been in the same elite
commando brigade within the Israel Defense Forces. Ben was a
fighter in that unit around the same time I served in the Israeli army
as a singer in the entertainment unit. In my New York City office now,
thirty years later, I gather information about him and ask about his
military service. He tells me the name of his unit and I write it down
and nod.
I remember the day my band was sent to perform on the base of
that unit. Nothing about it felt unusual or dramatic, except that I was
in love with the drummer of the band and was happy that it was too
dangerous for us to drive back home that night, and that we had to
stay and sleep there, in Khan Yunis, Gaza. It was 1989 and I
remember that we were given guns and told they were in case of
emergency. I didn’t remember how to use the gun although I had
been in basic training just a few months earlier. My best friend and I
had agreed that killing someone was bad karma, so during training
we just made believe we had listened but ended up having little idea
how to use the gun. On our way to Khan Yunis, it didn’t feel like a big
deal. In case of emergency, we thought, we would manage.
The special-unit soldiers sent us an armored bus, and a
motorcade accompanied us as we drove into Gaza. The roads were
bumpy and at some point the musical producer of the band, an older
man in his thirties who was a musician and served in the unit as a
reserve soldier, decided to sit on the floor of the bus. We looked at
him, amused, and asked, “Hey, what’s going on? Is everything
okay?”
To our surprise, he started to cry. “My wife is pregnant. They
didn’t tell me we were going into Gaza. I didn’t sign up for that. This
is crazy.”
We all looked at one another and didn’t know what to do. We
didn’t understand why he thought it was so crazy. We had traveled to
every war zone and never thought any of it was especially intense.
This was the world we were raised in. In some ways, the unstable
national security and our mandatory army service felt like an
irrelevant disruption, and life was about the future, not the present
moment or the past. It was made up of hopes and big dreams,
pushing against our external reality with deep friendships, with love,
and with music.
I turned around and smiled at the drummer, and he smiled back.
We had our little secret and the war around us seemed like
background noise.
That day, we performed in a small room, surrounded by a group
of soldiers who were our age but looked older and who we believed
were much braver than we were. We knew that at the end of the
concert we couldn’t ask them about the details of their activity or
their special operations, but the truth was that we were not so
curious anyway. We were more interested to hear about their high
school experiences, to learn about their girlfriends at home and
count the days until our army service would be over.
Now, in Ben’s first session, he tells me that as an eighteen-year-
old soldier he had no idea what he had signed up for, and that only
now does he realize how crazy it all was.
“Most of my friends from the unit are pretty fucked up,” Ben says,
“but I don’t have any PTSD or anything. I’m fine.”
I guess we are all fine, I think to myself. A part of me truly
believes that, while another part knows that it cannot be true. We are
fine, but we are also not fine at all.
Coming from a culture that normalizes the experiences that all
young Israeli men and women go through, Ben talks about his early
childhood in Israel and his life now in New York City. He tells me that
he is married to Karen, a woman he has been with since he was
eighteen, and that they are trying to get pregnant. He looks me
straight in the eye and says, “Since I was a child I wanted to become
a father. I’m here, in therapy, because I want to be a good father.”

I M morning when Ben walks into my office, a big smile on

his face.
“Doctor,” he says and then pauses.
When he calls me “Doctor,” treating my degree as a nickname, I
know he is in a good mood.
“Karen is pregnant.” He smiles, then corrects himself. “We are
pregnant. You know how long I have been dreaming about this baby,
how hard it was for us to get pregnant.” He pauses and looks at me.
“I’m going to have a baby boy, I’m telling you, Doctor, I’m going to
have a son.” He puts his hands on his chest and takes a deep
breath. “God willing, I will have a son,” he says seriously.
In the next session Ben tells me about a dream: He is a baby,
sleeping on his father’s chest. His father kisses his cheek and
whispers in his ear, “Cry, baby, it’s time to cry.”
“How strange,” Ben says. “Parents don’t usually ask their babies
to cry. And fathers, they especially don’t encourage their boys to be
babies and cry.”
“What comes to mind when you think about your father and
crying?” I ask.
“That he knows I need to cry. He gives me permission, I think.”
Ben is quiet for a long minute before he continues. “I have never
seen my father cry. Even when his own father died, even when I
went to the army and all the parents stood near the buses and shed
tears, my father didn’t. He just walked back and forth and then he
came and gave me a strong hug and said, ‘No need to cry, boy. You
do exactly what you have to do and may God be with you.’”
“When you were eighteen years old, becoming a man, your father
told you not to cry, and now, right after you found out that you are
about to become a father, he holds you in your dream and tells you
that it’s time to cry.”
 Ben nods and we realize that there is a lot for us to understand
about these permissible tears, about fathers, sons, and the
intermingling of vulnerability and masculinity.
Ben tells me about his father, who was born in Iraq and escaped
with his family to Israel in the 1950s. Having parents who fled to
Israel from Iran and Syria around the same time as Ben’s father, I
am familiar with the complexities of that immigration. Israel of the
early 1950s was a new country. It was built on the trauma of the
Holocaust.
At the end of World War II, many Holocaust survivors found
homes in Israel, where they joined the Eastern European immigrants
who had left their families in Europe and moved there before the war.
The immigrants who had moved before the war were Zionists and
were considered “real Sabras” (or Tzabarim in Hebrew), named after
the prickly pear, which has a thick skin and spikes on the outside but
is soft and sweet on the inside. This term started to be used in the
1930s to differentiate the old European Jew from the new Zionist
one. The Sabras were thought to be tough, physically active, and
shameless, the opposite of the old stereotypical Jews, who were
considered soft and passive. The new Jews were not religious and
didn’t study Torah; instead they were devoted to working the land,
and they learned how to fight, first in the resistance movement and
then in the Israeli army.
After the Holocaust and mostly as a reaction to it, the Israeli state
was founded and became the home for Jews from all over the world.
The first wave of immigrants were traumatized survivors who had
lost everything in Europe. The next immigration, in the fifties, was
from the Middle Eastern countries: Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Iraq,
Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia, among others.
Over the years, the new country of Israel consistently privileged
native-born members over the more recently arrived immigrants. The
goal was to create a new culture, and immigrants were encouraged
to abandon their original identity and adopt the identity of the Sabra
Jew. From a psychological perspective, we can see how this was a
way to cope with the massive trauma of persecution. The new Jew, a
fighter, represented a transformation from a passive victim into an
active victor, from a weak minority into a strong nation.
My parents, as well as Ben’s parents, were part of the 1950s
wave of Sephardic Jewish immigration. They came from a different
culture; they spoke Arabic and were considered uneducated and
even primitive. The traumatized white European hegemony
discriminated against those immigrants and treated them as an
inferior minority group. They lived in poverty and carried a great deal
of shame not only in response to their lack of resources and their
difficulty in adapting to the new culture, but also in being considered
ill-mannered and culturally vile. They spoke the “wrong” language,
listened to the “wrong” music, and brought with them a non-
European culture and practices that were unacceptable and even
threatening to the Zionist white privileged authority.
In order to become assimilated into Israeli culture, all immigrants
had to speak Hebrew; Yiddish and Arabic were not acceptable. The
Sephardic immigrants were asked to change their names to Israeli
names, which were often given by the clerk at the border. My mother
Suzan was now Shoshi, my aunt Monira was now Hanna, and Tune
became Mazal. This tradition carried on for many years. Even in the
1990s, Ethiopian Jews who immigrated to Israel were asked to
change their names. It was a way to communicate to the immigrants
that their previous identity was unwelcome and should be replaced
by a new one. It was a promise of belonging, that abandoning the
past would provide a new and a better future. In reality the
immigrants belonged to neither the old nor the new world; they were
trapped in a cultural limbo.
My own family’s immigration, like Ben’s, always hovered over my
childhood. I knew that both my parents had escaped to Israel as
young children with their families. My mother used to tell us kids
about that night in 1951 when they left Damascus. My mother was
only four years old at the time. Her parents paid a Syrian man who
owned a carriage to pick up them and their five young children in the
middle of the night, hide them in the back of the wagon, and get
them across the border.
 The man arrived at 2 a.m. They all silently rushed into the back of
the wagon and started riding toward the border. About thirty minutes
later, to their dismay, they noticed that my four-year-old mother was
missing. They had forgotten her at home. They rushed back to find
her asleep in her bed, picked her up, and started the ride to the
border again.
They arrived safely in Israel and settled in Haifa, a northern city
on the Mediterranean Sea where Arabs and Jews lived together.
They rented a one-bedroom apartment, where my mother and her
siblings grew up.
Ben’s father had moved to Israel with his family from Baghdad,
Iraq, when he was ten years old. During the first few years they lived
in what was called a ma’abara, a refugee camp that the government
had built for new immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries. In the
early 1950s there were more than 130,000 Iraqi refugees in those
camps. The ma’abarot were a symbol of the discrimination against
Sephardic Jews, as housing policies were weighted in favor of
people of Ashkenazi European descent. Camps sometimes had only
two faucets for a thousand people. The toilets had no roofs and were
infested with fleas, and the ceilings often leaked when it rained.
“Some people think my family was lucky,” Ben tells me, “because
my grandfather found a job as the cleaning person in a local school,
and they were able to move to Ramat Gan, a neighborhood on the
periphery of Tel Aviv. They lived in poverty. You can imagine how bad
a man felt, especially from that generation, when he couldn’t provide
for his family.”
Ben looks at me, searching for my understanding. After all, I’m
not a man; do I know what he is talking about? Do I realize how
painful it is to be a vulnerable man who has lost his power? I
understand that Ben is telling me something about himself too, about
his own vulnerability and tears and about the need to cover these in
order to preserve not only his masculine identity but also his father’s
and his grandfather’s pride.
“It was humiliating for my grandfather, the head of the family, to
become an immigrant with no language, no job, no status. It’s
heartbreaking to think about my proud grandfather being so weak
and powerless. In fact, he was never able to recover. He died with
his shame, a shame about being inferior, having no respect, about
speaking only Arabic, the wrong language.”
At the end of each session Ben sends me a YouTube video of an
Arabic song. He loves Farid El Atrash, Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, and
Abdel Halim Hafez.
“My parents never felt comfortable speaking Arabic,” he says.
“They didn’t want to feel like immigrants. But I remember the music
in my grandparents’ house, and my grandfather singing and
shedding a tear. I used to look at him crying and knew that this music
was filled with emotions, and I knew that it reminded him of the home
he had left behind.”
“Thank you for today, Doctor,” Ben writes in an email after a
session. This time he shares a link to Moshe Eliyahu and his Syrian
band.
I am grateful for the songs Ben shares with me. He doesn’t know
that, like him, I am pretty familiar with that music; that Moshe Eliyahu
was my mother’s uncle, a famous singer in Syria.
My grandparents spoke and wrote in Arabic and listened to Arabic
music at home. When we visited them in Haifa, it was clear that the
Arabic music bothered my mother, and she used to whisper in
Arabic, “Can you please lower it a little?”
Years later, I learned that at my parents’ wedding, my mother’s
uncle, the singer, was invited to the stage. He had agreed to honor
the bride and the groom and dedicate one of his famous songs to
them, “Simcha Gedola Halaila” (“A Big Celebration Tonight”). My
mother was devastated. The last thing she wanted at her wedding
was Arabic music, and she started sobbing. Her uncle was asked to
stop his singing and leave the stage. He never spoke with her again.
Arabic music became the soundtrack of my sessions with Ben.
We listened to it together, and I listened to the songs Ben emailed
me after the sessions, knowing that he needed to give me not only
the narrative of his family’s life, but also the flavors, the smells, the
feelings that words alone could not convey.
Ben carried his family history, the ghosts of immigration from east
to west. The Arabic music was one way to rework that history, to
confront it, to turn the passive experience of being a victim of racist
contempt into an active practice of celebration, pride, and ownership.
Ben, the boy who was holding his family’s shame of speaking the
wrong language, tells me about becoming a proud soldier in an elite
Israeli commando brigade unit, where fluency in Arabic was an
advantage. His was a counterterrorism unit; they performed
undercover operations in urban Arab territories and often disguised
themselves while speaking Arabic, gathering intelligence.
We began to process the significance of his military service and
the part it played in the interplay of victims and victors, the ways in
which one who feels inferior needs to become superior in an attempt
to heal a trauma.
That dynamic was true on the national level as well; a country
founded on the trauma of persecution raised generations of soldiers
and fighters. Every war was an opportunity to repeat and repair the
Jews’ past defeats and humiliations. In 1982, right before the
Lebanon War, the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin,
explained why that war was necessary. “Believe me,” he told his
cabinet, “the alternative is Treblinka and we have decided that there
will not be another Treblinka.”
The wish to repair, and this time to emerge from battles victorious,
is based on the illusion that when we do so, we become winners. But
in fact a soldier’s victory is never just a triumph. It’s also a loss and
an injury, as well as a repetition of the early trauma it was supposed
to heal.
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.
The wish to heal the intergenerational trauma of immigration
through becoming a commando soldier allowed Ben to feel like a
victor, but it also created a new trauma that we begin to unpack,
exploring the ties between fathers and sons.
A , world around us was the only world we knew and
military conflicts were our reality. Kids grew up knowing that right
after graduating high school they would have to serve in the army,
preparing for that by trying to remember that if they stayed strong the
Holocaust would never happen again.
The next step after high school was in some ways a break from
life as we knew it, an alternate reality with its own rules, hierarchies,
and struggles, but one we had spent our whole lives expecting. We
were all soldiers and even that didn’t seem strange. After all, we
thought, what else would we be at eighteen?
Every year, a small group was chosen to serve in the special units.
They had to go through a long acceptance process that started a
year earlier, with many months of interviews, and physical and
emotional tests.
Ben was accepted to serve in the commando unit.
“I was so proud,” Ben says. “I didn’t really think about the service
itself. Acceptance was my goal. You want to be accepted, to know
that out of all people, you are the one who got in.” He looks amused,
as if he sounds ridiculous, then adds with a smile, “Doctor, don’t you
think that the closest thing to it, here in the United States, is being
accepted to an Ivy League college?”
I remember how proud we were of our friends who were accepted
to special units. Sometimes we were surprised that those we thought
of as especially masculine or brave were not accepted, and we
looked differently at those who got in, as if we discovered something
we didn’t know about them, a secret power.
My version of being a “special-unit girl” was when Matti Caspi, a
well-respected musician, accepted me into the army band that he
was putting together, and my friends were proud of me. We were
teenagers, preoccupied with how we looked and with what others
thought of us. Special-unit boys were our omnipotent superheroes,
the most desirable men, and our society worshiped them. I knew that
this was Ben’s victory, that he felt recognized and had compensated
for his family’s “inferiority” with his new sense of superiority, of pride.
We lived in the midst of the paradox of going to war and being in
love with love. Love was everywhere and we lived an intensity that
only the combination of hormones and war could produce. We held
each other tight because we didn’t know what tomorrow would bring.
It was now or never.
I remember those nights when we performed for hundreds of
soldiers who had not been home for weeks. I was too young to
understand what I felt, that tension in the air, an energy that I don’t
think I’ve ever experienced before or since.
It was the time we performed for the Golani Brigade unit that I
remember most vividly. We were invited to perform on their last day
of training. The musical group performed every day and we usually
didn’t know in advance who our audience would be. The production
unit took care of the practicalities. We just met every day at noon.
Duchan, our military driver, waited for us to load the musical and
sound equipment on the bus, and we drove, to the south, to the
north, or to the east. We didn’t really care where and we didn’t mind
his wild driving, thinking that if we had an accident we would finally
get a chance to skip that evening’s show.
The Golani base was all the way in the north, about three hours’
drive from our base. We were tired and took naps on the bus. When
we got there, it was almost evening and we had only two hours to
put the stage together, eat something, and start the show. We looked
around. The place seemed empty.
“Where is everyone?” we asked.
“They have to finish something and will come to your concert right
after,” someone answered.
I remember thinking, They can come whenever they want, or
come late, or not come at all.
I helped the drummer put his drum set together and then checked
the microphones.
“The soldiers are really looking forward to it,” someone else said.
“We are too,” we lied.
It was our second year performing the same show every night. At
that point we didn’t even like one another anymore, and we could
sing those songs in our sleep. But we felt it was not appropriate to
complain. After all, we went home almost every night.
 “Can you play the songs faster today?” we asked the drummer.
“It’s already late and the soldiers are not here yet. We won’t get
home till late tonight.”
Sometimes, when we played songs we didn’t like, the drummer
actually did play them faster and we all thought it was funny. But that
evening was different—for some reason it felt too important.
I’m not sure where the soldiers came from, but hundreds
suddenly started walking toward us. All of them were wearing their
olive uniforms, as were we, but theirs looked dusty, and each soldier
was holding a short Galil gun. As more and more of them came, we
felt the intensity of sex and aggression, the yearning of so many
young men at once.
We felt powerful but we knew it was a false power. As women, we
were objects of desire, but it wasn’t us they desired; we were only a
channel through which they expressed their longings. They were
yearning for something else: for tenderness, for sanity, for touch, for
a taste of the excitement of adolescence. Our goal was to create the
illusion that for a moment we could give them all of that. We brought
with us a glimpse of home and awakened everything they longed for.
While we were used to the impact we had on those young men, their
uniforms couldn’t hide the boys we recognized inside them. For us,
they were men, soldiers, but also our high school friends. We knew
that they had many moments when they wanted to cry but had to
hide it, sometimes even from themselves. They needed to play the
roles they were assigned, to be the men they were raised to be.
I stood on that stage, the lights in my eyes. I couldn’t see their
faces, only a field of olive. There was a moment of silence before I
smiled and said, “Golani, we are really happy to be here tonight.”
And I started to sing “Naarat Rock” (“A Rock and Roll Girl”), by
Yitzhak Laor and Matti Caspi.
When I got to the lines about how the girl had sex with the
drummer, I looked back and smiled at the drummer. He wasn’t
playing the song faster than usual but when it ended I couldn’t
breathe.
The dynamic between the masculine and the feminine is that the
feminine often becomes the container for men’s vulnerabilities. They
work as a system, and while that dynamic helps one side “get rid” of
his neediness and place it in the other, it often leaves him with no
real access to his feelings, and with denial of his fear, helplessness,
guilt, and shame.
We can see that dynamic in men’s relationship to tears, which is
often complex. In our culture the split between femininity and
masculinity is represented in the split between hardness and fluidity.
Heterosexual culture often overvalues solidness, which is associated
with erection, masculinity, independence, and activity, while it
devalues fluidness, which is associated with femininity, vulnerability,
passivity, and even contamination. Being strong is associated with
being hard, not being a leaky, needy baby.
That split between the masculine and the feminine presented
itself very early in our lives. As a young woman I recognized that
when a man comes inside your body, it is potentially a way to
console his sorrow, to hold his tears. Love was as intense as war,
sex was as emotional as loss, and death was always in the air.

B wife, Karen, when he was a soldier.

“She used to wait for me at the bus station in Ramat Gan, and as
I got off the bus we would hug each other, sometimes standing there
hugging for thirty minutes, in the heat, unable to let go. Then we
would go to my parents’ house, where my mother cooked a big
lunch. We ate and then got right into bed. I was always so tired that I
don’t know how I functioned. I remember waking up the next day,
feeling Karen’s familiar body, hiding with her under the blankets, and
feeling happy. She was my sanctuary. When I came home, I needed
her.”
Ben’s unit was praised for being an effective counterterrorism
unit. They performed undercover operations in urban Arab territories
and often disguised themselves by dressing up as locals. They
gathered intelligence information and performed high-risk operations
like hostage rescue, kidnapping, and targeted killing.
The group was called Mista’arvim in Hebrew, a name that derived
from the Arabic “Musta’arabi” (those who live among the Arabs),
referring to Arabic-speaking Jews who were “like Arabs,” or culturally
Arabic but not Muslims.
Ben is not a big guy, and because of his green eyes, long blond
hair, and delicate features, he was often chosen to be the one
disguised as a woman when they walked into the Arab markets.
Sitting in my office, he tells me about the new Netflix television
show called Fauda.
“Do you know what fauda means?” he asks.
When I shake my head he explains, “That was the code word for
being exposed. We shouted, ‘Fauda,’ which in Arabic means ‘a
mess,’ to let others know that we needed to run, that we had been
discovered. The guy who wrote the show and plays the lead role was
a fighter in our unit,” he says, “and so much of it is based on real
things that happened. I started watching it and found myself thinking,
‘What the fuck? This is insane.’”
“And what is it that you watch and think is insane?” I ask.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” Ben says. “It’s that word that you used in
our first session: omnipotent. I asked you then what it meant, and
you said, ‘It means someone who thinks they can do anything, who
thinks they have endless power like a superhero, with no limitations.
God is omnipotent.’ You then said, ‘God can’t die. People can only
play omnipotent and then they pay a price for it.’ I remember looking
at you and thinking, ‘Wow, where did that come from? What is she
really telling me about myself?’”
“Yes,” I say, “and I remember you then told me about a guy in
your unit who, during your first months of training, was reading
Catch-22, and one day he looked at everyone and said, ‘We are
crazy. I’m out of here,’ and left the unit. And you said that even back
then you knew that he understood something that none of you did.”
“Yes, he was the sane one even as he seemed so completely
insane.”
“It was insane to be so sane.”
We look at each other and stay silent for a long while. Then Ben
glances at his watch, quickly stands up, and starts walking toward
the door.
“I’m getting there, Doctor,” he whispers. “I’m getting there.”
B minutes late to his next session. He has never been late
before and I am a little worried, checking my emails to see if he has
written to let me know that he is running late. I wonder if it was the
“getting there” from our last session that didn’t allow him to get here
on time today. Is he anxious about what he is going to uncover or
discover? Is he trying to slow down, to communicate with me that we
are moving into dangerous territory?
It is not unusual that as people get closer to sensitive emotional
material, or even to the issues they came to therapy to resolve, they
unconsciously have more resistance to treatment and “accidentally”
forget to show up, find themselves late, or sabotage treatment in
other ways.
What is it that causes Ben to be late? Is he safe?
There is a knock on the door, and Ben, trying to catch his breath,
apologizes, takes his jacket off, and throws himself on the couch.
“You won’t believe it, but somehow I found myself involved in a
physical fight between two people that I didn’t even know,” he says.
“It was bizarre. Things like that haven’t happened to me for years
and I don’t know what to think.”
Ben looks at me and from his expression I realize that I must
seem confused or even suspicious. He smiles and points his finger.
“I know that look of yours; you squeeze your eyes, I know, it’s like
you have a question mark on your forehead.”
“A big question mark,” I say, amused. “I’m glad that you didn’t
miss it.”
“Let me tell you what happened,” he explains. “I was riding my
bike here and suddenly I heard people screaming and running away
from something. I came closer and saw a big guy hitting another,
smaller guy. I thought he was going to kill him. And then suddenly
the big guy grabbed the smaller one and held a knife to his throat. It
all happened fast. It looked like they were fighting over a parking
spot and it got out of control. I didn’t think and just jumped right in to
try to help.”
I keep silent.
“It’s my instinct, you know what I mean?” Ben is trying to explain.
“People shouldn’t fight like that; it’s crazy. I came toward the big guy
and said, ‘Man, give me the knife, you don’t want to kill someone
over a parking spot, believe me, I’m helping you here, give me the
knife.’ The guy dropped the knife and I quickly stood between them
and told the smaller guy, ‘Get right into your car. Now!’ That guy
knew I had saved his life and he ran to the car and drove away as
fast as he could. ‘Stay safe,’ I said to the bigger guy and got on my
bike and left. I’m sorry I was late.”
I take a deep breath. “That’s a good excuse, what can I tell you?”
I say, half joking but in fact very serious. “It’s hard to argue with a
dramatic incident like that. I can see that something made you go
right in and not back off. You said this hadn’t happened to you for
years. Is it possible that it happened now because it is somehow
related to getting closer to something emotional here, in therapy? Is
it related to us ‘getting there’?”
Ben doesn’t look surprised or even irritated by my questions. He
nods.
“I think you are right. I went there because I was looking for
something.”
I don’t fully know yet what we are talking about, but I understand
that Ben needs to get closer to some unprocessed emotional
experience filled with aggression, danger, maybe even murder.
“I needed to get in touch with something that I’d rather forget,” he
says, “but it’s haunting me. During the last few nights, I’ve woken up
frightened. Suddenly, I’m having flashbacks.”
I look at him and realize that there is still much I don’t know about
his army operations.
Ben covers his face. I see him thinking, and then he says, “You
were right, Doctor, I remember you once telling me that pride is our
enemy. If I’m still a teenager, playing superhero, looking for revenge,
then I’m not a real man.”
“Then you act your feelings, instead of understanding them,” I
say. “You relive your trauma instead of processing it. I don’t know
that there is such a thing as a ‘real man,’” I add, “but I believe the
main evidence for strength is the ability to look reality in the eye.
When you are able to do that, you save yourself and the next
generation from carrying your unprocessed trauma.”
 “I know exactly what you mean,” Ben says. “My father was a tank
driver in the Six-Day War.”

I J 1967, when Ben’s father was twenty years old, the Six-Day
War broke out.
Ben doesn’t know much about his father’s experience as a tank
driver in that war. “My dad never talked about it. I only knew from my
mom, who met him right after the war, that he was fighting in
Jerusalem and that his best friend died there right before his eyes.”
The Six-Day War was the third big war for Israel since 1948. It
was that war that changed the old stereotype of the Jewish male.
Israelis were proud of the young men who had won the war in only
six days, and a new image of a Jewish man arose. Not only was that
man seen as more masculine; he was like King David, able to defeat
a greater enemy with his strength.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin announced after the war that it was
the men who had won the war—not technology, not weapons, but
the men who overcame enemies everywhere, despite their enemies’
superior numbers and fortifications. He declared that “only their
personal stand against the greatest dangers would achieve victory
for their country and for their families, and that if victory was not
theirs the alternative was annihilation.”
The young men’s job, then, was to prevent annihilation. This gave
them a way to work through the trauma of the Holocaust and the
Jews’ constant threat of persecution. The men carried the weight of
history by adopting a hypermasculine role. At eighteen years of age
they had to start presenting themselves as confident and fearless.
“When I was a child I remember my father waking up in the
middle of the night, screaming,” Ben says. “He was traumatized.
Who knows what he had seen. I was born only a few years after the
Six-Day War.”
In Hebrew, the name Ben means “a boy.” When Ben gave me
permission to write his story he also helped me choose this
pseudonym, a name to disguise his real identity, one that would
represent his father’s wish to have a first-born son.
 “On the day I was called to the army, my father was silent. He
walked back and forth and didn’t say a word. Then he drew closer to
me and whispered, ‘No need to cry, boy. You do exactly what you
have to do and may God be with you.’ He already knew that men
were not omnipotent; only God is. He knew where I was going and
he was the one who hugged me after a terrible incident. I didn’t have
to tell him anything, he knew, and he knew that I would never be the
same.”
The terrible incident that Ben hadn’t yet told me about was clearly
the moment when he and his father became one. They didn’t need,
nor did they have, the words to describe their parallel heartbreaks.
“Do you want to tell me about that incident?” I ask.
Ben is silent for a moment. “When I was a young soldier,” he
says, “I killed someone.”
We are both silent.
“It would never have occurred to me that what happened on the
street today was related, but when you made that connection I
realized that of course it was. We started talking about my army
experience, and on my way to you I found myself in a war zone
again, this time in the middle of New York City, and I went right in, as
if looking for something. Maybe to save someone’s life.”
Ben tells me about that traumatic day almost thirty years ago. It
was hot, and they were sitting on a hill spying on a group of people
in the Arab territory. Suddenly it was clear that they were
surrounded.
“Fauda,” someone yelled.
He looks at me and his eyes fill with tears. “I was the sniper. The
guy I shot was a little older, maybe in his thirties, and I thought to
myself, this man must be a father,” he says. “A father,” he repeats,
now in a firm voice, looking at me as if asking: do you understand
what I’m saying?
“I saw him getting closer and closer and I shot him right in the
head. Through the rifle’s scope I saw him so clearly. I looked right
into his eyes and then I saw his head exploding into a million
pieces.” Ben covers his face and whispers, “It’s unforgivable.”
 I keep silent. There is not a lot to say but to try to bear the pain,
the guilt, the intensity of the horror.
“We were proud to be chosen to serve in that unit, teenagers who
didn’t think about life or death, who wanted to be brave men, not little
boys. Only now I’m thinking to myself, what is so wrong about being
a boy? Now, when I’m about to have a child myself, it all comes back
to me. I wake up in the middle of the night and see the man’s face—I
can’t stop seeing those eyes, I can’t stop thinking about his children
and remembering what I’d done.”
Ben starts sobbing.
“I’m not crying about myself,” he says. “I can’t fix the past. I’m
crying for the injustice. I’m crying for the inhumanity. I’m crying for
the children.” The tears are streaming down his face.
I am aware of the intermingling of life and death, of past and
future, the father he killed and his son, who is about to be born.
Ben tried to fix the trauma and the humiliation of the past. He
wanted to be a hero who brings home victory and repairs his
grandfather’s pride, his father’s trauma, and the wounds of history.
Instead he was brought right into that trauma. Instead of being only
the victim he became both victim and aggressor. Killing another
human killed his own soul, too.
“It is time to cry,” I say, referencing his father in his dream. “There
is a lot to cry for. Your father was right.”
Ben nods. “I was a boy who thought he was a man. Now I’m a
man who is about to have a boy. I will protect my son. You are my
witness.”
He wipes his eyes as I feel my own welling up. Boy soldiers don’t
cry. But men, and fathers, can finally begin to mourn.
 8

DEAD BROTHER, DEAD SISTER

O shapes our behaviors, our

perceptions, our feelings, and even our memories. From a young
age, we learn to follow our parents’ signals; we learn to walk around
their wounds, try not to mention and absolutely not touch what
mustn’t be disturbed. In our attempt to avoid their pain and our own,
we blind ourselves to that which is right before our eyes.
In “The Purloined Letter,” the third of Edgar Allan Poe’s three
short detective stories, a letter is stolen from a woman’s boudoir. The
reader doesn’t know the contents of that letter, but we know that it is
secretive and forbidden. The police enter the house where they
believe the letter is kept. They look everywhere, but they can’t find it.
As it turns out, the letter is not hidden at all; it is in an ordinary card
rack in plain sight and this confuses the police, who expect to
uncover a secret truth.
We tend to assume that what we can see must be known to us,
but in fact, so much of what we don’t know about ourselves lies in
the familiar, sometimes even in the obvious. Often we realize that it
is in fact right before our eyes, and still we can’t see it.
When I meet my patient Dana for the first time, I don’t know that
her family traumas touch my own. My family trauma is unveiled and
brought to life in the space between us. One ghost awakens another,
and without awareness that brings us to new places.
My mother’s older brother drowned in the sea when he was
fourteen years old and she was only ten. In our family this was not a
secret, but it was something we never talked about. We all knew that
my mother was unable to speak about that part of her childhood. We
understood that for her, remembering was a form of living through
something that she couldn’t live through. The ten-year-old girl that
she was had broken into pieces and never recovered. A part of her
was gone with him, and only a picture in my grandparents’ living
room hung as a reminder that many years ago, something was
different.
We, her children, were vigilant, trying never to touch what was
clearly an open wound, and what became a sensitive spot for all of
us.
Once in a while, when someone whistled on the street, we all
stopped breathing, waiting for my mother to briefly sigh, “My brother
Eli,” her voice turning into that of a little girl. “He knew how to whistle,
and his were absolutely the loudest.” Then she would pause for a
moment and change the subject.
In our attempt to protect the people we love from pain, we
manage to keep those memories, stories, and facts forgotten,
dissociated, hidden in our own minds. We know, and still we do not
remember. Our unconscious minds are always loyal to our loved
ones and to the unspeakable fact within their souls. So, while
something familiar lives inside us, we treat it as a stranger within.
Of course I knew that my mother had lost her brother. Of course I
remembered every detail that I had ever learned. At the same time, I
didn’t know and never remembered. That part of my mother’s
childhood lived inside me in an isolated capsule, unintegrated with
everything else, and when my patient Dana enters my office for the
first time and tells me about her dead brother, I look at her tears and
don’t remember, don’t realize in that moment, that she is my own
mother who fell apart. I just know I can’t breathe.
Dana tells me she wants to start therapy. “But it’s not about my
dead brother. I’m just too emotional and I need to learn how to
control my emotions,” she says.
Like my own mother, Dana was ten years old when her brother
died in a car accident. Now she is twenty-five. “How many years can
one grieve?” she asks, frustrated that she is crying again.
She tells me that she hated herself all those years for not being
able to live like a “normal girl,” unable to stop her tears, to ignore the
finger-pointing and whispers of “the girl who lost her brother.”
She moved to New York City in order to forget, to become
someone new. “And besides,” she says, “I’m not even sure I cry
because of him. I’m just this whiny girl and I need therapy so I can
start my life.”
“Start your life,” I note.
“Maybe I started, but then I had to pause and I’m not sure I know
how to unpause,” she answers. I see how her fingers tap on the
chair as she asks in a childish tone, “Do you know how to unpause a
life?”

M ’ drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. She

admired him; she loved his whistles, his jokes, his brilliant ideas.
Dana tells me about her brother. “He was the funniest person in
the whole world,” she says with a smile, “and I thought I would marry
him when I grew up, or at least someone like him.” Her eyes fill with
tears. It is clear that her pain is still so profound that she can’t finish
a sentence without a sense of agony. Loss can never be fully
processed, but at this point, for Dana, it is an open wound, and every
time she thinks about it, the pain is intolerable. I am aware that she
needs me to hold her hand and slowly guide her through this land of
pain and devastation, but at this point I don’t recognize that I am also
visiting my own family’s devastation.
For fifteen years Dana has been alone with her pain. She has
refused to talk with anyone about her past, and that refusal has been
a way to protect herself from falling apart. But it has also required
her to pause her life. She is frozen in place, a ten-year-old girl who
has just lost her brother.
After her brother’s death, both her parents became depressed
and were unable to function. Her father had to leave his job, and her
mother couldn’t get out of bed. As is typical with loss, Dana didn’t
only lose her brother; she in fact lost everything—her family and her
life as she knew it. She couldn’t bother her parents with her own
confusing and overwhelming pain. She tried to make believe
everything was as usual and focused on her schoolwork. But she
couldn’t concentrate, and she failed in every class. “I am stupid,” she
concluded.

W office was frightening and unfamiliar for Dana. Her

friend’s therapist had referred her to me. She had kept my phone
number in her bag for almost a year before she called.
For so many years she had tried not to think, not to know; she
had disconnected when she felt too much. It was as if she had been
locked in a dark basement, and now we are trying to slowly turn on
the lights without blinding her eyes.
It is hard not to feel alone when it comes to pain. To some extent
all feelings are isolated, enigmatic, and we transform them, through
words, into a form that we can share with others. But words do not
always capture the essence of our feelings, and in that sense, we
are always alone. This is especially true when it comes to trauma
and loss. In order to survive, we disconnect not only from others but
also from ourselves. And we cry for the losses—of the people we
love, of the life we used to have, of our old self.
Mourning is a private, lonely experience. It doesn’t necessarily
unify people; it often splits them apart so that they are isolated in
their pain, feeling unrecognized, misunderstood, or invisible. We
need another mind to help us know our own mind, to feel and digest
our loss and everything that we are too anxious to connect to: our
shame, rage, identification with the dead, guilt, and even envy.
Dana needs me to know her suffering from the inside, unaware,
though perhaps she senses, that in fact I know her feelings better
than both of us realize. I don’t need to remember my own history; I
am living it. I am her therapist, I am my mother’s daughter, and I am
a mother myself with a daughter and a son. And I witness and
identify with my mother and with Dana—a dead sister to a dead
brother. All of those roles—some more conscious, some less so—
accompany us on our journey.
“In some ways, we mourn forever,” I say. My words are an
emotional reminder of the fact that the process of loss continues
across decades and generations, and that my children and I live with
that unprocessed loss, which my mother, still alive today, survived
more than sixty years earlier. That grief lives inside each of us, and
in that sense, it is part of our family’s heritage.

D moment vividly. It was just a few days before

summer break. Although everyone had showed up for class, it was
clear that even the teachers had given up on school. The kids were
planning the end-of-the-year party when there was a knock on the
classroom door.
My own mother was sitting near the dining room table, doing her
homework, staring at her notebook. She was an excellent student
and always finished her homework on time. Suddenly she heard a
scream. It was her mother’s voice, sounding like a wounded animal.
Dana was gazing out the window when she heard the knock. The
teacher went to open the door, and Dana saw the nurse whispering
something in the teacher’s ear. They both seemed serious and then
the teacher said, “Dana Goren, the nurse needs you in her office.”
My mother heard her own mother yelling, sobbing, screaming,
“My son, where is my son? Bring me back my son.” The whole
neighborhood heard her and people came over and gathered in the
house, crying and praying to God that this was all a big mistake.
Suddenly, her mother was lying on the floor.
Dana walked silently with the nurse to her office, and as the door
opened she saw her parents. They asked her to sit next to them.
“From there I don’t remember much. I remember that I didn’t
really understand what was going on. Everyone was upset and I was
invisible. I knew that something terrible had happened.”
Dana is crying. I cry with her, and it feels as if this is the first time I
have heard something so terrible, so painful, so devastating. It is the
first time I have had to think about a younger sister losing her
brother, and, in so many ways, it is indeed the first time I have
allowed myself to imagine the unimaginable.
Like my mother, I had never let myself think about that
experience, to live through it or to feel it. Dana took me to a place
where a family secret was buried. Not remembering allows us to
keep things “far from home” and to avoid wading into territory that
might otherwise be too dangerous. I went there with Dana without
fully realizing where I was going, silently following her to visit a
hidden grave.
Dana weeps for days, for months. She cries and I sometimes cry
with her, explaining to her what she is crying about, how confused
and scared she is, how it makes her feel guilty and ugly and dirty.
How she had watched her parents fall apart and couldn’t do
anything. How she had died with her brother.
Slowly, she begins to feel less overwhelmed and starts
reengaging in life.

D year of Dana’s therapy, I give birth to my third

child, Mia.
“She will have an older brother,” my mother cries when she hears
the news. I know she remembers herself as a younger sister, and I
find myself thinking about Dana.
A few days later I get an email from Dana.
“Welcome, baby girl,” she writes to my new daughter. “I’m writing
to you, new sister, as a younger sister who has been brought back to
life.”
 PART III

OURSELVES
Breaking the Cycle

P III about the secrets we keep from ourselves and about the
search for the truth: the exploration of true love, genuine intimacy,
real friendship, and the process of healing. It examines the journey
we have to take in order to know ourselves, to work through the
traumas of our past and to accept our own flaws and limitations as
well as those of the people around us. Analyzing the emotional
inheritance we might pass on to the next generation is a step toward
breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma. This is the emotional
work we do not only for those who came before us, but for our
children as well.
The hazard of intimacy frequently plays itself out in families.
Parents communicate with their children their ambivalence about
being vulnerable. They often either avoid a real intimate exchange or
hide behind their wounds and create false intimacy, making their
children become their caretakers.
As children, we experience our parents’ fears and inherit them,
perceiving the world the way our parents did, defending ourselves in
similar ways. We are invested in keeping our family secrets but
mostly we are trying to keep secrets from ourselves.
What we can’t let ourselves know leaves us unfamiliar to
ourselves, unable to know others or to be fully known by them. Part
III describes the ongoing process of examining our lives, the scars of
childhood trauma, and the wish to be better parents than our parents
were. It examines conflicts of loyalty as they appear in romantic
relationships, between parents and children, and in women’s
friendships.
The growing ability to integrate and process pain helps us find
meaning, heal, live life to the fullest, and raise the next generation
with honesty and integrity.
 9

THE TASTE OF SORROW

I that I find myself taken off guard by a patient’s secret. But

I was not prepared for what I discovered after Isabella’s death.
I have never met Isabella. She was my patient Naomi’s best
friend.
It isn’t unusual for therapists to feel that we know our patients’
friends, lovers, and family. In some ways, we accompany those
people from afar, as if they were characters in a beloved book. We
will never meet them but we know them intimately and have feelings
for them. We get attached to the people in our patients’ lives; we
follow their stories; we watch them change with our patients and see
their relationships develop or sometimes end.
Naomi has been in therapy with me for three years, and that is
how I have come to know Isabella, who has been her best friend
since childhood. Both of them grew up as only children, and in some
ways they have been sisters to each other.
Naomi takes a tissue from the box on the side table. She is
shaken. She tells me that Isabella has just been diagnosed with
ovarian cancer and that the doctors don’t know yet how bad it is or if
it’s treatable.
We are both silent.
Isabella gave birth only a few months earlier. She always wanted
a big family, and when she learned that she carried BRCA1, the so-
called breast cancer gene, she and her husband decided to rush to
have another child. Then she would have the surgery that she
believed would save her life, a double mastectomy.
 “Now it’s too late,” Naomi says quietly and immediately adds, “But
Isabella is brave. If anyone can make it, she can.”
I recognize the way Naomi comforts herself, using her idealization
of Isabella.
Naomi and Isabella met when they were nine years old and both
joined a musical theater group after school in the small town where
they grew up.
“Isabella was one of those girls you couldn’t miss,” Naomi told me
in one of our first sessions. “She was beautiful even as a little girl
and behaved as if she knew she was talented and attractive and
didn’t need others for reassurance. We all wanted to be close to her,
tried to be her friends, wished to be her.”
In fourth grade, the musical theater group performed Aladdin, and
Isabella got the lead role of Jasmine.
“No one was surprised,” Naomi said, amused but also a bit
annoyed. “Isabella wasn’t only talented; even as a young girl, she,
like Jasmine, was a princess who believed in love and fought against
injustices. All of us were envious of her freedom to express her
opinions; she wasn’t afraid of adults and didn’t obey authority.”
Isabella refused to accept the lead role. She stood up to the
director and said it wasn’t fair for her to play Jasmine because she
was a new student and the role should go to the kids who had been
there longer.
“She wasn’t scared,” Naomi said again, and I knew that she
couldn’t recognize Isabella’s fear that was hidden in that act of
rejecting the lead role. In thinking about her own life, comparing
herself to Isabella, Naomi could only see her friend’s boldness. She
felt paralyzed, unable to own her life.
It is not always clear who gets the lead role in Naomi’s life.
Sometimes it feels as though she gave that role to her mother,
sometimes to Isabella, as she silently accepts the supporting role.
When speaking of her childhood, Naomi describes her parents as a
perfect couple and her mother as good, charming, beautiful, and
caring. It often feels as though she is left to witness her parents’ love
from the outside. She admires her mother and her parents’
relationship. Naomi finds a way to play out that childhood dynamic
with Isabella, whom she idealizes.
Naomi had decided to start therapy because she felt unhappy but
didn’t have any idea why. During our first session she described how
she grew up in a loving and stable family and told me about Isabella,
who—unlike Naomi—was raised by a single mother in a volatile
household. She told me that Isabella was the one who constantly
searched for answers, while she, Naomi, didn’t even have any
questions. Now she was looking for something but she didn’t know
what.
Even in Naomi’s own treatment, at times Isabella became more
important than Naomi. In my writing of Naomi’s story, once again,
Isabella’s story often takes over. This recurrent enactment brings us
into the heart of Naomi’s hidden struggle with knowing and being
known, with feelings of inferiority and competition. Naomi and I
wonder whom and what we actually know and what is used as a way
to hide.

“I ’ last night,” Naomi opens the next session. She looks

distressed. “Isabella called me late and in a very matter of a fact way
said she wanted me to come over as soon as I could. She said that
she needed to tell me a secret.”
Naomi pauses and turns to me. “We were always so close and I
didn’t think we had any secrets. It worries me. What is it that she
wants to tell me?”
My thoughts are racing as we sit together in silence for a long
minute.
“I’m meeting her tomorrow,” Naomi says, trying to allay her fears.
“It will be okay. I feel honored that Isabella wants to share her secret
with me.” She smiles and adds, “Do you know that I have always
been her secrets keeper?”
In high school Isabella spent most days and nights at Naomi’s
house. Once in a while she told her mother that she was at Naomi’s
but instead stayed over at her boyfriend Sam’s. Naomi was happy to
be Isabella’s alibi. After all, Isabella was not only her best friend but
one of the most popular girls in their grade. She was the student
council representative, she was on the volleyball team, she sang and
played guitar in the school’s band, she knew how to put on makeup
before anyone else did, and she was the one the boys loved the
most.
Sam was Isabella’s first boyfriend. They were in tenth grade when
Isabella shared with Naomi that she was in love with Sam, a popular
boy and the captain of the varsity basketball team. When they kissed
for the first time, Isabella ran to Naomi’s house to tell her, and a few
days later she showed Naomi the note Sam wrote her. I can’t stop
thinking of you. He signed it with a heart, and they were both excited.
Isabella and Sam were a couple for a few years. He was the first
guy she had sex with, and she shared that secret with Naomi, her
best friend. When they graduated high school, Isabella and Sam
broke up and went to different colleges.
When they were in their twenties, Isabella had one boyfriend after
another, passionate love affairs, which Naomi followed, always a
little jealous and feeling slightly betrayed when Isabella prioritized
her boyfriends over Naomi. She wanted to be loved the way Isabella
was, but instead—as in her relationship with her mother—she was a
witness to someone else’s love.
One day, when she was in her twenties, Naomi ran into Sam on
the street. She called Isabella right away to tell her about it. She
asked her if she would give her permission to go out with Sam.
Isabella didn’t mind. She was in love with another guy; she gave
Naomi her blessing. A few years later, Isabella was a bridesmaid in
Naomi and Sam’s wedding.
Now, in her late thirties, Naomi looks back and tries to understand
why she isn’t happy. I listen as she begins to unpack her relationship
with her mother, her friendship with Isabella, her marriage with Sam.
“What am I missing?” Naomi asks again, sounding desperate. It is
clear to both of us that she has worked hard to keep herself from
knowing the truth about her life and about the people around her.
“I know it’s a cliché,” she says apologetically, “but life is short.” I’m
aware that Naomi is referencing Isabella’s illness, which brings her in
touch with the fragility of life. She feels frightened and disappointed.
 “On the surface I have everything I ever wanted and I love my
family, but I feel so defeated, as if life were supposed to be
something else, more than what it turned out to be. Now Isabella is
sick and it makes me angry.” Naomi’s voice becomes louder.
“Sometimes I feel that I don’t know anyone at all, not even
Isabella. I feel betrayed and I’m not sure why.”
I know what Naomi means. Naomi views Isabella, as well as her
own childhood and her perfect mother, in ways that often don’t feel
real. She idealizes the world around her as a way to protect herself
from seeing things as they really are. It’s not just that she doesn’t
know others; she is afraid to discover herself.
Idealization is a defense mechanism that serves to keep the
illusion that things, or people, are perfect, and even better than
reality. It is based on the splitting between good and bad, which
children do in order to organize a safe and predictable world. As we
grow up and become less fragile, we allow ourselves to see the
world as more complex. As adults, we sometimes use idealization to
pretend that things are perfect, that people are not flawed and that
we don’t have any negative feelings or ambivalence about them.
“I always wanted to be like my mother. She was everything I
wanted to be.” Naomi looks at me and adds in embarrassment, “But I
failed.”
I recognize how similar those feelings are to how Naomi feels
about Isabella. In her idealization of both women she splits between
good and bad and perceives them as all good and herself as a
failure. This is her way to defend against feelings she can’t tolerate
having about them and about herself. Naomi can’t let herself know
how ambivalent she feels about them, how envious she can be, how
angry. Rather, she directs those negative feelings toward herself.
“She was always better than I was. She was beautiful, smart,
talented, and I was myself. I know it’s childish but I feel like pointing
at my mom and saying, ‘It’s not fair, it’s not what you promised me.’”
Naomi takes a deep breath and then says with annoyance, “My
parents loved each other; they were the perfect couple. Doesn’t that
mean I am supposed to be happy in my own marriage? Isn’t that
how it works?”
 I pause and wonder if I should state the obvious. “It sounds like you
felt inferior, maybe even unworthy compared to your mother.”
Naomi looks intrigued, as if my words force her to recalculate
everything. I continue: “While our parents’ relationship can serve as
a model for our romantic life, it is usually our relationship with them
that we repeat in later intimate relationships.”
Naomi seems startled and I’m worried that maybe I have just put
into words the forbidden—that which was known but not allowed to
be spoken.
“Unworthy,” she repeats my word. “I remember that when I was
about ten years old I told my mother that I didn’t believe they loved
me the way they loved each other.” Naomi sighs and continues. “My
mother got so upset. She said that I shouldn’t talk like that, that of
course they loved me, and that one day I’d grow up and have a love
exactly like theirs.” Naomi stops and looks at me. “But I never did,”
she says. “Sam loves me, but he has never loved me the way he
loved Isabella. She was his first love.”
Naomi tries to hold back her tears. She doesn’t want to cry but
she can’t help it. “I hope you know how much I love Isabella,” she
says. “I feel devastated. I feel awful to compare the two of us right
now, when she is so sick.”
Isabella is fighting for her life while Naomi is trying to figure out
her life. Isabella’s illness forces Naomi to face the excruciating
limitations of our existence: that nothing is all good or lasts forever,
that we are all flawed and vulnerable, and that bad things happen to
everyone, even those we idealize.
Before she leaves, Naomi asks to meet me again tomorrow, and
we schedule a session to follow her breakfast with Isabella.
Naomi leaves and my heart is heavy.

T Naomi comes in and immediately throws herself on

my couch. Her eyes are red. She doesn’t speak and just sighs.
The news is bad.
“It was brutal,” Naomi finally says. “Isabella is dying.” She bursts
into tears.
 So many questions are running through my head, but I keep
silent.
“Isabella gave me packages with things to give each of her four
children after her death,” Naomi whispers. “That was her secret. She
didn’t want anyone to know about those packages.”
“How heartbreaking,” I say, and Naomi tells me about the
packages.
“It all started when Isabella read about a woman who, when she
learned she was going to die, prepared several years’ worth of
dinners for her family. For a few weeks that woman cooked every
day,” she says. “She packed all the meals in boxes, and labeled
them with dates, and stored them in a big freezer.”
Naomi takes a deep breath. “Isabella said she regretted that she
was never a good cook. ‘Can you believe I might force them to eat
my cooking for years?’ she joked, and I pretended it was funny.”
They laughed together, and Isabella shared with Naomi her idea
of leaving something for the children, letters and gifts for important
events she would miss. They both knew that like that mother she
read about, Isabella couldn’t imagine separating from her children.
Naomi doesn’t look at me. “Many people recover from cancer and
she could be one of them,” she says. I realize that she is trying to
calm herself, to make sense of everything, to feel less helpless.
She continues. “‘Don’t think about it,’ I told Isabella. ‘You are
about to start a new experimental treatment. There is still hope.’ I
held her hand as tightly as I could. ‘Isy, you are a fighter. It’s not
over,’ I said.
“Isabella didn’t answer. I could see that she was irritated, but she
kept silent and just handed me four big blue boxes. She asked me to
go over her directions, to make sure I understood what to do with
them.
“‘Open on your eighth birthday,’ she wrote to her daughter on a
big square envelope. On another, ‘Open on the first day of school.’
“There were good luck notes, gifts, and letters for birthdays and
graduations. She left each of the girls a book on puberty, the same
book she and I used to read together when we were twelve years
old. It was so painful that at some point I stopped and couldn’t go on.
‘Isy, why?’ I wanted to ask, but she was determined and I knew that I
should do what she wanted me to do; that if she could handle it I
should be able to handle it too.”
Naomi and I sit in silence. There is no real way to escape the
pain, and words cannot capture it.
“Before I left her house Isabella seemed restless. I felt like she
was trying to tell me something but couldn’t, and I have to admit, I’m
not sure I wanted to know. It was already a lot.” Naomi shakes her
head. “I feel like such a bad friend,” she says. “Isabella needed me
to imagine with her how it feels to say goodbye to her children and
know that she will never see them again. She needed me to know
that they will need her and that she won’t be there for them. And I
just couldn’t. I wish I could put my selfish pain aside and help her. I
wish I had the courage to ask her what else she was trying to tell
me.”

N office and I’m glad that she is my last patient of

the night. Walking home, I listen to the familiar hum of the city, which
like the white noise machine in my office helps me to daydream
when I’m alone.
The Bowery neighborhood in Manhattan is never peaceful, and its
hectic rhythm allows my thoughts to flow freely. I feel a strong urge
to rush home and hug my own kids, to hold them tight and not let
them go. I remember that feeling from when they were babies, how I
used to hurry back, imagining our reunion—their smiles, their smells.
Instead, I end up wandering. I walk aimlessly around the Bowery,
back and forth on the same route that I take every day from my
home to my office, and I cry. I cry for Isabella. I cry for her young
children. I cry for Naomi and I cry for what I know Naomi doesn’t
know about my life: that my life partner, Lew, is sick with bladder
cancer and is fighting for his life.
I walk on the street, carrying my patient’s pain, my own pain, not
knowing yet that sooner than anyone expects, Isabella will die, and
that not so long after, on a cold February morning, I will lose Lew to
cancer.
 I find myself gazing at a group of young people waiting outside for
a table at a trendy new restaurant. The days when I used to be one
of them seem far away. I look at them with longing and see only
purity, innocence, naïveté. They all look so happy, so glamorous, as
if they have never lost anyone, never felt devastated or realized that
cancer could be waiting around the corner, unaware that they might
lose everything they have.
Splitting, that primitive defense mechanism of all or nothing, takes
place again, as it does in moments of devastation, dividing the world
into good and bad, those who suffer and those whom we believe
don’t know pain. And we look at them with wonder and envy, the
healthy people who we imagine don’t know the taste of sorrow.
For Naomi, I’m one of those people. She needs to see me as
immune, invulnerable, as living outside the rules of reality in which
we are all survivors or survivors-to-be. It helps her see me as strong
enough to be with her, but nevertheless that need to see me as pain-
free leaves her alone again, connected to idealized others and with
the feeling that no one can truly know her.
“I feel so alone,” she says, and I share with her the feeling that we
all need another human to bear witness and accompany us on the
emotional journey of life, another person who can accept our feelings
and process them with us. We need to be known.
When Naomi was a child, her pain wasn’t recognized and thus
she couldn’t make sense of it and had to deny it. The emotional
holding that parents provide for their children is about accompanying
them in their lives, giving names to their feelings, helping them
tolerate the intense emotions that come with being alive. Now Naomi
gets in touch with her loneliness, conflicted about trusting that I could
understand, aware of her worry of knowing too much about her own
pain as well as about Isabella’s.
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.
 In the last few weeks of Isabella’s life, Naomi sits with Isabella’s
family next to her hospice bed, holding her hand.
Isabella’s older child goes to school and acts as if nothing is
happening. It is always confusing to witness the way children deal
with loss, to understand the things they are worried about that may
sound trivial (“Who is going to put me to bed at night?”) and not to
confuse their dissociated state with lack of care or to blame them for
being selfish. Grief is a tricky and unpredictable creature. It changes
its face every minute and often appears in disguise. In some ways, in
those unbearable moments, we are all children who need someone
to tell us that there is life after death.
Lying in her bed, Isabella becomes more and more disconnected.
“I feel far away,” she tells Naomi. “I looked in the mirror today and
I felt that I had already left.”
Naomi tells me about her guilt and the pain of separation. “She is
agitated and angry,” she says. “I constantly feel that I have done
something wrong, that I could be more helpful, that I could do it
better.”
I know that Naomi’s guilt is about being healthy and alive. It is
about not being able to save Isabella and abandoning her, sending
her all alone into the unknown. But it is also about feeling so
abandoned and devastated.
Isabella dies on a Monday morning when no one is there.
“She was waiting for us to leave,” Naomi says.
Naomi is left to process her losses, to count her regrets, to
cherish their friendship, and to wonder how she can move forward.
“Can you believe it really happened? I lost Isabella. She will never
come back.” She sobs and I cry with her. I feel that I have lost
something as well. But mine is an unusual, unrecognized loss. I
grieve for a woman I have never really known and mourn every loss I
have ever experienced and cry for the losses of my future.

T is rainy. On most mornings as I walk to my office, I

listen to the voice mail messages on my cell phone. This morning,
I’m holding an umbrella in one hand while trying to hold the phone
close to my ear with the other.
I rarely accept new patients these days, but something about the
message I hear strikes me as unusual. I listen to it again.
“I need to grieve but I don’t know how,” the caller says. Intrigued, I
call him back and we set up an appointment.
The following week a man in his mid-forties walks into my office.
“Hi,” I say, referring to him by his first name. He smiles. I look at
his face and try to find a sign of his loss.
“The woman I love just died,” he explains, after he settles into the
couch. “I felt that I needed to speak with someone and a friend gave
me your number. I’m not even sure where to start.”
I nod and he continues. “Her death was sudden. From cancer.
One day she was here, and the next she was gone.”
He lifts his head and looks into my eyes. “She left me many
notes,” he goes on, “a box filled with love letters. I’m not sure why
she thought that might help. It only makes it worse.”
“She left you a box of letters?” My voice is too loud.
“A big blue box,” he says. “That’s just who Isabella was.”
“Isabella?” I hear myself say.
“I mean, the woman I was with,” he clarifies. “We were lovers. We
had a secret relationship and we both tried so hard to end it, to go
back to our lives and forget each other. She even had a baby with
her husband to try to stay in her marriage. But our love was stronger
than life. We decided to have a life together right before she was
diagnosed. A couple of months later she was dead.”
I can feel my heart beat as he continues. “She was the love of my
life, but strangely, ever since she died I find myself thinking I just
made her up, that she never actually existed. Do you know what I
mean?”
He looks at me, and I can see the tears in his eyes—and feel
tears building up in my own.
“Love needs a witness,” I say. “I know what you mean.”
I’m thinking about Naomi and her devoted witnessing of Isabella’s
life. I’m thinking of everything I know that this man doesn’t realize.
I’m thinking of the major role this man played in Isabella’s life and of
his painful loss. So many invisible characters, so many secrets.
I decide to refer him to another therapist. He deserves his own
separate treatment, and Naomi deserves my loyalty. I want to
cherish her Isabella and not confuse her with the Isabella of the man
I’ve just met.
I am left stunned to process my own feelings, holding more secrets
than ever. Is this the secret Isabella wanted to share with Naomi, or
did Naomi know this and keep it as a secret from me? I may never
know. I’m reminded of the enigma of the human mind, questioning
whether we can ever fully know another person’s pain.
 10

THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE

O , Guy, a man in his mid-forties, walks into my office

for the first time. Wearing a heavy gray coat, he nods and says softly,
“Like you, I am not used to this weather.”
I am not sure exactly what he is referring to, and I wait for an
explanation.
“I was born in the same city you were born in,” he continues,
almost whispering.
We switch to speaking our mother tongue, Hebrew, but very
quickly I come to understand that we are speaking different
languages—one innocent, the other dangerous.
“So,” Guy says slowly, as he tries to find a comfortable position in
the armchair. “How come you chose to become a psychoanalyst
when no one else in your family is in the mental health profession?”
That is strange, I think to myself. How does he know no one in my
family is a therapist? And if he doesn’t know, why would he make
those assumptions? But I don’t have to speculate long, as Guy goes
on: “Your sister, she is an architect, and her kids seem pretty sweet.”
He doesn’t assume, I realize with fright. He knows.
“It looks like you know a thing or two about me,” I say, inviting him
to clarify, maybe to confess that indeed we met many years ago in
Tel Aviv, or that we have mutual friends who referred him to me.
Guy smiles. “I’m sure I know more about you than you want me to
know,” he says. He pauses and then adds, “I hope you enjoyed your
summer vacation in Italy.”
How does he know that? I start getting anxious and annoyed.
Who is this guy? Why is he here?
 People usually start therapy curious to learn more about
themselves than about their therapists—at least initially. Having said
that, most of my patients do come to their first session already
knowing at least a little about me. They google me and can easily
find a picture, my age, my birthplace, and my professional
affiliations. Some dig deeper and discover something about my
personal life, my musical background, or the obituary of Lew, my life
partner. In our digital age, the classical psychoanalytic idea of
neutrality is challenged. Whereas in the past our goal as therapists
was to stay objective and make sure our patients couldn’t know
anything about us—not even from our office decoration—nowadays
we work with the information people inevitably have about us, and
we search for the unique meaning this has for each patient.
The preliminary information patients have on their therapists
contributes to a fantasy about who their therapists are and what
therapy is going to be like. Most patients, however, limit their search
so they don’t learn more than they want to know or can handle. I
assume that those who have a negative reaction to my online profile
wouldn’t contact me, and I’m sure some patients might know more
about my personal life than they tell me, or even more than I let
myself realize. Most patients, though, do not disclose their online
research, especially not in the first session, and they come with a
wish, as well as a dread, of being known by me.
Guy introduces a different dynamic. I’m aware that he needs me
to feel that he has invaded my private life.
“Are you worried?” he asks. “I’m not sure, but you don’t seem
happy that I did this research about you.”
“Did you think I would be happy?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I am not a stalker or something, I hope you know,” he
says. “I just needed to find out. These days, who knows, strange
people are everywhere. I wanted to make sure you are not some
lunatic. And I kind of like that your father was born in Iran. It’s pretty
interesting.”
I look at him and wonder: Why would he want to make me so
uncomfortable? My professional self should know the answer, but I
feel paralyzed, unable to think clearly. I remind myself that Guy
surely wants and needs me to feel the way I feel: unsafe, even
frightened. He needs to make me feel at least as intimidated as he
feels when he walks into my office, perhaps as alarmed as he has
been every day of his life.
I’m not sure what Guy is afraid of. But I am aware that I don’t yet
have his permission to explore that question, that I’m not invited into
his world, and instead that he has invited himself into mine.
Confusing the therapist with intense feelings, evoking fear, or
even presenting intense erotic fantasy can serve as a defensive
strategy to make sure the therapist is unable to think, and therefore
unable to know anything real about the patient.
What would happen if I were able to think, to put things together,
to make connections and discover who he really is? What might I, or
he, discover that Guy needs desperately to hide?
The British analyst Wilfred Bion writes in his paper “Attacks on
Linking” about the ways in which people try to avoid knowing
anything that is too much for them to tolerate, to evade the painful
truths of their lives. In therapy, they unconsciously attack the
psychoanalyst’s ability to work. Instead of investing in making
connections and meaning, they make sure no links can be made—
links between ideas and feelings, between past and present,
between therapist and patient. Connections then are replaced with
disconnections, so that patients can escape the pain of discovering
themselves.
Guy enters therapy feeling too exposed, and he makes sure to
project—to instill that emotion in me. Now I am the one who is fearful
of being invaded by a dangerous stranger.
“You really worked hard to find out all of these things about me,” I
finally say.
Guy smiles again. “It’s not hard for me. That’s how I live my life. I
pay a few people and they give me all the information that I need.”
“You wouldn’t start therapy with someone you didn’t fully know,” I
note. “I wonder why. What would happen if we ended this session
with me knowing more about you than you know about me?”
Guy looks disappointed. “What do you mean?” he says. “You
already know more about me than I intended.” He takes a deep
breath. “Maybe it’s strange, but I feel that you know me.”
We look at each other silently and then he glances at his watch. “I
think our time is up,” he says as he stands up, grabbing his coat.
“This is mind-blowing,” he mumbles. “I don’t know what to think.”
He holds the doorknob, turning to look at me again before
leaving, and says, gently, “Now that you know me, do you think
therapy is for me?”
Guy leaves before I have the chance to say anything, and I
realize that we haven’t made another appointment.

T by and I don’t hear from Guy. Frankly, part of me is

relieved. I recognize that since our session I’ve been a bit restless
and I try to understand why. I find myself thinking of Guy when I am
out walking, and I look around to make sure no one suspicious is
following me. When I am on my phone, I have the fleeting thought
that he might be listening. And I have the urge to google his name
and learn more about him. Maybe he is a criminal or some secret
agent, I think. “And besides,” I hear myself repeating his words,
“these days, who knows, strange people are everywhere.”
I’m able to make sense of my thoughts and remind myself that
paranoid thinking by nature is contagious. People can evoke fear in
each other in unpredictable and powerful ways and without
awareness. That unconscious force is one of the reasons conspiracy
theories and fear are so easy to spread. It is why leaders can easily
frighten people by pointing to the enemy and promising them they
will be protected and saved.
Guy was right, I think. In that one session I really learned
something profound about his internal world and especially about
how threatened he feels.
As the days pass, I become more and more curious about the
feelings I’m left with. When Guy reaches out again, I offer to meet
him for one more session and only then decide if we would like to
start working together.
It is a cold day in March when Guy comes to my office for the
second time. He greets me and asks to keep his coat on.
 “It’s crazy outside,” he says, and points at the window. “What the
hell? I’m telling you, climate change is going to kill us soon.”
“Yes, it’s scary,” I say.
“It’s more than scary,” he replies. “It’s a catastrophe. It’s out of
control and we will find ourselves dead very soon.”
Many of my patients speak about climate change, but Guy
sounds a little different. His fear seems immediate, as if he is
currently struggling to stay alive.
He sits down.
“We did it to ourselves. We destroyed ourselves,” he concludes.
“Actually,” he then says angrily, “it’s them. They fucking did it to us.”
“They?” I ask.
Guy looks right into my eyes. “It’s their fault,” he says.
“Generations of people who didn’t take care of the planet. Our
parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents. They created this
disaster with their own hands and now we have to deal with it. What
a mess. There is no way we’ll be able to fix it; that’s the problem.”
Like Guy, I find the situation disturbing and worrisome. But I’m
aware that even as we agree, the words one chooses always have
their roots in one’s personal history. The political intermingles with
the personal. I listen to Guy’s words and try to recognize what it is
that he is telling me about his life, about his fears and his pain.
“The destruction the previous generations caused, the struggle
they put us in—you know something about that,” I say.
“Obviously,” he answers, though he doesn’t elaborate.
Guy communicates with me that he can’t rely or depend on
anyone, not the people who raised him and not anyone since. He is
in my office, asking for my help, but is worried that I can’t be trusted.
I look at him, sitting with his heavy gray coat on. He leans back on
the couch and his eyes wander, searching the room.
“Did you actually read all these books?” he asks, but doesn’t wait
for an answer. He points at the picture on the wall behind my chair,
an abstract painting on a big canvas.
“Interesting,” he says. “What did the artist mean?”
The picture Guy points at is the only one in my office that I
painted myself, and it has been hanging there for the last fifteen
years.
“Those dogs,” he says and points at the blurred figures in white
and yellow. “They are running away, don’t you think?”
“I see what you mean,” I say.
“They are like me,” he says, laughing. “Running away.”
“What are you running away from?” I ask.
“I was just kidding,” he answers. “You know, we all ran away. You
live in New York. I live in New York. This is not our home, but we are
here. This city is filled with ambitious survivors who ran away from
something. Everyone here has something they wanted to escape.”
Guy takes off his coat.
“It’s kind of pleasant here,” he says. “It’s not too cold but also not
too warm, do you know what I mean? In the winter, people heat their
apartments so much that you think you might die. But you did a good
job. It’s exactly right here.”
Guy feels less threatened, expressing the hope that I will do a good
job and be right for him. He uses projection again, a defense
mechanism that places threatening thoughts and feelings outside of
the self. Through projection we deny anxiety-provoking feelings and
instead put them in others. Uncomfortable feelings such as anger or
sadness tend to be projected into other people in order to get rid of
them. When a person is, for example, angry, she will attribute those
feelings to others and be convinced that the other is angry at her,
when in fact it is her own anger that she feels. I’m remembering Guy
entering my office for the first time and how he filled me up with a
sense of fear of being invaded, a feeling that he instilled in me and
thus effectively communicated the sense of danger he lived with
himself.
Similarly, paranoid thinking is often understood as the projection
of aggression onto other people. Our aggressive impulses make us
anxious and we often try to feel better either by overcompensating
with kindness or by projecting those feelings onto others. Paranoid
thoughts are a result of our aggressive feelings, feelings that we
couldn’t tolerate and needed to get rid of by attributing them to
another person. The more aggression is disowned and projected
onto others, the more frightened we then become of those people.
 Guy feels too anxious to talk about his feelings and instead talks
about the world around him, placing his feelings outside himself. He
is hesitant about taking off his coat lest he would be too exposed, too
vulnerable. He makes sure not to create a coherent narrative, and I
sense that there is a secret behind his smile.
“Why are you here, Guy?” I finally have the courage to ask.
Guy stays silent for a long minute.
“Because I come from mental illness,” he says. “I might be
mentally sick too.”
I’m not yet sure what he means, but I see how he is taking the
first step toward me, toward a new future.
Guy looks at his watch and then puts his coat on.
“It’s enough for today,” he says, and I notice that he is the one
ending our session again. “I’ll see you next week,” he says as he
exits.

I beginning of summer and a few months since Guy started

his sessions with me. We now feel more comfortable with each other
and I have learned to appreciate Guy’s cynical sense of humor and
respect his ways and his rhythm. Guy often needs to avoid direct
conversation; he rationalizes and intellectualizes his feelings and
speaks in general terms. While I know his opinions about many
topics, he tells me very little about his past or his family.
Every Monday evening I wait for Guy to arrive. He is never late,
and now, five minutes before his session, I hear the doorbell ringing.
Before I have the chance to answer it, it’s ringing again, and then
again.
I open the door and Guy storms in and immediately closes the
door behind him.
“How did you know who’s at the door?” he asks, still standing at
the threshold. “How did you know that it was me ringing and not
some random person who wants to break in?” He sounds anxious.
“You are worried,” I say, and Guy doesn’t answer.
We both sit down. I notice that he doesn’t carry his usual
backpack. He hasn’t gone to work, I assume.
 “Your doorman doesn’t seem so effective; he is sort of sleepy,”
Guy says, and I hear him sigh. “Today I had jury duty and it was such
a long day.”
“And what made you think about my safety today?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. I walked here from the subway and I saw a man
downstairs. He looked strange. He seemed violent, something about
the look in his eyes.” Guy points at the window. “He was here, on the
street right at the entrance of your building,” he says. “I suddenly
thought that this man could get into the building and ring your
doorbell, and you could buzz him in, as if he were me. How would
you know?”
Guy is hypervigilant, constantly detecting activities around him
and anticipating threats and danger. That sensory sensitivity is
usually the result of early trauma. High alertness aims to predict and
prevent danger, and the more I know Guy, the more I recognize the
scared little boy hidden underneath. That boy is frightened; what if I
open the door, assuming it’s him, and another guy shows up and
hurts me? The threat is from both outside and inside—the man
outside is dangerous and Guy is afraid he, too, might bring the
danger with him into my office. He is threatened by the violent other,
and I know that it is also his own unconscious aggression that he is
worried might sneak into the room. The aggression from the outside
and the aggression from inside him are intermixed, confused, as it
always is when a child is exposed to violence early in life.
Guy seems overwhelmed. I wonder about his childhood, why he
is especially susceptible today to what seems like an activation of an
early trauma.
“Was there anything in jury duty that made you feel unsafe?” I
ask.
“Not at all,” he answers. “It is a case of a father who broke his
daughter’s arm. The police have been involved, and the girl and her
mother, the man’s ex-wife, got an order of protection against him. I
mean, I’m not sure why he is in court. What else do they need from
him? The man can’t hurt her anymore.” Guy looks at me and then
continues. “The daughter is sixteen years old and she posted her
story all over social media, saying awful things about her father. It
feels wrong. It’s messy,” he concludes. “I have such bad luck. Can
you believe that this is the case I have to deal with?”
“Traumatic,” I say.
Guy looks confused. “Kind of,” he replies. “I mean, the man is an
asshole, that’s for sure, but is he a bad person? Is he the monster
his daughter describes? I don’t think so.” He pauses and gazes out
the window.
“What did you think just now?” I ask when he turns to me again.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I guess I’m not sure how I feel about this.
There is a noise in my head. I wish I could stop thinking. I mean, it’s
clear that she hates her father so much and I feel bad for him,” he
continues. “She wrote on Instagram that she wishes he were dead. I
guess I understand that part. I used to wish my father were dead.”
“That makes sense,” I say, carefully stepping into his childhood.
While most kids are afraid of losing their parents, I’ve often heard
patients describe that as children they wished for their parents’
death. The parent is the one the child depends on for survival; that
wish usually surfaces when the parent is the one threatening the
child’s physical or emotional being. The wish helps the child feel less
helpless as she imagines she can make the parent disappear. It
expresses the child’s pain as well as rage—two feelings that are
fused and confused. The child simultaneously feels helpless and is
overwhelmed with anger that she can’t process. Abused children
often have difficulty regulating feelings. Love and hate intermingle:
the people you love are also those you hate.
I notice that Guy becomes flooded with emotions. He needs to
take a break.
“It’s sick,” Guy says. “It pisses me off.” He suddenly stands up.
“Excuse me, I need to use the bathroom,” he says. “I’ll be right
back.”
He comes back a few minutes later, smiling. “Did you notice that I
said ‘piss’ and then went to pee?” he jokes. “You see, I know how to
therapize myself.”
He is conveying that I have taught him something, but also that
he is not dependent on me, that he can do it on his own. The ability
to master and control his life is crucial. It’s the only way he feels
safe, and he needs to make sure that he is in control in our sessions
as well. I’m again aware that it’s Guy, not me, who ends each
session. When he feels overwhelmed, rather than turning to me for
comfort, he withdraws.
“I needed to be alone for a moment, to calm down,” he says. I
know that there is something about jury duty that awakens his
childhood trauma. “As a child, I spent hours in the bathroom. My
father used to lock my brother and me in there every time he got
angry, which was all the time. He would lock us in there for hours,
and I learned to sit on the floor and wait. And I thought to myself, I
hate this man. I wish he were dead.”
Guy doesn’t look at me. “You know,” he says, “sometimes, when
my friends came over and we made noise, I would suddenly hear
him calling my name. I knew he was angry and that he was going to
lock me in the bathroom again. I had no choice. I had to do what he
told me to, or he would yell and hit me in front of my friends. He
locked me in while they were waiting in my room, wondering where
had I disappeared to. It was humiliating.”
Guy tells me about his childhood for the first time. His face is
serious but he doesn’t express any emotions. I listen in silence.
As he is speaking, I slowly notice that I start feeling pain in my
body, and I sense an urge to change my position in the chair. I watch
Guy turning uncomfortably in his chair and wonder what it is that we
each feel in our bodies.
“No wonder you needed to run away,” I say, remembering his
interpretation of the blurred figures in my painting. “Your wish to run
away was an act of hope.”
Guy nods. “As a child, there was nothing I could do. I had
nowhere to go, no one to turn to,” he says quietly. He explains that
his mother was afraid of his father and couldn’t protect him and his
brother.
“My only hope was that one of us would disappear; either he
would die or one day I would leave everything and escape, find a
new home in another country. I would flee to a place where no one
could find me,” he continues. “Like my mother, who always seemed
so frightened, I learned to hide, to be silent, to make sure I was
invisible.” Guy looks straight into my eyes. “I don’t know how to
explain this to you,” he says. “My father is a sick man. You have to
understand, it’s not his fault. That’s how he grew up, that’s how his
parents grew up, his grandparents. He didn’t know anything else and
he believed that this was the right way to raise his children. I’m not
angry at him.”
I hear Guy’s conflict. He is trapped between identifying with his
father and wanting to be different from him. He doesn’t want to be
angry because anger will make him too much like his father. But he
empathizes with that father in court more than with the man’s
daughter.
Anna Freud defined “identification with the aggressor” as a
defense mechanism that children use in the face of abuse. The
victims, instead of only feeling threatened and helpless, try to make
sense of and control reality by adopting the abuser’s beliefs and
behaviors. By impersonating the aggressor, the child turns passivity
into action and instead of being just the victim, she becomes the one
who hurts others and/or herself. These children, in identifying with
their parents, believe deep inside that they deserve the parent’s
anger and punishment.
It is not surprising, then, that like Guy’s father, many violent
parents were once abused children. Guy doesn’t only feel angry; he
is still trying to make sense of the world around him and to figure out
who is bad and who is good. Unprocessed abuse keeps the
intergenerational cycle going. Each generation identifies with the
previous one, and Guy is at a point where those intergenerational
conflicts have come to the surface. He is torn between his loyalty to
the past and the hope for the future, between the connection to his
ancestors and the chance to have new and different kinds of
relationships. As in his childhood, he is imprisoned again, but this
time he is the one who locks himself in.
Healing—breaking the cycle of abuse—is often filled with
resistance to the possibility of change. That possibility intensifies the
conflict between the part of the self that strives for future liberation
and the part that is connected to the past and to previous
generations. Healing is a journey filled with ambivalence, guilt, and
shame. It is a painful process that brings the ghosts of the past to life
and challenges our internal identifications on the way to setting us
free.
Guy stops and glances at his watch. “I don’t want to talk about it
anymore,” he says. “What’s the point of talking about it now? We
can’t change the past.”
He starts gathering his things from the side table. Holding his
keys, he looks at me and says, “Galit, at the end, I did save my life.
I’m here in New York almost twenty years now. I was able to run
away.”
I know that it will take time to process all the feelings that are
brought up to the surface. Guy moved to New York in an attempt to
survive, but his past chased him—as it always does.
He puts his keys back on the table. “We still have five more
minutes,” he says. “I have to go to jury duty again tomorrow. I wish
you could come with me.” He starts laughing. “I’m just joking. I
wouldn’t want you to have to hear that girl describing her childhood.
It’s brutal.”
“I know our session today was brutal,” I say, “and I assume you
always wished for a mother who could come with you and protect
you, make you feel safe, and help you to be brave.”
He glances at his watch again. “Our time is up. Maybe I should
come another time this week,” he says, taking another step toward
rather than away from his pain. He is brave, I think.
We plan to meet again on Thursday.

T I have a dream. Guy and I are in a big castle. We are

both wearing miners’ helmets and each of us is holding a flashlight
as we go down the stairs to the basement. We are clearly looking for
something.
“I brought you here to save my brother,” Guy says. “He is in
captivity.”
The castle is dark and I’m worried that we have gotten lost. Guy
says he is frightened. “Let’s run away; it’s filled with ghosts here,” he
says.
 “We have to be courageous,” I hear myself saying, either to him
or to myself.
The ghosts of the past control Guy’s life. I am aware that he and I
are on a journey to revisit his trauma and listen to the little boy he
used to be, the boy he left behind when he ran away in order to save
his life. Now we need our flashlights to illuminate everything that he
left down in the basement of his life, everything that prevents him
from moving forward, living, and truly loving.
Thursday is a warm day and Guy walks in smiling.
“Do you see how different the weather is from Monday? I’m telling
you, life is so unpredictable. My mood has changed, too. I’m sorry
that I was so emotional on Monday.” He looks at me and suddenly
starts to giggle. “You just had such a funny expression on your face,”
he says. “I bet I know what you had in mind,” he continues, his tone
playful and tender. “You thought, ‘What are you apologizing for, silly
boy?’”
I smile, aware of the maternal feelings I have for him and realizing
that he has recognized these on my face. He is right; I was
wondering what he was apologizing for.
“You let the boy you used to be have a voice on Monday,” I say. “It
was the first time I have heard that boy. He is sensitive, vulnerable,
traumatized.”
“He was in captivity,” Guy says to my surprise, conjuring the
image from my dream. “I couldn’t wait to come here today. I wanted
to tell you that I did something big.” He pauses, and before I have
the chance to ask what he means, he adds, “At court on Tuesday I
voted guilty for that father.” He sounds proud. “I looked straight into
his eyes and for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel fear. I thought
about you and said to myself, ‘You know what? It’s not me who
should feel bad. It’s him.’”
We sit in silence. I know how hard it was for him to go against the
father, and how painful it is to let himself remember his childhood
and protect the abused child he once was. Guy had wanted to
“bring” me with him to court because he never had a parent who
would defend him, and therefore he was worried he wouldn’t be able
to defend himself.
 Guy breaks the silence. “I feel embarrassed remembering how as
a child, I used to hide in my room, trying not to make any noise, not
even to breathe so my father wouldn’t notice me. I hated myself for
being weak like my mother and not protecting myself, and for feeling
angry, like my father. And I felt ashamed for hiding while my older
brother, Ram, became my father’s main target.” Guy pauses and
looks at his watch. “Ah—we have a little more time,” he notes.
“You know, the other night, after I came back from court, I had a
thought. I realized that Ram, my brother, was that girl, the daughter.”
“In what way?” I ask.
“Like her, he fought back; he wasn’t afraid. I watched him from the
sidelines and I felt jealous that he was so brave; but I also felt guilty
that he was the one my father attacked, while I was able to hide. And
then one day, when Ram was maybe fifteen years old and almost as
tall as my dad, he came home from school with a girl, and my father
got angry and smacked him in front of her. Instead of apologizing,
which is what I would have done, Ram slowly walked toward him. He
put his finger on my father’s forehead and whispered angrily, ‘You. If
you touch me one more time, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me?’ My father
stepped back and Ram walked away. I think it was the last time my
father hit him. I remember my mother and I walked away too, as if
nothing had happened. It was unbelievable, how they switched roles
and my brother became the aggressor. I remember that I suddenly
felt sorry for my father. I almost wanted to help him. How fucked up
is that?” Guy’s voice becomes louder. “When I turned twenty, I left.
I’m sorry. I had to leave. I just had to,” he says angrily.
“What are you sorry for?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“You just said ‘I’m sorry’ again.”
“Did I?” Guy looks at me, startled. “I guess I did. I guess I feel that
I have something to apologize for, don’t I? Maybe I feel bad that I ran
away and left them all behind. A family of sick people. I saved my
life, but what about them?”
The loyalty to the people we are attached to often keeps a part of
us with them even when we leave. Our parents tend to live inside us
without our permission. Our relationships with them are the first we
have, and our future relationships exist only in dialogue with them.
Guy had to move away but he still struggles with the guilt of
leaving—and living. As I have come to learn from him over time, he
hasn’t been able to create a safe-enough home in New York or to
have an intimate relationship. He isn’t sure that he can love or trust
others, and he certainly doesn’t trust himself to protect the people he
loves from his legacy of brutality and abuse. Being alone feels like
the best way to hide, and hiding, after all, is the only way to survive.
In our first session, hiding behind his gray winter coat, Guy told
me that he had researched me, wondering about who I was and
about the people I had left behind. He questioned if therapy was
even for him: Could he have an honest relationship, where he felt
known, without being too vulnerable or threatened? Could he heal
the abused boy he once was without feeling humiliated and
ashamed? Could he ever love and be loved?
On a snowy day, one year after Guy started his therapy, he walks
into my office, nods, and says softly, “I think I’m getting used to this
weather.”
He takes off his coat and smiles. We both notice the difference.
 11

THE UNEXAMINED LIFE

A than her age. Maybe it’s her long black hair,

or maybe it’s the sweatpants and sneakers she wears to our first
session that make me think of her as a girl. She comes to see me
right after celebrating her forty-fourth birthday. Very quickly her age
becomes a topic.
Alice was in her late thirties when she met Art, I learn. It was right
after she got divorced, and she was worried that she might be too
old to have children.
“I don’t care about marriage,” she tells me in that first session.
“My parents separated when I was five years old. They had a messy
divorce and after my father officially remarried, he was not in the
picture anymore.”
I ask her what she means by “officially remarried.”
Alice rolls her eyes. “It’s not why I came to therapy, but I guess it’s
all relevant to what I’m dealing with,” she says. “I had a shitty
childhood. Again, it’s not why I’m here.”
“Why are you here?” I ask.
“We are about to have a child,” Alice says, and I’m a bit surprised
because she doesn’t look pregnant at all.
“We tried to get pregnant for years. Between you and me, from
our first week together we knew that we wanted to have children, but
I couldn’t get pregnant. I tried everything. Many cycles of IVF.” She
turns to me. “Do you know how expensive that is? Our whole family
helped us financially. My mother and her husband gave us their
savings. Art’s sister gave us money too. I’m embarrassed to tell you
how much. You sit in the clinic’s waiting room, you look around, and
you think, ‘All those privileged people; I guess I’m one of them now.’
So you can imagine how awful it was when it didn’t work. Not only
could I not get pregnant; I couldn’t even make it happen by paying a
fortune. That’s what I call bad genes.”
“Just a second.” I try to slow her down to make sure I follow her.
“So you were married in your twenties and didn’t have children; then
in your thirties you got divorced and met Art and tried to get pregnant
right away—”
“Exactly,” she cuts me off. “Art and I were both married before, but
our love was like nothing we had ever experienced. It was very
intense from the first day we met. I’ll tell you about it one day.”
“And you are here because you are about to have a child,” I say.
“Exactly,” Alice confirms. “Another woman is about to give birth to
my child.”
“A surrogate mother?” I assume.
“Yes. We got an egg donation too. It’s not my biological child. It’s
a girl, by the way,” she adds, making sure I have all the information,
but I can’t find where she is emotionally.
Alice continues. “So you see, there are three women involved in
the creation of this baby: an egg donor, a surrogate mother, and me
—at this point a woman without a role. The fourth person is Art. This
child is going to be his biologically. Did I tell you that he has a
daughter from his first marriage? Lili. She is amazing, so we know
that he has good genes.” She smiles.
“Oh, and one more detail,” Alice continues. “Since we had already
emptied everyone’s bank accounts for the IVF, we still needed to
figure out how to pay for the surrogacy. We took a loan out but it is
insane. I’ll tell you about that too.”
“There is a lot to talk about,” I note. “How are you dealing with all
of this?” I ask as I try to get closer to the emotional struggle I believe
Alice is here to explore.
She doesn’t answer.
“I don’t know, actually,” she then says quietly. “I am not sure how I
feel about it. Some days I am disappointed with myself. I feel
damaged, that I’m a failure and I’m not going to be anyone for this
baby. On other days, I feel relief. First, because being pregnant and
giving birth doesn’t sound like fun. It doesn’t feel like something I’ll
be sad to skip. But the real reason, and I know this sounds awful, is
that I would rather have a child who doesn’t carry my genes. It’s
probably better for her.”
I ask her to tell me more. “Why wouldn’t you want her to have
your genes?”
“I come from pain,” Alice says. “It’s in our DNA. Bad luck and
trauma. My mother had the most painful childhood, like a bad movie.
Her family immigrated to the United States when she was around
eight years old, and her mother died on the way. They had to carry
her mother’s body until they got to a place where they could bury
her. My mother was probably sexually abused by her grandfather but
no one in my family talks about that. You see, when I say trauma, I
mean real trauma. I have never been in therapy before. My mother
has never been in therapy either.”
“So you are here for both of you,” I say.
“Exactly,” Alice answers. “Maybe if she could have stopped this
cycle of misery, I wouldn’t be so worried about raising another
miserable woman-to-be. The last thing I want is to have a daughter
who inherits the bad luck I inherited from my mother.”
“Another miserable woman,” I repeat her words.
“Exactly,” she says. “My mother would never admit she is
miserable. That’s why she became a hippie, if you know what I
mean. She always has a smile on her face. She believes that we
should focus on our own healing and spiritual journeys. Meanwhile,
she was never happy. She had a traumatic childhood, two failed
marriages, a failed career. When I was a child, she was at home with
me all day. She used to say how much she loved it, and that she
brushed my hair so many times, she became an expert in brushing
hair. I always had long curly hair that was hard to brush and I hated it
when she said that. I sensed her resentment. I remember one day at
a school gathering, the parents were asked to introduce themselves.
My mother, with a sweet smile on her face, announced, ‘I’m Alice’s
mom and I’m a professional hair brusher.’ I wanted to die.” Alice
looks at me to make sure I recognize her mother’s hidden bitterness
and especially the ways it was concealed behind a smile.
 “Meanwhile, every time she could disappear for a few days she
would. She would leave my stepbrother and me with my stepdad and
go on retreats. When she came back home, she’d sleep with my little
brother. For years I believed that she was putting him to bed and
falling asleep there because she was tired, but as I grew up I
realized that she just didn’t want to sleep in bed with my stepdad,”
Alice says. “My mother never admitted that she didn’t really love my
stepdad, that he was a compromise. She needed a husband
because she was too frightened to be alone. I feel so bad for her for
not having the life she wanted. I used to blame my stepfather for
that. I guess I wanted him to make her happy so I wouldn’t have to.”
Alice speaks fast and hardly takes any breaks. She plays with her
fingernails. I notice that she bites her cuticles until they bleed.
“Don’t get me wrong. The main person I blamed for destroying my
mother’s life was my biological father,” she continues. “I hated him.
My mom, by the way, was never angry at him, not after she found
out that he had had an affair, not even after he had left her for that
other woman. She used to say that he broke her heart and that his
abandonment of her hurt so much because it was a reminder of her
own mother’s death when she was eight years old. My mom never
got over what happened with my dad. He was awful. Did I tell you
that he had another family?” she says and glances at her watch.
I find myself out of breath. Alice keeps talking and I am
overwhelmed with feelings that I don’t have a moment to digest. I
assume that I am feeling what she has always experienced. She
helps me get to know her from the inside when, like her, I feel
overloaded with information. I have no way to stop things from
happening, to understand, or to process the information.
It is the end of our first session and I’m left with many questions. I
recognize the implicit connections Alice makes between her mother’s
traumatic past, her own bad luck, and the wish to save her unborn
daughter from the same future.
Alice and I plan to meet twice a week.
A a few days later and to my surprise but also my
relief, she picks up where she left off. I wonder how she felt about
our first session, a question I often ask in second sessions. But Alice
communicates with me a sense of urgency. She sits down quickly
and immediately starts talking.
“Basically, my father had another family,” she says. “He had
children with that other woman, and when my mother found out, he
left us. I’m not sure how she found out exactly, but you can imagine
how traumatic that was for her. This is where we ended last time,
right?”
I nod. “Last time you told me about your mother’s past,” I say.
“And how your father’s abandonment was a reminder of her early
loss of her mother. You described her dissociated anger and how
you felt so angry at him for her.”
Alice seems puzzled. “I guess that’s right,” she says, and I’m
aware that I framed it in a way that felt new to her.
Alice starts exploring her identification with and profound loyalty to
her mother, who was the parent who raised her.
“She is a brave woman who carried a lot of pain but still was able
to forgive him and even pray for his happiness,” she says. “She was
a bigger person than he was. And you know, after she found out, her
family used to call him ‘the monster,’ but she would ask them to stop.
She would say that she was sorry she wasn’t a good enough wife
and didn’t give him what he needed. For years, that made me so
angry. I saw the sadness in her eyes and her struggle to recover
from his betrayal. As a teenager, I swore that I would never speak to
that man, that I would never forgive him. And honestly, she was the
one who tried to convince me that he was my father and that I had to
try to understand him. But the more she said it, the angrier I became.
“‘I’m not interested in this motherfucker,’ I would say, and I would
never return his calls.
“At first, he would call me every day. I was only five years old and
we spoke for a minute because my mother forced me to. Then, when
I was in middle school, he would call once a week and I’d say that I
was busy and wouldn’t call him back. At some point he stopped
calling. He had a new life with that woman and it felt like I didn’t exist
for him anymore.”
Alice keeps talking. She tells me about her childhood, and the
angrier she gets, the sadder I feel.
“Did I tell you that about a year ago I reached out to my father?”
she asks. “I think I was ready to hear his side. He was excited to
hear from me and super nervous when we met. He said he would do
anything to stay in touch with me and to repair our relationship. But
the truth is, there was nothing to repair. What I realized by then was
that he wasn’t my father anymore. I’m a grown-up now, and he
missed my childhood. He is just a stranger who has nothing to do
with me, except biologically.” I see Alice thinking and then she adds,
“I hope you know that my mother never pushed me to reject him. It
was my own choice.”
For the first time, Alice begins to recognize what she lost as a
child. She was protective of and loyal to her mother and estranged
from her father. As a child Alice thought fathers were not important.
She wasn’t jealous of her friends who had good relationships with
their fathers and believed that as long as she and her mother had
each other, they were better off without him.
Unconscious dynamics are, behind the scenes, shaping Alice’s
life as a repetition of her mother’s history. While she believes she
inherited her mother’s genetic “bad luck,” it is in fact the identification
with her mother, and the unconscious attempt to heal her mother,
that bring Alice to live the same psychological pain her mother
experienced: the drama of a daughter who loses a parent. Her
mother’s trauma is reenacted in Alice’s childhood and, like her
mother, she, too, grows up with one parent and loses the other.
Alice’s loss, unlike her mother’s, was not framed as a tragedy for
the daughter. Through this reenactment, Alice and her mother could
relive the mother’s history together, but this time with the illusion of
control; Alice believed that it was her own choice to end the
relationship with her father. Instead of feeling sad, like her mother,
she felt angry. Instead of being abandoned, she was doing the
abandoning. Alice and her mother shared an unconscious fantasy of
repairing her mother’s trauma and healing her.
 Alice’s loss of her father remained unrecognized and even
dismissed. Once again, grief and sadness belonged solely to her
mother—her mother was the one who had lost a husband she loved,
and Alice became her emotional caretaker, replacing the mother her
own mother never had. It is only now, for the first time, that we start
questioning how much choice Alice actually had in that family
dynamic as we try to differentiate between her mother’s needs and
her own.
“My mother remarried but she was still unhappy. Her childhood
trauma was always there and it made her fragile and sad. She never
stopped mourning her mother, and she never recovered from my
father’s abandonment of her.”
Alice is unconsciously tied to her mother’s traumas. I recognize
how confused she feels as she tries to find out the truth about herself
and the people around her. Her parents were both dishonest, in
different ways, and she struggles with the double messages she
received from them, with her mother’s dissociated anger, with her
father’s lies, and with her own aggression, which functions as a
defense against her hidden vulnerability.
Alice pauses and searches her pockets. She finds a hair tie and
quickly puts her long dark hair up in a ponytail. Then she looks at me
and smiles.
“My mother is almost seventy years old now and she wears her
hair in two long braids, like a little girl. Did I tell you that?” she asks.
In that moment a thought crosses my mind. I wonder if her mother
was envious of her for being a child with a mother. Does her mother
need to keep herself looking like a young girl with the hope that one
day she, too, will have a mother who will take care of her and brush
her hair?
It is not unusual for mothers who didn’t have mothers themselves,
or those who had abusive mothers, to resent their daughters for
having the mother they never had. In therapy, the mother often
explores feelings about her daughter having more than she had; she
envies her daughter for having her as a mother.
Trying to understand Alice’s mother’s psychology, I become
aware of how, in our sessions, I switch from analyzing Alice to
analyzing her mother, and I assume this is my unconscious collusion
with Alice’s enmeshment with her mother. I’m enacting her wish to
heal her mother and to make her stronger. In these moments, I
become her mother’s therapist—her mother’s mother—as Alice
fantasizes about being able to leave her mother with me to take care
of while she goes off to start a family and become a mother herself.
“I can’t afford to hurt her feelings,” she says. “Maybe she can
have sessions with you too. Maybe she can work on her trauma,
because if I try to talk to her, she immediately tears up and says, ‘I
did my best to be a good person and a good mother.’ And you know
what? I believe her. She is a good person and I love her. I know she
did her best.”
Alice’s mother needs to feel she is the victim and not the cause of
the traumatic events that happened to her. To be a good person
means not feeling angry. Alice, on the other hand, feels better when
she is not a victim. She would rather be angry than sad. That
disparity in their defenses is Alice’s attempt to be different from her
mother, to be an active agent and control her life.
“I’m trying so hard to be different but I am too similar to my
mother. That’s exactly the problem,” she says. “The breast milk I
drank was hers and it shaped my body and my mind. I didn’t belong
to anyone but her. I didn’t have a father. My stepfather was an
outsider and it was only my mother and me in the inner circle. Yes, I
hate to be a victim but I, too, had a really sad childhood. I, too, got
divorced. My luck is so bad that I can’t even get pregnant from
having sex, like everyone else. I need to go through hell. And I want
everyone to leave me alone, just as my mother wanted. She wanted
to leave us and go on her retreats. I want to protect my baby from
the same future. She will have Art’s genes; he is amazing.”
Alice takes a deep breath. “Now you know why I’m here.” She
finishes the sentence in a childish voice.
We are left with the clear link between the past and the future, the
previous generation and the next one, and with Alice, in the middle,
trying to bridge the two, to heal her mother as a way to liberate
herself, to make sense of her past and to create a better future.
T be born in two months and Alice feels unprepared.
“Maybe I started this process too late,” she says. “I have so many
things to tell you and to talk about before she arrives.”
I wonder out loud about her urgency to resolve everything before
the baby is born.
Alice is frustrated. “You have no idea,” she says. “It is urgent.
There are so many decisions I have to make. And I suddenly have
many feelings and so many bizarre dreams at night. I’m worried
about the money and how we are going to cover that loan.
“They say that money isn’t important,” Alice continues, sounding
upset again, “but have you noticed that the people who say this are
usually the ones with money? Money is in fact very important when
you need it and don’t have it.”
I think about the open way Alice talks about money. Sex and
money are two topics that people usually try to avoid, not only in
their lives, but in therapy too. Those subjects are filled with hypocrisy
and dishonesty, and therefore they’re a good place to hide other
feelings and needs that people are uncomfortable expressing. Any
unwelcome feeling can be expressed through sex or money:
aggression, hostility, the need for domination and power, as well as
fragility, narcissism, and trauma.
Sex, for example, can be seen as lovemaking even in cases
where it is a way to express hostility. Like money, sex can be used to
control others, to compensate for emotional insecurities, and to
express or hide pain. Avoiding talking about money and sex allows
us to disguise any negative feelings. In therapy, for example,
negative feelings toward the therapist could be expressed in delayed
payments. When we are too embarrassed to talk about money, we
might miss the opportunity to reveal and process feelings that the
patient wants to hide.
Alice talks about the cost of the reproductive process and
explores her feelings about everything she might not be able to
afford, financially but also emotionally. The enormous economic
burden is part of a broader weight of self-doubt and shame that she
carries.
 When reproduction involves such transactional or medicalized
aspects—when it happens away from the couple’s bed—it often
breaks the romantic fantasy of a baby born “out of love.” Difficulty
getting pregnant can bring to life, in different ways, intense shame,
and evoke the darkest fears and feelings about being damaged,
cursed, rotten, broken, or bad. It is a profound injury that touches an
essential insecurity about one’s body and existence.
Like many people, Alice struggles with the feelings that her
inability to get pregnant might be a sign that she is not supposed to
have a baby, that she doesn’t deserve it, and that she won’t be a
good mother. She tries to push those painful feelings aside. She
sees herself as damaged with bad genes and defends against her
disappointment. While disappointed in herself, she is preoccupied
with the ways she disappoints others, especially, as I come to learn,
the surrogate mother.
“I feel like she wants me to be involved in this process but I
constantly forget to call her. I feel guilty that I don’t care about her or
the baby. I’ve heard that some people talk with their surrogate every
few days. I call her only once in a while. What am I supposed to ask
her? How is she feeling? Sure, I can do that, but it would be fake. I
don’t really care to hear the details about how she is doing. The most
difficult decision I have to make now is whether I should be there
when she gives birth. I mean in the room,” she clarifies. “What do
you think?”
“I think it’s hard to have someone else carry and give birth to your
baby while making believe that it’s only easy and happy. It evokes a
lot of feelings, positive and negative. It can be insulting and
disappointing,” I say.
“Exactly,” Alice agrees. “Finally someone understands. People
don’t get it. They say how happy they are for me and how exciting it
is that we will have a baby soon, as if it’s all good. A friend told me
the other day, ‘The minute you have the baby, you don’t remember
how it came into the world.’ What nonsense.” Alice sounds angry.
“People are so stupid, or maybe they just feel bad for me and try to
console me. But that’s dishonest and it makes me feel totally
invisible. Like they don’t see what I’m going through. Also, I feel
absolutely weird about being in the room with her when she gives
birth. I wouldn’t want some woman to be there, looking between my
legs, if I were giving birth. I want to give her privacy. I don’t know.
How do you think she feels? What do other people do?”
I believe Alice is afraid that it might be too painful for her to
witness another woman giving birth to her daughter.
“I think you are worried about what you might feel there, in the
delivery room,” I say.
“I’ll be an outsider,” Alice states. She is silent for a moment and
then adds, “Now I understand how fathers feel. They don’t carry
babies inside them, they don’t give birth to them, they don’t
breastfeed them. Nothing. That brings me to my next dilemma,” she
continues, and then she presents one of the questions many women
in her situation struggle with.
“Should I take hormones so I can breastfeed the baby? What do
you think?”
I follow the connections Alice makes between being an outsider
and being a father. She said that she and her mother were the inner
circle. Her father was an outsider. I recognize that her current conflict
is related to the historical fact that, for her, the only way to love is to
be a mother, not a father. She struggles with the fear that not being
able to give birth to or breastfeed her child implies that she is a
father rather than a mother. The problem of gender binary doesn’t
allow fluidity in her perception of herself. It activates the shame of
not being a “real woman” and, hence, the fear of becoming her father
instead, whose love she couldn’t trust.
“Are you worried that you won’t be able to love your baby?” I ask,
making the explicit link between gender and love.
“Absolutely.” Alice nods. “How do I know that I will be able to love
her if I don’t give birth to her and breastfeed her? I’m not so sure a
parent can love a baby without those love hormones. I mean, nature
has arranged it so that women immediately produce oxytocin.”
“It’s as if you believe that love hormones are what make a parent
love their child,” I say.
“How upsetting,” Alice whispers. “I thought I got over that. What’s
wrong with me? Like my mother, I’m stuck being a little girl, still
thinking that her father didn’t love her, even though I know it’s more
complicated than that.” Alice sighs. “I see what you are saying: that
underneath my wish to breastfeed my baby, I worry that I won’t love
her the way ‘real’ mothers do, which was the only love I trusted.”
“Exactly.” I hear myself using her words.
Alice looks at me and I notice her holding back tears. “My father
left me and he never came back. The angrier I was, the more he
withdrew, until he gave up on me. He didn’t call anymore. He just
sent me a birthday gift once a year with a card that read, ‘Happy
Birthday, my girl. I love you forever.’ I thought he wrote that because
he had to, and that deep inside he didn’t really care. He had a new
life with the woman he left us for, new children, and a new house. I’m
not sure why I’m crying. I didn’t care about him anyway.”
Alice is sobbing. She cries for the father she lost years ago, for
the little girl who believed that her sad mother was the only one who
could love her. She mourns her inability to carry and give birth to her
baby. Alice is filled with fear that she won’t be able to love her
newborn, and we realize that she feels like an unlovable girl herself.
“What if she doesn’t know that I’m her mother?” She wipes her
tears. “What if she doesn’t love me?”
There is so much pain buried inside her, sadness that she is used
to covering up with irritation and anger. She doesn’t want anyone to
know that just like her mother, she secretly mourns. She doesn’t
want her daughter to have to experience her grief, the way she
carried her mother’s grief. She knows what a burden that was on her,
and she is worried that her daughter will have to live that legacy.

“I A about our session,” Alice says when she walks into my

office the following week. “We had a long conversation about
breastfeeding and hormones, and it’s like I had another session with
him after my session with you.” She adds with a smile, “Victory. We
made a decision.”
Alice pulls a bottle of water from her bag. She places it on the
table. “Do you notice how anxious I am?” she asks. “I want
everything in place before our baby is born. And I made the decision
that I won’t take hormones. One thing is crossed off my list and it’s a
relief, so thank you.”
“Tell me more,” I ask. “How did you make that decision?”
“Suddenly, it wasn’t a hard decision to make. I told Art that I
realized my wish to breastfeed was based on the fear that I wouldn’t
be able to love the baby without those hormones. I told him how
upsetting it was for me to realize that I doubt myself as a woman,
and that under the surface this was about my feelings that my father
didn’t love me. Art knows the whole story, and a lot has changed
between my father and me since I met him. I think he helped me to
see my father as a full person. You will appreciate this,” she says
playfully. “I think I fell in love with Art when I realized how afraid he
was of losing his daughter, Lili, in his divorce. Isn’t that a good
psychological link?” she asks with a smile. “He was the father I never
had, and I betrayed my mother for the first time when I fell in love
with him,” she says. I ask her to explain.
“It was as if my mother and I had a secret contract that we were
the family. Even when I got married the first time, my marriage was
similar to hers—not a big love but what she thought a woman should
do. I was married, but I was still hers. We planned that if I had a
baby I’d move to live closer to her, and she would help me raise my
child. It was like she was my partner. But then I met Art, and it was a
double betrayal.” Alice looks at me to see if I can put it all together.
“A betrayal because you actually fell in love with him and he
became your partner instead of her,” I say. “But what else? Why
double?”
Alice closes her eyes. She speaks without looking at me.
“When I met Art he was still married. That’s why. I had just gotten
divorced and Art had already left his marriage, but he was not legally
divorced. One thing I thought I knew for sure was that I would never,
ever be with a married man. It was against everything I believed; it’s
wrong, as a principle. So I tried to stay away from him. But it was
hard. We worked in the same company and at some point were
assigned to work on the same project. We had to speak every day
and ended up spending hours on the phone. Our conversations
became more and more intimate. Art told me about his separation
and how hard it was for him. He had Lili, who was five years old at
the time, exactly the age I was when my father left, and he talked
about how painful it was for him not to spend nights with her. I told
him about my father and how he cheated on us and left for another
family. He was the first person I shared all the details with. I even
told him about the ceremony my mother conducted.”
“The ceremony?” I ask.
Alice opens her eyes and looks at me. “Right, I forgot that I didn’t
tell you about it. It’s a weird story. I was in first grade, and my father
had already left but they were not yet divorced. One Sunday
evening, my mother drove me to his office. I had been there many
times before with my dad, but that evening was different. She
opened the door with a key that she still had from when they were
together. His office looked exactly the way I remembered it. My
father is an accountant, and his office was on the second floor of a
brownstone in town, about an hour from where we lived.”
Alice closes her eyes again as she continues talking.
“My mother needed a goodbye ceremony. She explained to me
that we had to move on with our lives, and that in order to do so we
needed to have a healing ritual that would allow us to let go. She
didn’t cry but I remember that she looked so sad. When we walked
into his office, my mother stood right in front of his desk. She said
out loud that she wished him the best in his new life, and then she
took off her wedding ring and placed it on his desk. She collected the
framed pictures of our family and put them in her bag. Then she
pulled from her bag a small sculpture of a bird that we used to have
in our living room. It was a gift he gave her before they got married.
She put it on the shelf next to his desk. On his chair, she left their
wedding album along with some of his stamp collection albums,
which he had forgotten to pack.
“Before we left, my mom said that she had one last thing to do.
She stood in the corner, holding a few cards, and I recognized his
handwriting on them. I think they were birthday or anniversary cards
he had given her through the years. She whispered some things that
I couldn’t hear and then spread them out on the floor.
 “When we got back to the car my mother asked how I was feeling.
She said that we were free now and that this healing ceremony had
already made her feel much better. I remember saying that it made
me feel better too, but I was lying. That night I couldn’t sleep. I cried
but I didn’t know why.
“Art was the first person I ever told this story to. I remember his
silence on the phone. And then I realized that he was crying. I asked
him why he was so emotional, and he said he was not sure if it was
because this was just a very sad story or if he was identifying too
much with my father and felt his sadness at losing me. I was so
touched by that answer and by how kind he was in his attempt to
hear my story and not mix it with his own. It felt like he was the first
person who ever considered my feelings.”
Alice’s voice becomes tender as she continues. “It was also the
first time I thought that maybe my father was sad. That maybe he
had lost something too. I know it sounds strange, but honestly, I
never thought about how he felt when I didn’t want to see him
anymore. I never imagined how he felt when he walked into his office
that Monday morning. It didn’t occur to me that maybe my mother did
this to hurt him and not only to heal herself. Even when I say it now,
it feels wrong. I don’t think she had bad intentions.”
I hear how through Art’s eyes, Alice’s view of her father became
more nuanced. She could start seeing him and her mother as
complex humans who struggled to survive.
“After about a month of nightly conversations with Art, when we
talked about absolutely everything, I agreed to meet him outside of
the office. And that was it.” Alice pauses. “We spent that night
together and knew that we would spend every night of the rest of our
lives together. A month later we tried to get pregnant.”
“And you felt like you were betraying your mother,” I say.
“Oh yeah,” she replies. “I obviously told my mother right away and
she was happy for me, but I knew that I had crossed some secret
line. I was afraid to tell her that he wasn’t legally divorced yet. I was
afraid she would see that as a move toward my father and would
worry that I might forgive him and leave her. So I told her gradually.
 “At first she just listened, as she always did. She was always a
good listener. And then she asked, ‘Is he a good man, Alice?’ And
that made me so uncomfortable because I knew what she really
wanted to ask. I knew she was thinking about my father. But she
didn’t want to ruin it for me. She just kept asking if he was a good
man.
“‘Why do you keep asking that, Mom? Of course he is,’ I
answered, and she noticed that I was irritated.
“‘I love you more than anything,’ she said. ‘I want you to be with a
good man. I want you to be happy. One day you will have a daughter
and you will understand that.’”
Alice looks at me. “To tell you the truth,” she says, “it did ruin it for
me. It made me worried. I felt her doubt and I thought that maybe
she could see something about Art that I couldn’t. When I was with
him, I felt completely safe, but when I was with her, I felt her
suspicion of him, and it made me doubt my own judgment.”
I wonder out loud if it was her fear of losing Alice that made her
mother so worried.
Alice seems intrigued. “You know what Art likes to say? That it’s
impossible to separate from my mother. For him, the most
fascinating thing is my father’s choice of creating another family
behind my mother’s back instead of leaving my mother when he
wasn’t happy. My dad left only when my mother found out and he
had no other choice. I mean, don’t get me wrong. You’d have to be a
real asshole to do something so immoral, but Art was fascinated by
that choice. He said that for someone who was not a psychopath it
must have been so much more difficult to lie like that and live a
double life than to leave. And trust me, it was very hard for Art to
leave his family, so it’s not like he was saying any of that is easy.
“I see things differently now. I see how my father was unable to
leave her because he couldn’t handle hurting her. Does that make
sense? I’m sure he couldn’t even tell her how unhappy he was in the
marriage because she would feel so awful. I’m not blaming her, but
I’m sure he knew he would lose me if he left her, and he was right.
He was a coward, and she controlled him with her sadness, I guess
the same way she controlled all of us.”
 I recognize that Alice needs to be able to find a way to accept
both her mother and her father, with all their imperfections and faults,
so she can accept herself with her human limitations. She needs to
become her own person, free to choose, as opposed to a daughter
who is trapped in her parents’ world.
I hesitate at times, questioning whether understanding her father
is in fact obedience to a normative structure, not a form of freedom.
Is there a real freedom in the acceptance of both her parents, in the
forgiveness of her father? Or is it only a way to conform to the
patriarchal order in which men systemically have more power, and
thus fathers are not judged as harshly as mothers? I sit with the
questions that fill me, as I see Alice struggle to break that binary of
identification where she has to be like her mother or like her father
and is only allowed to be loyal to one of them. I know what a burden
it is on her and how it keeps her as a little girl with no real power to
choose or to grow up.
Alice grabs the water bottle and puts it back in her bag. “Therapy
is tiring, you know?” She smiles. “I never knew that I had so much to
talk about. Do you have other patients like me, who talk and talk and
don’t let you get in a word?”
I smile. I like Alice and I know how hard it is for her to talk about
her childhood and to challenge her narratives the way she does.
“I feel stronger,” she adds, and I nod in agreement.
“It’s like I’m giving birth to myself,” she says proudly. “And you are
my midwife.”

W I the door the following week, I hardly recognize Alice. It

takes me a minute to realize that it is her hair. She has cut it short.
“What do you think? Do you like it?” She sounds excited. “The
other day I asked myself what I would want to change before my
baby is born. By the way, we decided to name her Zoe, which means
life.“
Alice looks a little older. I think about her decision to name her
daughter Zoe and to cut her hair, which she mentions in the same
breath. I recall our conversations about hair: her mother’s long
braids, which seem inappropriate for her age; her own long curly
hair, which was hard to brush; and her mother’s resentment of the
brushing.
Zoe will be born soon. Alice will become a mother and she
doesn’t look like her mother anymore. Cutting her hair is a symbolic
way of cutting the thread, separating before becoming a mother
herself, and by doing that, allowing her daughter to have a life of her
own, free of the legacy of trauma.
Before I have a chance to share any of these thoughts, she turns
to me and says, “I have one more thought from this weekend. Tell
me what you think. I want to consider accepting my father’s offer to
pay for the surrogate mother.”
“Tell me about it,” I say, thinking about the new haircut and this
development. Alice is working to reorganize her family structure. She
tries to challenge the mother-daughter–centric family in order to
make space for a multimember family. I’m aware that this is enacted
in her process with me as well, where Alice has made sure a third
person is symbolically with us in our sessions. At first it was her
mother, whom she constantly analyzed, and then it was Art, with
whom she shared our sessions. Alice was unconsciously trying to
avoid the dyadic experience that most people seek in therapy, where
patient and therapist become an intimate therapeutic couple in a
private, secretive process. Instead, what Alice needed was to create
a triangle that first included both her mother and me and then
included both Art and me. She needed to create a structure in which
she didn’t have to be loyal to only one parent. That dynamic revived
the original family she had lost as a child but was also a rehearsal for
the family she was about to have.
“Art and I had a little fight about it this weekend,” she says, and I
am aware that it’s the first time I’ve heard of them having a conflict. “I
think I told you, a long time ago, when I told my father about our
infertility and the IVF and everything, he offered to pay some of the
bills. I was shocked and immediately said no. I was worried that he
wanted to bribe me and I didn’t want him to control me. So even
though we didn’t have the money, we took a loan from the bank
instead. But my father didn’t give up. He kept saying that he wanted
to be part of this process. I told him I’d think about it but I never got
back to him.”
“Like in your childhood.” I cut her off, and she nods.
“This weekend, Art and I talked about my childhood. I told him
that in therapy I realized that I always dismissed my father’s attempts
to be close to me. I just didn’t trust him. I told Art that I see things a
little differently now. He understood what I was saying but he said
that I still don’t let my father into my life and that when he tries to
give me something, I reject him.”
Alice smiles. “You know how Art speaks like a parent sometimes?
He is smart that way.”
I hear her slight ambivalence about Art’s parental position and I
smile and nod.
Alice laughs. “I know,” she says. “He can be annoying the way
parents are sometimes. He argued that parents feel good just being
able to give their child something she needs, and that it’s not always
just a power move, the way I usually interpret it. He said that
financial support is one way for parents to express their love. He
talked about love languages and how each person has their own
way of showing love, some through words and some through
actions, and that one way isn’t better than another.
“I started to raise my voice and said that my father’s actions are
not something he should be proud of. He cheated on my mother as a
way to express his unhappiness, which I don’t respect. I said that I’d
rather he express his feelings in words, not in actions. Art said that
I’m totally wrong and that, in fact, it’s the act of loving that counts, not
just the words or the feeling. He argued that people are truthful when
their words and their actions are synchronized, and that my father’s
act of betrayal was awful because his words and actions
contradicted each other. But that doesn’t mean he is not allowed to
try to repair it with a loving act. Art thinks my father is trying to give
me money as a way to tell me that he wants to make up for
everything he did wrong, to find a way to be a father to me and a
grandfather to our daughter, and that my rejection is a way to control
him and not the other way around.
 “Honestly, I never thought about it that way. I never thought that
by refusing to accept money from my father I control him and make
sure he isn’t too close to me. It reminded me of something you said
about how money and sex are areas that people are most dishonest
and hypocritical about. I mean, my father supported my mother and
me financially all those years. I never thanked him, even though I
knew he wasn’t wealthy and therefore had to sacrifice. I didn’t thank
him for the gifts he sent me, not for the summer camps or the college
tuition he paid, not for the big trip I took after I graduated. I didn’t
want to feel that I needed him or to give him that power over us. I felt
that it was his responsibility to pay. The truth is that sometimes I felt
that I was doing him a favor by letting him give me money, as if it
was something I gave him and not the other way around. Now I want
to do it differently, to be able to give him something by accepting his
money and to feel appreciative for what he gives me. What do you
think, Galit, does it make sense to accept his offer?”
I think about the betrayal of her mother, wondering if Alice is
aware that it was her conflict of loyalty that prevented her from
thanking her father for anything he gave her. If she let herself know
that she missed her father, that she needed him, she might be
breaking her mother’s heart again. She had to make herself forget
about her father. Now she is asking for my permission to let him in
and to forgive him.
Alice’s emotional growth is as speedy as her speech. I witness
her picture beginning to be filled in with nuances, as she adds more
colors to what used to be a black-and-white split view of her parents.
She can now let herself see both of them as humans who struggle to
be happy. She acknowledges the different ways they each used her
in their divorce, treating her as a valuable asset that they were not
willing to share.
I recognize the tender love Alice has for them and her pain at not
being able to start over, to heal her parents, bring them together, and
live her childhood again.
It is time to mourn, to treat her own wounds, and to liberate her
future.
“I want to let myself be my father’s daughter,” Alice says.
 I know what she means. She doesn’t want to end up envying her
daughter for having the father she never had. She doesn’t want to
repeat her history.
Unlike the fantasy that one’s life starts or ends when a baby is
born, life, and so, too, the process of examining it, is ongoing. There
are many layers that Alice will have to peel away and explore as she
gets closer to her emotional truth. She will relive her childhood with
every stage of her daughter’s life. She will need to be angry at her
parents and forgive them again. She will try to do her best, exactly
the way her mother did, and will realize that her best isn’t always
good enough. She will make mistakes and question herself, find
herself overcorrecting for her parents’ faults as well as repeating
them. She will feel gratitude for what they gave her, knowing that
they were limited in their ability to know themselves and to work
through their traumatic pasts, and that she had to do some of that
work for them.
Alice will never forget the painful yet fortunate journey of bringing
Zoe to life. She and I will keep searching for her truths; she will try to
own her past and question what she doesn’t yet know about herself
and about life.
In the end, we come to realize that it is the unexamined lives of
others that we ourselves end up living.
 A Door Opens

T love, to invest in life, to create and fulfill our dreams,

is in ongoing dialogue with our capacity to search for emotional
truths, to tolerate pain, and to mourn.
While our journeys to healing vary, each starts with the decision
to search, to open the door, and, rather than turn away from the hurt
of the past, to walk toward it. We choose to unpack our emotional
inheritance, to be active agents in transforming our fate into destiny.
The secrets of others become our own enigmas, and our secrets
will inevitably find shelter and hide in the minds of others. The more
concealed these secrets are, the more we become strangers to
ourselves, held in captivity, afraid of the freedom to know and be
known. The ghosts of the past are alive in our unconscious. To some
degree, we are all gatekeepers of the unspeakable.
The scars of our inherited trauma take their own unique shape.
Our awareness, like detective work, follows the traces those ghosts
leave in our minds. This awareness slowly sheds light on the ways
the past affects and controls our present being. 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. It
is those now-seen patterns that we search for and unpack.
Again and again, the human unconscious brings us to the original
site of where things went wrong with the wish to do it all over again,
repair the damage, and heal those who were hurt and wounded. We
identify with previous generations—with those who have been
injured, who have been humiliated, and who have died. In our
fantasy, their cure is also our own. We plead for liberation from our
bonds to the painful past and from the guilt of living and having a
better life than the people who came before us.
However, that unconscious wish to heal our ancestors often
prevents us from mourning everything we cannot repair, save, or
start again: our own childhoods, our parents’ wounds, and our
grandparents’ trauma. It is the process of mourning and working
through the pain that our parents couldn’t endure that paves the way
to breaking the identification with those who suffered. Mourning
differentiates the past from the present and separates those who
died from those who stayed alive. We mourn what was out of our
control, and therefore we mourn our lack of omnipotence, the fact
that in reality we are not as powerful as we are in our fantasies. That
emotional truth—our mortality, inherent vulnerability, and human
limitations—leaves us humble and allows us to explore who we
really are, to embrace future possibilities, and to raise the next
generation with dignity.
Ending the intergenerational cycle of suffering is expressed in the
quote from Jeremiah with which I open this book—the wish that in
the future “people will no longer say, ‘The parents have eaten sour
grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’” (31:29). This is a
prayer that children won’t have to carry the consequences of their
parents’ lives, and the wish that our emotional inheritance can be
worked through and altered.
For years, we were used to accepting genetic heritage as fate.
Biologists believed that environmental factors had little, if any, effect
on DNA and that therefore psychological growth was separated from
our genetic legacy. These days, the field of epigenetics gives us
another framework for understanding how nature and nurture
intermingle and how we respond to the environment on a molecular
level. It emphasizes that genes have a “memory” that can be passed
down from one generation to the next.
The implications for this new research are bidirectional: we realize
that trauma can be transmitted to the next generation but also that
psychological work can alter and modify the biological effects of
trauma. Stephen Stahl, professor of psychiatry at the University of
California, San Diego, argues that psychotherapy can be
conceptualized as an “epigenetic drug” since it changes the circuitry
of the brain in a manner similar to or complementary to drugs. Our
hope lies in the understanding that our emotional work has a
profound effect on who we, our children, and our grandchildren will
become. Trauma is transmitted through our minds and through our
bodies, but so are resilience and healing.
The next generations carry not only the despair of the past, but
also hope, because their mere existence is evidence that their family
survived and that a future is possible. Reliving our ancestors’ pain
allows us to reference the traumatic past as a way to imagine a
possible future, a trajectory from chaos to order, from helplessness
to agency, and from destruction to re-creation. In that sense, our
work is a way to process and recall past liberation, and also look
forward to future redemption.
When we can learn to identify the emotional inheritance that lives
within us, things start to make sense and our lives begin to change.
Slowly, a door opens, a gateway between present life and past
trauma. On our way to healing, that which seemed impossible now
becomes tangible, the pain diminishes, and a new path appears—to
love.
 Acknowledgments

T dedicated to the memory of Lewis Aron, whose

devoted love, incredible wisdom, and constant support are always
with me.
My enormous gratitude goes to my patients, those whom I’ve
written about and those whose stories are carried in my heart. Thank
you for teaching me so much about the human mind and about
myself. The patients whose stories are in this book helped me to
alter the details and disguise their identities. Thank you for inviting
me to join your journeys, for trusting me to write your stories, and for
reading those chapters with so much insight and generosity.
I’m blessed to be part of the incredible community of the New
York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis. I’m especially grateful to my dear colleagues,
students, and friends who have read and commented on early
versions of these chapters: Dr. Jessica Benjamin, Dr. Carina
Grossmark, Dr. Jonathon Slavin, Karen Tocatly, Dr. Velleda Ceccoli,
Nina Smilow, Dr. Yael Kapeliuk, Colette Linnihan, Dr. Noga Ariel-
Galor, Dr. Lauren Levine, Kristin Long, Avital Woods, Dr. Merav
Roth, Dr. Robert Grossmark, Dr. Yifat Eitan-Persico, Ivri Lider, Orly
Vilnai, Anat Binur, Limor Laniado-Tiroche, Jamie Ryerson, and Amy
Gross. To Dr. Roberto Colangeli for sharing with me his work on
epigenetics and psychoanalysis. To Dr. Judith Alpert for her help on
the chapter on sexual abuse. To Dr. Beatrice Beebe for her
inspiration and edits of the chapter on babies. To Ezra Miller for their
helpful guidance on gender binary.
A special thank you to Dr. Melanie Suchet for her generous
ongoing love and support.
To Dr. Steve Kuchuck for his invaluable contribution to this book
and for years of friendship and creative collaboration. I couldn’t do it
without your talent, wit, and loyalty.
About ten years ago, aiming to investigate psychoanalytic
“ghosts,” I joined a group of psychoanalysts in New York City who
were analyzing the many ways in which ghosts appear in our
practices. I would like to thank Adriene Harris and the group:
Margery Kalb, Susan Klebanoff, Heather Ferguson, Michael
Feldman, and Arthur Fox.
Many thanks to Emma Sweeney, who held my hand and believed
in this book before it was born. Thank you for your insightful advice
and deep care. Thanks also to Margaret Sutherland Brown at Folio.
A special thank-you to my wonderful agent Gail Ross.
I’m deeply grateful to Sally Arteseros for her remarkably keen eye
and endless dedication. I’m so lucky to have you be part of this
creation.
I feel incredibly fortunate to have Tracy Behar as my editor and
publisher. Thank you for your brilliant work and for believing in this
book and in me. Thank you for your close reading, deep attention,
thoughtful guidance, and unique ability to respond not only to the
words on the page, but also to the words that need to be there.
To the extraordinary group at Little, Brown Spark: Ian Straus,
Betsy Uhrig, Laura Mamelok, Lucy Kim, Jessica Chun, Juliana
Horbachevsky, and Lauren Ortiz. To SallyAnne McCartin of McCartin
Daniels PR.
To Bob Miller, who is my rock and my sanctuary. Thank you for
joining me on a constant search for emotional truths, for always
being there to catch me, for reading every word I write with curiosity
and breathtaking intelligence. Thank you for sharing with me your
gifted mind and soul and for loving me the way you do.
To my family, whom I love endlessly: my parents, Shoshi and
Yaakov Atlas, who taught me everything I know about love and
dedication. To my sister, Keren Atlas-Dror, who was my first real
witness and supporter. To Ashi Atlas, Anat Rose-Atlas, Tamir Koch,
Mika and Itamar Dror. To my beloved stepchildren, Benjamin, Raphi,
and Kirya Ades-Aron, for being with me through so much and for the
family that we are for each other forever.
 Above all, I want to thank my children, Emma, Yali, and Mia Koch.
You inspire me, surprise me, move me, and teach me something
new every day. Thank you for being the people you are and the best
family one could ever dream of.
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 About the Author

Galit Atlas, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private

practice in New York City. She is a faculty member of the New York
University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis. She is a faculty member of the National Training
Program and the Four Year Adult Training Program of the National
Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City. Dr. Atlas has
published three books for clinicians and numerous articles and book
chapters that focus primarily on gender and sexuality. Her New York
Times publication “A Tale of Two Twins” was the winner of a 2016
Gradiva Award. A leader in the field of relational psychoanalysis, Dr.
Atlas is a recipient of the André François Research Award and the
NADTA Research Award. She teaches and lectures throughout the
United States and internationally.
 ALSO BY GALIT ATLAS

The Enigma of Desire:

Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis
Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice
When Minds Meet: The Work of Lewis Aron (edited)
 Praise for Emotional Inheritance

“Beautiful, artistic, and elegant. Dr. Atlas skillfully uses stories from
her practice to explore the archeology of transgenerational trauma.
The descriptions of the therapeutic process pull you in; you come to
know both patient and therapist. In doing so, you cannot help but
reflect on your own journey. Emotional Inheritance is a gem for
anyone, but it is an essential read for those seeking to understand
trauma, therapy, and the healing process.”
—Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, coauthor (with Oprah Winfrey) of
What Happened to You?

“Dr. Atlas writes with profound living compassion for those who have
carried, in their bodies, minds, hearts, spirits, and souls, the most
often unspoken and secret traumas of their own hurt elders. As a
first-generation American child growing up in my tough family of war
refugees, deportees—the ethnically cleansed, struggling immigrants,
I humbly assert that I know about generational traumas in depth. I
recognize Dr. Atlas as one who writes in full, knowing detail about
what I call in my work ‘the generational wound.’”
—Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés Reyés, author of Women Who Run
with the Wolves

“With elegance, Galit Atlas explains the troubling and nourishing

aspects of our emotional inheritances. She deftly shows why the
hurts and stuckness that can plague us can be faced and, yes,
dissolved. Contemporary psychoanalysis at its best. And good
storytelling too.”
—Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue

“Galit Atlas has given us a gift with her book Emotional Inheritance.
With warmth and compassion, she is able to show the reader the
ways our present challenges could be linked to our inherited past.
Using patient stories and her own experiences, we are taken on a
journey of discovery. By sharing these stories, she gives us a
glimpse behind our own curtains and helps us understand that if we
are open to the possibility of hope, now might be the right time to
break the silence our ancestors have held for so long.”
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Happiness

“Galit Atlas’s Emotional Inheritance is insightful, perceptive, and

provocative—but also tender, touching, and personal. Talented
clinicians are not always talented writers, but Dr. Atlas is, and her
stories will stay with you. The world of epigenetics is in its infancy for
most of us, but Dr. Atlas uses ordinary language to explain how we
are born with psychological legacies that we cannot escape but
which we can, with her help, understand.”
—Juliet Rosenfeld, author of The State of Disbelief

“This book is full of great wisdom, expertise, and humanity. An

important, terrific, gripping read.”
—Dr. Anne Alvarez, author of Live Company

“Emotional Inheritance offers extraordinary insight to readers who

feel stuck in lifelong patterns and sense they are haunted by ghosts
from their family’s past. Dr. Atlas deftly shares her own history and
those of her patients while seamlessly weaving in the relevant
psychological research. Dr. Atlas’s book reads like a propulsive
page-turner while also offering deep psychological insights about
inherited trauma and family secrets. This book will undoubtedly
change lives and help readers unlock their unfulfilled potential.”
—Christie Tate, author of Group

“Galit Atlas takes up Tolstoy’s assertion—‘Happy families are all

alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’—as she
narrates the ways in which traumas are uniquely held within families.
Atlas tells the layered stories of her patients as their traumas
reverberate with her own history of trauma and loss. The intimacy of
the storytelling captures the recognition and repair that Atlas
undertakes with her patients. Together they exhume the secrets and
the ghosts that carry and bury trauma, pulling the reader into the
present through the past, in order to break into the potential that is
the future. Such potential is not a simple, sunny vale. Unhappy
families are not made unthinkingly happy. But as Atlas demonstrates
through her graceful generosity, bringing secrets and ghosts into the
daylight offers the potential for new stories, more life, and the
liberation called happiness.”
—Ken Corbett, PhD, author of A Murder Over a Girl

“A truly wise and daring book, Emotional Inheritance is an utterly

compelling account of how the unconscious passage of trauma from
one generation to the next is revealed in psychotherapy. With her
special gift for evocative narrative, Dr. Atlas makes us present as
witnesses to powerful stories of sorrows held in secret, of children
who carry those sorrows forward, knowing without knowing what
darkens their lives. Illuminating the meaning of such histories with
splendid insights, this book will deeply satisfy whoever has
wondered what psychoanalysis can offer in the present world.”
—Dr. Jessica Benjamin, author of The Bonds of Love

“A powerful, lucid, deeply empathic exploration of the legacy of

generational trauma, Emotional Inheritance makes clear that Galit
Atlas is not only a gifted psychoanalyst, but a gifted writer as well. I
loved this book and was stirred by it.”
—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

“An illuminating book. The stories Dr. Atlas shares reveal the
potency of our inherited wounds, showing how the experiences of
our ancestors shape our lives in quiet but far-reaching ways, and
how we all have the potential to heal.”
—Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

“An intimate, textured, and compassionate exploration of

intergenerational trauma, how it is carried and transmitted within
families, and how it can be skillfully invited in, recognized,
attenuated, and perhaps resolved through the therapeutic
relationship, metabolizing what has hitherto not been named or
nameable.”
—Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of The Healing Power of Mindfulness