September 7, 2023 • 33 mins
In the first episode of this special bonus series, Dani and great mind Dr. Galit Atlas unpack the themes presented in a memorable Family Secrets story from our third season.
Listen to Adam Frankel's episode, 'Bubbe and Zayde and Grandma and Pa' here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Throughout My childhood. A pair of framed family trees hung
on an upstairs wall in Grandma PA's colonial style home,
white with black shutters, in the wealthy, largely Jewish suburb
of Scarsdale, a short commute from New York City. I'd
go up to them as a boy and stare at
the rows of generations spanning the two sheets of beige paper,
feeling a sense of pride. This is where I come from.
(00:28):
I think, this is who I am.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
That's Adam Frankel reading from his memoir The Survivors, a
story of war, inheritance and healing. Adam's episode Bubby and
Zeta and Grandma and Pa, which dropped during the third
season of this podcast, has really stayed with me. This
is a special bonus episode of Family Secrets, in which
(00:53):
I'm joined by the psychoanalyst doctor Galite Atlas, author of
the international bestseller Emotion Inheritance. Galite and I will be
talking about what we can learn about family secrets from
the themes in Adam's story. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
(01:19):
is Family Secrets. The secrets there are kept from us.
The secrets we keep from others and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Galat, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Thank you for inviting me. I'm very honored to be
here with you, Danny.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
As soon as you agreed to talk with me for
the show, I pretty much immediately knew which episode I
wanted to pick for us to discuss, and that episode
is Bubba and Zadi and Grandma and Pa by Adam Frankel.
And I thought of you because of your absolutely beautiful book,
Emotional Inheritance, and the themes and the you know, the thoughts
(01:59):
that you have about the secrets that we keep and
the secrets that are kept generationally and their impact on us,
you know, sometimes obvious and sometimes hidden, And this episode
is full of those themes and ideas. And so I'd
like to begin by asking you what was the first
thing that struck you listening to this episode.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
I thought that this is, first of all, about all
a beautiful, beautiful episode that takes us in such a
delicate way into a therapeutic process and moving healing processes.
As we listen to Adam telling his story, and he.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Kind of holds our hands and takes us with him
to experience every stage of this and revelation and shocking
things that he finds out and it's a healing process.
And of course, of course it also demonstrates how emotional
(03:03):
inheritance looks.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Like absolutely he embodies that. And I was struck when
I was listening to it again. It's been years since
I've listened to it, and it was a treat that
listened to it again and almost as if I hadn't
recorded it. And I was struck by his describing his
childhood early in the episode as great and happy and uneventful,
(03:26):
and then we very quickly learn that like, wait a minute,
but his parents divorced and his mother was mentally ill.
That was just interesting to me, you know, the ways
in which we think about our lives and the narrative
of our lives and.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
The familiar, right, the familiar narrative, there is some we
don't know anything else, this is our lives.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Right exactly. Also, I was struck by, you know, because
his childhood happens, of course, way before this bombshell revelation
that then shapes so much of his adult life, and
maybe at least consciously, really didn't shape that much of
his childhood. It was there somewhere, but you know, the
(04:09):
events of his childhood were more sort of garden variety.
Parents get divorced, his mom is troubled, but it's really
not until we reach the part in his episode that
is the before and after moment.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
You know, this is such an important thing that you're saying,
because to me, what that means is that some of
the defenses, and I would even say the emotional inheritance
part of the defenses. We can talk about that how
that that defense is passed down from generation to generation,
(04:44):
that that defense makes exactly what you're describing, makes the
secret so compartmentalized, so dissociated, that life is a you know,
life is what it is. Everything else is kept in
some isolated place in the family's mind, especially his mother's
(05:08):
mind and his father too. And so I think that
what you're really saying here that is important is really
how something about the structure of the defensive structure of
the family that we can trace back to the defensive structure,
especially on the mother's side, that is related to trauma.
(05:29):
And he is talking about that in the episode right
about the history of Holocaust and the secrets around the Holocaust,
and he's describing a family, that secret is part of
their legacy, and I think that that means that something
about that defense works very very well.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
That's so interesting. He uses the word absorb a number
of times in our conversation, and there's a moment where
he says that the way in his family was to
absorb the secret, whatever the secret was, the sense that
something wasn't untouchable, you weren't supposed to go there, there
(06:11):
was this live wire and then move.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
On, mm hmm. And it's a family collusion, like it's
collusion that happens in families. And I think Adam's story
shows us how the legacy of secrets lives in families,
how how living with secrets passes down right from one
generation to another. And the mechanism of dissociation. We all
use the association, right, We all use the association to
(06:35):
some degree to survive life. I want to say, but
in some families that that mechanism is really the major
mechanism and is an emotional inheritance.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Could you talk a little bit about association, And I'm
also wondering whether they're such a thing as healthy dissociation.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
It's a very good question, and I think we these
days we really connect the association very very clearly directly
to trauma, even though wild association is a defense mechanism
that is there to protect us from horrible experiences. And
I'll explain what that means how does that work. But
(07:16):
it's important to say that we're all using that mechanism
to some degree. We're all capable of dissociating. It is something,
but it's a mechanism that disconnects. It's the fragmentation, the
ability to compartmentalize, to have I mean, in his story
you could see that, it's the ability to even have
(07:38):
parallel lives, to keep secrets in a way that is
not mixed with the rest of your life because it
lives in an isolated capsule. And those are some of
the defenses we use to manage the pain of life,
but mostly to servive traumatic experiences. And I think it
often makes us live a compromise life. But what it
(08:00):
means is that we protect our mind from pain, so
we help ourselves to not feel or not be fully present.
I think the most extreme extreme version of that is
in multiple personality, when you see what people experience really
really really terrible, especially physical trauma or physical abuse, emotional abuse,
(08:22):
what we hear from these patients in the office is
that they had to they see themselves from the outside.
They had to disconnect and kind of separate themselves from
their body, and that is a very extreme way to survive.
So I think it's important to really emphasize the importance
(08:44):
right the benefits and how important it is to respect
our defense mechanism. As an aside, I'll tell you just
so just to put it all together, that we could
see severity. So also in other pathologies. It's not only trauma.
We see that in sociopathy and psychopaths, you know, that's
(09:07):
it's that mechanism that we could see. It's it has
more healthy and important parts and more pathological aspect.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
So for a relatively healthy, you know, worried well person
walking around and living their lives, not in a you know,
an extreme pathology situation, what paths does dissociation take? What
does it look like? What does it feel like? Because
(09:38):
it is something that I think I and my listeners
we hear it bandied about all the time. It's a
it's a word that's become you know, used a lot
in our culture, you know, being dissociated. I mean, I've
used it myself many times, do.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
You know, I'll try to explain it in the most
simple way, the way I experience it, not in an
intellectualized way, because what I relate to, even as a
you know, as a human, I want to say, is
the experiences when I face something that is too painful
(10:16):
for me, there is a part of me that disconnects.
I'm not fully present to it, and I think, like,
for example, and I talked about it in the book
a little bit, when I lost my partner Louve, there
was a whole year where my dissociation was much much,
much more intense. With that means, and my kids used
(10:39):
to comment on that that it looks like I'm not
fully there. I kind of stare at things, I don't
fully hear things, I don't fully respond quickly to things.
There is a part of me that is disconnected. And
so of course that was a response to a very
immediate for me. We're very immediate threat and fear and trauma.
(11:05):
But I think that the day to day, every day
way of experiencing that is in situations that are anxiety
provoking or trigger us in some ways, one of the
ways to deal with that is to just be a
little disconnected and it doesn't allow us allow us to
(11:29):
fully experience the experiences the threat.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
And there's a paradox too, it seems to me, which
is that when we're in that state of being dissociated,
we don't know that we're doing that. You know, it's
not language that we're applying to it. Or when you're
checked out, you don't realize you're checked out because you're
checked out.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Right, It's important, you know, we in psychoanalysis, we also
differentiate it from repression, for example, which is in association,
it's your checkout, but it's not like you don't remember.
It's not like you don't know that something happened if
I tell you. And I think that in the office
with patients, patients that are highly dissociated, many of them
(12:11):
are patients who experience childhood to trauma or complex trauma,
are becoming dissociated in their everyday life as adults. And
that's something to just sometimes know about yourself, to respect,
to not necessarily challenge, but to acknowledge, to look at it.
And I think that people become more and more and
more aware. And in my experience, as you know, as
(12:33):
a psychoanalyst, I have seen people that that mechanism shifted,
that they're becoming less dissociated. And some of it is
the even the intellectual awareness of yeah, when something really
scary happens to me, or when I feel unsafe, or
(12:54):
when something triggers me, I can become really disconnected. I
don't feel fully there. And you know, again, when we
think about there is there is a whole terminology of
repression and dissociation, and some of it is in the
old days. You know, the Freudians used to think that
repression is about forgetting something. I think that even that
(13:18):
is not fully true because as a defense against trauma,
even if we go back to the episode, I don't know,
I don't think we could say that maybe as an example,
Adam's mother was also she repressed that. But what that
means often is that somebody still could remember that that happened,
(13:41):
but take away the meaning of the event. So we
kind of change the meaning of an event, especially emotional meaning.
And so that's something to look at. Also when we
think about secrets, how do we how do we remember
those secrets? I think sexual abuse is usually the kind
(14:04):
of traumas that we tend to and what I see
the office is that people can talk about it in
a mechanical way, but to protect themselves to feeling is
not there.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
We'll be right back. You know. There's another seemer sort
of aspect of Baba and Zadi and Grandma and Pa,
which is that this idea, you know, And I don't
want to give too much away about the episode itself,
(14:43):
because I really hope that listeners will go back if
they haven't listened to that episode and listen to it
in light of this conversation, because I just think it's
a really really powerful story, as you said, But there's
this aspect of our mission to recognize that something is
(15:05):
a trauma. And and Adam is so articulate about this.
I mean, he makes this discovery, you know, when he's
in his twenties, he's twenty five years old, and it's
really a pretty earth shattering, identity shattering discovery, and he
is reluctant to think of it as trauma. And part
(15:28):
of that is, you know, as you say, he comes
from you know, his grandparents on his mother's side were
Holocaust survivors, and that's trauma. You know, that's trauma, and
genocide is trauma, and gun violence is trauma. And the
war that was going on at the time that this
discovery happened, you know, in Iraq was a trauma. And
(15:51):
so the idea that you know, we talk about like
big T trauma and little T trauma, but it seems
to me that it's a hallmark of any kind of trauma.
And you know, and I myself am suspicious of, you know,
like easily labeling. You know, I have a hangnail, that's
(16:12):
a trauma, you know. But Adam is so articulate about
the way in which he pushed away the idea that
this was a trauma because he was skeptical of the
very idea, and that minimizing is something that I see
a lot.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, yeah, listen, I think what you're saying is super important.
I mean, let's start with his family history. And I
think everything we were talking about so far is about
the legacy of trauma, right, even the defense mechanism, all
the defenses that we're talking about are somehow related to
the previous generations trauma into what you learn from your ancestors,
(16:53):
for your mother, from your grandmother. All of that. We
cannot ignore that when you experience something and I have
to say, I hear it all the time from people
and I'm sure, I'm sure everybody who listens to that
here that all the time, that there is something about,
especially people that grew up with what we call vig
T trauma or really really intense trauma like persecution like
(17:19):
nine eleven and all of those everything you mentioned, We
then anything nothing else seems like a traumatic event. It
all feels And I think what I see, especially in
people who are second generation, is the ambivalence about about
defining anything as trauma. Now, I agree with you that
(17:44):
there is these days, there is a real misuse of
the word trauma. Everything is trauma, Everything is small is trauma.
Everything that happens to us. The truth is, the definition
of trauma is related to something that shakens our our system.
And when I talk about system, I mean also the body,
of course, because the trauma is directly related to our bodies,
(18:05):
so we can measure it even in some ways. I
think that what you're talking about is related to also
to survival fuild. You know that the second generation of
people that had parents who have been traumatized, and I
think about even children that had parents who have been
(18:28):
abused and who talk about how hard their childhood was
how how difficult it was, how how much they didn't
have parents, or they were emotionally, emotionally or physically abused.
They they feel guilty to experience anything as traumatic everything,
(18:50):
and they feel that they're spoiled, that they're entitled, that
they're you know, that that what they're going through is
not painful comparing to what other people go through, right.
And I see that as especially in second generation, as
part of a larger picture of survivor guilt that is
also passed down by the way from generation to generation.
(19:10):
You see that when the parents, when the grandparents are survivors,
the parents have serious survivor guilt that passes to their children.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
That's so interesting because in Adam's case, he buries it
his word, he buries it. There was a guest in
a recent season of this podcast who had a just
an absolutely fantastic line about secrets. You know, there's there's
so many wonderful quotes about secrets, but this one from
(19:43):
this guest was I thought extraordinary, which was when you
bury a secret, you bury it alive. And so Adam
buries the secret. He doesn't tell anyone, he tries to
push it away, and he has on the surface of things,
A very successful adult life.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
He's a speech writer for Barack Obama. You know, during
his first presidential campaign. He's running miles every day. He
has a girlfriend, he has a group of other young
speech writers who he hangs out with. He tells no
one and one of the things that he says in
the episode is you can only succeed at that for
(20:22):
so long, h.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Which is of course true. And you know, Danny, I
think which was so complex for me when I listened
to this. What I thought was so really complex is
the right word? Was there realization that not only something
was hidden from Adam, but that in fact he was
(20:48):
the secret hear himself. And I think that's related to
what you're saying, because the way I listen to it
is that, to some degree, when he finds out the secret,
it is that moment when he starts talking that he
breaks the collusion and changes his role from being the
secret baby to having a subjective experience an agency. He's
(21:11):
turning passive into acting. So you hear ow I listen
to it. I listened to everything you're saying about how
he buries the secret as alive as bearing himself alive
in a sense that he's the secret, and he keeps
(21:31):
himself as the secret.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
So he's burying himself. Yeah, that's so powerful.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
He is not a wanted baby, right, He's not a
wanted baby, but he's when you listen to that story,
it sounds like he's an object that is used to
enlife in the parents, to create what his biological father
calls the mystery and the erotic. And so therefore I
think that until he claims his voice story, until he
(22:01):
starts talking, he doesn't have a voice, he doesn't have
a subjectivity, he doesn't have a life. He still remains
an object. And you see it to me, which was
fascinating and moving about these stories that you see the
healing process of moving from participating in keeping himself as
(22:23):
an object when he doesn't talk, to becoming a human
to becoming somebody who is who has subjectivity, has a voice,
and has a life.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, it's really extraordinary. I mean there's so many different
layers of coming out, you know, of emerging from keeping
this secret first keeping it from everyone, then finally, because
it can't be contained because it's so huge, because it
(22:58):
really is impacting everything about his life, he finally does
tell one person. He tells his girlfriend, and his girlfriend
urges him or his ex girlfriend because he's trying to
win her back, because one of the reasons why they
break up is because he's not himself. He's not fully
(23:19):
able to be a full blown human in terms of
intimacy and love and being known. And his girlfriend urges
him to go to therapy, and at some point he
talks about multiple therapists over the course of a number
of years wondering with him about how much he needs
(23:42):
to reveal. You know, there's something that really frightens him.
There's a relationship with his dad, who he adores, who
he learns is not his biological father, and he doesn't
think his father knows. And I mean, one of the
things that was so moving to me is that a
(24:04):
decade goes by where he's told people and he's in
therapy about it, and he's processing it to some degree,
but not to the whole degree because in order to
do that, he has to talk to his dad, and
he's so afraid to. I mean, I guess I'm wondering
about the you know, the role of I mean, first,
(24:25):
there's shame, right first, there's confusion, you know, then there's shame,
and the shame layer starts to largely kind of get
dealt with. But then there's this fear that he's just
worried that he's going to hurt his father, and that
he himself is going to be terribly hurt by his
(24:45):
father's reaction.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
And lose his father. Right, there's a fear of something's
going to fall apart or something is going to happen.
You know, when I listened to that part, it's so
emotional that I started crying because I felt like, wow,
that's a really profound moment. You have to tell your father,
(25:13):
but there is a huge fear and risk that something
will change with him, and you don't want it to change.
And maybe you will hurt him, maybe you will shame him.
Maybe Right, there's all my fantasies that maybe maybe he
would love you in the same way.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
He is so eloquent about it because he talks about
you know, his father is a really big hearted and
kind and wonderful man, and he's been a wonderful father.
And Adam knows that his father will try his damnedest
to absorb this, to take it in, to assure him
(25:50):
that nothing changes. But Adam says he's afraid that he'll
see something, that there'll be some slight, subtle change in
the way that his father a glance or his tone
of voice or something, and he'll know. No one else
will know, but he'll know that it has mattered, that
(26:12):
it mattered. And that's not what happens. What happens is
beautiful and profound. And one thing that he does say
after he finally has put down the burden, you know,
when we talk about secrets, we talk about the weight
of secrets, the burden of secrets, the heaviness of secrets
(26:33):
literally like a like a weight that we carry. And
he he says in the episode, my only regret is
that I hadn't talked to him sooner. It was unnecessary,
needless heartache for all those years.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Yeah, yeah, he carried all of that burdens alone, and
and all the fears that we you and I expressed
that what was the fear? What did he imagine? Imagine?
That is for a decade, all of that is there,
that those speculations of what would have happened, what would
happen if I if my father knows And that's that's
(27:12):
the lots to carry.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, and what does it do to finally put that
burden down. A place that we go in the episode
is that I mean Adam describes he uses the word groundedness,
and you know, before his discovery, you know, in all
of the years until he was twenty five years old,
he would have considered himself fairly grounded, but he was
(27:38):
actually on shakier ground than he knew because there was
this fault line, there was this secret, and then for
all those years that he then carried that secret alone,
the ground was extremely shaky beneath him. And even when
he began to heal and he started to process it
(28:02):
and even felt probably to some degree that he was
putting it behind him, there was this huge way in
which he wasn't doing that. Yet.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
There is something there that we learn, and I'm not
going to say it right at the end, that he
really teaches us that in fact, his ground was pretty
solid and he was the right to experience his life
as solid. Then I wonder what he would say about
that interpretation. He was not a wanted baby. But the
(28:33):
truth is that it does feel like he had two
parents who really were invested in him, and it sounds
like especially his father was very solid and his mother.
It sounds like, from what he's telling, had more mental
health issues and more struggles, which is not necessarily only
(28:54):
related to him. But it sounds like obviously that impacted
his life. But I would say that it's about the
fact that nothing actually changed. You know, after he did
the whole process and went back to the beginning, his
perception at the end was similar to the perception before
(29:15):
he knew that he knew the secret. Do you do
you agree with that?
Speaker 1 (29:19):
I do? And what keeps on running through my mind
is that And I hope this doesn't sound sort of
sentimental and hokey, but is that those who love us
save us. And he was loved. He was loved by
four grandparents who adored him, and by two parents who
(29:39):
adored him. And that love that is the is the
ground and was real. You know, it wasn't It wasn't
a performance, and it wasn't it wasn't complicated. You know,
the story beneath all of it was complicated, but the
love was uncomplicated.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
I really agree with you. I really agree with you,
and I think about love in a more multilayered way.
That love is not just the feeling, is the act
and it's related to the attachment that something does feel
to some degree secure.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Yeah, it's the nurturance which is what allows us to
grow and to you know, to bloom and to blossom
and to become ourselves. And and Adam says something very
I think universally true towards the end of the episode,
and I love your take on this, which is he says,
I'm not just a product of the family story that
(30:34):
I want to be part of. And he says, you know,
it's the good, the bad, the ugly, the heroic, the shameful,
and that that is extraordinarily empowering. And you know, I
think when we talk about family secrets and we talk
about emotional inheritance, and you know, we began this conversation
by my asking you I mean or offering sort of
(30:54):
my take about you know, my childhood was great. You know,
that wasn't the whole story. And yet somehow, if we're
able to wrap our arms around the whole story and
not just the shiny bits, that's when, perhaps, you know,
when we come to really know ourselves and feel whole.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
I love that, you know, because I think that what
you're describing is what allows us to live a fuller
and more integrated life where we have everything you know,
we have they said, the full catastrophe, where we don't
have to keep secrets from ourselves, but we don't have
to walk around things that we don't have to disconnect
(31:39):
one part of ourselves. That bring us back to the
association and repression and all the defenses, the very very
very you know, rigid defenses we have in order to
not feel that live a part of us outside. And
so I think what you're describing is really the ability
to live a full life that is not compromised and
(32:03):
be able to tolerate not only what is good, but
also the difficult, the pain that being able to sit
with again, you know, when we said the full catastrophe,
which means everything that life offers us without being afraid
to fall apart if we find out or if we
(32:26):
experience something that is outside of what we can tolerate.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
I think that's a beautiful place to wrap up. I
have so loved exploring all this with you and so
appreciate your insights and your mind. And thanks, Gully, thank you.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
I love this conversation and I also really love this episode,
Adam's episode, So thank you for inviting me to talk
to you.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Throughout My childhood. A pair of framed family trees hung
on an upstairs wall in Grandma PA's colonial style home,
white with black shutters, in the wealthy, largely Jewish suburb
of Scarsdale, a short commute from New York City. I'd
go up to them as a boy and stare at
the rows of generations spanning the two sheets of beige paper,
feeling a sense of pride. This is where I come from.
(00:28):
I think, this is who I am.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
That's Adam Frankel reading from his memoir The Survivors, a
story of war, inheritance and healing. Adam's episode Bubby and
Zeta and Grandma and Pa, which dropped during the third
season of this podcast, has really stayed with me. This
is a special bonus episode of Family Secrets, in which
(00:53):
I'm joined by the psychoanalyst doctor Galite Atlas, author of
the international bestseller Emotion Inheritance. Galite and I will be
talking about what we can learn about family secrets from
the themes in Adam's story. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
(01:19):
is Family Secrets. The secrets there are kept from us.
The secrets we keep from others and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Galat, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Thank you for inviting me. I'm very honored to be
here with you, Danny.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
As soon as you agreed to talk with me for
the show, I pretty much immediately knew which episode I
wanted to pick for us to discuss, and that episode
is Bubba and Zadi and Grandma and Pa by Adam Frankel.
And I thought of you because of your absolutely beautiful book,
Emotional Inheritance, and the themes and the you know, the thoughts
(01:59):
that you have about the secrets that we keep and
the secrets that are kept generationally and their impact on us,
you know, sometimes obvious and sometimes hidden, And this episode
is full of those themes and ideas. And so I'd
like to begin by asking you what was the first
thing that struck you listening to this episode.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
I thought that this is, first of all, about all
a beautiful, beautiful episode that takes us in such a
delicate way into a therapeutic process and moving healing processes.
As we listen to Adam telling his story, and he.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Kind of holds our hands and takes us with him
to experience every stage of this and revelation and shocking
things that he finds out and it's a healing process.
And of course, of course it also demonstrates how emotional
(03:03):
inheritance looks.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Like absolutely he embodies that. And I was struck when
I was listening to it again. It's been years since
I've listened to it, and it was a treat that
listened to it again and almost as if I hadn't
recorded it. And I was struck by his describing his
childhood early in the episode as great and happy and uneventful,
(03:26):
and then we very quickly learn that like, wait a minute,
but his parents divorced and his mother was mentally ill.
That was just interesting to me, you know, the ways
in which we think about our lives and the narrative
of our lives and.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
The familiar, right, the familiar narrative, there is some we
don't know anything else, this is our lives.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Right exactly. Also, I was struck by, you know, because
his childhood happens, of course, way before this bombshell revelation
that then shapes so much of his adult life, and
maybe at least consciously, really didn't shape that much of
his childhood. It was there somewhere, but you know, the
(04:09):
events of his childhood were more sort of garden variety.
Parents get divorced, his mom is troubled, but it's really
not until we reach the part in his episode that
is the before and after moment.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
You know, this is such an important thing that you're saying,
because to me, what that means is that some of
the defenses, and I would even say the emotional inheritance
part of the defenses. We can talk about that how
that that defense is passed down from generation to generation,
(04:44):
that that defense makes exactly what you're describing, makes the
secret so compartmentalized, so dissociated, that life is a you know,
life is what it is. Everything else is kept in
some isolated place in the family's mind, especially his mother's
(05:08):
mind and his father too. And so I think that
what you're really saying here that is important is really
how something about the structure of the defensive structure of
the family that we can trace back to the defensive structure,
especially on the mother's side, that is related to trauma.
(05:29):
And he is talking about that in the episode right
about the history of Holocaust and the secrets around the Holocaust,
and he's describing a family, that secret is part of
their legacy, and I think that that means that something
about that defense works very very well.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
That's so interesting. He uses the word absorb a number
of times in our conversation, and there's a moment where
he says that the way in his family was to
absorb the secret, whatever the secret was, the sense that
something wasn't untouchable, you weren't supposed to go there, there
(06:11):
was this live wire and then move.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
On, mm hmm. And it's a family collusion, like it's
collusion that happens in families. And I think Adam's story
shows us how the legacy of secrets lives in families,
how how living with secrets passes down right from one
generation to another. And the mechanism of dissociation. We all
use the association, right, We all use the association to
(06:35):
some degree to survive life. I want to say, but
in some families that that mechanism is really the major
mechanism and is an emotional inheritance.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Could you talk a little bit about association, And I'm
also wondering whether they're such a thing as healthy dissociation.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
It's a very good question, and I think we these
days we really connect the association very very clearly directly
to trauma, even though wild association is a defense mechanism
that is there to protect us from horrible experiences. And
I'll explain what that means how does that work. But
(07:16):
it's important to say that we're all using that mechanism
to some degree. We're all capable of dissociating. It is something,
but it's a mechanism that disconnects. It's the fragmentation, the
ability to compartmentalize, to have I mean, in his story
you could see that, it's the ability to even have
(07:38):
parallel lives, to keep secrets in a way that is
not mixed with the rest of your life because it
lives in an isolated capsule. And those are some of
the defenses we use to manage the pain of life,
but mostly to servive traumatic experiences. And I think it
often makes us live a compromise life. But what it
(08:00):
means is that we protect our mind from pain, so
we help ourselves to not feel or not be fully present.
I think the most extreme extreme version of that is
in multiple personality, when you see what people experience really
really really terrible, especially physical trauma or physical abuse, emotional abuse,
(08:22):
what we hear from these patients in the office is
that they had to they see themselves from the outside.
They had to disconnect and kind of separate themselves from
their body, and that is a very extreme way to survive.
So I think it's important to really emphasize the importance
(08:44):
right the benefits and how important it is to respect
our defense mechanism. As an aside, I'll tell you just
so just to put it all together, that we could
see severity. So also in other pathologies. It's not only trauma.
We see that in sociopathy and psychopaths, you know, that's
(09:07):
it's that mechanism that we could see. It's it has
more healthy and important parts and more pathological aspect.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
So for a relatively healthy, you know, worried well person
walking around and living their lives, not in a you know,
an extreme pathology situation, what paths does dissociation take? What
does it look like? What does it feel like? Because
(09:38):
it is something that I think I and my listeners
we hear it bandied about all the time. It's a
it's a word that's become you know, used a lot
in our culture, you know, being dissociated. I mean, I've
used it myself many times, do.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
You know, I'll try to explain it in the most
simple way, the way I experience it, not in an
intellectualized way, because what I relate to, even as a
you know, as a human, I want to say, is
the experiences when I face something that is too painful
(10:16):
for me, there is a part of me that disconnects.
I'm not fully present to it, and I think, like,
for example, and I talked about it in the book
a little bit, when I lost my partner Louve, there
was a whole year where my dissociation was much much,
much more intense. With that means, and my kids used
(10:39):
to comment on that that it looks like I'm not
fully there. I kind of stare at things, I don't
fully hear things, I don't fully respond quickly to things.
There is a part of me that is disconnected. And
so of course that was a response to a very
immediate for me. We're very immediate threat and fear and trauma.
(11:05):
But I think that the day to day, every day
way of experiencing that is in situations that are anxiety
provoking or trigger us in some ways, one of the
ways to deal with that is to just be a
little disconnected and it doesn't allow us allow us to
(11:29):
fully experience the experiences the threat.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
And there's a paradox too, it seems to me, which
is that when we're in that state of being dissociated,
we don't know that we're doing that. You know, it's
not language that we're applying to it. Or when you're
checked out, you don't realize you're checked out because you're
checked out.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Right, It's important, you know, we in psychoanalysis, we also
differentiate it from repression, for example, which is in association,
it's your checkout, but it's not like you don't remember.
It's not like you don't know that something happened if
I tell you. And I think that in the office
with patients, patients that are highly dissociated, many of them
(12:11):
are patients who experience childhood to trauma or complex trauma,
are becoming dissociated in their everyday life as adults. And
that's something to just sometimes know about yourself, to respect,
to not necessarily challenge, but to acknowledge, to look at it.
And I think that people become more and more and
more aware. And in my experience, as you know, as
(12:33):
a psychoanalyst, I have seen people that that mechanism shifted,
that they're becoming less dissociated. And some of it is
the even the intellectual awareness of yeah, when something really
scary happens to me, or when I feel unsafe, or
(12:54):
when something triggers me, I can become really disconnected. I
don't feel fully there. And you know, again, when we
think about there is there is a whole terminology of
repression and dissociation, and some of it is in the
old days. You know, the Freudians used to think that
repression is about forgetting something. I think that even that
(13:18):
is not fully true because as a defense against trauma,
even if we go back to the episode, I don't know,
I don't think we could say that maybe as an example,
Adam's mother was also she repressed that. But what that
means often is that somebody still could remember that that happened,
(13:41):
but take away the meaning of the event. So we
kind of change the meaning of an event, especially emotional meaning.
And so that's something to look at. Also when we
think about secrets, how do we how do we remember
those secrets? I think sexual abuse is usually the kind
(14:04):
of traumas that we tend to and what I see
the office is that people can talk about it in
a mechanical way, but to protect themselves to feeling is
not there.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
We'll be right back. You know. There's another seemer sort
of aspect of Baba and Zadi and Grandma and Pa,
which is that this idea, you know, And I don't
want to give too much away about the episode itself,
(14:43):
because I really hope that listeners will go back if
they haven't listened to that episode and listen to it
in light of this conversation, because I just think it's
a really really powerful story, as you said, But there's
this aspect of our mission to recognize that something is
(15:05):
a trauma. And and Adam is so articulate about this.
I mean, he makes this discovery, you know, when he's
in his twenties, he's twenty five years old, and it's
really a pretty earth shattering, identity shattering discovery, and he
is reluctant to think of it as trauma. And part
(15:28):
of that is, you know, as you say, he comes
from you know, his grandparents on his mother's side were
Holocaust survivors, and that's trauma. You know, that's trauma, and
genocide is trauma, and gun violence is trauma. And the
war that was going on at the time that this
discovery happened, you know, in Iraq was a trauma. And
(15:51):
so the idea that you know, we talk about like
big T trauma and little T trauma, but it seems
to me that it's a hallmark of any kind of trauma.
And you know, and I myself am suspicious of, you know,
like easily labeling. You know, I have a hangnail, that's
(16:12):
a trauma, you know. But Adam is so articulate about
the way in which he pushed away the idea that
this was a trauma because he was skeptical of the
very idea, and that minimizing is something that I see
a lot.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, yeah, listen, I think what you're saying is super important.
I mean, let's start with his family history. And I
think everything we were talking about so far is about
the legacy of trauma, right, even the defense mechanism, all
the defenses that we're talking about are somehow related to
the previous generations trauma into what you learn from your ancestors,
(16:53):
for your mother, from your grandmother. All of that. We
cannot ignore that when you experience something and I have
to say, I hear it all the time from people
and I'm sure, I'm sure everybody who listens to that
here that all the time, that there is something about,
especially people that grew up with what we call vig
T trauma or really really intense trauma like persecution like
(17:19):
nine eleven and all of those everything you mentioned, We
then anything nothing else seems like a traumatic event. It
all feels And I think what I see, especially in
people who are second generation, is the ambivalence about about
defining anything as trauma. Now, I agree with you that
(17:44):
there is these days, there is a real misuse of
the word trauma. Everything is trauma, Everything is small is trauma.
Everything that happens to us. The truth is, the definition
of trauma is related to something that shakens our our system.
And when I talk about system, I mean also the body,
of course, because the trauma is directly related to our bodies,
(18:05):
so we can measure it even in some ways. I
think that what you're talking about is related to also
to survival fuild. You know that the second generation of
people that had parents who have been traumatized, and I
think about even children that had parents who have been
(18:28):
abused and who talk about how hard their childhood was
how how difficult it was, how how much they didn't
have parents, or they were emotionally, emotionally or physically abused.
They they feel guilty to experience anything as traumatic everything,
(18:50):
and they feel that they're spoiled, that they're entitled, that
they're you know, that that what they're going through is
not painful comparing to what other people go through, right.
And I see that as especially in second generation, as
part of a larger picture of survivor guilt that is
also passed down by the way from generation to generation.
(19:10):
You see that when the parents, when the grandparents are survivors,
the parents have serious survivor guilt that passes to their children.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
That's so interesting because in Adam's case, he buries it
his word, he buries it. There was a guest in
a recent season of this podcast who had a just
an absolutely fantastic line about secrets. You know, there's there's
so many wonderful quotes about secrets, but this one from
(19:43):
this guest was I thought extraordinary, which was when you
bury a secret, you bury it alive. And so Adam
buries the secret. He doesn't tell anyone, he tries to
push it away, and he has on the surface of things,
A very successful adult life.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
He's a speech writer for Barack Obama. You know, during
his first presidential campaign. He's running miles every day. He
has a girlfriend, he has a group of other young
speech writers who he hangs out with. He tells no
one and one of the things that he says in
the episode is you can only succeed at that for
(20:22):
so long, h.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Which is of course true. And you know, Danny, I
think which was so complex for me when I listened
to this. What I thought was so really complex is
the right word? Was there realization that not only something
was hidden from Adam, but that in fact he was
(20:48):
the secret hear himself. And I think that's related to
what you're saying, because the way I listen to it
is that, to some degree, when he finds out the secret,
it is that moment when he starts talking that he
breaks the collusion and changes his role from being the
secret baby to having a subjective experience an agency. He's
(21:11):
turning passive into acting. So you hear ow I listen
to it. I listened to everything you're saying about how
he buries the secret as alive as bearing himself alive
in a sense that he's the secret, and he keeps
(21:31):
himself as the secret.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
So he's burying himself. Yeah, that's so powerful.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
He is not a wanted baby, right, He's not a
wanted baby, but he's when you listen to that story,
it sounds like he's an object that is used to
enlife in the parents, to create what his biological father
calls the mystery and the erotic. And so therefore I
think that until he claims his voice story, until he
(22:01):
starts talking, he doesn't have a voice, he doesn't have
a subjectivity, he doesn't have a life. He still remains
an object. And you see it to me, which was
fascinating and moving about these stories that you see the
healing process of moving from participating in keeping himself as
(22:23):
an object when he doesn't talk, to becoming a human
to becoming somebody who is who has subjectivity, has a voice,
and has a life.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, it's really extraordinary. I mean there's so many different
layers of coming out, you know, of emerging from keeping
this secret first keeping it from everyone, then finally, because
it can't be contained because it's so huge, because it
(22:58):
really is impacting everything about his life, he finally does
tell one person. He tells his girlfriend, and his girlfriend
urges him or his ex girlfriend because he's trying to
win her back, because one of the reasons why they
break up is because he's not himself. He's not fully
(23:19):
able to be a full blown human in terms of
intimacy and love and being known. And his girlfriend urges
him to go to therapy, and at some point he
talks about multiple therapists over the course of a number
of years wondering with him about how much he needs
(23:42):
to reveal. You know, there's something that really frightens him.
There's a relationship with his dad, who he adores, who
he learns is not his biological father, and he doesn't
think his father knows. And I mean, one of the
things that was so moving to me is that a
(24:04):
decade goes by where he's told people and he's in
therapy about it, and he's processing it to some degree,
but not to the whole degree because in order to
do that, he has to talk to his dad, and
he's so afraid to. I mean, I guess I'm wondering
about the you know, the role of I mean, first,
(24:25):
there's shame, right first, there's confusion, you know, then there's shame,
and the shame layer starts to largely kind of get
dealt with. But then there's this fear that he's just
worried that he's going to hurt his father, and that
he himself is going to be terribly hurt by his
(24:45):
father's reaction.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
And lose his father. Right, there's a fear of something's
going to fall apart or something is going to happen.
You know, when I listened to that part, it's so
emotional that I started crying because I felt like, wow,
that's a really profound moment. You have to tell your father,
(25:13):
but there is a huge fear and risk that something
will change with him, and you don't want it to change.
And maybe you will hurt him, maybe you will shame him.
Maybe Right, there's all my fantasies that maybe maybe he
would love you in the same way.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
He is so eloquent about it because he talks about
you know, his father is a really big hearted and
kind and wonderful man, and he's been a wonderful father.
And Adam knows that his father will try his damnedest
to absorb this, to take it in, to assure him
(25:50):
that nothing changes. But Adam says he's afraid that he'll
see something, that there'll be some slight, subtle change in
the way that his father a glance or his tone
of voice or something, and he'll know. No one else
will know, but he'll know that it has mattered, that
(26:12):
it mattered. And that's not what happens. What happens is
beautiful and profound. And one thing that he does say
after he finally has put down the burden, you know,
when we talk about secrets, we talk about the weight
of secrets, the burden of secrets, the heaviness of secrets
(26:33):
literally like a like a weight that we carry. And
he he says in the episode, my only regret is
that I hadn't talked to him sooner. It was unnecessary,
needless heartache for all those years.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Yeah, yeah, he carried all of that burdens alone, and
and all the fears that we you and I expressed
that what was the fear? What did he imagine? Imagine?
That is for a decade, all of that is there,
that those speculations of what would have happened, what would
happen if I if my father knows And that's that's
(27:12):
the lots to carry.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, and what does it do to finally put that
burden down. A place that we go in the episode
is that I mean Adam describes he uses the word groundedness,
and you know, before his discovery, you know, in all
of the years until he was twenty five years old,
he would have considered himself fairly grounded, but he was
(27:38):
actually on shakier ground than he knew because there was
this fault line, there was this secret, and then for
all those years that he then carried that secret alone,
the ground was extremely shaky beneath him. And even when
he began to heal and he started to process it
(28:02):
and even felt probably to some degree that he was
putting it behind him, there was this huge way in
which he wasn't doing that. Yet.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
There is something there that we learn, and I'm not
going to say it right at the end, that he
really teaches us that in fact, his ground was pretty
solid and he was the right to experience his life
as solid. Then I wonder what he would say about
that interpretation. He was not a wanted baby. But the
(28:33):
truth is that it does feel like he had two
parents who really were invested in him, and it sounds
like especially his father was very solid and his mother.
It sounds like, from what he's telling, had more mental
health issues and more struggles, which is not necessarily only
(28:54):
related to him. But it sounds like obviously that impacted
his life. But I would say that it's about the
fact that nothing actually changed. You know, after he did
the whole process and went back to the beginning, his
perception at the end was similar to the perception before
(29:15):
he knew that he knew the secret. Do you do
you agree with that?
Speaker 1 (29:19):
I do? And what keeps on running through my mind
is that And I hope this doesn't sound sort of
sentimental and hokey, but is that those who love us
save us. And he was loved. He was loved by
four grandparents who adored him, and by two parents who
(29:39):
adored him. And that love that is the is the
ground and was real. You know, it wasn't It wasn't
a performance, and it wasn't it wasn't complicated. You know,
the story beneath all of it was complicated, but the
love was uncomplicated.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
I really agree with you. I really agree with you,
and I think about love in a more multilayered way.
That love is not just the feeling, is the act
and it's related to the attachment that something does feel
to some degree secure.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Yeah, it's the nurturance which is what allows us to
grow and to you know, to bloom and to blossom
and to become ourselves. And and Adam says something very
I think universally true towards the end of the episode,
and I love your take on this, which is he says,
I'm not just a product of the family story that
(30:34):
I want to be part of. And he says, you know,
it's the good, the bad, the ugly, the heroic, the shameful,
and that that is extraordinarily empowering. And you know, I
think when we talk about family secrets and we talk
about emotional inheritance, and you know, we began this conversation
by my asking you I mean or offering sort of
(30:54):
my take about you know, my childhood was great. You know,
that wasn't the whole story. And yet somehow, if we're
able to wrap our arms around the whole story and
not just the shiny bits, that's when, perhaps, you know,
when we come to really know ourselves and feel whole.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
I love that, you know, because I think that what
you're describing is what allows us to live a fuller
and more integrated life where we have everything you know,
we have they said, the full catastrophe, where we don't
have to keep secrets from ourselves, but we don't have
to walk around things that we don't have to disconnect
(31:39):
one part of ourselves. That bring us back to the
association and repression and all the defenses, the very very
very you know, rigid defenses we have in order to
not feel that live a part of us outside. And
so I think what you're describing is really the ability
to live a full life that is not compromised and
(32:03):
be able to tolerate not only what is good, but
also the difficult, the pain that being able to sit
with again, you know, when we said the full catastrophe,
which means everything that life offers us without being afraid
to fall apart if we find out or if we
(32:26):
experience something that is outside of what we can tolerate.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
I think that's a beautiful place to wrap up. I
have so loved exploring all this with you and so
appreciate your insights and your mind. And thanks, Gully, thank you.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
I love this conversation and I also really love this episode,
Adam's episode, So thank you for inviting me to talk
to you.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
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