Your 'Inner Child' Runs Your Life. Here's How To Spot It and Take Back the Wheel. | Dr. Galit Atlas
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What is the inner child and why does it matter for adult relationships?
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Ten Percent Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. I have been thinking a lot and writing a lot in my never ending uh next book project about what I was like as a child. uh super anxious, often uh deeply ashamed, uh, and how that impacts who I am now. And I, as a consequence of doing all this thinking and writing, was very intrigued when my staff recommended that we bring on the show uh a woman named uh Dr. Galeet Atlas, who is a psychoanalyst and the author of a new book called uh Come Closer, in which she argues that the key to your adult relationships is the child you once were. So without further ado, let's uh say a big hearty ten percent happier hello to uh uh Dr.
Galit Atlas. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. I have to say that over and over on this show. Concepts that I used to love to gleefully dismiss as bullshit, like uh like going to your happy place or being in the present moment or whatever, uh, I've had to come to admit are actually deeply useful. And here we are now with the inner child. Um so what say you to folks who might be tempted to write off the whole notion of the inner child as like therapy nonsense?
You know, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the inner child is not just a metaphor. It's a self state, something that developed early in life and lives inside us and comes back to life and to some degree drives our relationships, especially our intimate relationships and our love relationships.
Yeah, it's not just a theory, like the the five year old version of me is grabbing the steering wheel and making me say stupid shit in ways that really impact my psychological and material well being right now.
Yes. Yes. The child you once were Continues to live inside you. And that child influence impacts the way you attach to others, the way you connect, the way you relate, and often without awareness, right? It's it's I like to say that it whispers in our ears. And the reason is that that child is trying to protect us, that child is trying to teach us how to survive, what works for them, and we keep You know, hearing the voices saying, Hey, be careful this person is too close to you. Hey, be careful this happened in the past, remember? Don't do that again.
Have you ever heard the expression if it's hysterical, it's historical?
Yes. And I think that's a good expression because it is Historical Because our history is is what shaped us. We learned from a very young age what works and what didn't work and A lot of what we do in psychoanalysis is look at our defenses, early defenses, adaptations, uh emotional maneuvers, right? Everything that really helped us uh survive became our later pattern.
You practice psychoanalysis, which is one school of therapy. There are many different schools of therapy. I've seen um a whole cornucopia of therapists over the course of my fifty-five years. Um, and some of them really are can be dismissive of mining the past. They're much more focused on like, how do we tweak your behavior right now? So like what what are those debates like when you engage?
It's a good question because there are of course a lot of debates about insight versus tools. You know, and some people say that. It's either you need to have only insight or you need to have mostly tools. And I think that the way we think about it is the integration and insight of insights and tools in psychoanalysis especially. And especially we're talking about a com a concept that we call resistance. Resistance means that we all Really want to get better? We really want to know ourselves, and But we also are very afraid of knowing ourselves, and we want to we want to know, but we are also afraid of knowing. And especially we want to change, but we are also Very afraid of changing. We resist change. We are attached to the old versions of ourselves.
So that's why having tools doesn't always work. And that's why having insights doesn't always work. Part of what we do in psychoanalytic treatment is really look at the gaps between what we want and what we are.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the inner child and why does it matter for adult relationships?
0:03–5:17
2
How does Dr. Galit Atlas define the six childhood archetypes?
5:17–11:05
3
What are the characteristics of the frightened child and how does it affect us?
11:05–22:30
4
How do the guilty and ashamed children create shame and blame cycles?
22:30–32:20
5
What’s the difference between jealousy and envy and why does it matter?
32:20–44:09
6
How can we catch ourselves when the inner child hijacks our reactions?
44:09–53:12
7
What simple question can we ask to identify the source of a fear?
53:12–1:02:46
8
What practical tools does the guest recommend for integrating the inner child?
1:02:46–1:02:48
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from 10% Happier with Dan Harris
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