Your 'Inner Child' Runs Your Life. Here's How To Spot It and Take Back the Wheel. | Dr. Galit Atlas

Six archetypes: Which one are you? Plus, a simple question to help you distinguish real, current fears from old, outdated ones. Dr. Galit Atlas https://www.galitatlas.com/ is an internationally renowned psychoanalyst and leader in relational psychoanalysis. She teaches at NYU and Columbia University and lectures internationally on sexuality, desire, and emotional inheritance. Her latest book is Come Closer https://www.galitatlas.com/home-1-1. You can also read her essays on Substack, Wild Analysis with Dr. Galit Atlas https://wildanalysiswithgalitatlas.substack.com/. In this episode we talk about: The six childhood archetypes that quietly run your adult relationships Why the version of you that felt too big or too small never actually grew up A simple question to ask yourself the moment old fear takes over The surprising link between blame and a feeling you'd rather not name What separates jealousy from envy — and why it matters more than you think The phrases people use when they're secretly telling you the opposite Why setting boundaries feels like betrayal if you were raised a certain way The real reason acceptance has to come before change, not after Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD This episode is sponsored by: OSEA: Go to OSEAMalibu.com http://oseamalibu.com/ and get 10% off your first order with code HAPPIER. Planet Visionaries: In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, listen to or watch Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts. Cash App: Download Cash App Today: click.cash.app/ui6m/oh9jnxlq https://click.cash.app/ui6m/oh9jnxlq #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N. A., pursuant to a license from Visa U. S. A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Savings provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. I have been thinking a lot and writing a lot in my never-ending next book project about what I was like as a child, super anxious, often deeply ashamed, and how that impacts who I am now. And I, as a consequence of doing all of this thinking and writing, was very intrigued when my staff recommended that we bring on the show a woman named Dr. Galit Atlas, who is a psychoanalyst and the author of a new book called Come Closer, in which she argues that the key to your adult relationships is the child you once were.

• 0:45Dan Harris?

  So, without further ado, let's say a big hearty 10% happier hello to Dr. Galit Atlas. Welcome to the show.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.

• 0:54Dan Harris?

  I have to say that over and over on this show, concepts that I used to love to gleefully dismiss as bullshit, like going to your happy place, or being in the present moment, or whatever, I've had to come to admit are actually deeply useful. And here we are now with the inner child. So what say you to folks who might be tempted to write off the whole notion of the inner child as like therapy nonsense?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:38Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it's not just a theory, like 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.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 2:26Dan Harris?

  Have you ever heard the expression, if it's hysterical, it's historical?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yes. And I think that's a good expression because it is historical. Because our history 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, emotional maneuvers, right? Everything that really helped us survive became our later pattern.

• 3:00Dan Harris?

  You practice psychoanalysis, which is one school of therapy. There are many different schools of therapy. I've seen a whole cornucopia of therapists over the course of my 55 years. 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 what are those debates like when you engage?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  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 of insights and tools, in psychoanalysis especially. And especially, we're talking about a concept that we call resistance. Resistance means that we all really want to get better. We really want to know ourselves, but we also are very afraid of knowing ourselves. And we want to, we want to know, but we are also afraid of knowing.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  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, I'll call it, able to tolerate, between what we want to do, our goals, right? But what interferes with our ability to change anything?

• 4:47Dan Harris?

  So these are, remember those commercials? You're probably younger than I am, but when I was a kid, there are these commercials where the, somebody would accidentally drop a chocolate bar into a jar of peanut butter and they would say, "Two great tastes that taste great together." And I think it was an advertisement for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. And that's what you're saying is you're like, you can't do insight without, it doesn't make sense to do insight without tools or tools without insight.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. It doesn't make sense. You need to find a way to integrate both. And part of what we do, I think in every therapy, and I can differentiate a little bit what psychoanalytic therapy is, is to really relive those patterns between therapists and patients. Some of the tools of psychoanalysis is what is really looking into dynamics that happen in the room. And I would say that psychoanalytic treatment, on the surface, looks very similar to any other therapy. You sit and talk to your therapist. But what's different is, let me call it, the ear of the analyst. The way we listen, the way we listen and what we listen to.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  So we listen to psychological defenses, to unconscious material, to survival strategies, and to early adaptations. And in Come Closer, I demonstrate this. I take you with me into the mind of the analyst, my mind, and I share with you what I think, how I listen, what feelings it brings up for me to listen to you, and how I work with those feelings that come up for me, and how change looks like.

• 6:30Dan Harris?

  Psychoanalysis, am I right that that's the type of therapy where you're going several times a week?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  It used to be. I think that right now, psychoanalysis has really changed. And contemporary psychoanalysis adopted, like a lot of other therapists, by the way, the Freudian language of unconscious, of, so you say someone is defensive, right? The culture uses a lot of the Freudian ideas. But psychoanalysis itself changed, and many people cannot come more than once or twice a week. So the psychoanalysis now is really much, much more about the training of the therapist than about the frame itself.

• 7:10Dan Harris?

  Got it. And do you insist on doing it in person, or is it okay? Can you do proper analysis on Zoom?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Since COVID, I do, I work also on Zoom. And like most of us, it's interesting. I do, I like the in-person much more, but I do work remotely as well.

• 7:29Dan Harris?

  Okay. Thank you for humoring me during that digression. Let's get back to the inner child. In your book, you lay out like six kind of archetypes of children. And I believe, I believe you argue that actually many of us, you know, will see ourselves in several of these. But can you walk us through the six types of inner child?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  So in the book, I took this project of identifying six different children and the way those children live inside us, how they impact especially our relationships, but our life in general. I talk about the frightened child, which is the child who experiences fear, has parents who are scary or scared, or both. We can talk about more about that. Then I talk about the melancholic child. That's the child who's preoccupied with loss. The child that later in life has difficulty with separations and endings and transitions.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  The ashamed child is the child that feels that they are bad. As opposed to, then we have the guilty child, who feels like they did something bad, that they are, that they're too much, that they're too, that they're too intense or too needy or too aggressive. And then we have the invisible child, who felt unknown as a child and later in life masters the art of disappearing and makes that their superpower.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  And last, I have the chosen child. And the chosen child is the child that has a very close relationship with one parent, where they feel responsible for that parent and feel like loyal to them to a degree that they cannot choose themselves.

• 9:31Dan Harris?

  Are these the only archetypes? Or is just, these are just the six you chose?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  I'm sure there are more archetypes. These are the archetypes that I recognize in my practice that I think cover a lot of the basic wounds that all of us, I think, carry at least one. And most of the times more. I mean, I can tell you that when I wrote a book and I started with, okay, I'm probably this and this and that. And as I started writing it, I realized that there is, all of these children, to some degree, live inside me. And I think it's really about eh, the degree. The, it's, it's all in a, some kind of a continuum. So you could be a little bit like, you can, you can measure yourself. I'm very frightened, a little bit guilty, or the other way around.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  By the way, frightened and guilty have relationship between them often. Frightened children very often are also guilty children, not necessarily the other, the other way around. And so you can really pick and see who you are and to what degree.

• 10:39Dan Harris?

  It's interesting. You said frightened children are often guilty children. I was a very anxious child and I'm a quite anxious grown up. I don't know that I was guilty, like I felt like I was too much, but I was definitely ashamed in that I felt like maybe, and still harbor this suspicion that maybe fundamentally, I'm just a bad person.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And it will be interesting to think, I'll maybe tell you more about the guilty and the ashamed, but it sounds to me like you're saying you are more ashamed than guilty, but you might be both, right? And the guilty child is the child that is very, very afraid of their power. And I think that is a little link that you could really ask yourself. Guilty children are very afraid of, get very anxious and sometimes have panic attacks when they, when they win or when they have a lot, or when they're about to do something big. They're afraid of bigness. You know, and, and ashamed children are often afraid of smallness. And it's important to say, you could be both.

• 11:44Dan Harris?

  Right.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Right? You could be afraid of being too small and afraid of being too big.

• 11:50Dan Harris?

  I think, yeah.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Sorry about that.

• 11:53Dan Harris?

  I think that's probably true for me. Like I get panic attacks when I'm doing public speaking. That's, that could be, I think, construed as fear of being too big. And I spent a lot of time worrying about my ongoing relevance and other things that I'm not proud to admit that is a fear of being too small.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I, that makes sense to me, you know? It is, people really tend to think that we are afraid of failure more than we're afraid of success. But I actually don't think that's true. I think people are afraid of success as much as they're afraid of failure. It's that feeling that maybe you took it from other people. Maybe people are gonna hate you. Maybe they're going to envy you. You're maybe too big. And, and we can talk about the guilty child and see, you know, they're in, in there, there is a fear of being too much.

• 12:45Dan Harris?

  When I first started meditating, I got extremely lucky. I was able to meet and befriend some of the world's greatest meditation teachers, people like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. I know, of course, that that is not possible for most people, which is why I have created a whole meditation app designed to give you the experience that I've been lucky to have in person. On this app, we've collected some of the world's most amazing teachers, including Joseph and Sharon, but many, many others who are teaching courses and doing weekly live sessions. The app is really designed not only to give you all of the things you get on a normal meditation app, but also to give you community, direct access to me and the teachers

• 13:30Dan Harris?

  and our weekly live video sessions where we meditate and you can ask questions. Also the opportunity to connect with your fellow users. We know from the science that social support, that's the term that researchers use, is one of the most powerful ways to create and keep up with a habit like meditation. Go to danharris.com and sign up for the app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. There's a free 14 day trial if you wanna check it out before you buy. Danharris.com, join the party. We'll be right back after this. Most of us can remember being about 15 and feeling completely invisible, or worse, extremely visible, but for the wrong reasons. I remember one year when I was a teenager,

• 14:15Dan Harris?

  I had a pimple in the crevice of my nose for the entire year. I didn't like that. Either way, even if we have painful memories of that age, most of us tend to soften it in memory. And it was actually harder than we remember it now. That is the territory of Carrie, now streaming on Prime Video, the first ever television adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie. Eight episodes from Mike Flanagan with Stephen King as an executive producer. Flanagan had described this show as a tragedy. It's about a girl who doesn't feel seen by anyone and about how small, everyday acts of unkindness compound into something nobody meant to cause, which happens now at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable not long ago.

• 15:00Dan Harris?

  What I really appreciate about the show is that the show takes Carrie seriously as a person rather than as some sort of symbol. And the season keeps circling around one major question. Are you watching the making of a hero, a villain? Or something more complicated than either of those options? Carrie is now streaming on Prime Video.

• 15:28Dan Harris?

  For those of us who are not in psychoanalysis, how would we go about figuring out like what our mix is? We'll get to what we do about it in a moment. But like, how can we do the, the self-analysis to get a sense of where we fit on these various spectrums?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  You know, one of my goals in Come Closer was to write something that helps you, first of all, takes you into some emotional journey. These are stories, right? It's story, it's not instructions. I don't believe in instructions. I believe in emotional experiences. So I take you with me into this emotional experience where you almost like sit next to me on, on my chair and listen to someone's story. Right? And in it, I give you those insights that will teach you a little bit about what we hear and how we think about it and how we talk about it and what happens when we talk about it.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  So part of what will help you, I think, is like really look into those characteristics of, okay, if I'm a, if I am a guilty child, what does that mean about how I function in the world? How does that look? How do I, so for example, the guilty child chapter is the chapter that, of Marco, which is of course a pseudonym with a patient's permission. And Marco comes to therapy when his wife goes through medical procedures and he starts having panic attacks. And you think, right, naturally, okay, the man is afraid that his wife will die, something will happen to her. As we listen to him slowly,

• 17:09Speaker 01

  we find the guilty child who lives inside him. He was born to a mother who lost her husband. His father died before he was born. She was very worried about his mother all his life. And he was very afraid that she would be, she won't feel good, that she'll be sad. So what he did, for example, when he wanted to go play with friends, he felt very sad and, and guilty to leave her alone. And he says to me, she was, she was lonely. So what he would do is that he would sneak out and lie to his mother and tell her that he's going to do his homework with his friends and hide a nice shirt in the garage.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  And so he developed these patterns of not being able to be fully himself, compensatory caretaking, taking care of his mother, and making his needs something that he does secretly. And we see how that started playing out in his life with his wife. And later on, and I'm not gonna ruin this for you, with me too. So I catch him and I, and I ask myself, do I trust him? Do I not trust him? What comes up for me about trust? So I share with you, eh, the reader, what comes up for me? How do I deal with it? How do I sit close to him?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  How do I help somebody that I'm not sure I trust? Reminds me of someone from my future. And for, interesting, I said from my future, from my past, but for my future too. And I'm thinking. Freudian and and he reminds me of of my past and and I'm afraid of the future. And I'm sitting with all of that to help him unpack what's going on. What we see is his fear is not just a fear of losing his wife. His fear is that this is happening because of him, that this is happening because that he caused it, which is some kind of an omnipotent fantasy that guilty children usually have.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Because guilt can also be a defense against a fear, right? Or shame in a sense that when you're a guilty child, we call it like a moral defense. We prefer to see ourselves as responsible for bad things and keeping the world and the people around us is good.

• 19:38Dan Harris?

  That kind of gets me to my armchair theory about my own psychology, which is, and you you tell me if this is bullshit, but it just my sense is that what may have happened with me is that I was some mix of nature and nurture left me with a nervous system on a hair trigger. I was very anxious as a child, very prone to both anxiety and depression. And my sense is that I may have, and again, this is the armchair part of it, decided that it was easier to tell myself a story that I'm the problem. There's something fundamentally wrong with me than to look around at my caretakers and find fault in them because that would have been even scarier.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely. This is this is exactly it, actually. This is the moral defense I'm talking about. There was a Scottish psychoanalyst named Ronald Furburn. And in 1952, he wrote one of my favorite sentences, you know, quotes in psychoanalysis. And it is, it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the devil. What does that mean? It means exactly what you were saying, that a child would be too devastated to accept that their parents or the world they live in, again, by the way, I'm not here blaming parents. Childhood is a complicated, you know, time. Things happen and things happen in every family.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  So it doesn't necessarily, it could be that your parents were not good enough, as Winnicott would call it, but it doesn't have to be that, right? But what we see that the child adapts to reality, that instead of instead of thinking that the world is bad or dangerous or scary, instead they blame themselves. And becoming, as Furburn said, they become the sinner while maintaining the illusion that the world is fundamentally good and that they can they can repair things by fixing themselves and their actions. And I think that's exactly what you're saying, right?

• 21:40Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it is exactly what I'm saying. And it's a great setup for a lot of the traps that I've fallen into of like hyper optimization around trying to be the best meditator, the most fit human, the most successful anchorman, et cetera, et cetera. Like that, that seems like a great way to fall into all the traps that I've fallen into.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's it is really the child that takes on responsibility and become a little bit. We call it omnipotent defenses, right? That you are, you really believe as a child that you have so much power that it's everything happens because of you, right? You take on responsibility for what's wrong. But if you think about it, it also, it's a very helpful thing as a child because it has hope in it. The hope that, right, imagining a self, a sense of control and safety. It's like it all depends on you.

• 22:37Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  And you feel more safe.

• 22:40Dan Harris?

  Safety for for a frightened child, which is what I would a million percent characterize myself as. It's all about safety. I mean, it's one of those words when people use safety that I've historically found kind of annoying. Like a safe space at, you know, at some liberal arts college where you can't say anything challenging. There's just no better word for it. I think that my pervasive sense of precarity, you know, I'm using too many Ps here, but like kind of persists till now.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, let's talk about the frightened child because I think what you're saying, in my mind, as I started investigating this, I realized that to some degree, we're all frightened children. And again, on a continuum, some people felt more safe in their childhood than others. And part of it is also because the world is is scary, right? And parents are scared, can be scary. Parents are big, angry parents are very scary. So every child who experienced fear in their childhood. And for some of us, that was the way life was. And for some, it was anecdotal thing.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  So the frightened child learned from a young age that the people you love and the people you depend on can hurt you. And that is the the most extreme version of being frightened, that the caretaker, the caregiver of the frightened child, as I said before, is usually scary or scared or both. And it doesn't mean they're bad, by the way, but it could be traumatized and being scary and scared. But that means that the attachment figure, what we used to call attachment figures is a secure base, right? In attachment theory, is both the source of security and the source of fear, which is very confusing.

• 24:32Dan Harris?

  That wasn't really the case for me. My my parents spanked us, which was probably not, I mean, that was the thing that was done in the seventies, but probably not the best parenting move. But generally, I don't think I found myself too scared of my parents. They might have been scared, almost certainly were. And my dad's Jewish and so there's a lot of fear baked into that bloodline for lots of good reasons. And and yeah, my mom had an abusive parent. So so maybe I picked up on their fear, but they weren't necessarily menacing or threatening me.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  You know, what you're saying is really important because it is what I call the emotional inheritance, which was my previous book that was really about trauma and fear, the way they they really pass down from generation to generation. And there is a lot of infant research on that, on traumatized parents and how in a moment by moment analysis, you see that in infant research, how they communicate nonverbally with a child that the world is scary. And the child picks up, as you said, the fear of the parent and that becomes their own fear.

• 25:44Dan Harris?

  Nobody gets out of this thing unscathed.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Alive.

• 25:49Dan Harris?

  Yeah, or alive, for sure. Let's pivot, if you're okay with it, to the practical. Like, once we've got a sense of who's often subconsciously grabbing the steering wheel or grabbing the mic in our mind, how do we manage this inner child?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  So you see, what I'm saying in the book is that each child has its unique things. Like, for example, right, the work with of the frightened child, not every child. I mean, every child needs safety, right? That's obvious. But I think that the frightened child as an adult needs to feel safe and struggles with not feeling safe. And so, for example, the frightened child is more ambivalent about closeness. Because if I look at infant research and we see those infants, especially those who are afraid of the parents, right, not necessarily the emotional inheritance piece, those are infants that in infant observation,

• 26:49Speaker 01

  you see them running towards and away, towards and away. And they are very afraid of ambivalence, you know? And what you see later in life is that these children become threatened by closeness, but also upset by distance. So you see that there is, it's a lose lose. If you're away, you're upset. If you're close, you're threatened, right? Often aroused by danger, but overwhelmed by tenderness. So what happens is that many of these people choose unvaluable partners who who don't overwhelm them with too much closeness.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  And for those children, the therapeutic relationship and new relationship in their lives are the primary ways of change, the primary ways to heal. There is a lot of power to new relationship that provide a secure base and what I call a reliable witness. And I want to emphasize the word reliable because we all have witnesses in our lives, even children, right, have siblings and the other parent is a witness to one parent behavior and grandparent. But what we see is that many, many of children's witnesses are actually not reliable.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  And I talk and come closer about those families when one parent functions as the active aggressor and the other is the passive participant. And one is the instigator and the other takes charge or one lashes out and the other shuts down or dissociates. So you see that the parents work as a system. And therefore, in situations like that, the child would not have a reliable witness. And the therapist becomes and new relationships become witnesses for that. And so for for the frightened child, for example, that is a very important piece.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  If for, I'm thinking about for the guilty child, for example, right? The work of the guilty child, the practical work. As guilty children, we we tend to to blame ourselves, right? So part of what we want to make sure is to recognize, first of all, to recognize that's true for all the children. We look at our behavior, we identify something and then we go to the origin of it. We ask ourselves, wait, Dan, why are you so feeling so guilty? Why are you afraid of, why were you so anxious as a child? You know, you you might even felt survivor guilt.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Right? I don't know. I don't, I don't know your history enough, but I think in psychoanalytic treatment and in that perspective of Come Closer, what we do is, is identify the children inside us and identify where it's all started. And we give that child a seat at the table. We dialogue with that child inside of us.

• 30:04Dan Harris?

  Well, let me pick up on that exactly, because I believe in Come Closer, you are recommending that we start to enter into a dialogue with the child inside of us. And I'd be curious to, to, to know, like, well, how does one even start that kind of dialogue?

• 30:19Speaker 01

  You know, I think the first step is to tell your childhood story with the child as their narrator. So let's say that you are, you're, you're not the adult that looks from the outside and say, this child is doing, he felt this and this and that. In therapy, I, I even try as the therapist to get really, really closer into where you were as a child and what, how was it for you? And tell me the stories. I love, for example, to ask people about their first memory and to ask them what their first memory was and to, to

• 30:57Speaker 01

  take me with them into those very precious moments of, that they remember from childhood. So let me tell you something. I think that what we do, what we start saying is that we open a dialogue between different parts of ourselves. The child inside us holds a lot of emotional truth. It has a lot of wisdom, right? We want to hear that child's story, their subjective truth. And at the beginning, the first step in therapy at least, is that the child and, and me are talking. I talk to the child in you. But I think outside of therapy, it's very interesting to think about the dialogue between the child and

• 31:36Speaker 01

  the adult, because the adult in you offers care, offers understanding, offers agency. The problem, I think, is that most of the times, the adult in us dismisses the children in us. They, they, they mess up our lives, right? So you just want to shut it out, you know, and say, like, be quiet, stop, stop. And, and often we treat the children in us the way our parents treated them. We identify with our parents. So we treat the child. If your parents used to say you're too dramatic, there would be a voice in you. That's identification, right? That says, Dan, you're too dramatic. Stop. Why are you so, why are you so upset? Nothing happened.

• 32:22Dan Harris?

  This episode is sponsored by FarmKind. I had a key moment several years ago when I was listening to a podcast by my friend Sam Harris, and he asked his guest, what do you think in hindsight will be today's version of slavery? We all look back at slavery and think that was inexpressibly awful. What's happening now that would fit the bill? And both Sam and his guest said factory farming. And that moment made me think a lot about how much meat I consume and where I'm consuming it from. For every person on this planet, there are about 13 farmed animals. The vast majority live in conditions most of us would rather not picture, packed into cages or crates so small they often can't turn around.

• 33:03Dan Harris?

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• 33:44Dan Harris?

  through farmkind.giving/happier, FarmKind will boost your donation by 50%. Go to farmkind.giving/happier to learn more and donate. That's farmkind.giving/happier. We talk a lot on this show about training your mind, and today's sponsor works on the physical side of that. CocoVia is a plant-based supplement built around cocoa flavonols, plant compounds that come from cocoa. They say ordinary chocolate processing destroys most of these compounds, so CocoVia developed their own process to gently harvest and preserve them, concentrating them into a high potency extract called Coco Pro. Only CocoVia uses

• 34:24Dan Harris?

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• 35:07Dan Harris?

  Tell me if this comes close to what you're describing. I've been very influenced by the work of Kristin Neff, who is sort of the, the, the, the prime mover behind self-compassion. And one of the, one of her practices is to notice when you're in a moment of suffering, put your hand on your heart, that's optional, and just talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend. And for me, I've tried to wake up in moments of, usually it's anxiety, and if nobody's looking, I'll put my hand on my heart or on my chest and just talk to, talk to myself, like, bro, like, you're good. You know, this is, this is a problem,

• 35:52Dan Harris?

  but like, there are a million potential solutions. You're fine. You're safe. Is that at, at least a cousin to what you're describing here?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. I think that part of what we do in psychoanalysis and in psychoanalytic treatment in general, is to sit with all the parts of ourselves and really talk to yourself in a specific, you know, we, people tend to talk to themselves worse than they talk to anyone else. And you know that, we all know that. We all talk to ourselves in ways that are worse than we talk to anyone else. So there are people in my practice who are really fantastic parents, and they talk to themselves in ways that they will never, ever, ever talk to their child, you know? And so sometimes in those moments, you say, you know, let's sit with you as if you are your own parent. What would

• 36:43Speaker 01

  you say to yourself? And so I think that's exactly it, you know? It is a lot of the work, and the work of the melancholic child especially, is the work of self-acceptance.

• 36:53Dan Harris?

  Why, yeah, say more about why that's the work of the melancholic child?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Because the melancholic child is preoccupied with loss. So from a young age, the melancholic child is anxious about separations and transitions. And, and we express the fear of loss through resistance to change. We have difficulty in endings, and we have, we're, we're arguing with losses. We're arguing with separations. So there is something for, the melancholic child is the child that insists, for example, stays in relationships too long, even after the relationship ended. And something about, acceptance becomes the most important form of change. You know, again, we talked about binaries, and that's another binary, change and acceptance. It's like people come to therapy and they ask themselves, do I want

• 37:43Speaker 01

  to change, or do I want to accept myself? And I think that for many people, acceptance is a form of change. And it's, it's sometimes the most important and formative form of change.

• 37:58Dan Harris?

  People have asked me this so many times, and I have a little rap that I give, and I would be curious to see if you agree. When people say, hey, Dan, you're a Buddhist, it's all about accepting things as they are, but, but, you know, for me, I can't, I can't accept that I overeat, or that I lose my temper, or whatever it is. And you're asking me to accept that, and that's unacceptable. And I say, no, no, no, this is a stepwise progression. You start with the acceptance, you're, so you're no longer at war with reality. And then you can change. But it's a little bit of a paradox until you, like, accept yourself as you are, then, then you can't change.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  I agree with you completely. I think that's exactly it, because those are not exactly contradictions. You can accept yourself, and then from that place, help yourself to deal with whatever that is that you're, you're dealing with. You do not have to, the fight is the problem. You know, the minute you fight with yourself, the minute you start attacking yourself, start telling yourself that you're bad, and everything you're doing is bad, the immediately, there is another part of you that will fight with, so what we are entering is a battle, right? Between two parts of yourself. And so I do agree that there is something about the ability to, I think many people don't accept their

• 39:24Speaker 01

  insecurity, for example, you know, that a lot of people feel like it's a horrible thing. I have to be, I have to learn how to be secure. And I feel that the first step is really to sit with yourself and, and with your therapist and talk about, about the parts of you that you don't, that you refuse to accept. And again, if I go back to melancholic child, in a melancholic child's story, there is a woman who, as a child, used to collect garbage and put it in her, in her closets. And she felt that she, she couldn't throw away anything. And as she comes to therapy, after she drops off her daughter at college,

• 40:09Speaker 01

  a lot of her fear of separation comes to the surface. And we start understanding that in fact, she had a lot of unrecognized losses as, as a child, and she clings to everything. So she even chooses unhappiness instead of facing uncertainty that comes with change. You know, she clings to everything. She stays too long. She's afraid to voice any, any disappointments, any needs, just to make sure that nothing changes, that she doesn't lose anything, you know? And it's, and it's interesting, because I feel that unconsciously...

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Any form of separation or ending, even unintentional ones like death or parental depression, like in that specific story in the book, activates a primary feeling of being left. And in fact, I write in the book that even the act of leaving, our own choice to end relationships, to move, to change jobs, evokes the same fundamental sense of abandonment. So in some ways, it doesn't matter who's doing the leaving. Unconsciously, we're always also feeling left. And I think that brings us back to, you know, being able to not argue with the reality all the time,

• 41:35Speaker 01

  but the ability to accept our losses. And that means also the ability to accept our own, the losses that we will inevitably experience in life and our own aging and our mortality and everything, all the limitations that life has.

• 41:54Dan Harris?

  It makes total sense when you view it through the lens of evolution. Like, why are we, why is the fear of being left such a, I think you called it a primal or primordial fear. Why is that so common? Because, you know, abandonment on the savanna was like, you're going to get eaten by a tiger. And so it is, it is such a primal thing for us. And I see it like, even with my parents, just the fact of their aging brings up feelings of abandonment for me.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Exactly, like you're being left. You're being left when you leave someone. That's what we're talking about, right? People who decide to break up with other people, deep inside unconsciously feel that they are left. And you know, it's interesting because I feel that that is something that repeats every end of a session. Did you ever experience that? That every end of a session is a small separation or abandonment? Or in some ways, for some people, a rejection or an injury? You know, and there's something about endings in therapy too, that we examine. And not to talk about the end of a therapy, right? Ending, the process of termination, terminating a treatment.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  It allows us to think about endings and to grieve together, which is so, right? When do we have, you know, this opportunity in life to actually grieve together? Not in breakups usually, definitely not in deaths. And it is an opportunity to mourn again, everything we have lost already. And also, to some degree, you know how it is that you always also mourn your future losses? You also, you know how you go to a funeral and you cry for the people that are about to die, that you know will die? And probably also ourselves, our own death and our own.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  So I think that's true. It's all, it's all very existential in those ways.

• 44:04Dan Harris?

  Let me take us back to the practical for a second. Not that you've strayed, but I'm curious, in a moment, in a charged moment, where it has become obvious that, and often we don't catch ourselves in these moments because we're too in the thing, but sometimes we do, or right afterwards, that our inner child has overreacted to a situation, although in the POV of the inner child, it's not an overreaction at all. What tools do we have to catch ourselves when we've been hijacked by the ancient parts of our psyche?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  You know, I think that we start with recruiting a different part of ourselves. In those moments, we can try to recruit the adults we are to regulate and comfort and soothe. It goes back to what you said before, but we have the grownups' voices in our head very often telling us to stop, relax, stop, you're exaggerating, you're dramatizing, you're too dramatic. I think that we really recruit a grownup, a parent who is compassionate, a parent, internal parent, right? We're talking about internal parts,

• 45:29Speaker 01

  internal parent inside us, who could regulate and soothe that part of us who feels very distressed and upset.

• 45:40Dan Harris?

  I believe you have a question that you advise people to ask themselves in charged moments. Whose fear is this?

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Right, because what I try to do with myself and with patients is to differentiate between past and present. Because I do understand that some of the feelings that we feel in the present moment belong to the past. So when I ask you, I would probably ask you, whose fear this is? Where does it come from? What are you actually afraid of in the moment? You will be surprised that even in times of a lot of fear in the world, you know, we could really go back to a feeling of safety in our body in the present moment. And that is what, that's what parents do for children, right?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  The world around them could be very intense and the parent's job is to take the child and say, you are safe right now with me. And that's what we do for the younger part of us. We really address it. And in sessions, we do it sometimes, right? Are you, whose fear is it? And are you in danger right now? This moment, are you in danger? You feel, right? Or your body, do you feel safe in your body?

• 47:02Dan Harris?

  I think you have another expression that might be worth talking about in this regard. Follow the blame to find the shame?

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Follow the blame to find the shame is one of my go-to for the ashamed child. Shame is one of the most painful experiences. And usually, it's very, very shameful to talk about shame. When you carry a lot of shame, you usually become defensive because you don't, because it's so painful to carry shame. And what happens is that ashamed people tend to blame. And so when you, when you see someone who always blames other people, the analyst in me will listen to it and say,

• 47:49Speaker 01

  oh, here there is, here there is shame underneath the blame. It is a way of saying, it's not my fault, which is really interesting, you know? Because in the book, I talk about negation. Negation is that when somebody doesn't ask you a question, but you come, you come with a statement that says, I am not, I'm not angry. I'm not, somebody once told me that, she was sitting with a married man, who, the first time they were sitting together, he said to her, I am not going to leave my wife. And she told me this and the analyst in me thought,

• 48:33Speaker 01

  okay, I guess he has a conflict there. She said, I didn't ask him if he's going to leave his wife. It was the first time I was meeting this guy. And there was something, and this is an extreme example, but that is the way we listen to negation, to the fact that one could bring threatening material and denying it at the same time. You know, so for example, in Come Closer, there is a, in the Chosen Child chapter, there is, the mother and the daughter cannot separate. And the daughter has a boyfriend and she feels very ambivalent and a lot of conflict of loyalty. She can't leave her mother and marry this guy. And at some point, he proposes to her

• 49:17Speaker 01

  and she feels horrible for the mother. She feels like the mother is going to, you know, have, feel so lonely and so abandoned. And then she tells the mother they're going to get married. And the mother says, Oh, okay, that's great. Amazing. I'm going to, I have a yoga retreat exactly then, but never mind. I don't want to ruin your big moment, right? And the way we hear it is like, I don't want to. So I think that's the, what we're talking about, negation, right? I don't want to.

• 49:54Dan Harris?

  I once got an email from somebody in a business context where the person said three times in the email, I'm not threatening you.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  I'm not threatening you. You know, people have a lot of ways, and I think that's where psychoanalysis is very, you know, that's what we focus on, on the things that people don't say or say in ways that we could hear the defense more than the actual feelings. And I think that the truth is that most of us walk in the world with expressing defenses more than we talk about, more than we express a actual feelings. And I'll, I'll give you an example for that. It's like, I write in Come Closer about jealousy and envy. You know, there is a big difference between the two.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  So jealousy is a, jealousy is the feeling in both of them, right? We, we want something that the other person has. But in jealousy, let's say I, I, I want to have a podcast. And I look at you and I think, wow, Dan, your podcast is amazing. You're so good. And I want to have a podcast too, right? I'm jealous that you are, you have something that I don't have. And that is a motivation that will help me get what I want. In envy, I will not be able to feel that I want that.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Cause I would think that it's related against to shame that I cannot have that. So what would I do? I will try to ruin it for you. That's, that's envy, right? Envy has a destructive force in it. I will try to say, how, how do I do that, right? There are a few ways, a few tricks to listen to envy. If I think that your podcast is really good and I am envying you, I will use devaluation. I will say, this podcast is not so great. You know, actually it's not good at all. I don't like it, right? And I'll, I'll try to put you down in order to manage the feelings of envy I have because I don't want to feel envy.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Or for example, the flip side of that, which is also related to the ashamed child is idealization. If I will idealize you and I will maybe try to be your best friend. So everything you have, if I can't become you, I will have you, right? Or I'll do something to make you envy me, envious of me. And so all of that I'm saying, because I think that what we are listening to, what we see usually is not the actual feeling, even with fear. We often don't see just the feeling. We see the defense against it. We see what we do in order to not feel envious. I devalue you not because I'm envious of you. It's because I don't want to feel envious, right?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  And with fear is the same. What you feel is not usually the fear. You feel the anger or the shutdown. And that is true, you know, in many, many, many other ways.

• 53:08Dan Harris?

  Just to get back to follow the blame to follow the shame. If I notice myself blaming other people for everything, maybe that's a moment to wake up and, and investigate.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yes, the problem with blame is that the person who blames often denies the fact that they blame. So what you have to follow is what people tell you about you. If people tell you, Dan, you blame me all the time. That's the moment for people who are not a, you know, people who want to have good relationships, right? To stop and say, okay, maybe, maybe I'm experiencing shame. Maybe it's too difficult for me to tolerate responsibility, to tolerate that I did something bad to someone else. You know, that it's, it's too painful, maybe. And I defend against it with saying, you did that to me.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Or, you know, it's a, you, you listen to defensiveness and to blame. It's because of you that I did that.

• 54:13Dan Harris?

  Let me ask one, one other real practical question here that, that I put in my notes is, is that you, I'm not sure which child you're speaking to here, but you recommend that we practice expressing one need that we would normally redirect.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  That was the guilty child, you know? Because the guilty child is very worried about not taking care of other people as a way to, to manage, again, to defend against the guilt. So the guilt to what I'm saying is that as guilty children, we can't just say to people, you know, from now on, you need to, you need, you need to take care of your own needs. You know, as guilty children, we experience ourselves as, as we could be a burden or harm people and we constantly worry, right? And what we're saying here is that guilty children cannot always

• 55:13Speaker 01

  learn to set healthy boundaries and to balance the urge to be a caretaker. So what we're looking to, to do practically is to express your needs while staying connected to another person. It's like, and not hide your needs. So I need, I need to rest and I care about you. So the work is to learning that, that loving, loving another person doesn't necessarily require you to, to abandon yourself or to erase yourself.

• 55:46Dan Harris?

  That's an important thing that a lot of, a lot of people overlook or learn the hard way. It strikes me, there's perhaps some irony to the fact that we have not spoken much about the invisible child. We've overlooked the invisible child. Is there more to say about that child? And if you see yourself in that, like what, what coping strategies would work in the present moment?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  You know, I, I presented the invisible child to a group of therapists. And at the end of the, at the end of the workshop, every therapist raised their hand and said, I was the invisible child. So I think that it's, it's a very, very typical, you know, therapists and caretakers, a child, inner child. And with invisible child, I think we're, we're really entering a conflict about being vulnerable and being seen. Because, you know, there is a very known Winnicott quote that says, it's a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found. And you think about hide and seek, right? Children hiding and everybody's hiding.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  And then one child is just forgotten. This is, this is the invisible child. Invisible child is the child who was to some degree forgotten because it could be many reasons, right? It could be that the parents were preoccupied with something, that they had, they have a sibling who was, you know, struggling, that there is chaos or there are a lot of reasons for children to be invisible. And I think that what the main struggle for the invisible child is vulnerability. And doing every, and if invisible child, for example, a practical advice for invisible children, invisible children rely on themselves. Invisible children try to not depend on other people.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  They have, they're, they perform independence. So it is important for invisible children to practice relying on others or, or asking something, even if they think that they can do it better. You know, because invisible children will think, why would I ask you to, to make me coffee? I know how to make my coffee and I make it better.

• 58:07Dan Harris?

  Do you think understanding your own inner child inexorably leads to compassion for others?

• 58:14Speaker 01

  I do think so. I do think so. I think that there is something about about being able to understand and and and accept yourself that allows you to see other people's vulnerability, other accept other people's limitations. As long as you don't accept your own limitations, you won't be able to accept other people's limitations. And as I said before, I do think that sometimes we accept other people's limitations more than we accept ourselves. But especially in the way we talk to others as opposed to the way we talk to ourselves. But there is something about really, it's all about vulnerability. The child in us is

• 58:54Speaker 01

  always vulnerable. It's always, you know, in some ways powerless. And we sit with that part of us and we can accept others for who they are.

• 59:07Dan Harris?

  We're going to do our final segment in a moment. But before we get to that, is there anything related to Come Closer that you were hoping we would get to that we haven't gotten to?

• 59:17Speaker 01

  No, I think we covered most of the children that I that I bring with me. And and the way that we could really listen to the child inside us.

• 59:30Dan Harris?

  Our new closing segment is called What's Good, where we ask the guest, what can you recommend that's good in your life? That could be a TV show, song, movie, book, some little practice or habit you've developed. And then I'll give you one from my side.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  That's a good question. Because the first thing I thought when you said what's good, I thought about, funny that I'm talking about children, and I'm talking about my own children, as the source of goodness in my life. What I recommend, I, one of the books I loved the most in the last year is Miranda July's All Fours. And Miranda is joining me for the book launch of Come Closer, and together with Adam Phillips, the psychoanalyst. And so I really, part of what I loved about that book is that it's a book about life and death.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  It's a book about our emotional deadness and the parts of us that needs to be enlivened.

• 1:00:35Dan Harris?

  I didn't read that book, although a lot of, many of my friends did and really loved it. I saw a movie Miranda wrote or directed, or maybe wrote and directed. I think it was called Kajillionaire. Does that sound familiar?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  I haven't seen that. But I feel like, you know, this is a book that a lot of women identify with, because it's a book that tells something, I mean, especially about how our hormonal journey and life and death, we bring life to, right? And we and we struggle with with the end of fertility. And I think that that's a very powerful theme that is connected in my mind to all of us as people who are mortal.

• 1:01:22Dan Harris?

  Well, my recommendation picks right up on that and mortality. I've been reading a book called The Life of the Buddha. The Life of the Buddha is written by a Buddhist monk named Bhikkhu Nyanamoli, but it's spelled N A N A M O L I, I believe, if you want to Amazon the book, The Life of the Buddha. Anyway, it's a little dry. But I find it fascinating to just learn more about, you know, I practice a lot of what the Buddha taught, but to learn more about what the guy was like. And it's, it's really hard because the teachings of the Buddha weren't written down until, you know, hundreds of years after he died. And

• 1:02:04Dan Harris?

  I think there was a lot of later insertion. So it's, it's really hard to kind of peer through the sands of time and figure out like, what was this guy really like? But I enjoy that little mystery and trying to, you know, get a sense of, you know, this guy whose teachings have had such an impact on me, what was he really like? And there are times in reading the book where I'm not sure how much I would have liked him.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  So you found that he's not perfect?

• 1:02:33Dan Harris?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Although he's repeatedly referred to as the perfected one, which is, I think, tricky in and of itself. But anyway, I recommend the book. It's worth checking out. Gleat, it's been such a pleasure to meet and learn from you. I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:02:53Dan Harris?

  Thank you very much for listening to the show. I really appreciate it. And if you enjoy listening to the show, if you get anything out of it, please do me a solid, leave a rating or a review. I know every podcast host asks for this, but it really makes a difference. It helps boost the visibility of this show. We view this show as a mission to help people become nodes of sanity in an insane world. And so by taking a minute and giving the show a rating or a review, you're really helping us out and helping us achieve our mission. Thank you again. And now on to the credits. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10% Happier

• 1:03:34Dan Harris?

  is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Kashmir, David Hart, and Hayden Broome. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. And Nick Thorburn of the indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thank you for listening. Peace.

• 1:03:51Dan Harris?

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