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

Dan Harris (0:03)

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.

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

Galit Atlas (0:52)

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

Dan Harris (0:54)

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?

Galit Atlas (1:21)

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.

Dan Harris (1:38)

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.

Galit Atlas (1:51)

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.

Dan Harris (2:26)

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

Galit Atlas (2:30)

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.

Dan Harris (3:00)

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 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?

Galit Atlas (3:26)

It's a good question because there are, of course, a lot of debates about insight versus tools. Do 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 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, 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.

Dan Harris (4:47)

So these are, remember those commercials? You're probably younger than I am, but when I was a kid, there were these commercials where somebody would accidentally drop a chocolate bar into a jar of peanut butter and they would say, two great tastes that taste great together.