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

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 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 doctor 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 doctor 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 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? 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? 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 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. You practice psychoanalysis, which is one school of therapy. There are many different …