Book review

This book offers a powerful collection of client case studies rooted in the silenced legacies of family trauma—and I absolutely loved it. Galit Atlas reveals how the emotional pain of our ancestors—parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents—can live on within us as an emotional inheritance, shaping our lives in ways we often fail to recognise. She highlights the importance of our unconscious connections to those around us and shows how these hidden bonds can direct the course of our relationships and identities.

The line that first stopped me in my tracks was:

“I’m not sure my parents ever realised how similar their histories were, now their bond was silently tied with illness, poverty, early loss and shame.”

So often, families collude to keep unpleasant truths buried. Yet healing requires that we search for what has been hidden—gathering clues, piecing together evidence, and daring to ask the question Atlas poses: What is my ‘me-search’?

Much of her writing resonated deeply. She explains how one child often becomes the symptom carrier for the entire family system, expressing on the surface what others cannot. She explores Freud’s concept of melancholia, in which a lost person is kept alive within the living, trapping them emotionally and diminishing vitality. She examines the reverberations of suicide through generations, and how guilt, shame, and silence become inherited burdens.

What fascinated me most was the exploration of the unconscious forces beneath the surface—the currents that pull against our conscious desires. Atlas writes about the conflict that arises when we attempt to change, the tension between loyalty to one family and belonging to another, and the struggle to move beyond entrenched myths and legacies. Trauma, she reminds us, has a kind of radioactive half-life, showing up intergenerationally through emotional and physical symptoms. A narrative of the past continually reshapes the present; the story is replayed until it is understood.

“When our minds remember, our bodies are free to forget,” Atlas writes. She shares a case in which a brutal death, long unspoken, lived on in the body of a descendant. Unresolved emotional facts can surface at key moments—an age, a date, a relationship. Strikingly, the synchronisation need not be exact; it is simply close enough. Our survival instincts match patterns whether we want them to or not—until we finally confront and release them.

Atlas also explores the idea of old injuries. A soldier victorious in battle experiences not only triumph but also loss and trauma. Acts intended as reparation often repeat earlier wounds rather than repair them. She describes parallel heartbreak, the moment a son and father merge emotionally through pain. And she reminds us how often, in therapy, we sabotage our progress as we approach vulnerable material: we act out feelings rather than understand them, relive trauma rather than integrate it.

Throughout the book, Atlas offers striking insights, including this favourite passage:

“We tend to assume that what we can see must be known to us, but in fact, so much of what we don’t know about ourselves lies in the familiar, sometimes even in the obvious. Often we realise that it is right before our eyes, and still we can’t see it. This stuff is dissociated, hidden in our own minds. We know but don’t remember.”

My key takeaways include the understanding that we often repeat our early family relationships in later intimate partnerships; that we need another person to bear witness to our emotional reality; and that feelings can be contagious. We may identify with the aggressor as a defence mechanism, adopting an abuser’s beliefs or behaviours. Loyalty keeps a part of us tied to those we leave behind, and ultimately, it is the unexamined lives of others that we end up living.

Galit Atlas writes with the authority of an experienced psychotherapist, yet with a gentle, accessible tone. The learning she offers landed quietly but stayed with me. Her style reminds me of Oliver Sacks and Virginia Axline—both clinicians who wrote with precision, compassion, and deep humanity. I loved them, and I loved this book.