Emotional Inheritance Moving beyond the legacy of trauma

This book is about those family secrets that belong not only to us, but to our parents, grandparents, and other loved ones, and about the ways these impact our lives - keeping us from living to our full potential, creating gaps between what we want for ourselves and what we are able to have, and haunting us like ghosts. In the last decade, contemporary psychoanalysis and empirical research have expanded the literature on epigenetics and what is called "intergenerational transmission of trauma", referring to the way trauma is transmitted from generation to generation and held in our minds and bodies, sometimes in uncanny ways. The people we love and those who raised us live inside us: we experience their emotional pain, we dream their memories, and these things shape our lives in ways that we don't always recognise. Emotional Inheritance describes the many ways in which we can identify the ghosts of the past that hold us back and interfere with our lives. For it is only by following the traces that those ghosts leave, and identifying the links between our life struggles and the emotional inheritance we carry, that we can change our destiny.