168. Why We Keep Choosing People Who Hurt Us, with Dr. Galit Atlas

About this episode

Why do we keep ending up with people who hurt us, even when we swear it won't happen again? I sat down with Dr. Galit Atlas, renowned psychoanalyst, faculty member at NYU's Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at Columbia University, and author of the international bestseller Emotional Inheritance, to talk about exactly that. Her new book, Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love and the Secrets of Emotional Intimacy, releases the same day this episode airs. We get into Freud's concept of repetition compulsion, why the familiar so often gets mistaken for safety, and why changing a pattern can feel like losing your own identity. Dr. Atlas introduces the different…