255 - How Your Inner Child Shows Up in Love: The Wounds That Decide Who You Choose w/ Galit Atlas255 - How Your Inner Child Shows Up in Love: The Wounds That Decide Who You Choose w/ Galit Atlas
Adult Child
Andrea Ashley and Dr. Galit Atlas talk through six wounded inner child archetypes and how they shape love, shame and trauma patterns in adulthood. The conversation connects childhood roles like the chosen or frightened child to adult intimacy, guilt and the partners people are drawn to.
1:05:52•4 Nov 2026
Childhood Wounds, Adult Love: Dr. Galit Atlas on Inner Children and Relationships
Episode Overview
- Childhood coping strategies often limit adult relationships, especially around intimacy and dependency.
- Parentified or ‘chosen’ children learn to meet a parent’s emotional needs, making adult loyalty and separation very difficult.
- Choosing a calm, emotionally distant partner can be a subtle trauma response that trades safety for deadness and loneliness.
- Guilty children tend to hide their needs and act in secret rather than asking directly, carrying lifelong patterns of self-blame.
- Shame underlies many patterns; those most driven by shame may present as superior or narcissistic while feeling deeply inferior inside.
“Everything that helped you survive childhood costs you something as an adult. Love is usually where you pay.”
Curious about how others navigate their sobriety journey? This conversation on Adult Child brings psychoanalyst Dr. Galit Atlas together with host Andrea Ashley for a raw look at how childhood wounds shape adult love. The focus is on six inner child archetypes Dr. Atlas writes about in her book *Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, and the Secrets of Emotional Intimacy* – including the frightened child, ashamed child, chosen child and guilty child.
You’ll hear Andrea share her own history of parentification, growing up with an alcoholic mother and a father who treated her as his emotional support. Dr. Atlas names this dynamic the “chosen child”, where a parent leans on the child to meet their emotional needs and subtly punishes them when they don’t. It sounds flattering on the surface, but as Dr. Atlas shows, it can make adult relationships feel like a constant conflict of loyalty.
The episode also looks at complex trauma and disorganised attachment, especially through the “frightened child” who depends on the very adult who scares them. One striking idea is that picking a calm, steady partner can sometimes be a trauma response: a way to stay safe from emotional overwhelm that quietly leads to emptiness and loneliness. As Dr. Atlas puts it, “we choose deadness to prevent a trauma” and then chase aliveness in risky ways like affairs or chaotic partners.
Shame threads through all the archetypes, with the “ashamed child” being least likely to seek therapy and most likely to show narcissistic traits as a cover for feeling inferior. Throughout, Dr. Atlas explains psychoanalysis as a way of understanding the unconscious patterns behind anxiety, love, and intimacy rather than just reducing symptoms.
If you’ve ever wondered why you keep picking the same kind of partner or feel guilty putting your own needs first, this episode might give you language for what’s going on. Which inner child feels most familiar to you?
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