The Forgotten Child Grows Into the Adult Who Needs No One

It was almost a joke. After a long conversation about six different inner children, host Dan Harris pointed out that one had barely been mentioned. Psychoanalyst Galit Atlas, the author of Come Closer, laughed. They had overlooked the invisible child.

She answered with a story from her own work. She had once presented the idea of the invisible child to a room full of therapists, she said, and at the end every hand went up. I was the invisible child, they each said. For Atlas, who treats the inner child not as a metaphor but as an early self that keeps shaping adult relationships, the response made sense. Therapists and caretakers often recognize themselves in it.

Then she offered the line that holds the idea. Quoting the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, she said, "It's a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found."

What she meant was hide and seek, the game every child knows. Most children hide because they want to be discovered. Atlas argued that the invisible child is the one who hides and then is simply forgotten.

That forgetting, in her account, does not require cruelty. The child may have had parents who were preoccupied with something else, a sibling who was struggling, or a household with too much chaos. For many reasons, she said, a child can grow up somewhat unseen.

The survival strategy that follows is self reliance. As Atlas describes it, the main struggle for that child becomes vulnerability. The adult learns to get by without leaning on anyone. She calls it performing independence.

Her suggestion is small. She advises those adults to lean on other people and ask for things even when they believe they can do them better themselves. Her example was coffee, in Atlas's words: "Why would I ask you to, to make me coffee? I know how to make my coffee, and I make it better."

Ask anyway, she argues, even when you think you can do it better yourself.