So much of collective trauma goes unconscious this is the most important psychological point shared by Donald Kalsched in his lecture on the nature of the protector/persecutor which gets set up or introjected deep inside the psyche of the child who carries the parental traumas and ancestral traumas. I noticed in that first lecture I shared yesterday it was an attendee at his lecture which noted this dimension of what was carried. Instead later in his talke he spoke of the idea of ghosts in the nursery which was noticed by another therapist Selma Fraiberg
In 1975, Selma Fraiberg, a clinical social worker and child psychoanalyst, introduced the metaphor of “ghosts in the nursery.” This concept refers to the relationship between a parent’s early, often harsh or traumatic experiences of the way they were raised and their own parenting style. Young children who are abused by their parents can exhibit similar behaviors when they become parents themselves. Sometimes they don’t remember the abuse, sometimes it’s what they consider to be “normal” because it’s how they were raised. These “ghosts” can reappear throughout generations, contributing to a cycle of abuse.
Trauma-informed therapy like Trauma Informed – Child Parent Therapy helps parents to recognize ghosts from their past so that they and their children can heal together.
These ghosts live on as introjects.. We may not have been aware of the parents earlier trauma that they carry and we absorb into our psyche and energy body. If we dare to protest it we may be persecuted by the parent for this and learn in time to turn against ourselves and so these bundles of intense vibrational libidinal or energetic experiences may live on appearing as a kind of demon or possession within the raging, up set or angry parent. Struggling to deal with this we face anxiety, confusion, fear and/or shame, hopelessness and/or helplessness, thus a protector persecutor steps in to protect us from the sharp brunt of it all.
At times it is not necessarily traumatic experiences that occur in terms of overt abuse that affect us or a child it may be the inability of a parent to connect to the child emotionally and on a need level, and to allow that child to express its authentic self due to carried pain or anxiety from their own parenting, something Mark Wolynn addresses in depth in his book It Didn’t Start With You.
This was the case with one of the women who came to Donald for help and had to shut herself down to the point where her anxiety grew in collusion with the voice of a defensive demonic figure with obsessive compulsive dimensions which continued to keep her hostage.. Kalsched notes the voice and power of the demonic tyrannical protector/persecutor will only get louder the more we give into it.. For the client he was treating help came as she began to face the buried feelings this PP force made her repress when she had to become a ‘good girl’ in order to lower her mother’s anxiety.
In Kalsched’s words to recover she had to ” develop some aggression” in the face of this inner tyrant. Kalsched points out that for trauma survivors whose energy remains bound in defense against unbearable feelings of anxiety (or repressed life energy) survival inside such a fortified system of defense works to increasingly restrict life space. Expanding outside of those limits can evoke a lot of anxiety, but anxiety is what brings that voice of the protector in. That then seems like proof the direction we are heading in is bad or wrong but really it is not. According to Kalsched what we need in order to move past the defenses of trauma is less anxiety defense and more anxiety tolerance because in order to live fully we must embrace those feelings.
The way to work with this protector persecutor is to find ways to talk to and calm the abandonment anxiety of the concern it has in protecting you. We must not antagonize it, we must express appreciation but we must try to take over that function something the protector/persecutor will see as problematic.
Such persecuting figures may often turn up in dreams or nightmares in people with high anxiety or much trauma who have more tendency to dream persecutory dreams, dreams in which a demon comes or a force such as an axeman or grim reaper figure may appear attempting to sever the head/heart mind/body connection.. Since the buried feelings contain the repressed life energy they need to be felt but doing so can seem life threatening to trauma survivors who were far from safe with original caregivers. What is best in this situation is to face down the demon or worrying figure but not in hostile way. We must thank it for trying to keep us safe while reminding it that it can take a bit of a holiday, have a cup of tea and put its feet up for a while!
The article below expands the idea of ghost in the nursery to include the energy of angels in the nursery demonstrating how promoting feelings of safety and love can help to protect children of trauma and our inner child of trauma..
Kalsched points out most powerfully in his work how when a child’s distress or attunement is not recognised, mediated or soothed by caregiver (or by our own inner loving adult angel within) this will lead to demonic protector figures taking up the energy of the psyche entirely and turning the entire psychic dark.. Then the protector persecutor continues to hold dominion over the person and blocks any attempts by the self or others to connect in love by convincing that person that most people in the world are not safe, not to be trusted, stupid, evil or dangerous.
https://www.wilder.org/articles/angels-and-ghosts-nursery-trauma-informed-child-parent-therapy
Emerging From The Dark Night 