How does Early Relational Trauma Affects Our Psyche?

In origin, the experience of reality is psychosomatic: negative affects tend to fragment the psyche, whereas positive ones integrate these fragments. Symbols emerge gradually within the context of a reasonable primary relationship, which functions as a metabolizing organ for psychosomatic experiences.

In the presence of traumatogenic early relationships, the raw data of existential experience cannot be transformed into a psychological experience, and the inflation of unprocessed affects becomes a threat to the child’s ability to ‘feel real’.

Implicit to this is a distinguishing feature of trauma: it disrupts the psyche’s capacity for mentalization.

The inner division resulting from trauma “accomplishes a partial cure, enough so that life continues, despite dissociation and its effects in limiting a person’s full potential” (Kalsched, 2010, p.281).

The psyche’s defence against trauma is dissociation, which distributes the affect/state to different parts of the psyche/soma: this way, unbearable affects and states don’t acquire mental representation, and the internal world is formed around archaic affects and related objects that remain permanently disconnected from personal meanings of significance.

Trauma experiences are experiential state images, which overwhelm the ego.

It is as if the traumatic injuries are 220 plus voltage, and the first half of life ego is only wired for 110 volts. The ego symbolically gets shocked/knocked out of the boat and drowns. During this unconscious-to-ego phase of the episode, something of the experience comes in, lodges in the body, in total psyche, now separate from ego consciousness. Back to the container problem: how can the 110 wired ego relate to the 220 plus voltage trauma episode?

·       It seems the ego owes its recovery/resuscitation to psyche’s capacity to split off unbearable trauma. Of note, the scenes, affects, and energies of repressed traumas are not diminished by time/space.

·       While the ego is now protected from direct awareness of the intensity of the core emotional impact of the trauma, these un-integrated trauma complexes contribute to chronic core over-stimulation issues and generate sedation and exhaustion strategies. They become psychological drivers of compulsive behaviour and addictions.

·       In the service of developing ego strength and adaptation to life demands, the first half of life dynamics favour repression of emotionally overwhelming experiences

In the mid-life passage, a developmental imperative initiates a shift in the dynamics, now in the service of re-membering that which was dismembering at the time of the original wounding. In the service of recovering wholeness, the ego is challenged to open to the return of the repressed. In view of the ego’s 110 voltage wiring, and the 220 plus capacity of deeper consciousness, opening to the Self is experienced as death to the ego. 

Trauma and the self-care system

People who have experienced early relational trauma may sometimes be tyrannized by archetypal figures in their dreams, or perceive significant others ( i.e. their partner, their psychotherapist, etc) in a way that, out of conscious control, swings between being protective and persecutory.

As Kalsched suggests (1996) this experience of early relational trauma can be related to to feelings of having been “murdered”: what remains in the ‘here and now’ is the “soul-less part” (Ferenczi, 1933), which protects the foreclosed Self from re-experiencing the affects originally linked to a devastating sense of helplessness.

The result is a defensive structure, where the coexistence of infantile needs/vulnerability and tyrannical rage leads to the formation of a world of severed internal objects, which swing between being protective and persecutory.

Such division replicates in the person's life through patterns that might be understood in terms of internal working models based on distance regulation as a way of keeping distressing affects at a safe distance from consciousness.

By severing the links between affect and image, its function is to preserve the centre of psychological essence (Kalsched, 1996). This concept might be assimilated to Winnicott’s idea of “true self” and refers to the pre-traumatic part of the self that remains foreclosed from entering reality, while the SCS constellates experience and acts as an imprimatur of subsequent ones.

As the Self Care System continues to operate through life, all the relations with the outer world are screened according to the original assumption that reaching out beyond a closed system of certainty will expose the true self to further experiences of failed dependency. To prevent that, the SCS defends the person against dangerous stimulation from the outer world, but also from needs and longings that arise in the internal environment. This way, ‘What was intended to be a defence against further trauma becomes a major resistance to all unguarded spontaneous expressions of self in the world’.

This links with Jung’s idea of an universal tendency for the psyche to fragment, under the pressure of a strong affect, into subsidiary egos or complexes, each holding a part of the original experience that was intolerable (trauma) or incompatible (conflict) with the central ego.

As Jung stressed:

“[A complex is] The image of a certain psychic situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally […] this image has a powerful inner coherence, [..] its own wholeness and, in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy, so that […] behaves as a foreign body in the sphere of consciousness” (Jung, CW 8, para 201)

We might imagine the individual experience of the Self Care System as organized around an un-integrated affect that remains unconscious and that, constellated, acts as the epicentre of a magnetic field, assimilating into itself everything that has any resonance. 

Not only does this inner process exert a powerful organizing influence on the individual whilst remaining unconscious but, also, it en-acts itself: this way, it attracts, co-opts and subsumes other parts of the environment, both inner and outer, into itself.

As the SCS is organized around themes of failed dependency, it constellates when vulnerable needs start to emerge in a relationship. 

An un-symbolised affect charges the psyche, forming a dissociative gap between selfhood and the ‘me’ experienced at that given moment: this leads to a state of consciousness in which aggression operates internally to defend against disowned needs of dependency, and externally to attack the links with a significant other, unconsciously perceived as dangerous.