Transgenerational haunting passes trauma through the family narrative in the form of secrets and lies and half-truths.  It consists of knowing and unknowing and of unspoken things which are seen and heard but half-forgotten or buried, like treasure, or ghosts, in the unconscious.  Haunting of this nature can control a family system and can cause children to carry burdens which are not theirs and it can put at risk the next generation if trauma is carried through without resolution.

It is as if the whole family lives in a world of their own and in fact that is exactly what they do. A case of trans-generational trauma transmission, requires that anyone who is involved with the family on an intimate level, must conform to the internalized, often highly secretive narrative of the family.  To be unable or unwilling to do so, demands that the person be excluded, silenced, shunned and shamed. This is because within the internalized walls of these families, within the inter-psychic subjective life of the family lies a secret. This secret is so secret that it is either unknown by the family members, was known but is split off into the unconscious or is known and deliberately kept hidden. Depending upon whose secret it is and how far back in the generational line the secret goes, inter-psychic relationships to and with the secret will be adapted to suit the need to keep this secret. The secret, which is never spoken about with words, is part of the unconscious life of the growing child who will, in some situations, seek to manifest an opportunity to resolve the unresolved by recreating a scenario which is similar to the original wound.  

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A case of alienation of a child can, in this context, be thought of as a defense against the disintegration of the intra-subjective life of the family or the atmosphere. A case of trans-generational trauma transmission, requires that anyone who is involved with the family on an intimate level, must conform to the internalized, often highly secretive narrative of the family.  To be unable or unwilling to do so, demands that the person be excluded, silenced, shunned and shamed. The parent who has been cast out/or who has left the family but who has refused to go away without a relationship with the child, is felt to be an interloper or intruder into the internal world of the family left behind. 

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This is the atmosphere which is readily apparent in cases where fixed and fused dyadic relationships between parent and child are present and where historical patterns of loss and trauma become apparent on investigation.  This is the space in which the things are not said and not given symbolic representation, where the world is divided into two parts in which the trauma is frozen alongside a life which is going on in the here and now.

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In reality, when working with these families, the parent who is being rejected will often be shown to have been experiencing either rejection or inability to fit in with the family narrative for a time prior to the rejection by the child. If we think about the birth of a child in a family affected by trans-generational transmission of trauma, as being a risk factor for the family secret to be revealed, it is easy to see why many parents are evicted from the family when they will not allow baby to be brought up in the way which is necessary to keep the family internally regulated.

The atmosphere of alienation is suffocating, it is foggy, and it is quite often bewildering in the way that the spoken narrative is broken and not linear.  The past is not another country in these families, it is happening right now, alongside the here and now and it is manifested in ways which can only be interpreted because they cannot be easily understood cognitively.

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If you are living this, you will know it.

If you are working with families affected by alienation, you need to know it.

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When children are born into such families, they attach to their care-givers and inter-psychically absorb the reality that there is an encrypted secret (Salberg 2017).  The secret, which is never spoken about with words, is part of the unconscious life of the growing child who will, in some situations, seek to manifest an opportunity to resolve the unresolved by recreating a scenario which is similar to the original wound.  This understanding, of how a child of a parent suffering trauma, seeks to attach to every aspect of the intra-psychic experience of that caregiver, even the negative, explains how that child replicates that traumatic experience in the here and now.

This is the atmosphere which is readily apparent in cases where fixed and fused dyadic relationships between parent and child are present and where historical patterns of loss and trauma become apparent on investigation.  This is the space in which the things are not said and not given symbolic representation, where the world is divided into two parts in which the trauma is frozen alongside a life which is going on in the here and now.

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​In many of the families I work with, generational patterns of estrangement are very apparent.

Children born to such unions will inherit that felt sense of conflict and danger and so goes the march of the next generation.

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How a family deals with conflict, through cutting someone out and sending them to Coventry, though not speaking to someone for decades at a time and through avoiding the reality of the unspoken by ignoring or avoiding it, is passed down through generations.

Listening to the words not said is as rich in content as any spoken word and how the family flows and plays together as well as how the family does conflict together or apart, speaks volumes.

​In many of the families I work with, generational patterns of estrangement are very apparent.​​​

​Which leaves us with what when we consider these families? Well, it leaves us with ghosts and with whispers and silences, it leaves us with glances and voices half-heard in the stillness  It leaves us with fragments of truths which surround the children (we work with: and it leaves us with this:​

• We cannot remove from the life of the child, those ghosts which are haunting the here and now. We can only learn to work with them. 

• We cannot evacuate the nursery and start over again with clean sheets and fresh scripts, we can only bring resilience and strength to the children who live there.  

• We can educate, excavate and illuminate the dark spaces within the family so that the children can see better the ghosts that attempt to seduce them and we can build up the strength of the parent who can better protect them.  

• But we cannot get rid of those ghosts.  We cannot remove them completely. To do so would be to remove the reality of the life that the child is born into and we are not god.​

• My work with alienated children increasingly tells me that whatever we do (and we can do much) to help, we can never get rid of the ghosts, but we can turn up the light so their impact is weaker.

• We cannot silence their voices but we can turn down the volume.​

• And we can teach children the skills that ensures that when they become mother and father, the alchemical struggle brings gold and not ghosts.​

For children who have no words, our voices may be the only hope they have.