The Inner War of Trauma

When we have repeated, emotionally charged conflict with a partner or a therapist, there is likely trauma underneath. In psychoanalyst Donald Kalsched’s recent research, he argues that what is often struggling to come forward in these instances is the “unremembered child,” a part of the psyche split off in early childhood and available to the adult only as a vague emotional field.

When we are in acute fight or flight with a partner over seemingly benign matters, this could likely be the unremembered child poking through. It can also show up in sudden withdrawal, disproportionate anger, or even moments of unexpected tenderness.

Recent trauma research has shown that overwhelming experiences don’t just get stored; they get split. Dissociation, once understood as a pathology, is better recognized as a necessary adaptation to a threatening environment. The mind siphons off the violence to survive in the present state.

The Costs of Dissociation

But this survival comes at a cost later on. When trauma strikes early, the psyche cannot hold or cognize the event, and so the mind develops a self-protective system to keep us whole as an organism. Trauma is thus not what happens to us but what failed to happen—namely, the ability to process, narrate, or metabolize the event in words and feelings.

Worse off, when this happens as a child, this often happens alone, without the necessary mirroring of a parent to see and validate the experience. This wounded part thus cannot come into being and becomes parked in a split-off part.

Wounded Innocence

Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has a useful name for this early part of ourselves: “generative innocence.” This refers to a vital, creative core in the psyche. our capacity for aliveness, spontaneity, openness, and most importantly, curiosity.

Trauma threatens this core, and we can see this in the evidence of adults who seem to have been depleted or zapped of their spontaneity or playfulness.

Psychically, what is happening is that the mind is unconsciously still protecting the wounded child that has been split off. We often assume that dissociation reflects a loss of innocence. But clinically, the opposite can be true: Dissociation may be protecting innocence by isolating it from reality.

It is like the rose in The Little Prince, a rose that is protected in a glass case, but as a result, does not engage with or meet the real world outside. In other words, many of us learn early on that our curiosity or spontaneity is not rewarded or even punished, so we have adapted to protect that part of ourselves from further harm.

Protection as Violence

Unchecked, this protection can become outwardly directed as adult violence. Aggression can emerge as a defence of the “true self,” often preempting provocation from external stimuli. People who are always seeking conflict or engaging in a bullying way are lashing out on behalf of their wounded child. Tyrants and dictators often come from deeply violent or abusive homes.

Repairing the Split

External defences and even violence can preempt further harm to the wounded child, but these do not heal it. As Kalsched argues, the wounded child needs to leave the protective space and enter the world in reality. The easiest, though often still conflictual, place to do this is in therapy.

When a therapist touches a nerve, this might create blowback or even lead to quitting therapy. In the best cases, however, the contained space of a therapeutic relationship can engage with this split part without retaliating violently as someone may do in real life. A therapist may be intentionally provoked by a client, but in an ideal model, they can withstand the aggression and get beyond it to the hurt child beneath.

Trauma Essential Reads

The Body Doesn't Keep the Score?

Caleb Mathura on What It Takes to Become Johnny Cade on Broadway

The therapeutic space—what Jungian analysts call the analytic temenos, or protected container—allows dissociated parts of the self to re-enter experience gradually, not by force, but through relationship.

The Japanese practice of Kintsugi offers a helpful metaphor. Broken pottery is repaired using gold, making the cracks visible rather than concealing them. The object is not restored to its original state; it is transformed through its fracture.

This process is not about recovering a pure, untouched innocence. It is about allowing innocence to develop—to encounter reality, to suffer, and to change.

To find a therapist, please visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.