Up: [[Trauma]] Course: Psychology of Early Trauma, Donald Kalsched for Jung on Hudson Created: 2023-07-23 There are two parts to the protective self-care system that kicks in through behaviours like [[Dissociation]]. Donald Kalsched, using William Blake’s painting ‘Good and Evil Angels Struggle for Possession of the Child’ as a schematic, calls them the dark angel and the bright angel and believes they are the archetypal defences that emerge in the case of early trauma. See also [[Every Archetype is Both Light and Shadow]] ![[Good and Evil Angels Struggle for Possession of the Child - William Blake.webp]] ## Dark Angel is Self-Blame The dark angel is aggression turned inward as self-blame because aggression against the person causing the trauma is not allowed. So, for example, the dark angel berates the child for crying or making a fuss, and later the adult for any number of transgressions. ## Bright Angel is Oblivion The bright angel is oblivion and bliss, which is trance. It’s the bright angel that tells us that a traumatic event didn’t happen or doesn’t matter. She’s trying to preserve the aliveness, the vitality that was true of us pre-trauma by interjecting herself between the child and too much reality. ‘Bright’ suggests positive, but she isn’t. Her sympathy keeps us stuck, doesn’t carry us forward into the world. The bright angel is often the role that a therapist falls into when she is trying to counter the inner attack from the dark angel about how worthless and awful we are. And she’s often what the patient wants in therapy. Projecting the role of bright angel onto a willing therapist lets both parties stay away from painful or difficult material. Kalsched says this is why it’s important that therapists have supervision. If the therapist resists taking us to negative suffering, which often lies on the other side of anger and some negative transference, that therapist isn’t doing the best work she/he can do. Sometimes the bright angel appears in the protective self-care system in the form of a companion animal — dogs, cats, ponies, even a giraffe for one patient. And sometimes the image of the bright angel isn’t apparent at all, whereas the dark angel always is because he’s about the violence that is a big part of the defensive system, the attacks on connections with others. ## Therapy is Often Essential When the angels find their way into the [[Transference]], they lose some of their energy. Therapy is often essential because if the self-care system is left to its own devices, it will keep demoralizing the inner child to keep it in the system and keep it safe. Kalsched gives the example that if the child reaches out to make contact with people and, especially if the child is hurt in that attempt, the system comes in and says, “See, I told you so, that was stupid. You have all you need. You have me.” But with therapeutic intervention, the self-care system starts to believe that maybe the therapist won’t injure the patient and that ultimately changes other relationships. ## Integrate the Dark and Bright Angels A goal of therapy is for the dark angel and the bright angel to be integrated. Wherever dark and light are unified, God is happy because the Godhead is all about integration, wholeness, unity, love. That place can only be reached through honest suffering. Honest suffering is different from secondary suffering, what Jung called neurotic suffering, where we feel victimized and angry.