Ghosts and angels in the nursery
Hi friends, my kids’ teachers are on strike so it will be a short dispatch this week. This is my third strike since my older kid first entered public school seven years ago, so the rhythm feels familiar—show up on the picket line in the morning with donuts and bright smiles, ready to chant. Figure out some kind of patchwork childcare collaboration with another parent. Lament that we live in a time when public school teachers aren’t treated like the foundational public leaders they are. I wrote this about common good bargaining last time around, in case it’s of interest.
Have you ever heard of “ghosts in the nursery”? It’s the idea that parenting often brings up your own childhood trauma, things that you may have thought were long buried get resurfaced by interacting with your child at the age that you were when something fractured in your sense of safety. Or sometimes, things show up on the periphery of your conscious mind or in your behavior that you didn’t even have a solid memory of until that moment.
I’ve often thought about this concept as I navigate parenting alongside my partner. Even in non-traumatic contexts, our pasts are constantly showing up. I can trace so many of the choices we both make to either ways in which we are trying to correct for the parenting we received or want to replicate it in cases where our parents’ approach worked for us. Much of this is fairly mundane—my husband is the “yes” man in the family, determined to get our kids’ gifts they most desire since that wasn’t always possible for his parents as they had six kids to feed, clothe, educate etc. I pay a lot of attention to what topics and kinds of stories the girls seem drawn to and then request books from the library align with this; something my own mom modeled while I was growing up. Reading was sort of my family’s religion.
The legacy of what we both got or didn’t get from our parents looms large in our approach with our own daughters. I can feel it weaving through such a vast array of interactions and expectations, creating a family culture that we are sometimes intentional about, but more often, piecing together based on fragments of the past.
I had the great fortune to hear two trauma therapists from UCSF’s Child Trauma Research Program speak last weekend at an event about what immigrant families are facing right now in this violent political climate. Alicia Lieberman and Vilma Reyes spoke about the ways in which they approach healing with families—making sure that both generations, kids and parents, get therapy simultaneously. Healing, they said, always happens in context and in relationship. There is no one-size fits all fix to the kind of trauma that comes from being separated from your parents because of forced or elective migration, an ICE raid, incarceration, or any number of other violences—state-inflicted, interpersonal, or some mix of the two.
But they have learned that people can and do heal, particularly when they are motivated by wanting to create a better life for the kids. And immigrants, as diverse as they are, often have two things in common: they are hopeful and they are courageous. The therapists spoke about how they build on these assets, as well as other “angels” to help families heal even under the most unthinkable of circumstances.
They explained that, in addition to “ghosts in the nursery,” we have “angels in the nursery.” They wrote about it this way in their paper introducing the concept:
In this article, we examine the chiaroscuro of ghosts and angels in the nursery moving together to shape the development of children, and argue that the uncovering of angels as growth-promoting forces in the lives of traumatized parents is as important to therapeutic work as the containing, taming, and exorcizing of ghosts. Our clinical experience indicates that the recovery and integration into consciousness of early experiences of safety, intimacy, joy, and other pleasurable experiences can promote a more nuanced appreciation of early relationships with primary caregivers and encourage a greater sense of self-worth and emotional investment in developmentally appropriate goals.
In other words, early positive attachment that we have with our own parents, even when things are complicated by political or personal forces out of our control, stay with us forever. When we become parents, we not only bring the hardship, but the love and comfort and kindness and joy with us. We need to recognize that most of us already have a well of love within us to draw from as we heal. Most caregivers were not all bad or all good; they were complicated people who did the best they could within the context they came up in. We can recognize how they harmed us, recognize how the political and economic climate we were raised in may have harmed us, and also, identify the gifts of love and care that are also within, ready to steady us in precarious times.
It reminded me of the research around toxic stress, that shows that even one loving adults in a child’s life can be a huge buffer to the long-term consequences of having experienced abuse, hunger, addiction, and so much more.
This might sound obvious to some, but I feel like we live in a time when finally, finally way more people are being honest about trauma, telling hard truths, peeling back the layers on generations of violence and addiction and suffering. This is profound. And also, we must not forget that people contain multitudes and we can do more healing if we acknowledge this in others and in ourselves. I often think of my friend and somatic expert Molly Caro May teaching me that it is much more possible to change my own behavior if I have one foot in pleasure, in comfort, in strength.
Who are your ghosts and who are your angels? (Sometimes a single caregiver might have been both.) How do they dance together? What can you heal from, yes, speaking brave familial and political truths, but also from recognizing your lineage of love, too?
If you want to donate to the incredible work these women are doing to offer two-generation trauma therapy to the families most impacted by ICE right now, please donate here. My family is contributing as part of our year-end giving and I would love to see more of our Examined Family supporting the training that they are doing right now. Your contribution will go directly to expanding the trauma-informed, racially and culturally diverse workforce supporting families separated, traumatized, and living in fear because of ICE.
Read more here. Thanks to Elissa Strauss for this incredible learning opportunity.
Thank you for this hopeful perspective during this Advent season of hope- there are angels, as well as ghosts, are in our lives.
Thank you. "Courageous and hopeful" brought tears to my eyes. My immigrant father was difficult and when I think of him 2 years after his passing it's not always positively. But thinking about him in the context of this article was a release.