On 01/06/2025

Ancestral beliefs as Fractals

Anastasia Nikolitsa © Sofo Soma,

April 2025

The conflict between the two sexes is a much-discussed, over-analyzed and timeless issue. The root of this conflict seems to lie very deep in the history of human existence. We could say that it begins with the creation of the 23rd pair of chromosomes that determines whether a soul incarnate will take on male or female biological substance. So, we can understand why this primordial conflict affects us all, as our DNA includes both female and male sex chromosomes. In Traumatherapy, during the process of healing the personal psychological trauma, internal struggles associated with this primordial conflict emerge in the consciousness of the person-in-healing. Most of the times they seem to transcend the sensate boundaries of space-time and extend into perpetuity͘ as an unresolved human trauma whose origins lie deep in the past, while we see only the manifestations of its vibration in the present, in living descendants. In other words, ” the unbearable pain left unprocessed or the defense response that the ancestor developed in order to survive seems to be activated and experienced by some descendants when circumstances similar to the original -ancestral- trauma arise in their life. We can see the repetition of trauma in subsequent generations as a fractal(1) which was firstly created as an original imprint on an ancestor of a particular lineage and which repeats its form as we move through space-time” (Nikolitsa, 2024, p. 47).

Carl Jung brought this primordial conflict back into the consciousness of humanity by analyzing the human soul in terms of the Anima and Animus (1959), our feminine and masculine elements that through their inner polarization create enhanced awareness. The unconscious is represented by the Anima/female and, correspondingly, the conscious by the Animus/male. Neither is determined by gender but manifests clearly at the level of consciousness. The unconscious is timeless while the conscious is determined by space-time. Anima is also the intermediary between the unconscious and the conscious. “It is something that lives of itself, that makes us live; it is a life behind consciousness that cannot be completely integrated with it, but from which, on the contrary, consciousness arises” (Jung, 1959, p.27). Moreover, this feminine element of our soul, as Patrick Harpur says, “she bestows on us that feeling of being unique and special” (Harpur, 2011, p. 60). It is our feminine essence that nourishes our psyche and takes care of ourselves on all levels as it “believes in the ‘καλόν κάγαθόν” (2) (Jung, 1959, p. 28). The feminine power, once co-opted with and embodied by humans, carries the characteristics of resilience or otherwise, yielding, re-direction, vulnerability, and establishing connections, which patriarchal cultures project as weak, passive, deceitful, and manipulative (Barton & Huebner, 2020). Below I will attempt to explain, through a vignette, how this ancient distorted perception of the true power of the feminine nature of our souls and the disconnection from that power can hinder the healing of a personal psychological trauma.

A 30-year-old man seeking healing of his personal trauma of attachment and intrauterine rejection is experiencing difficulties in his love relationships with women. In the process of Traumatherapy he encounters a very significant and seemingly insurmountable obstacle to accessing the “root of the trauma” (Nikolitsa, 2024, pp. 47 & 83), the intrauterine pain of rejection. To survive this primary pain during his intrauterine development, neurochemical mechanisms were wired which, during Traumatherapy sessions, obstructed the access to the implicit cellular memory of this experience. An inner adolescent part (3) of him continuously surfaced as an inner protector. When he was feeling rejected at that phase of his life, he avoided being hurt, and consequently psychologically collapsing, by developing aggression and anger towards anything that reminded him of weakness and vulnerability, both within and around him. This man suffered his adolescence emotionally unsupported, as there was no healthy male power available to guide him. In other words, he managed to survive events or situations of adolescence that triggered this unbearable pain of intrauterine rejection with mechanisms of cutting off from emotion, i.e. from the female psychic material, the Anima. Outwardly this manifested itself in aggression, sadism and rage towards the girls he fell in love with. As a general request for healing, he had raised a paradox around his connection with the opposite sex. The more he wanted to connect with the women he desired the more he felt threatened by their feminine power and tended to withdraw from deeper connection with them in various ways (physical, emotional or mental). Internally, it manifested as disconnection from emotion, fear of emotions that spontaneously arise through the senses, disregard for the importance of compassion for the self, and lack of connection to and empathy for the wounded embryo that has existed. Neurochemically, this functions as an automatic response that cuts him off from emotion, pain, the feeling of weakness and vulnerability, i.e. the psychic material of the Anima within him. As Jung famously taught, “archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life” (Jung, 1959, p. 30).

In processing “the truth of his life” (Schwarz et al., 2017), it emerged in his awareness that the only way he had available, as a teenager, -to endure amorous disappointment, existential loneliness and the unbearable pain of not connecting with his heart and the heart of others- was anger towards everything inside him that was hurting and was vulnerable. That is, anything feminine that belongs to Anima’s field. Thus, what constituted psychic “resilience” in adolescence stands today as an unconscious obstacle to having other options, to being able to connect with his heart, to being able to transform emotions, by experiencing them, and to being fulfilled as a human being as he connects the feminine with the masculine within.

The most important realization in working through this obstacle was that it will not destroy himself if he finally turns with compassion towards the wounded fetus/infant/child that he has been – as he wrongly believed – but it would destroy the thought-form which he had been “feeding” and relied on for survival, for many years. That is, the belief that he was endangered by these painful parts of himself and therefore had to eliminate them so that he could be healed, had created his reality and had determined his position and attitude towards anything that reminded him of affect or emotion. “Maybe I shouldn’t throw them away after all… I thought that the spiritual path presupposes that I have to throw them away in order to heal, but that’s not the case… I didn’t get it right” (his words from the session).

The unbearable and unresolved pain that we have to face in our experience on Earth seems to have created a distorted belief about the value of our emotional, feminine, nature. As Patrick Hurpur says, “archetypes are, like soul itself, `empty’ in themselves. They can only be known through the many images they adopt. They shape-shift, taking on different values, different masks, according to the relationship they are in” (Harpur, 2002, p. 91). In searching for the origin of this archetype we discovered that its root lies in the depths of human history and has been repeated over the centuries as a fractal. It was transmitted to this man through the paternal bloodline from ancestors from whom he had a great distance physically and chronologically. That is, there was no explicit memory or narrative of the ancestors who carried the same distorted belief around the feminine aspect of the self and whose lives were decisively influenced by it.

Both information and access to the content of this archetype was possible through what the philosopher of science Ervin Laszlo calls the quantum, in-formational, universal field of interconnection. An interconnecting cosmic field that conserves and conveys information and which is the constant and enduring memory of the universe, holding the record of all that has happened on Earth and in the cosmos (Laszlo, 2008). “The fields of the spirit and the physical body … are the means for such a connection to the field of human consciousness, with intention, intuition and imagination as basic tools and the field of mind as mediator” (Nikolitsa, 2024, p. 228). Thus, this man was “in-formed” that in the process of passing on this archetype there were ancestors, both men and women, who, because of this disconnection from emotions and aversion to the experience of pain as something destructive, ended up committing suicide. Their pain was experienced by them as something that “will never end”, as “something that rots” inside them, as “petrified crying”. What led to the flight from life itself was the content of the archetype: emotions are abhorrent and reveal weakness, and all weakness must be avoided, at all costs, in order to prevent the feeling of vulnerability from emerging.

Thus, through a deep, embodied and intuitive process of attunement and remembrance, through his nervous system, the origin of this pain this man was able to reconnect with the essence of what defined his adolescent life and influenced the way he perceives life and the way he responds to emotions as an adult today. Consequently, he expanded his perception towards traumatized inner children with more empathy, empowering his current adult perspective/self.

The common elements that, one could say, have been “inherited” along with this archetype, in this particular genealogy and timeline, are:

- The inability to express and communicate emotions outwardly.
- The belief that pain and difficult emotions last forever.
- The unconfessed hatred towards everyone, including God.
- The separation of the body between right and left side. One petrified (right – male) and the other ‘on fire’ with unprocessed emotions (left – female).
- The petrification of emotion, which does not allow for mourning and loss and thus change and new beginnings.

In our modern, “refined”, Western, “civilized” society, these realities are manifested secretly, internally, in the invisible field within and without us. As a fractal, such a primordial archetype that to this day sustains both hatred towards women themselves and war towards anything resembling feminine power, “seems to be able to expand geometrically, both in the past and in the present, to remain the same or to generate itself as one magnifies or reduces one’s focus” (Nikolitsa, 2024, pp. 165-166). We come across it in its most obvious manifestations, in all people, male and female, as:

- violence and rejection towards children (and internal ones),
- detachment from the emotions that emerge through the body and disconnection from feelings,
- holding back against gentle tenderness,
- aggression in proximity,
- disdain for the manifestation of vulnerability,
- abolition of awareness through intuition,
- competition instead of nurturing,
- domination instead of coexistence, etc.

As Richard Tarnas (1991) points out, the crisis of modern man is an essentially male crisis. The male and female within us perpetuates a centuries-long war in our absence, bringing aspects of the collective, intergenerational and personal material as an obstacle to our evolution as a species and as spiritual beings seeking love. By bringing this material into our emerging consciousness we can free ourselves from distorted beliefs by expanding our consciousness so that future generations can be born with more choices than our ancestors and closer to our true human nature that contains the wisdom and power of the male and female.

(1) A rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. The term “fractal” was coined by the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975. Mandelbrot based it on the Latin frāctus, meaning “broken” or “fractured”, and used it to extend the concept of theoretical fractional dimensions to geometric patterns in nature (Wikipedia)

(2) In ancient Greek language: καλὸς κἀγαθός [kalòs kaːɡatʰós]) The word was a term used in Greek when discussing the concept of aristocracy. It became a fixed phrase by which the Athenian aristocracy referred to itself; in the ethical philosophers, the first of whom were Athenian gentlemen, the term came to mean the ideal or perfect man. The phrase could be used both in a generic sense, or with certain specific force. As a generic term, it may have been used as the combination of distinct virtues, which we might translate as “handsome and brave”, or the intersection of the two words “good” or “upstanding” (Wikipedia).

(3) Ego-states or self-states: dissociated aspects of the self/personality.

References

Barton, B. & Huebner, L., 2022. Feminine power: a new articulation. In Psychology and sexuality Journal, Volume 13, issue 1

Corrigan, F.M. & Hull, A.M., 2018. The Emerging Psychological Trauma Paradigm: an Overview of the Challenge to Current Models of Mental Disorder. International Journal of Cognitive Analytic Therapy & Relational Mental Health, vol. 2, pp. 121-146

Harpur, P., 2002. The Philosophers’ Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination. Penguin Books

Harpur, P., 2011. The secret tradition of the Soul. Evolver Editions, Berkeley, California

Jung, C. G., 1959. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press

Laszlo, E., 2004. Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything. Inner Traditions

Nikolitsa, A. 2024. The fractal of existence: body-mind-spirit in the healing of trauma. Self-published ISBN 978-618-00-5487-3

Tarnas, R. 1991. The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View. The random house publishing group.

ARTICLE