When the Past Arrives as a Stranger

In recent years, a growing number of therapeutic and spiritual approaches have begun describing certain experiences as “entities”: foreign forces that seem to inhabit the psyche and influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. While I remain open to many possibilities regarding the nature of consciousness, I approach the language of entities with caution. My concern is not merely philosophical but practical. The way we describe our experiences shapes our relationship to them.

From an intergenerational perspective, trauma rarely ends with the person who experiences it. Human beings are remarkably adaptive. When confronted with overwhelming circumstances, we develop strategies to survive. A child raised by a fearful parent may learn hypervigilance. A child raised in an emotionally unpredictable home may learn to suppress their own needs. Children whose parents endured war, displacement, poverty, or abuse may inherit ways of organizing themselves that once served an important purpose.

The difficulty is that these adaptations can be transmitted to future generations without context. Parents pass on far more than genes. They pass on nervous system states, emotional patterns, beliefs, expectations, and unspoken rules about what it means to be safe, loved, and worthy. A child absorbs these patterns long before possessing the capacity to understand them. The child cannot yet say, “This fear belongs to my mother,” or “This vigilance helped my grandfather survive.” The adaptation simply arrives. And because it arrives without a background story, it can feel foreign.

An impulse, fear, shame, or compulsion may then arise that does not seem to fit the circumstances of the child’s life. A strong feeling moves through them, but they do not know its origin. In this sense, intergenerational trauma can feel remarkably similar to what some describe as an entity, a strange force operating within us that seems to have a life of its own. But perhaps, rather than encountering an alien presence, what we are encountering is undigested experience.

In Gestalt terms, experience requires assimilation. Like food, life must be tasted, chewed, digested, and transformed into something that can become part of us. What nourishes us is assimilated. What does not is rejected. Healthy development depends upon our capacity to discern what we want to take in and make our own, and what we need to release.

Trauma interrupts this process.

When experience overwhelms our capacity to metabolize it, some of it remains undigested. It cannot be fully integrated, yet it does not disappear. Instead, it lingers at the edges of awareness, seeking completion. Across generations, unfinished adaptations can be passed from parent to child. The child may inherit not only the adaptation but also the unfinished task of making sense of it.

This is why I think of healing less as exorcism and more as digestion. The work is to develop enough awareness and support to metabolize what has been carried forward. We become curious and ask ourselves: Where did this fear come from? What purpose did it once serve? What wisdom might be hidden within it? What do I want to carry forward, and what am I ready to release? Like chewing food, assimilation requires discernment. We take in the experience and examine it carefully. We keep what nourishes us and release what does not. Healing, in this sense, becomes an act of reclaiming agency.

Instead of viewing ourselves as occupied by forces beyond our control, I encourage us to recognize their capacity to participate in transforming what we have inherited. We can honor an adaptation by recognizing that it may once have helped someone survive. And then we can ask whether it still serves life in the present. In other words, the task is neither to deny nor fear what emerges from the depths of the psyche, but to meet it with enough awareness that what has been carried unconsciously through generations can finally come home.