The Tower We Build to Survive

A reflection on trauma, protection, and returning to life

Sometimes a single memory from childhood carries an entire emotional landscape.

Lately one of those memories has been returning in dreams and flashes of anger.

For survivors of early trauma, the past does not sit quietly behind us. It moves through time with us. At certain moments memories surface again, sometimes through dreams, sometimes through sudden emotional intensity.

This does not necessarily mean something is going wrong. Often it means the psyche is continuing to process experiences that were too overwhelming at the time they occurred.

In his book The Inner World of Trauma, psychoanalyst Donald Kalsched describes how the mind develops a powerful internal system to protect the child when trauma occurs early in life. He calls this the self-care system.

When the external world becomes unsafe, the psyche creates an inner structure designed to preserve the core of the self. This system can be lifesaving for a child who has no way to escape what is happening around them.

But the protection comes with a cost.

Kalsched writes that trauma can create “an inner world organised to protect the vulnerable self from further injury.” The psyche builds powerful defenses around the wounded core.

In mythology and fairy tales this kind of protection often appears symbolically as a figure locked in a tower.

Rapunzel is a familiar image. The tower protects her, but it also isolates her from the world.

For many survivors, adulthood eventually brings a difficult realisation. The structure that once protected the child can later feel like a prison.

There have been many times in my own life when I have felt something like this — as though large parts of the world were happening elsewhere while I remained inside the psychological work of surviving and understanding the past.

This is where anger sometimes emerges.

Anger is not simply rage at the past. It can also be the psyche recognising how much life has been constrained by the effort to survive.

There can be grief for missed opportunities, for years spent in fight-or-flight, for the long work of trying to understand what happened.

And yet the appearance of anger can also signal movement.

To come fully into life requires something difficult. As Kalsched suggests, it means entering time and space and gradually relinquishing the protective psychological structures that once helped the psyche survive.

This process is rarely simple. Memories may return. Dreams may become more vivid. Old emotional landscapes may appear again.

But these moments can also be part of integration.

As the years pass, many survivors become aware of another feeling alongside the psychological work: a longing for the ordinary freedoms of life. To wake up and see a sunrise, to travel, to experience places beyond the narrow geography of survival.

These longings are not trivial. They are often signs that something within the psyche is turning outward again, toward the world that once felt too dangerous to enter.

The hardest part of childhood trauma is not only what happened, but how many years of life are spent trying to understand and survive it.

Reclaiming life is not about forgetting the past. It is about gradually stepping out of the inner tower and discovering that the world, however imperfect, still exists beyond its walls.

Penelope Ryder is a hypnotherapist, astrologer, mentor, peer supporter and writer completing a book on trauma and survival. She writes about psychology, astrology and the inner life at Substack https://substack.com/@peneloperyder