Forty years ago, the course of Western psychological research in trauma was changed with the groundbreaking book Children of the Holocaust by Helen Epstein, which explored the subject of the sons and daughters (second generation) of Holocaust survivors. The book inspired new questions: Had the unspoken horrors of Nazi Germany been in some way passed down to the descendants of those who had lived through them? If so, what might this traumatic transmission mean for other traumatized groups and their progeny? The psychologist and researcher Eduardo Duran, who worked with Native American populations, contended that “when trauma is not dealt with in previous generations, it has to be dealt with in subsequent generations.” These researchers help us recognize that trauma is never purely an individual problem and that, no matter how private or personal, trauma does not belong solely to a single family or even that family’s ancestral tree. The consequences of trauma, which include the cumulative effects of personal, familial, and historical traumas, are now being reframed by trauma therapists as a continuum that seeps across communities, regions, territories, and nations. While traditional individual therapy has focused on unhealed personal trauma, in recent years there has been an increasing movement to incorporate the healing of collective trauma into an individual’s treatment. This next article will discuss this expanded map of trauma healing and what it means for reclaiming one’s natural, balanced state of being.
The term collective trauma refers to the psychological reactions to a traumatic event that can affect a society or smaller group. Collective trauma does not only represent a historical fact or event, but is a collective memory of an awful event that happened to that group of people. The COVID-19 pandemic is a good example of a collective trauma. Other examples include the Holocaust, slavery in the United States, the 9/11/2001 attacks in the U.S., and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More subtle examples are racism and patriarchy. Collective memory of a trauma is different from individual memory because collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors of the events and is retained by group members that may be far removed in time or space from the traumatic event. Individuals reliving traumatic experiences from the collective level can experience a vast range of mental health problems including PTSD, Major Depression, and Dissociation.
Every form of trauma interrupts relationships -- within one’s own body, and between self and the outer world and other people. For example, your body parts always exist in relationship with each other: your arm is in relationship to your chest via muscles, bones, vessels, and nerves, your torso and lower body work together to move and lift, and the way eating something nourishing gives you more overall energy and mental clarity. Trauma disrupts those relationships by generating tensions in the body that become physically locked in the connective tissue, organ, and neurological systems. This tends to lead to mounting disconnection between the mind and the body, as discomfort causes the person to lose perception of their internal sensations and feelings, and therefore become increasingly less responsive to the subtle messages from the body. At that point, the person can no longer be fully present in life and relationships, and instead will manifest a stress response of either hyperarousal (e.g., feeling scared, distrust, agitation) or hypoarousal (e.g., numbness, apathy, disconnection, pessimism). Once trauma disconnects a person’s body, emotions, and cognition, a distortion of external perception follows which injures the capacity to relate to others realistically. Therefore, healing this is the work of opening and reestablishing connections within one’s body and in relating to others.
Over recent centuries, there have been two major assumptions the collective culture has bought into: 1) the illusion of the mind and body as being separate and the idea of mind-dominance -- that somehow one can and should control the unruly emotions and unwanted sensations of the body with the power of the mind, and 2) the illusion of separation from others -- that we are individuals existing completely separate from each other and independent of the world, in spite of the obvious interdependence that has been among us all along. These underlying assumptions create a limiting dissociation from feelings and interconnectedness, causing people to think about what’s difficult or wrong in the world rather than feel and engage the experiences in the realness of their body’s emotions and sensations. The significance of this is that your physicality is where you have the power of perceiving what is in the immediate environment (both internal and external) and choosing the most effective actions of response. Thus, many people have lost touch with the innate human ability to sense and respond to the situation or another person directly, and end up stuck in the isolation of the mental domain.
Perhaps the biggest challenge I face as a therapist working with anxiety and trauma is to help clients become aware of this disruption in their bodies and to reawaken their capacity to feel rather than think about a feeling. In therapy where there tends to be a focus on personal trauma exclusively, the whole story is not addressed. The individual work is crucial, but there is also information from ancestral lineages and collective experiences that are carried in the person’s body and contributing to their issues. For example, when a woman has experienced sexual abuse as a child, there is also the content of the shadow trauma of the perpetrator, the intergenerational trauma of such things as keeping secrets, and the accumulation of crushing experiences growing up in a patriarchal society. The healing of trauma is not about the individual, the ancestral, and the collective as three separate aspects but rather is a continuum that allows fluidity to open up the map of trauma healing.
So, how does a person get past the underpinnings of the collective framework of separation and mind-dominance? It is my opinion that the story that has been told of us being separate – this story that leads to the burden of loneliness, to seeing the world as dangerous, and to disconnection from humanity as a community -- has expired. It is ending, but the fear of changing and transforming is so great that many people would rather remain entrenched in the outdated version of who they are.
But there are changes taking place in the treatment of personal and collective trauma. One international teacher and group facilitator, Thomas Hubl from Austria, offers a different paradigm for understanding human nature that helps: that individuals are distinctive drops of consciousness in a bigger ocean of a collective consciousness. Over the past decade, Hubl has developed and facilitated a group process to address, integrate, and heal collective trauma throughout the world. Within these gatherings, he teaches internal regulation with graded exposure to sources of individual, ancestral, and collective trauma to help people embody and integrate where they are stuck in their traumatic experiences. He believes the biggest source of our collective trauma today is what he calls “the collective fragmentation between the mind, body, and emotions that we call “normal”.” When this fragmentation happens, the person is no longer able to connect to others and the world in a truly present, authentic way.
As you look into the world, you might be aware that there is so much collective trauma and so much pain. You might conclude that you will never have the resources to deal with it all; and that would be true from the fragmented state Hubl described. However, if you are open to your own internal development and creating more connection between your mind, heart, and body, then you will have a higher capacity to deal with the fragmentation of the world from a more balanced state and without internalizing it. Internal Family Systems (IFS) is one type of trauma therapy that incorporates individual, ancestral, and collective healing (called a “legacy burden”). Like Hubl and IFS, I also focus on helping others to relearn how to feel in their bodies and create new capacities and resilience through my work with individual clients, in workshops, and through my book, 5 Steps to Tame the Overwhelmed Mind. To me, this may be one of the great callings of our time -- to help society by assisting individuals take responsibility for collective healing and coming back into alignment with the natural, healthy principles of life.