What wisdom from personal healing can we apply to the collective?
In my written piece here (and recording above), I’d like to offer you the sense-making that’s been emerging through me over the last several years. Sense-making that’s rooted in the concept of and calling towards collective healing; seeing it as a tool we have available to us to usher in and facilitate the shifts in paradigms and consciousness we need to address the global issues we face. The paradigms and consciousness we’re evolutionarily positioned to move towards.
As I share this sense-making I’ll do so through the lens of the following question: “What can we take from what we know about individual healing and apply it to the collective?” What can we take from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and emotional and spiritual health and development and apply it to how we think about collective healing, practically and philosophically? In the first chapter, I’ll start by offering up a working definition on the term “collective wounds” and collective trauma. Then in the second chapter move to principles within the field of traumatology and what we know about individual healing, in order to use the third chapter to weave them into how we might explore understanding our current historical moment, the many collective wounds we’re feeling and facing, and ultimately the opportunity we have for transformation through collective healing.
At the heart of this sense-making is a deep humility and desire to hear from you. I’m curious what you think about the puzzle pieces I’m presenting here. I’m curious to hear what puzzle pieces are alive for you around the topic of collective healing. What threads you’re weaving together to make sense of these times and to be of service to the healing and transformation of our world. For We Heal For All is a growing community that serves as a convening ground for this type of co-creation. And I’d love to learn from you. Visit community.wehealforall.com to join us.
Because none of us have all the answers, but all of us have wisdom to offer.
So if you’re not already, my invitation is to make yourself comfortable, maybe even 5% more so. Feel your feet on the ground, your seat in a chair, the Earth below you. Take a deep conscious breath in and out. And let’s dive in -
CHAPTER 1: DEFINING COLLECTIVE WOUNDS
We are living at a time when our awareness of our system and its history is greater than ever. We are the system becoming aware of itself, and becoming especially aware of the ways we as a system negatively impact people and planet. Through the Internet, mass media, and increased education, more of us are increasingly aware of things like the climate crisis, our history of colonialism, systems of oppression, extreme poverty and global inequality, rapid species loss, shifts in the livability of our planet, corporate greed, political lies and so much more.
This awareness, while empowering and inspiring action, also brings with it deep collectively-shared wounds associated with injustice, exploitation and separation that have been buried in our collective consciousness for centuries. Similar to the way that we as individuals inherit emotional energy from our family lineages, entire groups that have a shared history carry imprinted energy that can take the form of trauma. As more information about the structural violence of our world, the abuse of our people, the corruption of our leaders, the state of our planet come to light within the collective, this imprinted trauma is activated and has an opportunity to heal.
We can see this is the Black Lives Matter movement that has been taking the world by storm. Or the waves of the Me Too movement that continue to reverberate in different countries throughout the world. Our ability to connect and learn from each other is fostering waves of collective awakening that bring with it the unresolved, unseen, unspoken material of collective wounds. Our communities’ voices and the voices of their ancestors are being spoken.
Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart, PhD (Oglala/Hunkpapa Lakota), whose work centers on the historical trauma inherited by Native Americans and Indigenous communities throughout the world, offers us a definition of collective wounds through the lens of historical trauma. She defines historical trauma as “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma.” She and her colleagues have developed and researched an intervention model based on four components for community-based programming: confront the trauma, understand it, release it and transcend it.
Thomas Hübl, who is a modern day mystic making strides in the field of collective trauma, offers this description of ancestral trauma, another word for collective wounds:
"Whatever has been blocked, denied, or suppressed in the experience of one generation is simply energy or information—a modulated wave—that can neither be created nor destroyed; it must fulfill its movement. Succeeding generations will enter the world bearing those scars, and it will be their task to integrate the psychological impact of whatever traumas created them."
CHAPTER 2: INDIVIDUAL HEALING
“Nothing that feels bad is ever the last step.”
This is a quote from American philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin. More than just a nice saying on a poster in your therapist’s office, Gendlin’s line is backed by cutting edge research in the fields of neuroscience and clinical psychology. This research is showing us that we are neurologically wired to heal, grow, and transform. That those “bad” feelings are signaling something to us about our needs, our individual system, and our environment and that it’s our job to decipher what we hear. That if we learn to listen to those feelings and learn how to communicate with them, that they can guide us on how to respond to what’s going on in and around us.
The fields of clinical psychology and neuroscience provide us with more and more evidence that the presence of challenging emotions indicates that there’s an opportunity to heal and transform. Dr. Diana Fosha, psychologist and founder of the psychotherapeutic modality accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy, (or AEDP), that addresses attachment trauma, describes it like this: “Emotions are wired into us by eons of evolution. Their purpose is not to scare us and overwhelm us and make us afraid of losing control; their purpose is to help us cope with our environments and enhance our adaptation (Jacobs Hendel, foreword xii).”
How does the presence of the collective wounds that we’re seeing today offer us opportunities to better adapt to our changing world? What opportunities lie in the fact that these wounds—around corruption, abuse, oppression, greed, disconnection and more—are increasingly in our face and increasingly felt in our own lives and in our collective consciousness? How can we work with these collective wounds to better ensure that we reach our evolutionary potential as humans?
Turning to the field of traumatology more specifically, trauma is understood as anything that is too much and too fast for someone’s nervous system to healthily process in the moment. It occurs when something deeply distressing, painful, horrendous, or stressful happens, such as a natural disaster, sexual assault, or a physical accident. The experience is so overwhelming and intolerable that the nervous system protects itself by doing what it needs to do to return to a sense of stability. Often times, at an unconscious level, this means pushing that experience and its related energy outside of one’s conscious mind until the person has the time, space, tools and resources to look at it, work with it and integrate it into their being in a healthy way.
Trauma is understood to be emotional energy that has not been able to live out its full expression because of an inadequate level of safety, resources, cognitive capacity or bandwidth. Therefore the emotional energy gets stuck in a person’s mind and body, leaving them tethered to wounds and threat of harm that may no longer exist. When something triggers or activates that stuck emotional energy, the person can be transported across space and time to the pain point’s origins or coping mechanisms. It is once the proper conditions and resources are in place for these wounds to show themselves that a person is able and ready to heal them. Arriving at this place is a reflection of a person’s development and environment.
CHAPTER 3: APPLYING THIS TO THE COLLECTIVE
Extrapolating what we know about individual trauma to our collective wounds, the fact that we are awakening and bearing witness to so much more of the world’s pain may mean that we have arrived at a place with the capacity, resources and environmental conditions to process and heal them. It may mean, evolutionarily speaking, that we’ve reached a developmental milestone in our economic development, our cultural development, our sociopolitical development that, sourcing from Dr. Braveheart’s intervention model, is inviting us to confront and understand the trauma held in our history and collective consciousness, in order to release it and transcend it at collective levels.
Feeling long held collective wounds and the emotional energy associated with them may mean that we’re resourced enough to work with them in new and constructive ways. As new incidents of injustice and breakdown arise, as news reports and current events roll in, and as interpersonal experiences with others activate these collective wounds, we may be able to do work on behalf of our ancestors, each other and the larger system.
Because even though witnessing the world’s injustices and structural flaws may activate feelings of existential distress, the field of trauma studies teaches us that when an individual is in a true existential crisis, the emotional reaction to the crisis may not be immediately accessible because instead they are in survival mode. Their system is flooded with adrenaline and the fight-or-flight mode of operation kicks in. It is only once they are safe enough to digest and process traumatic experiences that the emotional energy arrives. This offers an angle of hope, albeit perhaps a confusing one, that the fact that we're feeling these collective wounds may mean that we're ready to process, heal and integrate them; and that enough of us may be safe enough and have enough resources to do so.
Because our world is richer and arguably safer than any point in history. Despite COVID-19’s upheaval and the fact that it showed us aspects of our global system that are still undoubtedly vulnerable, and despite the fact that structural violence still absolutely affects communities and ecosystems across the world, we are firmly planted in the 21st century with many of us having access to the material goods we need to thrive: we have food, shelter, clothes, a living wage, health, companionship, technology and luxury. A little over 200 years ago 85% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Food was inconsistent, work started at a young age. It was the standard way of life. Now a mere 9% of the world lives in those conditions, with that percentage having dropped 20% in just the last 20 years (Rosling, 2018).
Yes, the world is safer and richer than it has ever been before. Experts point to people living longer lives, carrying out successful births, and surviving communicable diseases as indicators of our success. And similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, now that we’ve achieved a certain level of material development, higher orders of development are being called forth. Now instead of worrying about meeting our basic food, shelter, and life needs we are worrying about the quality of and process by which we meet these needs. If in order for me to be clothed then that means a young girl in Bangladesh needs to be abused and enslaved then I don’t want those clothes. This is a huge shift in consciousness that is a product of our economic development, and that is fostered by the emotional experiences and moral grapplings that come with our greater awareness.
This is why I believe that collective healing is one of the strongest tools we have for addressing the global issues we face and for facilitating the systemic transformation we need. We can work with the emotional energy of collective wounds in a way that not only helps us sustain our organizing work, our activism, our professional pursuits to shift the structures that be (and reduce burn out along the way), but we can also work with this emotional energy in a way that can lead to deeper cultural shifts associated with the worldviews we carry and the paradigms of power we operate from. We can heal and transmute patterns the live below the hood of the car, like patterns of exploitation that lead to human rights abuses and the degradation of our ecosystems; or patterns of control and dominance that are at the heart of systems of oppression, toxic leadership practices, society’s relationship to the Earth, and our history of geopolitics and development.
Because it’s clear—we need to shift the way that we live, act, behave, problem solve and relate as a collective society. We need to do so desperately and we need to do so now. And we also must be mindful to not do so in a way that further replicates and embeds the old colonial paradigms of power, extraction, urgency and scarcity into how we go about doing it. This is what collective healing has to offer - an opportunity to better position us not to do so.
📸: Laura Adai, unsplash.com
Hi, I’m Liz Moyer Benferhat. Writer, facilitator, coach, and development practitioner dedicated to the subtle interplay between how inner transformation feeds the outer transformation we need in the world. Welcome 🌿