The Pocket Project nonprofit is running a series of sessions to help people explore their response to climate change via a process called Global Social Witnessing.
Curious whether witnessing the news can be done without being traumatizing... I have been revisiting Bonnie Badenoch's (the Heart of Trauma author) musings about this, which I included in my latest article (on the traumatizing nature of the news media!) which (Bonnie's words) I will copy below too...
“In addition to the sheer volume of information, much of this inundation involves ongoing exposure to suffering. We are connected moment by moment to far-flung events as they unfold… our exposure to potentially traumatic events is ubiquitous and continuous. Images and sounds of war, natural disasters, and human-made devastation explicitly surround us and implicitly leave their imprint in our muscles, our belly and heart brains, our nervous systems, and the brains in our skulls.”
"Like so many changes, this current onslaught has crept up on us incrementally, until most of us are now exposed to potentially traumatic experiences many times each day. Some would say that witnessing trauma can be more harmful than enduring the experience itself because of the acute helplessness we feel."
“Because we absorb so much more implicit information than explicit, much of the time our bodies may be the only witness to this outpouring of suffering. In response, many of our systems, largely below conscious awareness, have adaptively found ways to not feel so much.”
“While we could call this desensitization, it is likely the product of us protectively shifting away from our right hemisphere neural circuitry that is attuned to the present moment and to relationships as well as sensitive to suffering, toward the left that can stay more distant and analytical (McGilchrist, 2009). This hemispheric movement does not happen by conscious choice but as an adaptive change guided by a sense of increasing danger (Porges, 2011).”
“For herein lies the danger. If our right hemispheres harbor significant trauma in the form of unhealed fear and pain or we feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of incoming information, we may adaptively shift toward left dominance in an effort to protect ourselves from a crippling onslaught of unmanageable inner and outer experience.”
Curious whether witnessing the news can be done without being traumatizing... I have been revisiting Bonnie Badenoch's (the Heart of Trauma author) musings about this, which I included in my latest article (on the traumatizing nature of the news media!) which (Bonnie's words) I will copy below too...
“In addition to the sheer volume of information, much of this inundation involves ongoing exposure to suffering. We are connected moment by moment to far-flung events as they unfold… our exposure to potentially traumatic events is ubiquitous and continuous. Images and sounds of war, natural disasters, and human-made devastation explicitly surround us and implicitly leave their imprint in our muscles, our belly and heart brains, our nervous systems, and the brains in our skulls.”
"Like so many changes, this current onslaught has crept up on us incrementally, until most of us are now exposed to potentially traumatic experiences many times each day. Some would say that witnessing trauma can be more harmful than enduring the experience itself because of the acute helplessness we feel."
“Because we absorb so much more implicit information than explicit, much of the time our bodies may be the only witness to this outpouring of suffering. In response, many of our systems, largely below conscious awareness, have adaptively found ways to not feel so much.”
“While we could call this desensitization, it is likely the product of us protectively shifting away from our right hemisphere neural circuitry that is attuned to the present moment and to relationships as well as sensitive to suffering, toward the left that can stay more distant and analytical (McGilchrist, 2009). This hemispheric movement does not happen by conscious choice but as an adaptive change guided by a sense of increasing danger (Porges, 2011).”
“For herein lies the danger. If our right hemispheres harbor significant trauma in the form of unhealed fear and pain or we feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of incoming information, we may adaptively shift toward left dominance in an effort to protect ourselves from a crippling onslaught of unmanageable inner and outer experience.”