Applying the lessons
Can individual healing drive systemic change?
A clip of an interview I conducted with my former Reuters colleague Dean Yates for the Collective Trauma Summit 2022 — which runs from Sept. 28-Oct 6.
Resonant World #5
One of the reasons I love collective trauma work so much is that I believe it can change the world.
I feel it in my bones. It’s why I write this newsletter, and it’s why I’m invested in learning as much as I can about the impact of collective trauma, and how it can be healed.
But it can sometimes be difficult to sketch out exactly how this world-changing mechanism would work in practice. It certainly isn’t a question that lends itself to the kind of classical, Newtonian journalistic exploration practiced in my alma mater of the legacy media.
“Global acupuncture”
For sure, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of the power of collective healing to change individual lives. Now almost a year into Thomas Hübl’s Timeless Wisdom Training, I’ve had my own intense experiences that have left me in little doubt that the work is releasing very old, inherited traumatic material from my nervous system. (I hope to tell the story of my great uncle killed in Italy during World War Two, and how I connected with the legacy of that incident, in a future edition of Resonant World).
And there are many other accounts of how individuals have benefited from these processes. (See for example the story of Vietnam veteran-turned-therapist, teacher and author Patrick Dougherty in Hübl’s essential book Healing Collective Trauma). And yet, the conversations can feel either very granular ─ as in the case of these personal stories ─ or so abstract that their planetary potential can be hard to see clearly. I mean, I love Hübl’s phrase “global acupuncture” ─ but what exactly does it mean?
Hands in the clay
I had a tentative go at bridging that divide this week in an opinion article I wrote for DeSmog (the nonprofit climate change investigations website where I work). I used the platform to ask what organisations campaigning for action on climate change can learn from collective trauma work.
My sense is that ─ at the core ─ the struggle to preserve a liveable planet and collective healing are merely different facets of the same essential process of remembering who we really are as a species. (Though I couldn’t quickly find the exact reference, I recall that Hübl enigmatically writes in Healing Collective Trauma words to the effect that: “Collective trauma work is environmental activism.”) But I wanted to go further in elaborating how climate action and collective trauma work could reinforce one another in practice.
Transparent communication
In the article, I suggested that the kinds of processes we use in collective trauma work to build more precise relational attunement, foster open dialogue, and create safe spaces for vulnerability can be readily adapted to help climate-focused campaigns and networks become more responsive, flexible, robust and coherent. This won’t only help in day-to-day movement-building: Such skills would be vital to bring to bear at high stakes moments — such as high-level negotiations between governments.
But if I’m honest with myself, what I wrote was only scratching the surface.
Shift in consciousness
In my experience, the work of healing collective trauma is more than simply a process to rid ourselves of unwanted emotional reactions, conditioned behaviours and limiting beliefs. Although the work can include all those things, it is as much a process of moving toward something greater as it is a movement away from the repetitive cycles of the past.
The work proceeds from a fundamental recognition that, at our core, humans are good, and clearing away the residue of trauma allows us to live in healthier relationship to everyone and everything around us. To go a step further: Healing trauma is a step towards spiritual awakening. Though that kind of language can turn people off, it seems self-evident to me that a mass shift in consciousness will be needed if we’re going to transform the economic, political and financial systems threatening all life on Earth. Collective trauma work could be one of the catalysts for precisely such a shift.
Non-linear
I stopped short of making that point in my DeSmog story. But I was heartened to see some in the climate community pick up and run with the ideas (and write much better Twitter threads than me).
My friend Clara Vondrich, a leading climate campaigner in the United States, who wrote an excellent story on quantum social change for DeSmog, retweeted the story, noting the quotes from Christiana Figueres, the former U.N. climate chief, who Hübl interviewed for the summit. (You can watch a clip of their exchange here).
The work of collective trauma healing moves in mysterious, non-linear ways — and opens up new understandings of the nature of reality that challenge our usual boxes.
It’s exciting to see these ideas cross-pollinating the climate movement and other fields pushing for transformational change.
Do tune in to the summit if you haven’t had a chance already — and I’ll be back next week with the next edition of Resonant World.
Matthew, I saw two of your interviews in the Collective Trauma Summit that I really enjoyed. I appreciated your authenticity, your passion and your creativity in the way you engaged with your speakers. I recently wrote an article called Compassion and Trauma in A Private War, the film that showcases the life of Marie Colvin. I am very interested in possibilities of creating trauma integrated journalism, medicine, education; as an orientation towards creating ripples of healing and transformation. I am a university prof. in Ottawa, Canada.