Building a Media System to Heal Collective Trauma. Who's in?

Five (provisional) pillars of a new commitment statement for Resonant World.

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Resonant World now has more than 1,050 subscribers in countries from the United States and Australia, to South Africa and Colombia. Of these, 34 are paying supporters — to whom I’m profoundly grateful. This newsletter serves the global movement working to heal individual, inter-generational and collective trauma — sharing, commenting, or subscribing, helps reach more people. Thank you!

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Resonant World #73

I want to live in a resonant world.

A world of attuned communication; harmonious international relations, and the intentional evocation of collective intelligence in service of planetary repair.

That world is possible.

On good days, I believe it is inevitable.

But it’s going to need some help getting here.

That’s why I launched Resonant World.

And, in the spirit of springtime renewal, that’s also why I want to share a few thoughts about where the project has come from, and where I see it going — in the hope that I may spark some resonance in return.

Because this was always a shared endeavour, and I love to hear ideas for people to profile, and practices to explore.

Newfound Freedom

Resonant World launched in July 2022, a couple of months after I’d quit my job as a journalist at Reuters, where I’d worked in various roles for more than 10 years, in different countries, over various phases.

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Here’s a conversation I recorded in January with the wonderful Kim Hare, who founded the HEART Community Group building resilience in Hertfordshire, where we discussed my cognitive dissonance over Reuters’ approach to the climate crisis, part of the reason I quit.

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Being newly free to share thoughts, feelings and experiences on social media was exhilarating. (Reuters and many other large media organisations deny or significantly curtail this freedom to their employees on the grounds that their views may undermine the company’s efforts to appear impartial. Reuters has notably fewer qualms about taking millions of dollars from the oil industry to produce propaganda touting fake solutions to the climate crisis, as Drilled founder Amy Westervelt, my Desmog colleague Joey Grostern, and myself reported in this investigation —which grew out of a post in Resonant World — the most-read of any I’ve written).

I’d taken a role as an editor at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog, and was also a few months in to a two-year training in the principles of healing individual, inter-generational and collective trauma with Thomas Hübl and team.

I’ve loved having a space to share some of my journey through that transformational process, and write about some of the many inspiring people I’ve met. It’s also been powerfully supportive to have had an opportunity to reflect in public on shadow patterns at work within myself, and the company I left behind.

Evolutionary Update

From the outset, I conceived of Resonant World as a media platform to serve the “global healing movement” — the network of individuals and organisations working to heal trauma in all its many presentations.

This mycelium finds a form of expression (though by no means a comprehensive one) at the annual online Collective Trauma Summit, which runs for 10 days in October, where I’ve served as a co-host these past two years.

My thinking has since been inspired in no small measure by the encouragement of former colleagues in legacy media, who are themselves equally disillusioned with their organisations’ response to the climate crisis, and — in at least a few cases — love the idea of a “global healing correspondent” (my dream job title). I’ve also found inspiration from the News from Planet A incubators convened by my friends Indra Adnan and Pat Kane of the Alternative UK, whose invitation to explore what a new “media system” could look like gave me permission to think in more expansive terms. (I invite you to explore their renewed mission statement here).

Credit: The Alternative UK.

I’ve come to see Resonant World as one seed in that landscape — supporting new growth in the direction of the work needed to unearth and heal the collective trauma that lies at the root of our interlocking crises.

For more traditionally minded journalists (as I once was), the idea of the media being dragooned into the service of “healing” will sound like heresy.

But perhaps it’s time for what Thomas Hübl calls an “evolutionary update” — a new approach to reflect and nurture new forms of awareness of what’s going on “in here” — inside our individual and collective mind-body systems. Because it’s the disconnect between the inner and outer — between head and heart — that the media has inadvertently cemented. And that disconnect is the root of where we’re going wrong.

I believe the evolution is already well underway.

Higher Source

People who undergo deep trauma integration processes often feel impulses to speak and act in new ways, and report a sense of alignment with a higher source of guidance.

We’re getting metaphysical here, but I’m thinking about concepts such as the Self (in the language of Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems school of therapy); Core Self (in the Comprehensive Resource Model of Lisa Schwarz); or — my preferred term, Soul.

Let’s imagine an analogous process is happening on a collective level, giving expressions to new forms of media. There are many examples emerging, but I’d like to highlight Rachel Donald’s work for her platform Planet: Critical, which explores the inner dimensions of the climate crisis, as well as the political, cultural and economic aspects, with deep insight, personal transparency and intellectual vigor).

I believe the success of Planet: Critical (which has more than 10,000 subscribers) and other new platforms is proof of the hunger for a new way.

I also invite you to read my friend Daniel Simpson’s characteristically rigorous blend of self-inquiry and philosophical analysis of his own trial and error quest to elaborate the principles of a more compassionate media system. Daniel and I joined Reuters on the same day (he quit twice, while I have the dubious distinction of three resignations to my name). By complete coincidence — or telling synchronicity, depending on your personality style — he published this post this morning, while I was editing this one:

Red Pills Cause Blind Spots

Five (Provisional) Pillars

Resonant World is my stab at drawing on my own experiences in legacy media to develop something new.

In October, 2022 I had a very initial go at elaborating a model of how a “quantum newsroom” intent on supporting the healing of collective trauma could work. (Resonant World#8). Here are some more ideas about what I would love Resonant World to offer, perhaps with the backing of some external funding, and more contributors.

1. Covering the News Through the Lens of Trauma

How often do we read a story that explains what’s going on in the headlines through the lens of individual, inter-generational and collective trauma?

Not very often.

I think that’s why the world doesn’t seem to make much sense.

After more than two years of immersion in collective healing spaces, I’m more convinced than ever that unresolved trauma plays a huge role in driving almost everything we see in the news. But this perspective is largely absent from coverage — giving so much content a one-dimensional feel. Considering the role of trauma renders a situation in 3-D.

How relevant is it that Putin’s father pulled his mother half-alive out of a pile of bodies during the battle of Leningrad? What role does the legacy of the Holocaust play in the Middle East?

I want to read stories that explain the war in Ukraine, or the actions of Hamas and Israel, or school shootings in the U.S., or Europe’s response to climate migrants, to name just a few examples, through a wider lens.

This undertaking has to be handled with care. Understanding is not condoning. But to have a hope of achieving a resonant world, we have to be clear about what’s really driving crises — and what it would really take to resolve them. Can we gain a higher-resolution picture of the deep fragmentations in individual and collective consciousness that allow our species to enact so much brutality — and learn more about how these fragmentations can be repaired?

2. Covering the Global Healing Movement

There’s a significant and fast-growing constituency of people all over the world who are engaged in some form of trauma healing work.

Let’s lightly adopt the term “global healing movement” as a placeholder to describe this audience.

Where do they go for news about their work?

Or stories that might affect it?

I’m certainly thinking of people who work directly with individuals suffering from trauma.

But there are also growing numbers of people working to integrate an awareness of collective trauma into social change projects of the kind documented in the seminal article published last month in Stanford Social Innovation Review by Laura Caldéron de la Barca, John Kania and Katherine Milligan of the Collective Change Lab.

How could a new media system serve them, and the many other people out there who sense the need for a deeper approach to our personal and collective problems?

The Collective Trauma Summit and other online gatherings perform a valuable role in providing platforms for leading practitioners.

Nevertheless, such gatherings are one-off events that require months of planning. There’s less in the way of connective tissue to sustain the conversation hour-by-hour in a coherent way — at least that I know about.

What would a media system designed to serve this movement (including by interrogating its shadow sides) look like?

3. Parsing the Implications of Scientific Research

I’m nowhere near qualified to comment on this domain, but here goes:

My hunch from what I can glean from occasional forays into science-focused media is that there’s a lot going on in the research world that’s of direct relevance to the global healing movement — only it’s not reaching people who could benefit from learning about it, in a form they could easily grasp.

Of course, research directly related to trauma healing is of obvious concern.

But I’m also thinking of articles like a recent essay in New Scientist on growing evidence to support a quantum theory of consciousness — which directly buttresses the kind of worldview elaborated by Alexander Wendt in Quantum Mind and Social Science, and Karen O’Brien in You Matter More Than You Think.

Such worldviews could ultimately provide new theoretical frameworks to support the global healing movement, which operates way beyond the confines of the prevailing materialist-reductionist paradigm — without necessarily spending too much time elaborating a coherent, widely-accepted alternative.

The movement deserves to be kept informed of scientific advances that point to the more expanded version of reality that many of us can sense — and sometimes actively engage in our work to integrate trauma.

4. Visualise What We’re Learning About Integration

There’s nothing inherently wrong with drawing stick-men on whiteboards to help explain the mystical principles of trauma healing.

I’ve seen some of the best teachers in the world do it.

But in 2024, we have the capacity to develop new forms of media that could help to convey the increasingly subtle understanding the movement is developing of the psychological, neurobiological, and metaphysical principles of healing individual, inter-generational and collective trauma.

Imagine a virtual reality presentation that explained the mechanisms of trauma and dissociation, or how trauma can leave epigenetic biomarkers in our cells?

Or multi-media assets that could rapidly convey how healing protocols — such as Thomas Hübl’s Collective Trauma Integration Process, or Lisa Schwarz’s Comprehensive Resource Model — actually work?

5. Co-regulate, Resource and Inspire

I draw so much strength from certain forms of content — mostly talks and podcasts — that speak to me at a deep level.

Of course, everyone will have their preferences in this regard.

But it seems key to me that the new media system will provide abundant opportunities to experience co-regulation, resourcing and inspiration, as much as information and intellectual insight.

The kind of Global Social Witnessing practiced by the Pocket Project — where we come together in community to mindfully attend to a crisis in the news — is an approach that could be replicated at exponentially greater scale.

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As always, there’s a lot more to be said on all the above.

I offer these partial reflections in the hope they may inspire some resonance in return.

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Work With Me

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Resonant World is written in the gaps between my work editing investigations at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. It’s a huge boost when people become paid subscribers, and support of any amount affirms that my mission to support the global community of practitioners engaged in integrating individual, inter-generational and collective trauma has value. Thank you!