Such an important and necessary topic! Your perspective, experience, and knowledge from several domains will help lead this conversation. Looking forward to reading more and bringing others into the conversation..
Great initiative Matthew - thank you. Your question (on your welcoming signup response email) is about what we might be interested in exploring here.
My understanding, as a psychotherapist, trauma is the result when processes of resolution and integration get frozen, denied, ignored or interrupted. This "invisibilises" the event, the experience and the experiencer - who then has to make a new sense of themselves with a little piece/peace missing. This little hole in our psyche is ripe for exploitation in various ways, any of which keep the trauma in place.
The body keeps the score, as van der Kolk writes. The body is also our most direct encounter with the world, and is viscerally, sensually attuned in a myriad of ways - most of which are socio-culturally included or ruled out (this aligns with the task of the left hemisphere as described in Iain McGilchrist's wonderful work). However, without any framing for attending to the greater psycho-emotional whole, whether personal or global, subsequent visceral encounters with stress can only be understood in terms of our own unresolved process - this is Zhiwa Woodbury's great insight. Consequently, we are very likely to snap to our default settings of isolation, avoidance, masked fear, and anything that will pack that little hole in the psyche.
This seems to be completely at odds with an understanding of systems theory, in which an effect on one part of the system is likely to in-form (ie: play on the material) the system as a whole. So, as Gabor Maté points out in the clip below, the trauma/suffering is an experience of being out of alignment. And he asks "with what?". He suggests that the answer to this is: "our true nature".
Seems reasonable enough to me. And I think we can go further than what, superficially, might seem to suggest simply a deeper understanding of our wonderful individual potential. That might be what Arne Naëss termed a dive into "shallow ecology".
I'm interested in a conversation that embraces a notion of "psychosphere". Biology and neuroscience, quantum physics and epigenetics, developmental theory and ecology point to how the whole shapes the parts that shape the whole, and that relationships of information exchange maintain equilibrium. Francisco Varela and Andreas Weber suggest that single living cells have a felt response to their environment, and seem to evidence a form of proto-memory that helps them interact more successfully in their context.
Psychosphere refers to this interacting process at every level, from cell to scientist. Developing greater and greater complexity, evolution continually adapts and improves ways of managing itself and maintaining life-supporting equilibrium. It makes sense that this capacity of relationship, part to whole, is a wonderful means for developing a self-reflective aspect of the system.
And if this seems a wild and crazy idea, consider that whilst the great and good meet to discuss how changes in the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere and lithosphere impact and feedback between one another, no-one seems to want to talk about how our dominant, Modern human identity, worldview, sense of place and purpose - ie our psychological self-arrangements - impact these other spheres. And, in truth, is the dominant factor in the changes underway.
If we include the notion of psychosphere, of which humanity is but a part, we have to ask how we are included in the feedback, noting that Varela and many others have suggested that the feedback is received directly in our multicellular bodies. And the system is out of whack, carrying imbalances all over the place. Whilst we measure it with scientific instruments, counting birds, and taking pictures from space, we also get it viscerally and sensually.
But if our "training" has been not to include ourselves as embodied, thinking, feeling, reflective elements of the whole, and if we have had experiences that imbalanced our own equilibrium and which were somehow disallowed, then we have nowhere to take the new information other than to the past.
Our psychology manages to recognise "eco-anxiety" and "climate grief", experiences in response to the feedback, but it fails to have a language to begin to say that our psyches are causal. I don't mean at all that we just have to think something to make it real, but when we act upon the unquestioned idea of being separate, largely powerless, and mostly insignificant in the scheme of things, then we are going to act out the pain of this over and over.
So I'm very interested in how a forum might explore our individual relationships with the basic common sentience from which psychosphere emerges. I'm excited by how this might change our psychological institutions and interventions, change how we engage with the cascade of systemic feedback, rein in and redefine the corporate process, and the flow on effect all this might have on how we raise our children, conduct social discourse, make our livings and share our deepest experiences, including those informed by our own painful experiences.
Because however we may have been abused, abandoned, silenced, ignored, rejected, othered and so on, we learned skills to address this, and these almost certainly give us useful and powerful insights into the qualities and values we need to relaise personally, collectively and in the "communion of subjects" if we are to take any tentative steps towards redefining our place and purpose in ways that are responsive to the more than human world - and which require us to open to the prior to human world which is alive within us.
All of which unpacks my initial comment - "Great initiative Matthew - thank you"!
Hi Matthew, I am excited by your official entry into the blogosphere... to add to your journalsm, trauma work, and podcast.
I am a buddy of Zhiwa / Tom and have a podcast myself, and am wondering if you would be interested in doing an interview with me for that YouTube channel podcast, The Poetry of Predicament.
I also have a body of work that was created in order to bring transformative resources and support to people bravely facing human-caused collapse of Earth and Human Systems.
Anyway... I am especially excited about your journalistic work in the world. Mainstream media and journalism have done a rather piss-poor job of educating the public about the massive elements of trauma, gaslighting, propagandizing, and the maintenance of the status quo by violent means...
and we could really use some fresh and truthful reporting.
Please let me know if you might be interested in being a podcast guest.
I noticed collective trauma when, in my thirties, I was trying to stop blaming my parents for destroying my self-esteem. I had a conversation with a woman who had gone to Ireland to work for a priest in a small town. Her hair-raising description of the hatred and blame she encountered "resonated" with me in a big way. It was the same type of atmosphere I was raised in, and my parents before me. Something to do with the Catholic Church's ideas about sin, and the collective self-esteem problems of a hated and oppressed social group, the Irish. Everyone was always stewing in negativity, on the inside.
But why? I always wondered why the Catholic Church was so hell-bent on hating everything about sexuality, when it is such a beautiful, basic and inescapable human need??? There's got to be a reason for this.
I've been searching for years for an answer. I like Dorothy Dinnerstein's "The Mermaid and the Minotaur," a kind of psychoanalysis of the human species writ large. And now I am on to MIkki Kashtan's "Spinning Threads of Radical Aliveness," a critique of Marx and Freud that points to using their breakthrough ideas to go much further towards collective healing. Kashtan is a student of Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication. When I studied Rosenberg, I was shocked by how violent language is so normalized in our society that any attempt to stop using it sounds so weird you can't do it openly. What does this tell you?
How did our species go so wrong in such a beautiful world? One explanation that goes way back is that Nature itself was the first traumatic experience. Ecosystems are ever-changing and to primitive humans brought cold, famine, infections, and pitiless predators. How would you like to be scared all the time, like rabbits and birds are?
Now we have mastered our environment; and, by the way, have become each others' predators. The very act of mastering the environment has brought on the end times. We can't escape Nature. We are just animals who have reproduced to the point we are soiling our nest. Maybe, like animals, we should just accept suffering and death. It is essential. When you learn gardening you learn that life only lives on the death of what came before. When compost is your holy grail, you learn that death is good.
I have sometimes thought that humans must come from outer space. We are alien to our own home! We are animals, yet we set ourselves up in opposition to Nature and Life in so many ways. Maybe self-consciousness was a bad idea. It conferred evolutionary advantages, but harbored tremendous suffering as well. One idea I got from Bret Weinstein's "A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the Twenty-First Century" is that evolution only has to be "good enough." It doesn't need to optimize. Hence we get ugly things like elephants and humans. Dinnerstein points out that the narrow birth canal in humans requires, besides difficult birthing, a small helpless body following the large brain into the world, therefore necessitating a long infancy and childhood in the hands of the woman that birthed you. A recipe for, well, difficulty... Other animals have such an easier and simpler time of it!
Of course I wouldn't trade self-consciousness and all the glory of human intellect and art for an easier and what seems like a darker time on earth. We must redeem ourselves! Which is why I think Resonant World is onto something.
Good to connect with you here. I forwarded your article to Piers Cross, which led to the excellent podcast chat, and hence me finding this site. I've spent the last twenty years as a guide working in many types of environments and some conservation projects. It's interesting when British clients have spent time with local people, say in Borneo for example, how they comment and desire the simple lifestyle, shared living, in co-operation with each other. Much of this I've put down to being in the forest, which I believe is a wonderful environment for healing.
I'm very keen to participate in this dialogue having also worked as a mental health first aider and, in a former life in the Police, as a facilitator in Restorative Justice, which brings the victim and offender together to find resolution. An idea taken originally from the Maori.
I trained last year as a Climate Reality Leader under former Vice President, Al Gore. There's no doubt that the World has been poisoned and that conventional methods of healing are either not working or are too slow, in my opinion. We need fresh ideas to kick-start us into action.
Beautiful expressive resonant writing. I appreciate your clarity of being at the edge of unknowing, casting into it. Thank you and I look forward to the next post.
Such an important and necessary topic! Your perspective, experience, and knowledge from several domains will help lead this conversation. Looking forward to reading more and bringing others into the conversation..
Matt, great as usual. Signed up
Great piece Matthew.
Beautifully written. Personally relevant in the context of the war in Ukraine.
Lovely intro, excited to read more
Hi Matthew. Thanks for this. I'll continue to read in this publication.
May I republish this at The R-Word? I think it is a good fit there. See: https://rword.substack.com/
Great initiative Matthew - thank you. Your question (on your welcoming signup response email) is about what we might be interested in exploring here.
My understanding, as a psychotherapist, trauma is the result when processes of resolution and integration get frozen, denied, ignored or interrupted. This "invisibilises" the event, the experience and the experiencer - who then has to make a new sense of themselves with a little piece/peace missing. This little hole in our psyche is ripe for exploitation in various ways, any of which keep the trauma in place.
The body keeps the score, as van der Kolk writes. The body is also our most direct encounter with the world, and is viscerally, sensually attuned in a myriad of ways - most of which are socio-culturally included or ruled out (this aligns with the task of the left hemisphere as described in Iain McGilchrist's wonderful work). However, without any framing for attending to the greater psycho-emotional whole, whether personal or global, subsequent visceral encounters with stress can only be understood in terms of our own unresolved process - this is Zhiwa Woodbury's great insight. Consequently, we are very likely to snap to our default settings of isolation, avoidance, masked fear, and anything that will pack that little hole in the psyche.
This seems to be completely at odds with an understanding of systems theory, in which an effect on one part of the system is likely to in-form (ie: play on the material) the system as a whole. So, as Gabor Maté points out in the clip below, the trauma/suffering is an experience of being out of alignment. And he asks "with what?". He suggests that the answer to this is: "our true nature".
Seems reasonable enough to me. And I think we can go further than what, superficially, might seem to suggest simply a deeper understanding of our wonderful individual potential. That might be what Arne Naëss termed a dive into "shallow ecology".
I'm interested in a conversation that embraces a notion of "psychosphere". Biology and neuroscience, quantum physics and epigenetics, developmental theory and ecology point to how the whole shapes the parts that shape the whole, and that relationships of information exchange maintain equilibrium. Francisco Varela and Andreas Weber suggest that single living cells have a felt response to their environment, and seem to evidence a form of proto-memory that helps them interact more successfully in their context.
Psychosphere refers to this interacting process at every level, from cell to scientist. Developing greater and greater complexity, evolution continually adapts and improves ways of managing itself and maintaining life-supporting equilibrium. It makes sense that this capacity of relationship, part to whole, is a wonderful means for developing a self-reflective aspect of the system.
And if this seems a wild and crazy idea, consider that whilst the great and good meet to discuss how changes in the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere and lithosphere impact and feedback between one another, no-one seems to want to talk about how our dominant, Modern human identity, worldview, sense of place and purpose - ie our psychological self-arrangements - impact these other spheres. And, in truth, is the dominant factor in the changes underway.
If we include the notion of psychosphere, of which humanity is but a part, we have to ask how we are included in the feedback, noting that Varela and many others have suggested that the feedback is received directly in our multicellular bodies. And the system is out of whack, carrying imbalances all over the place. Whilst we measure it with scientific instruments, counting birds, and taking pictures from space, we also get it viscerally and sensually.
But if our "training" has been not to include ourselves as embodied, thinking, feeling, reflective elements of the whole, and if we have had experiences that imbalanced our own equilibrium and which were somehow disallowed, then we have nowhere to take the new information other than to the past.
Our psychology manages to recognise "eco-anxiety" and "climate grief", experiences in response to the feedback, but it fails to have a language to begin to say that our psyches are causal. I don't mean at all that we just have to think something to make it real, but when we act upon the unquestioned idea of being separate, largely powerless, and mostly insignificant in the scheme of things, then we are going to act out the pain of this over and over.
So I'm very interested in how a forum might explore our individual relationships with the basic common sentience from which psychosphere emerges. I'm excited by how this might change our psychological institutions and interventions, change how we engage with the cascade of systemic feedback, rein in and redefine the corporate process, and the flow on effect all this might have on how we raise our children, conduct social discourse, make our livings and share our deepest experiences, including those informed by our own painful experiences.
Because however we may have been abused, abandoned, silenced, ignored, rejected, othered and so on, we learned skills to address this, and these almost certainly give us useful and powerful insights into the qualities and values we need to relaise personally, collectively and in the "communion of subjects" if we are to take any tentative steps towards redefining our place and purpose in ways that are responsive to the more than human world - and which require us to open to the prior to human world which is alive within us.
All of which unpacks my initial comment - "Great initiative Matthew - thank you"!
(You can see Gabor here - a 7min clip - https://youtu.be/9xcsuLyJJF4)
Hi Matthew, I am excited by your official entry into the blogosphere... to add to your journalsm, trauma work, and podcast.
I am a buddy of Zhiwa / Tom and have a podcast myself, and am wondering if you would be interested in doing an interview with me for that YouTube channel podcast, The Poetry of Predicament.
I also have a body of work that was created in order to bring transformative resources and support to people bravely facing human-caused collapse of Earth and Human Systems.
https://living-resilience.mn.co
Anyway... I am especially excited about your journalistic work in the world. Mainstream media and journalism have done a rather piss-poor job of educating the public about the massive elements of trauma, gaslighting, propagandizing, and the maintenance of the status quo by violent means...
and we could really use some fresh and truthful reporting.
Please let me know if you might be interested in being a podcast guest.
and, again, thank you for your work.
Dean Walker
safecircle@gmail.com
I noticed collective trauma when, in my thirties, I was trying to stop blaming my parents for destroying my self-esteem. I had a conversation with a woman who had gone to Ireland to work for a priest in a small town. Her hair-raising description of the hatred and blame she encountered "resonated" with me in a big way. It was the same type of atmosphere I was raised in, and my parents before me. Something to do with the Catholic Church's ideas about sin, and the collective self-esteem problems of a hated and oppressed social group, the Irish. Everyone was always stewing in negativity, on the inside.
But why? I always wondered why the Catholic Church was so hell-bent on hating everything about sexuality, when it is such a beautiful, basic and inescapable human need??? There's got to be a reason for this.
I've been searching for years for an answer. I like Dorothy Dinnerstein's "The Mermaid and the Minotaur," a kind of psychoanalysis of the human species writ large. And now I am on to MIkki Kashtan's "Spinning Threads of Radical Aliveness," a critique of Marx and Freud that points to using their breakthrough ideas to go much further towards collective healing. Kashtan is a student of Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication. When I studied Rosenberg, I was shocked by how violent language is so normalized in our society that any attempt to stop using it sounds so weird you can't do it openly. What does this tell you?
How did our species go so wrong in such a beautiful world? One explanation that goes way back is that Nature itself was the first traumatic experience. Ecosystems are ever-changing and to primitive humans brought cold, famine, infections, and pitiless predators. How would you like to be scared all the time, like rabbits and birds are?
Now we have mastered our environment; and, by the way, have become each others' predators. The very act of mastering the environment has brought on the end times. We can't escape Nature. We are just animals who have reproduced to the point we are soiling our nest. Maybe, like animals, we should just accept suffering and death. It is essential. When you learn gardening you learn that life only lives on the death of what came before. When compost is your holy grail, you learn that death is good.
I have sometimes thought that humans must come from outer space. We are alien to our own home! We are animals, yet we set ourselves up in opposition to Nature and Life in so many ways. Maybe self-consciousness was a bad idea. It conferred evolutionary advantages, but harbored tremendous suffering as well. One idea I got from Bret Weinstein's "A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the Twenty-First Century" is that evolution only has to be "good enough." It doesn't need to optimize. Hence we get ugly things like elephants and humans. Dinnerstein points out that the narrow birth canal in humans requires, besides difficult birthing, a small helpless body following the large brain into the world, therefore necessitating a long infancy and childhood in the hands of the woman that birthed you. A recipe for, well, difficulty... Other animals have such an easier and simpler time of it!
Of course I wouldn't trade self-consciousness and all the glory of human intellect and art for an easier and what seems like a darker time on earth. We must redeem ourselves! Which is why I think Resonant World is onto something.
Intrigued. Signing up.
Hi Matthew,
Good to connect with you here. I forwarded your article to Piers Cross, which led to the excellent podcast chat, and hence me finding this site. I've spent the last twenty years as a guide working in many types of environments and some conservation projects. It's interesting when British clients have spent time with local people, say in Borneo for example, how they comment and desire the simple lifestyle, shared living, in co-operation with each other. Much of this I've put down to being in the forest, which I believe is a wonderful environment for healing.
I'm very keen to participate in this dialogue having also worked as a mental health first aider and, in a former life in the Police, as a facilitator in Restorative Justice, which brings the victim and offender together to find resolution. An idea taken originally from the Maori.
I trained last year as a Climate Reality Leader under former Vice President, Al Gore. There's no doubt that the World has been poisoned and that conventional methods of healing are either not working or are too slow, in my opinion. We need fresh ideas to kick-start us into action.
Kevin
https://kevin-albin.com
Beautiful expressive resonant writing. I appreciate your clarity of being at the edge of unknowing, casting into it. Thank you and I look forward to the next post.
I'm in the second group. I'm in. I have also been writing on these themes for some years, and will be including this theme on my own substack.