How To Heal Collective Trauma

The wisdom we need now lies in the shadows of our shared past.

Statue at the retreat centre at Hof-Oberlethe.

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Resonant World #47

With such horrific atrocities unfolding in Israel and Gaza, not to mention many other war zones, I noticed myself hesitating over whether to write this post.

To focus on the efforts of a small group of people fortunate enough to have the time and money to investigate how the imprints of historical traumas live on inside our bodies, and how to transmute these legacies, might seem at best marginal, and at worst indulgent, at a time when so much new trauma is reverberating globally.

But what I experienced in my fourth week-long retreat with the facilitator Thomas Hübl in Germany opened a deeper understanding of the kind of work that I believe can interrupt the vicious cycles that trauma inevitably triggers, whether on a personal or collective level.

Our group of about 180 people worked to unearth our personal inheritances from histories including the Second World War and the Holocaust; Israel and Palestine; the division of Eastern and Western Europe; Soviet and prior oppression in Baltic states; slavery, racism and colonialism in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean; genocide of Indigenous peoples; collective traumas in Asia, and more. By coming together in community, with clear intentions, and some accessible practices, we experienced how this work can create the conditions for evolutionary leaps — not only in our own lives, but perhaps for whole communities, nations and — this is the idealist in me speaking now — even the planet as a whole.

That’s a bold claim. But I want to explore these possibilities here because of what I’m learning about the unconscious mechanisms by which past collective traumas shape our reactions in the present; the practical steps we can take to bring these processes to light; and how to harvest the wisdom concealed in the pain from the past.

This can of course be liberating for the individuals undertaking this shared inquiry. But the more intriguing possibility, for me at least, is the prospect that this work might — through fractal processes that transcend our default notions of linear cause and effect — have a disproportionate impact at much larger scales.

As Thomas’ team has shared on social media, he led the retreat online from a house in Tel Aviv, having decided to stay in Israel with his family after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war. Though the hostilities were powerfully present, especially for those with Israeli or Palestinian roots, the conflict could hardly have been a more vivid illustration of the urgency of collective healing work.

The journalist in me would love to write in detail about some of the people I’ve been doing this work with; the specific collective traumas they worked on; and the insights they gleaned, to make what can sound like abstract concepts more relatable. I plan to do more of that in future profiles of people ready to speak publicly about their process. For now, I’ll respect the confidentiality that forms the bedrock of the approach, while sharing a little about my own experience, filtered in large part by my newly revived connection with my grandfather Charles, and great uncle Lionel, who fought in the First and Second World Wars respectively.

Lionel Brown, my great uncle.

The Gateway

For some people, the lived experience of ancestors who struggled with oppression, war, genocide, slavery and other atrocities infuses their daily lives in a way I’d find hard to imagine.

But for those of us for whom historical experiences feel more remote, the gateway is to try to establish a feeling of connection with the forebears who feel closest.

For me, that was my grandfather Charles, who was wounded fighting on the Western Front as an 18-year-old private in 1918. Thomas Hübl has written and spoken extensively about the processes for this kind of ancestral work, notably in his 2020 book Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, part of a wider canon of work by a new generation of facilitators and therapists pioneering novel approaches to intergenerational healing.

In my own case, I found myself experiencing a surprising sequence of high definition images from First World War trenches, and a new awareness of the profound nature of the rupture in our collective psyche caused by the slaughter. The bald statistics do not even begin to do the depth of this fracturing justice, but I still catch my breath at the death toll on both sides: 880,000 British soldiers, and 2,037,000 Germans (and that’s not counting other armies and civilians). I didn’t grasp this rupture at a cognitive level, but as a dreamlike image, reminiscent of a chasm — the prewar world on one side, the postwar on the other — nothing but shattered rock and rubble in between. The gulf seemed unbridgeable.

For many others, the journey back through the generations evoked ancestral experiences of the Second World War and Holocaust — both in terms of victims of atrocities, and the perpetrators. Similar dynamics played out in relation to other enormous collective shadows: slavery and colonialism; dispossession, oppression and violence related to Israel and Palestine; and the impact of totalitarian regimes in eastern Europe and beyond.

Labyrinth at the retreat centre at Hof-Oberlethe.

Karmic Packages

In Healing Collective Trauma, Thomas describes how  the emotions that were too overwhelming for previous generations to fully feel do not just disappear — they are passed down like “karmic packages” lodged inside of us, beyond the level of our everyday awareness. It was these packages that we were gradually starting to open, contacting frozen layers of grief, shame, anger, and terror that may have accumulated over generations, or even centuries, whether our ancestors played the role of victim, perpetrator or (often failed) rescuer — or some combination of all three.

The precise contours these imprints assume in each individual are as unique as fingerprints. But in each case, the inheritance serves as a kind of invisible scaffolding that structures — in subtle or not so subtle ways — the way we react to situations, people, and particularly groups of other people, in the here and now.

I’d had my own unexpected taste of this process at my first week-long retreat in Germany in March last year — the inaugural in-person gathering of my cohort of the latest edition of Thomas’ two-year Timeless Wisdom Training in the psychological and mystical principles of healing individual, collective and ancestral trauma.

Seemingly out of nowhere, after a particular process of shared self-inquiry, I felt an overwhelming upwelling of grief for Lionel, who had been shot by SS officers along with three other allied prisoners, days after being captured in Italy in March, 1944. The activation in my system was so powerful I found it hard to contain. At one moment, I experienced what felt like a direct perception of the poisoned aspect of human consciousness that glorifies war — and a realisation that I had carried a homeopathic dose of this poison in my own system. (I have since wondered whether this was perhaps the reason I’d found myself, aged 27, traversing the deserts of southern Iraq as a journalist embedded with invading U.S. Marines). I was shaken by this sudden contact with the legacy of ancestral trauma, and sought a session with a member of the team of amazing therapists who are on hand to support participants in the Timeless Wisdom Training, who helped me to safely integrate the experience.

Transformative Agent

At this last in-person retreat of the training, the stage was set to go deeper.

Since the first gathering in March last year, we had been building what — in collective healing jargon — is known as a “safe container.”

On a practical level, that means we’d spent more than 18 months practicing speaking with authenticity; deeply listening, and tracking our own emotional and psychological processes as we related to one another with ever greater precision. (It’s via this work that I’ve learned to appreciate why Thomas often says “Precision is love.”) On the basis of the three previous in-person retreats, including a silent retreat; monthly small group online meetings; regular four-day online retreats; and weekly practice in “triads” of three people, we had woven a sense of safety that I have never experienced in even the most supportive workplaces, schools or community spaces.

It was this level of safety that allowed people to feel confident sharing deeply personal processes that may have remained mute for a lifetime with the entire group. And that witnessing provided the transformative agent — as buried emotions, no matter how uncomfortable, could be brought into awareness not just by the individual, but by everyone present. Holding the emotion in relation in this way, at least from what I observed, seems to have the power to catalyze shifts in an individual’s consciousness that I suspect would be very difficult to recreate in one-on-one therapy, and practically impossible alone.

The individual process being witnessed, in turn, ripples back into the group, as other people who share a similar emotional signature from a trauma — perhaps incurred in very different circumstances, in a different time and place — feel the resonance of what has been shared. Listening to many sharings by German participants, particularly around perpetration by past generations, I felt powerfully connected. I sensed that both Charles and Lionel were there with me, encouraging me to support the healing process for our nation’s — and family’s — former enemy, and for all the others carrying fragments of the Second World War and the Holocaust. (Resonant World#7)(Resonant World #25) (Resonant World #42)

Likewise, there was often a lot of tiredness and overwhelm in the room. As one participant shared about a military ancestor who had suffered “survivor’s guilt” after witnessing comrades killed, I suddenly felt so fatigued I could have fallen asleep. I wondered whether there might be some of that guilt in my ancestry as well — perhaps connected to Charles, or maybe even Lionel, who may have left a legacy of misplaced guilt for others who survived the war.

Ethical Restoration

It would be easy to assume that spending a week diving so deeply into such a global inheritance of trauma would have left the group exhausted, overwhelmed and fragmented.

While there was no doubt that many of us went through deep processes — and I can feel the energies shifted in me by the retreat still working — the feeling of connection as we closed gathering was unique in my experience.

If there is one key discovery that I’d like to share from this very partial account, it’s that coming together to work on the shadows we carry from collective trauma can be a portal into a new way of relating — creating a field of coherence that can unlock new levels of inspiration, creativity and impulses to restore. I have a strong intuition that these are the kinds of fields we’ll need to generate, at scale, to have any chance of responding appropriately to the many crises bearing down upon our species. The seemingly impossible may suddenly start to happen when we do, I suspect.

In an almost trivial micro-example, I surprised myself as the retreat drew to a close by composing a satirical spoken word poem on the newfound sense of connection I felt with German people as a result of the work we’d done, which I read during a celebration on the last night. The audience (mostly) laughed in the right places, and — though I had a pang of paranoia afterwards that some of my lines may have landed a bit too close to the bone — I consoled myself with the thought that at minimum, Charles and Lionel would have appreciated the scene of me standing up naked — at least in the emotional sense — in front of a room full of so many of the people whose ancestors they’d gone to war with. Certainly, the culturally sanctioned sense of moral superiority over Germany I’d imbibed as a schoolboy was gone; transmuted into a newfound curiosity, and affection — as well as a dawning awareness of the complexities so many in the country are still working to resolve.

At a deeper level, my experience of connecting with my ancestry, in Germany, fostered an impulse towards ethical restoration for Britain’s past — an impulse that has yet to cohere into any kind of clear plan. Having gained a much more visceral appreciation of how the legacy of slavery, colonialism and racism lives on in so much of the world’s population through the sharings I’d heard in many different contexts during the Timeless Wisdom Training, I couldn’t help notice the contrast between the paucity of Britain’s collective reckoning with its colonial past — and Germany’s decades-long process of confronting its role in World War Two and the Holocaust. Without wishing to making any kind of judgments on historical rights and wrongs, draw simplistic parallels, or take a view on how far such processes have matured, I was left with the question of whether there was more I had to learn from the Germans in our group. Might they hold some key that might inform my personal process in relation to the collective trauma fields of Britain’s colonial past? Something in my heart tells me there is something to explore here, even if my mind is not yet clear on the when, where, what and how. (Resonant World#36).

In about fifteen minutes from now, I have a piece of work to do that’s even closer to home. I’m here at my father’s and grandfather Charles’ house in the suburbs of southwest London, about to sit down with my dad to watch last year’s remake of All Quiet on The Western Front. The film follows the story of German student Paul Bäumer and his classmates, who enthusiastically enlist to serve their fatherland at the outbreak of the First World War. We know how the story ends, but it feels like a journey we should now take, together, tonight.

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I write Resonant World in my spare time from my job as an editor at DeSmog, a nonprofit news service dedicated to investigating the vested interests blocking action on climate change. For now, I am not introducing a paywall on my posts, but paid subscriptions are huge boost, and help to make this work sustainable. Thank you for any support you can offer.

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New Course for Men: Power to Relate

Meanwhile, I’m delighted to be teaming up once again with my friend Daniel Simpson to offer our new course for men: A four-week online immersion to learn practical tools for enjoying better relationships, taking place next month.

For some of us, the primary motivation for joining this course will be to improve our relationships with our partners. But the skills we’re going to be practicing will work to enrich any relationship, whether it be with friends, family, colleagues or somebody you interact with for just a few minutes during a chance encounter in the street.

In Power To Relate, we’re going to share practical tools to show you how to:

• Get clearer about how you feel

• Recognise your triggers — so they don’t control you

• Listen at a whole new level

• Find the courage to say “yes” and “no” — and really mean it

• Speak from the heart and share yourself more freely

• Embody more of who you really are

More details on dates, times, logistics and pricing at the course page.

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Work with Me: Soul-Witnessing Via The Tarot

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