How to Heal Collective War Trauma, Part III
The last, necessary piece.
This is the final part of a three-part series by Patrick Dougherty. Here are the other parts:
To read more about Patrick’s work, please visit his website movingthroughit.org.
Resonant World #54
By Patrick Dougherty
During our training, most of us therapists — with the possible exception of social workers — have acquired a major impediment to meeting our clients in our shared humanity. We have learned to separate ourselves with the “medical model,” or the need for “healthy boundaries,” or other seemingly logical reasons, believing our role as citizens should be left at our office doors.
That form of denial is quickly crumbling, as shown by the impacts of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, and other forms of social unrest. For most of us, there were (and still are) many days when our personal experience as a citizen feels immediate and primary, and our role as a therapist feels secondary.
We walk into our offices in whatever turmoil we’re feeling from the collective traumas alive in us, and in our communities, and then we have to be a therapist to our clients, dealing with the problems that brought them into therapy, along with whatever activation they’re carrying from the same collective traumas we’re experiencing. And I think most of us would admit that we’ve not always handled that messiness very well.
Specifically to the trauma of war, and the issue of citizen-therapists, my therapists, who were all older than I was, were tax-paying citizens when I was in Vietnam. I believe that they hadn’t been able to fully feel and face the fact that they had helped pay for the gun I used, and my bullets and uniform. Neither had they been able to face the fact that they had helped pay for every war and military operation we have been involved in, up to and including the time when I was their client.
And they couldn’t let themselves feel that the freedom many of us experience, the safety we enjoy in our communities, in part, comes from us waging war around the world. All of this helped them keep the Vietnamese woman, and me, at a distance.
Moral Wound
I had committed an immoral act in what — at the time, and certainly all these years later — felt and still feels to me like an immoral war. They had avoided that, and were focused on me and my trauma. Besides not helping me heal, they had left me carrying the weight of a moral wound that I believe should have been shared.
If they had been aware of their role as citizens, and their share of the responsibility for our wars, regardless of how they felt about Vietnam, they probably wouldn’t have gone numb. They might have been able to feel their own pain at what we’d done in that war, while staying open and caring for me. They might have been able to say something like: “I feel so bad for you, given all you have gone through in your life, and the impact that this has had on you, and then to have done such harm to that woman and mother, I can understand why that has been so hard to walk with.”
That sentence probably would have changed my life. I would have felt their care for me, and their pain for the pain I carried, and also their pain for the woman and mother, who was a victim of my rage and aggression, and of America’s war.
And it would have totally rocked my world if they would have been a bit more relational and vulnerable, and inserted into that statement somewhere, something like: “It certainly pains me what we Americans did in Vietnam.” But in my view, these therapists, like most of us practicing, were not aware of the share of collective trauma they carried, how they felt about it, and how it impacted their clients.
I am also aware that our therapist group, which had evolved out of our work with Thomas Hübl, had offered me something that isn’t available in individual therapy. (See Part II). I had the support of trusted peers who were also committed to processing their own personal, inter-generational and collective trauma connected to war. The group was safe and big enough to allow the collective trauma of war to come forward, in a way that isn’t always possible when working one-on-one.
Facing What I Had Done, Finally
I sat with this new understanding of what had happened in my therapy — or hadn’t happened — without knowing where to go with it, for many months. The whole gestalt of this trauma had shifted, and I could feel the possibility of healing was now present. I trusted that the path would make itself known as it had in so many ways before — that something would show up.
As a therapist, when a client comes in to see me and has done something wrong and harmful to another, I always look for ways to help them make amends, whatever that entails. I try and practice this myself of course. About a decade ago, I spent a year studying apology, repair, remorse and atonement, while wrestling with what I — and we Americans — had done in Vietnam. But I’d now realized that I ‘done nothing to address the harm I’d caused to the Vietnamese woman.
One of the places I do a lot of my inner work these days — especially with my ancestors, and the trauma that has flowed downstream from them into me — is in my meditation. All of us who work with Thomas Hübl have an embodied meditation practice. I feel very resourced in this sacred realm, both by my sense of connection to the Divine, and from calling upon loving ancestors to support me while doing this deep work.
It is also a place where I have learned to use what Jungians call “active imagination.” This technique — developed by Carl Jung — has been adapted in many different ways, and for many different purposes. Mostly it is used to get out of the box of the conscious mind, and to tap into the instincts, symbols and archetypes in the collective unconscious. In common with many, and Jung himself, I believe that this approach can help us tap into spiritual realms.
Inviting the Woman in
After several months, maybe even a year, I started to meditate on what I should do to heal the wound of my violence toward this Vietnamese mother and her child. I would light my candles, sit on my cushion, close my eyes and go into that quiet space and sit with the intention to pursue the healing, and be in curiosity about what might unfold.
One morning, it occurred to me that I could invite the woman into my meditation, as I had learned to do with my ancestors, and talk with her. This idea felt both dramatic and profound: I could, on my own, while deeply resourced, invite this woman into a conversation.
It then came to me that we could have a dialogue like they do in restorative justice — a community-based practice where a crime victim is brought together with the offender, to seek some resolution in a relational manner. The offender has a chance to hear the impact that they’ve had on the victim, and apologize to them. After 50 years of feeling frozen, it seemed radical that something so simple might be available to me.
During meditation, I invited the woman in, and imagined her sitting on a cushion a few feet in front of me. I asked her to please, if she would want to, let me know what had happened to her that day when I’d barged in and threatened her and her child’s life. I told her that I really wanted to know what had happened to her then, and in the aftermath of that incident.
I imagined her telling me how horrible it was to see my terrifying, rageful face, and my gun raised and pointed directly at her chest, directly at where she held her baby, and to know there was nothing she could do to protect them. I could have sobbed, but held back as I tried to listen. She was very mad, even incredulous, that I had done that. She said more, but since I could barely imagine this woman’s life, no words came to me — only the emotional charge of her fury, which I sat with until she was finished.
Once again, a part of me could have sobbed at what felt like such a humane process: She and I could be in the same room, and I would have a chance to hear the impact of my actions. I could then do the obvious: offer a sincere apology — something that neither myself, nor my therapists, had ever thought to consider.
But I didn’t let myself sob at that point, since I was really trying to imagine this happening in real time with her, and I needed to make the apology without losing myself in my own grief. I wanted to be present to whatever she wanted to tell me.
So I apologized, a heart-aching and remorseful apology that took a few minutes. Tears occasionally rolled down my cheeks, but I kept control of myself. I said I was sorry for barging into her home; for going into a rage because she had looked at me in a way that had offended me; that I had threatened her and her child, and nearly killed them. And I said I was really sorry for how horrible it had been to make her feel so powerless to protect her baby. My heart was aching terribly, but I still didn’t succumb to the sobs that were so close to escaping my control.
‘Make you Human’
Then, in what felt like a moment of grace, a thought popped into my mind: Part of the restorative justice process can involve the victim hearing the offender say something about how they came to do what they did, if the victim is interested, and capable of receiving this. And I immediately imagined the woman saying: “Tell me how you could possibly do something like that. Tell me so I can understand better what you did, since it would also help me to make you human.”
By then, I was sobbing. To imagine, even in my own creative imagination, that she might want to know something about my humanity, when some part of me had felt like a monster for all of those 50 years, moved me beyond words. By telling me about the impact that my actions had had on her, she had become human to me. But imagining that she actually might want to know about my side of the experience moved the whole incident beyond the brutal and stark trauma of war, and opened up the possibility of a healing beyond anything I could have imagined.
So I told her not a lot, but enough, about how I had grown up in a violent, hate-filled family; how the Marines took that violence and shaped it into a fighting soldier; how I had learned the Vietnamese were our enemy, and less human than us. And I told her about an incident that had happened 36 hours before I walked into her home, when I had sat in a field in the dark of the night, certain that North Vietnamese soldiers were crawling toward our position, and sure I was going to die. I told her about my resultant fear, self-pity and rage. Then I apologized again. It ended with her saying: “I am glad you told me. I am still so mad, so very mad, but now you are more than that terrifying, rageful face with a gun pointed at me and my baby.”
The Last Necessary Piece of Healing
After sitting with the woman in my meditation, while it felt so deeply healing, I could still feel that there was something more that needed to happen. Something was unfinished. Over the next couple of weeks, it became clear to me: I needed to tell someone the whole truth of what had happened that day in her home. I had never shared the entire story with anyone, since it had been too painful and shameful to share more than the general details.
In an ideal world, if my therapists had seen what I needed, and had done enough of their own work to get past the numbness in their bodies over America’s role in Vietnam, then I might have been able to tell the whole, exact and honest story in one of their offices. That didn’t happen, but I’m so glad my body and my conscience let me know there was one last thing I needed to do so that I could let go of the weight of the pain and shame that I’d carried for 50 years.
I asked four good friends from my therapist group to help me. Two men friends, Joachim in Berlin, and Rasada in Johannesburg, and I had been meeting for biweekly triads for over three years. Their role in helping me on this journey of healing from the harm I had done was central to this process. I asked them to sit with me while I told them the whole story of what had happened that day. I also asked them not to lose track of the woman, or the harm I had done to her, while they stayed present to me with their care and love.
There was something important in my telling the story of exactly what I did that day. It was very emotional, but it wasn’t the anguish I usually experienced when telling any version of the story. Having reached a point where the woman felt more real and human, instead of frozen in my memory, it felt like something real was happening, in real time.
I also asked two women friends, Emma in Dublin and Louise in Auckland, to light candles on the day I sat with Joachim and Rasada and told the story. I asked Emma and Louise to sit with the Vietnamese woman, and to be present to the harm done to her by me, and by my country, and not to turn away from any of it, and to be with her and the injustice that had been done to her by a man. They said they would be glad to do that for her, and for me. At the end of that very emotional day something felt settled, or complete, or made right.
What I Hope Therapists Do
It is an exciting time to be a therapist, especially for those of us who work with trauma, as we learn more and more about how unprocessed inter-generational and collective trauma can hinder our clients’s healing. I do think that healing collective trauma is best done in groups, as I have described. But widespread access to those groups may be years away, and much can still happen in our offices.
Of course, for us to help our clients heal personal trauma that is also connected to unprocessed collective trauma, we have to know how collective trauma lives in our own bodies. We can do this if we are willing to shift the emphasis in our consultation groups, or start new groups, to focus on the deep and vulnerable work of following our somatic experiences in response to what we experience as citizens, and what gets activated in us by our clients. It is deep and vulnerable work, which fortunately always leads us to our own personal and inter-generational healing.
Doing this deep exploration not only make us better therapists, but also heals us personally, as family members, and as citizens. That is pretty exciting.
Editor’s Note
Each time that I have read Patrick’s essay, particularly the concluding section, I have felt activation within my own system — a sign perhaps that the transmission that comes through in his writing is pointing to more collective and inter-generational material for me to unearth within myself.
I hope that this remarkably precise and transparent description of one man’s 50-year healing journey, and the group processes that made that possible, will help to inform others working to integrate individual, collective and inter-generational trauma, and demonstrate that — no matter how deep the moral injuries we may experience — restoration is always possible.
I plan to integrate Parts I, II and III of this essay into a single document in a future edition of Resonant World, for easy reference.
With thanks, as ever, for your support,
Matthew Green
Like any labour of love, Resonant World is written in the gaps between work I get paid to do, notably editing investigations at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog, and my Tarot reading practice (to find out more, or book a session, drop me an email). 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 supporting people to integrate individual, inter-generational and collective trauma has value. Thank you!
Thank you so much for your sharing of your humanity in such a humble, authentic way from the perpetrator perspective.
Thru it I realized how much grief and rage I still hold toward patriarchal violence, even after my potent 50 year healing journey, facilitating groups with 1000's of women globally around this all so commonly experienced violence and powerlessness of women. Blessed be the women of Vietnam who suffered by the hands of American soldiers. May she have heard you....
That was so helpful to read such a personal account from a therapist dealing with his own grief. Thank you two for sharing this thorough-going resolve, beautifully expressed, deeply felt. It seems to combine all the threads of Hubl's teachings into a single narrative. Well done, Patrick!