How to Heal Collective War Trauma, Part II

Cracking Open the Closed Door.

Patrick Dougherty (left), during his deployment in Vietnam.

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This is the second part of a three-part series by Patrick Dougherty. To read Part I, please visit (Resonant World #52), and to read an introduction, please visit (Resonant World #51). To read more about Patrick’s work, please visit his website Moving Through It.

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Resonant World #53

By Patrick Dougherty

I was a member of a group of therapists for over three years — 15 of us from nine countries in North America, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia — who met every other Monday to explore the collective trauma living in us, and our clients. We brought cases where we were pretty sure collective trauma was an issue, aiming to support each other to work with it. 

Thomas Hübl had developed a framework for integrating collective trauma, drawing on insights gained during deep meditation, and his experiences of facilitating large-group processes around the world. But it was up to us to do the work, and learn to attune precisely to what was emerging in us personally, and in a group. My friend Joachim facilitated our consultation groups with attentiveness and care, as we adapted the basic processes we had learned from Hübl, and then let our practice evolve.

A therapist would bring a case, and share a short overview to give us a sense of where we were headed. Then we would all relax into our bodies and listen. As a somatically based therapist, this came quite naturally for me, but even those who weren’t somatic therapists had done enough of Hübl’s meditations and group work to allow them to feel the sensations and energetic movements in their bodies.

The presenting therapist would then share the dynamics of their work with the client in much more detail, with as much description as possible of their somatic awareness, even if they felt nothing, or numbness, or were stuck in shame. This helped us to feel into what was happening for the therapist and their client, and in their collective field.

Always at War

One day a Jewish woman who lives in Israel asked to share one of her cases. She had been working with a veteran who had fought in two wars, and had let her know that he wanted to talk about something he had done. Since he had never told anybody, it was a huge weight he carried.

The therapist also shared briefly that she felt emotionally raw and overwhelmed when the veteran approached this issue — a feeling she often experienced when directly talking about war. War was such a way of life in Israel, and the trauma of it lived in her own family, and every family she knew had been impacted by war, and everyone carried war trauma. War was such a complex issue and it overwhelmed them all. 

This therapist didn’t feel any specific feelings towards this man, a client whom she had seen for a couple of years, and liked. Her feeling of overwhelm was associated with being an Israeli Jew living in a country that felt like it was always at war, or on the brink of another war.

This gave us a sense of the terrain we were entering. My whole body felt as if a low voltage charge of electricity was running through it, and I was on high alert as to where this would lead.

Everyone knew I was a war veteran and had “done harm to a woman.” Those were the words I was using at that time and in this group. And I assumed they were thinking that this might be a little more activating for me than for the others. 

But we all knew that everyone brings something important from their own personal, inter-generational and cultural histories, that live on in our bodies, and that add to the collective processing in the group. So I knew that everyone else would have their own family’s — or country’s — war trauma alive inside of them, so no-one would be overly focused on me, which was very liberating.

The woman did a beautiful job describing the specifics of who her client was, and what she imagined he needed, and how activated she felt when he talked about his war experience. Then she talked about how her family kept it all at a distance by never talking about it — even though it took up so much space in their lives. The grief, terror, rage, remorse and anguished uncertainty of not knowing what was right and what was wrong for their country, and their military, to do to protect them also lived in all of them.

The therapist said she could feel an echo of a deep sadness she could now identify that lived in her family — a sadness that kept her family members apart, rather than sharing their grief and sorrow and confusion together.

Cascade of Images

When she had finished, I was left feeling deeply moved by her description of what it was like for her and her family living in Israel. But my major somatic reaction came from feeling a strong identification with the veteran coming in to see this therapist. I was so electrified now that it was hard for me to think. I volunteered to share what came up for me first, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear anyone else given how activated I was.

As I tried to speak, tears ran down my face. My chest felt so constricted that I could hardly breathe, and my head felt almost like it could explode, and it swam with an overwhelming cascade of images and insights. I could feel and see what I wanted to say but the words wouldn’t quite form. What had become clear to me — what had come to me as I had tuned in to the veteran who had come to see my colleague — I knew was true for me, and possibly for him. 

When I could finally speak, I choked out how incredibly alone I had felt as a veteran for decades in my own therapy, trying to talk about what I’d done in Vietnam, and how at this moment I could feel how I carried in my body what I had done, and I could feel how lonely and weary I was. I said I had tried — so hard — to bring this memory and this feeling into therapy, but it had never helped.

I wept a little here with deep sadness, feeling the long walk, nearly 50 years long, of being alone with what I had done. When I got that out, I stopped and took several breaths, knowing that what I had to say next was the major piece that had been missing the whole time.

Frozen for 50 Years

I could sense that saying these words would shatter a block to my healing, a block that had now become startlingly clear and radically obvious. I am pretty sure this came out almost as a whisper, since it was the most I could do. And I said: “Nobody let the woman into the room. Not once. They never even mentioned her.” And a brief wave of sobs flowed from my body.

It was such a stark and confusing picture. Me, in my therapies, telling the story, three times, of what I had done to a Vietnamese woman holding her infant child. And not once did any one of my therapists mention her, or acknowledge her humanity in any way I could remember. They stayed focused entirely on me. It was so clear to me now what had happened  — or hadn’t happened — in my therapies. And how that had added to my feeling of being so alone. 

I felt such relief at arriving at this understanding, and letting some of my grief and remorse flow through me. And it also left me feeling very raw, since I could now feel the humanity of the Vietnamese woman, something that had been frozen in trauma for nearly 50 years. Now she was real: the woman who I had terrified with my rage while pointing my rifle at her chest, and not knowing if she and her child would be alive in the next second. She felt real for the first time since I’d walked out of her home half a century earlier.

That all took maybe 10 minutes. I knew, as everyone did, that my experience was no more important or valid than their experiences. We all knew that the more people share what comes up for them in any collective realm, the more fragments of the specific collective trauma are in the room and being processed. There were brief and very kind comments in response to what I had shared, then we moved on to the next person to share.

A woman from Germany said she felt energized and excited, in a way, to hear what the Israeli veteran would bring into therapy. She shared that, as a German woman, she felt such a deadness in her family, and the German culture, and in the men, stemming from World War Two.  

And this deadness, or frozenness, had to do with what the invading German armies did all across Europe and Russia, and also what had been done to the German armies in their defeat, and what the Russians had done to the civilians as they swept through Germany at the end of the war — and of course the Holocaust. This wasn’t a happy excitement, she clarified, but an excitement of feeling some emerging possibilities of what might be possible for her home country.

Another German, a man, said he felt a very acute aloneness and sorrow in him,  and could easily connect it to his silent and sad war veteran grandfather. From listening to the Israeli woman share about herself and her family’s war trauma, and from my sharing of the aloneness of what I’d carried through my life, he shared with tears in his eyes that he felt a loving urge to go and sit with his (long deceased) grandfather and tell him he understood why he hadn’t spoken, and that he wanted to just sit with him and love him.

Below the Surface

A Colombian woman shared that she felt a strong constriction in her chest and abdomen, and that she could relate to the overwhelming emotions, and that she also had a lot of numbness about the war in her own country. She also felt the inner conflict the Israeli therapist felt about what, and who, is right and wrong in war. 

There had been war in her country for many years, and both the government army and the guerrillas had done so much harm to the people living in rural areas, especially the women. All she saw was the horrible trauma suffered by the people she worked with, who were often the direct victims of war. She felt both confused and relieved to feel into her own numbness to the collective trauma of war. She said she felt very close to the Israeli woman.

A man from South Africa said he could feel fear, even panic, in his body at the idea of talking about what was not talked about in his country, because people lived with such a powerful tension over the unhealed wounds of apartheid. There had been such horrible injustices and brutality towards Black people, and members of minority groups, and so little healing had happened when apartheid ended. And all of that simmered right below the surface. It was part of life in South Africa, part of what everyone carried, and he was sure every client carried it, yet it had rarely been brought up in therapy.

A woman from England went last and shared that she was experiencing a feeling of numbness, as if she was filled with Styrofoam. Trying to imagine a veteran coming into her office, she immediately became numb, since in her country nobody talks about — let alone feels — anything about the harm England had done in its wars, and throughout the colonial period. Listening to all of us, she had felt warmth in her belly from the authentic humanity in our group.

When we had all shared, the Israeli woman looked visibly more relaxed and softer. She said she felt so grateful for how the group had helped her to lessen the feeling of overwhelm, and feel more alive and present in her body by talking about war from so many angles, and with a deep and vulnerable humanity. She could now feel the way forward, which suddenly seemed so obvious and accessible.

She said: “What he needs, I can see, is just for me to stay in relationship with him. That I don’t have to see him, and what he did, through all the overwhelming filters I have. But I can see him through the filter of who he is as a man, and my client, and I as a woman, and his therapist.” Then she laughed and said: “At this moment that seems like it will be so easy to do.” And we all laughed, because we knew that things can seem so simple at times in a consultation group, but in person it can be so much more complicated.

What Happened to my Therapists? 

I certainly don’t know for sure what was going on in the minds of my therapists, and why they were unable to help me in dealing with the harm I had done to the Vietnamese woman. But in the last few years, I have come to believe that I do know something of what happened to them, as my understanding of the impact of unprocessed collective trauma on individuals has grown.  

This impression was only reinforced a few weeks ago, as I worked on my second draft of this article, and I painfully recalled a Vietnam veteran I’d once worked with. I realised that I’d done the same thing to him that my therapists had done to me: I hadn’t helped him to deal with the harm he’d done to a captured North Vietnamese soldier.

About 20 years ago, this veteran had come to see me over the harm his war trauma had been causing to his marriage. He had been drafted into the Army and had been very upset at the time because he was very much opposed to the war, and hadn’t felt himself to be a soldier. But to war he went. While in Vietnam, his platoon had captured a North Vietnamese soldier.

They had to take turns guarding this man, whose hands were always tied together, and who was also tied to an American soldier, or a tree, at night. Someone started to inflict a humiliating and degrading act on this captured soldier, which others could see — apart from the company lieutenant and the platoon sergeant.

That quickly became something everyone who guarded the enemy soldier was expected to do. It wasn’t said, but everyone knew this was part of belonging to the platoon. (This is common in war, that you do things that are immoral because everyone else does, and it just doesn’t seem bad when you’re doing it.)

My client had felt horrible for doing this, knowing even at the time it was very wrong, but had felt strong peer pressure, and complied. But he was also honest and admitted that there was a little thrill in it. When he finished telling his story, he said he felt greatly relieved to have told me: his therapist and fellow veteran.

But as I sit here writing this, I feel pained that I never commented on the Vietnamese soldier — that it never occurred to me. I just felt bad for my client who had grown up in a violent home; was drafted and felt strongly that the war was wrong; had taken part in this violence, and felt remorse. And he was a good man. I imagine my therapists also felt similarly about me: I was a good guy; grew up in violence; had done harm in a morally questionable war, and felt remorse for my actions.

I have this image of my own therapies — all three of them — that the woman I nearly killed was always in the waiting room; that I had always brought her along hoping for help to get her into the room with me, so I could fully face what I had done. And to understand that this man had a North Vietnamese soldier sitting out in my waiting room; someone who had followed him for over 30 years; and I didn’t know it, and couldn’t feel it, pains me. I don’t judge myself for not understanding and doing more, but I am pained.

The Harm We Did

Even as a veteran with my own trauma of having done harm, I couldn’t feel the humanity of the soldier he had harmed; just as I believe that my therapists couldn’t feel the humanity of the woman I had harmed; and just as the American public can’t feel the humanity of the Vietnamese people who we have so greatly harmed.

My therapists, like me, were born into a cultural numbness around war, and had lived in that numbness their entire lives. The numbness — that I believe was in their bodies and psyches — also meant that they couldn’t feel me; attune to me; and respond in an emotionally empathetic manner around this issue, like they had been able to do for every other trauma I had talked about.

And even though I had been in war, seen the harm, and taken part in it, when I came back, I came back to a culture that had nothing but numbness for the harm we had done to the Vietnamese people, a numbness that — no doubt at the time — I had been relieved to find.

Again, in hindsight, I can see that my experience in all of those therapies was that talking about what I did in Vietnam left me feeling more alone with my war experience, and even more disconnected from my caring therapists. I always believed that the feeling of separation and aloneness must be me, and caused by the trauma of what I did in that home in Vietnam. I didn’t know they had left.

I didn’t emotionally leave my client like my therapists’ left me since I was able to ask him to tell me what happened, and what he did. I had room to hear his horrible story of war because of my own experiences in war. But I couldn’t feel what my client couldn’t feel — and what I believe my therapists couldn’t feel, and what the American public can’t feel — and that is the humanity of the people we waged war upon, and the harm we did to them.

My client told me he felt very relieved to finally tell the story, and I am glad for that. I imagine that he’s happy and content with the therapy that he did with me. But I now know that something in him is still frozen, still numb, because the man he abused is still not human for him, and that comes at a cost.

In Part III, to be published over the next few days, Patrick describes how this work allowed him to undertake an extraordinary ritual of repair.

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