How To Heal Collective War Trauma, Part I

A Vietnam veteran-turned-psychologist’s 50-year journey to make peace with the past.

Nov 21, 2023

Patrick Dougherty serving with the U.S. Marines in Vietnam.

This is Part I of a three-part essay by Patrick Dougherty. Parts II and III will be published later this week. To read a brief introduction, please visit (Resonant World #51).1 To read more about Patrick’s work, please visit his website Moving Through It.

Resonant World #52

By Patrick Dougherty

I couldn’t talk about my war trauma until 1976, which was five years after I left Vietnam. This was four years before post-traumatic stress disorder was even formally recognized as a medical diagnosis. In 1979, I went to the Veterans Affairs for help. They told me I didn’t have enough war experience to warrant any support from them; that all my trauma actually came from my traumatic childhood, and had nothing to do with Vietnam. This is what they told just about every veteran back then.

Over the ensuing decades, I talked about my experience in several therapies, increasingly focused on one specific incident that didn’t seem to change: It always had the same charge, and the same anguished outcome.

The incident was that I’d nearly killed a mother and her infant while in a rage after barging into her home while searching a village. I brought this up in three long therapies: two with Jungian therapists; and one with a psychoanalyst, whom I saw four times a week.

With hindsight I can see that none of those therapies helped me feel less guilt, remorse, or anguish. They actually all left me feeling even worse — and more alone. It felt like I was doing something wrong, and that I couldn’t or wouldn’t let the incident go. My heart aches as I write this, remembering how I carried this pain in my heart and body for decades longer than I now know was necessary. I was ready to heal — in some ways pleading for help — but the help wasn’t available. I just learned to live with it, like so many veterans do.

And I didn’t even know how much this wound, this trauma, had stayed with me until 2017, when I started a year-long training focused on inter-generational and collective trauma with the spiritual teacher and group facilitator Thomas Hübl. I had sought out Hübl’s work to better understand how I carried the collective trauma of racism as a white liberal activist, so I could better support myself and other white people to face this trauma, and stop being part of the problem.

However, not a word about racism left my mouth during the initial five-day training in Israel, nor over the next year of Zoom meetings, because the work activated my war trauma from Vietnam. It was stunning to me to recognise how much of the trauma of war was still living in my body.

There were 150 of us in the room the first day of our training, from 39 countries: This was no American-centric group, and most participants were not subject to the filters, denial, and numbing affecting almost all of my friends, colleagues and clients back home — without our even knowing.

To this group, I was just another one of those men, those soldiers, those perpetrators part of an army that had invaded a much smaller country, and did many horrible things to its people, its social and political structures, and its natural environment. They saw us as having gone home as soon as we’d wanted to, leaving Vietnam with massive trauma, and never looking back.

And I couldn’t argue with their bigger picture assessment of what I’d taken part in. It left me feeling emotionally naked; stripped of all numbness, and the rationalizing and excuses provided by my nation. Nevertheless, I sensed that the other participants were glad I was there, glad that one of the men who’d taken part in doing such great harm was facing what he and his country had done.

Those initial five days, and the next year, were quite a roller-coaster for me as I faced many stark truths about my being a Marine in Vietnam, and having lived with my share of America’s collective numbness for nearly half a century. As all of us, from 39 countries, explored the personal, inter-generational and collective trauma we carried in our bodies, it became abundantly clear that most of us carried the trauma of war.

War as Collective Trauma

Five years ago, the term “collective trauma” was foreign to most of us, but today we know it all too well. From the pandemic and the protests after the murder of George Floyd, to the political violence and polarization gripping our county and many other places around the world, we’ve all been living with it, and in it.

And I would suspect that most of us who are therapists would admit that we didn’t do too well helping our clients with the impact of these collective traumas since we weren’t doing too well ourselves — often not even able to fully feel and acknowledge their impact on us.

Nevertheless, not only are we slowly learning how to work with current collective traumas, we’re also beginning to learn how to deal with past collective traumas that we’re still living with — mostly unconsciously. And we’re now appreciating the huge consequences of our turning away from what needed healing: from the collective traumas of racism; bigotry of all kinds; sexism and male violence against women, to the patriarchal and oppressive architecture of our cultures, that harms so many people.

And in the United States, one collective trauma that haunts us is barely recognised, because the victims are usually far away; and we turn away from those who took part in it; or send them off to get help behind closed doors, and that is the collective trauma of war.

War is a collective trauma that exists in possibly every culture in the world. Here in the U.S., most people have numbed themselves to our shared responsibility for what we as a country did in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — and those are just some of the wars during my lifetime. Trauma, of course, doesn’t care if you’re the good guys or the bad guys; the attacker or attacked; the victor or vanquished. It shows up on each side of the brutal reality of war, in varying degrees, and for various reasons.

I was born a few years after the end of World War Two and was raised with the stories of our heroic victory over the Japanese and Germans, and the moral certainty that we had done right. The three wars I mentioned have not left us clearly the heroic victor, nor clearly in the right. More than 58,000 of our soldiers were killed in Vietnam. And we killed more than two million Vietnamese. But we have never collectively faced the fact of what we did there, and that we were defeated and quit the war.

Throw in the two recent wars and the trillions of dollars spent; the immense trauma that our service members have carried home; the many that died, and the many, many more Iraqis and Afghans who died, and those who carry trauma; and the destruction of their cities, homes and countryside, without our having any clear sense that we did the right thing. This also weighs heavily and unconsciously on our national psyche.

Collective Trauma Needs a Collective Response

Immediately after the training ended many of us continued to work with Hübl and our training group. We also held many peer-led groups, and took part in regular groups of three known as “triads” — immersing ourselves in a culture of exploring, through group work, how inter-generational and collective trauma lived in us, and impacted our lives. It was very exciting to begin to find ways to bring this work into our personal and professional lives, and communities, as we helped to create tools and develop protocols for this type of healing.

I processed many aspects of my war experience in these groups, but the specific issue of my nearly killing the Vietnamese woman and her infant wasn’t one of them. It was a couple of years later, when it finally came forward in my therapist consultation group made up of fellow Hübl students, that I finally understood why this trauma was still stuck in me.

The major method for exploring this terrain happens through group processes. What was clear to me then — and even more so now — is that collective trauma is too big for any one of us to face or manage alone. “I can’t, but we can,” is the axiom I draw on whenever I find myself in the realm of collective trauma, whether my own or others’.

There are some essential protocols that make these groups work. First, there is a shared intention to commit to the well-being of the group, as well as yourself, which is a subtle but profound shift in how most of us have ever experienced group work. This helps the group stay more regulated, because everyone feels a shared responsibility for the well-being and the emotional regulation of the group, instead of relying on a leader to hold the group together. This means everyone needs to make sure they stay regulated and don’t go too far into their individual or collective trauma and lose connection with the group.

Trauma is often compared to a process of fragmentation: An experience is so overwhelming to the nervous system and mind that an individual cannot hold a coherent somatic or visual memory of what happened. It’s as if the experience has shattered into many fragments. Then in therapy, those fragments can slowly come back together as a specific, or felt, memory. That process allows us to develop a coherent narrative of the traumatic memory — an essential step towards healing.

This metaphor holds true for collective trauma. When we collectively experience something overwhelming, such as war (even when we are warring in a faraway country); the murder of George Floyd; the pandemic; the climate crisis and so on, none of us individually can process it in real time, because it’s so overwhelming that it fragments in us, and in the collective consciousness. This is also true for past unprocessed collective traumas: They fragmented in the collective realm when they occurred, and we all still carry the fragments. Both past and present collective traumas affect our body and mind, but they can neither be fully felt, nor processed, by any individual alone.

In our groups, every member has agreed to process, as best they can, what comes up in their body when approaching the specific collective trauma that we’re working with. War; oppression of marginalized people; male violence to women, and many other collective traumas have affected people all over the world, and we all carry similar but culturally specific fragments of those traumas.

When each group member begins to experience emotional activation in relation to these collective traumas, they are not only processing their own trauma history, they are also processing a fragment of the collective trauma. And as this process deepens for each individual, the more the group can establish a coherent, shared sense of awareness of the collective wound.

What is fascinating to me in this work is that regardless of how remote the collective issue may seem to you, if you’re getting activated then it’s touching something personal in you, something that you carry in your body, something that is part of your human experience.

For instance, the murder of George Floyd — a mile from my home here in Minneapolis — was very disturbing, overwhelming and traumatic to me for many reasons. But it also had a huge impact on many of my friends and colleagues — not just in the U.S., but around the world. I joined several small groups in the days and weeks after the murder, and listened to many of my friends share what was stirring in them.

We named what was happening in our bodies; what images or memories were coming to us, and let ourselves feel whatever level of emotion we were willing to experience while in the presence of others. This could be as simple as just being present to the release of grief, anger, fear and so on. It could also be sharing feelings of being frozen, numb or dissociated.

Everyone had a chance to share, but was limited to between five and 15 minutes — depending on the group, the material, and their level of experience in this kind of work. The people listening are asked to be totally somatically and empathetically present, but to give no feedback. There is also an explicit commitment by everyone that if you get severely triggered it’s your responsibility to get support for that outside of the group process.

I’ve often marveled at how when all the intentions and agreements are in place, people feel quite free to share with great depth and vulnerability, knowing that others will be compassionately present without giving any commentary or feedback, although sometimes there are brief expressions of care and love.

Many things came up for people: their own experiences of witnessing violent injustices to others; maybe doing nothing in response, or in some way taking part in inflicting the injustice. Some talked about being on the receiving end themselves as members of marginalized groups. Sometimes they talked about what happened to their ancestors: traumas that happened generations ago, that they could identify in their body. Many felt a deep fear of violence whose origins they couldn’t identify, yet they felt its presence. Others spoke of numbness or shame.

What had felt very personal to me here in Minneapolis had touched unprocessed personal and collective trauma around the world. Every time someone shared their experience in these groups, it made it easier for me to feel and process the waves of traumatic stress in me, and helped me be more present to my loved ones, my clients and community.

In Parts II and III, to be published over the next few days, Patrick describes how these processes allowed him to finally understand how the collective trauma of war lived in him, and in society, and to begin an extraordinary ritual of repair.

Resonant World