Like Plumbing
One day, collective healing will be considered a basic necessity.
Resonant World #17
It’s by now a familiar story from the annals of medicine.
In 1849, towards the end of London’s second cholera outbreak, the physician John Snow published a paper, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera. Contrary to the widespread belief that the disease was spread through “miasmas” hanging in the air, Snow argued that cholera was a waterborne infection. Nobody took much notice.
Snow appeared to vindicate his theory during the next outbreak, in 1854, when he demonstrated cases had clustered around a public water pump in Broad Street, Soho. He even managed to persuade authorities to remove the pump’s handle — though by that time the worst of the epidemic had passed.
It was only in 1866 — 17 years after Snow first published his paper — that the waterborne nature of the disease was finally accepted, after it had been found that London’s third and final cholera outbreak was concentrated almost entirely among people who drank from the East End’s Old Ford Reservoir.
“Psychic Sludge”
By then, the Victorians had found the stench wafting from the River Thames so intolerable that the government had commissioned the network of sewers that forms the backbone of the capital’s sanitation system to this day. The age of the cholera, typhus and scarlet fever epidemics that had caused enormous death and suffering in the first half of the 1800s drew to a close.
I like to imagine that future generations might look back on our present time as the moment when people began to develop a new understanding of collective trauma, its transmission mechanisms, and its impact — and how to respond.
Just as we can now no longer imagine a metropolis without modern sanitation, so we might come to wonder how we managed to cope before our culture had acknowledged the pervasiveness of the influence of individual, ancestral and collective trauma, and found ways to honour its many imprints. There may come a time when the work of building communities, large and small, to integrate these imprints may seem as essential, natural and normal to us as modern plumbing does today.
To meet the early pioneers of this work, we need look no further than guests at events such as the Collective Trauma Summit 2022. Likewise, I’ve experienced the power of integrating trauma in community first-hand over the past year via online and in-person retreats with Thomas Hübl’s Timeless Wisdom Training, which I wrote about in-depth for Resonant World #11. The practices, tools and processes for safely engaging with the “psychic sludge” we all carry from ancestral histories and traumatic experiences are increasingly available. And they can be the antidote to the epidemics of dissociation, emotional distress and social fragmentation that — in their own way — can cause as much harm as the waterborne infections of the past.
It’s all possible.
Welcome to Our New Membership Community
In the past few years, the term Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) — coined by the American psychologist Dr Elaine Aron — has begun to gain a foothold in mainstream culture. Research suggests that about 30 percent of the population would rank high enough on sensitivity scores to be considered HSPs. And if you’re reading a newsletter on collective trauma and healing, I’d say there’s an above average chance you might find the framework helpful for understanding your own experience.
My wife Dr Genevieve von Lob, who writes The HSP Revolution newsletter, and myself have just launched an online membership community to support HSPs to fully own the gifts that high sensitivity brings, and manage the challenges, with the support of a supportive network of others on the same journey. If this sounds like it might be for you, you can find out more here. We’d love to have you join us.
Climate and Agency
Here is a three-minute excerpt from a longer Dialogos I held with Jacob Kishere and Liam Kavanagh exploring the relationship between our inner lives and the climate crisis, and much more besides:
Thank you for reading Resonant World. I produce this newsletter outside of my job as an editor at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. Donations of any size are a huge morale boost, and help make producing this newsletter sustainable. I am in fact about to start a month-long caffeine fast ahead of a silent retreat in Germany. Needless to say, that doesn’t mean stop buying coffees. A huge thank-you to everyone who’s been supporting this work.
There’s so much more to this metaphor. Biblical metaphors or ‘living water’ and also, as Michelle Garner pointed out to me, tears themselves are a restoration of living water. Crying is plumbing?
As much as I respect people gathering around whatever common traits they share if that helps, some labels and categorizations come across as awkward and even counterproductive to me.
Highly sensitive people are defined in relation to what? (There's obviously an implicit comparative parameter engrained in this term).
In relation to a brutalized norm or standard?
Is brutality and brutalization the human standard? And then there's a bunch of 'us', poor little things that are so sensitive, and oh my (or hence?) so innocent? and even (hence?)... So foolish?... Bullocks.
I'd say we may agree that the world is fucked up. Humankind is (pretty?) fucked up. And we continue perpetuating the idea that a disconnected, brutalized, psychopathic and basically fucked up existential stand/mindset that has fucked up the planet is actually the standard for humanity. Hence, those who are connected, empathic and sensitive are set apart in a box for ''unsual' beings.
It certainly seems to be the case now. Likewise it certainly wasn't ALWAYS the case. And it certainly ISN'T the intrinsic standard for human species, let alone for the overall landscape of species.
Should we keep it up, in a few years time someone caring about someone else's head being chopped off while they walk around the park will be considered highly sensitive or even better: 'pathologically sensitive'.
We really are going/gone bananas, sorry.
As individuals and human species we become what we feed from a vast array of constant possibilities in a very wide bright-dark continuum (both Hobbes and Rousseau were right). We create processes and trends that crystallize in narratives about what we are and what we label as 'standard', that in turn normalize and perpetuate the very processes themselves: 'that's all there is', 'this is what we are'. Obviously not. We're self-destroying ourselves and destroying the overall planet. This is certainly NOT the standard for ANY species n this world. We wouldn't even be here -and we won't be if we continue perpetuating the idea that brutalization is human species' standard.
By reifying and essentializing time and space-bound constructs we perpetuate their false innate nature. What we choose to feed and nurture grows and once it gets into motion and takes hold in the field it can seem to be The (only) standard.
Creating affinity groups, practices and platforms that help each other and the collective navigate (and heal) a brutalized world sounds great, though.