Sand in the Engine

Visionary initiatives will only go so far unless they can integrate collective trauma.

Mandala at Medicine Festival in southern England last month

Resonant World #4

It’s a familiar pattern in the lives of visionaries, culture-builders and rebels.

A leader or group of founders receives an inspired idea for a movement, community, business or institution.

This seed intention contains real truth and power. People channel their energy and support into the emerging structure, and it begins to take on a life of its own.

But then progress stalls. Innovation hits a plateau. The founders retreat and pour their evolutionary impulse into something new. The full potential of the original vision is never fully realised.

The reason? The enterprise has hit the invisible buffers of collective trauma.

“Growth stops”

That was the dynamic described last week by Kosha Joubert, a former chief executive of the Global Ecovillage Network, who has spent 30 years living, teaching and working in intentional communities around the world. (Watch her Tedx Talk on Ecovillages here).

Now chief executive of the Pocket Project, a nonprofit working to integrate individual, ancestral and collective trauma, Kosha was speaking during an online preview of the Collective Trauma Summit 2022, where we’re serving as co-hosts.

Kosha Joubert speaks with Thomas Hübl during last week’s live preview of the Collective Trauma Summit 2022

Thomas Hübl, the summit convener, had been describing how collective trauma could be the “sand in the engine” hindering many promising new projects — and Kosha had immediately recognised this dynamic from communities she had known.

As Kosha recalled: (you can see the clip at 54:00):

“These are communities that have a big psychological tool set for processing stuff…But I could see that there is a limit where it feels as if they reach a ceiling…And then the founders and key people start moving to the edge of the community to continue their journey of innovation elsewhere…The communities keep attracting loads of visitors that are deeply inspired by what happens there, but it’s as if their growth stops…And I have come to realise that this is where we hit the edges of collective trauma.”

Though Kosha was speaking of her experience in intentional communities, I suspect similar dynamics play out in all kinds of ground-breaking organisations and projects. I found the connections she drew between these kinds of organisational limits and collective trauma so intriguing that I felt inspired to explore her observations further — and relate them to my own experiences in the corporate media.

Argyle Street

For a long time, I looked at trauma purely through the lens of its impact on individuals. What did childhood neglect, abuse or psychological injury in later life do to a person’s mind, body and brain? (Or, as family support counsellor Felicity Evans put it an email to Resonant World last week: “How does the ‘good child’ become the ‘traumatised child’ and then the ‘addicted child?’”)

Kosha was taking a wider view. She had observed that a failure to reckon with the effects of collective trauma affecting whole groups, communities or cultures was often the main reason that otherwise promising new forms of social organisation foundered. Here was the unseen, unobserved and unacknowledged culprit derailing so many attempts to build a better world.

Collective trauma can of course present in many different forms — from the legacy of war, colonialism, slavery, genocide and political oppression to the impact of economic inequity and environmental injustice, to name some major categories.

Despite all this variation, I was left wondering whether the mechanism might be similar in each case: The accumulated legacy of generations of unresolved trauma intrudes into the present — shaping our assumptions about how reality works; influencing how we respond to challenges, and limiting our beliefs about what’s possible. Since the traumatic material has been buried so deeply, this process may operate largely outside our conscious awareness. We’re trapped in repetitive cycles, but we don’t even know it.

We’ve probably all been in situations, perhaps when disagreements arise, where repressed trauma reactions crack through the usually calm surface, and super-charge internal conflicts. It takes great skill to support a group to integrate these energies without fragmenting, and that’s why nurturing the next generation of facilitators to help heal collective trauma is such an urgent task.

More commonly, the “edges” of collective trauma — to use Kosha’s phrase — may be much harder to perceive. But if this trauma residue isn’t brought into the daylight, and alchemised via healthy relationship, then these “edges” may turn into barriers that prevent a community or project evolving any further. Since we’re obviously going to need new forms of social organisation to navigate the times ahead, this is more than an academic discussion.

I’ve never lived in an intentional community, though I’ve visited a few long-established ones, including Findhorn in Scotland, and the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center in Sonoma County, California). Incidentally, my wife Genevieve spent the first two years of her life in a comparatively short-lived community — the Argyle Street Alternative Republic in the eastern English city of Norwich, then the largest squat in Europe, which sadly collapsed after six years in 1985.

Though it might be a fruitful experiment, I doubt I’ll find time to track down surviving members of the Republic to find out whether they felt their community had hit “the edge” of collective trauma. Nevertheless, even considering the question got me thinking: What kinds of collective trauma derail group endeavours? How do the symptoms arise? And what would be the best way to work through them?

I’d have loved to have heard more from Kosha about her own experiences — and maybe we’ll have time for that discussion in a future edition of Resonant World. In the meantime, her comments reminded me of a very different kind of organisation that I do know quite well: big, global news media.

Occidental Arts & Ecology Center in 2019

“Trauma agreements”

In one of the news organisations I worked in, signs that many staff felt under-appreciated surfaced in almost every company-wide meeting. People were committed to their jobs, and valued their relationships with colleagues. But there was a widespread sense that any approval from management was at best fleeting and conditional, and many people worried whether they were measuring up.

I believe that this collective sense of being under-valued served as a brake on innovation. It encouraged journalists and editors to play ultra-safe, rather than test creative edges. And I still like to imagine that a heartfelt effort to address this epidemic could foster the kind of internal coherence that would allow the organisation to truly thrive.

But is it correct to see that lack of self-worth as a symptom of collective trauma?

I’d say so — and would be interested to hear what others think in the comments.

Lacking self-worth is not our natural condition. It’s a feeling we acquire. It may start when we don’t receive the kind of attachment we need as infants, perhaps because our own parents were too stressed, or simply didn’t inherit a healthy attachment template from their own parents (this can go back through generations).

Our Victorian-style school systems, and the competitive nature of the job market, only reinforce these patterns. Our self-worth becomes dependent on a notion of performance that can only be validated by authorities outside of ourselves.

This lack of self-worth seems normal — because everyone takes part in this unconscious “trauma agreement,” to use Hübl’s phrase. But a lack of self-worth is actually a sign that we have become cut off from our true nature — which is already and eternally “enough.”

Though the following example, shared by Susan in the comments to the first edition of Resonant World, refers to a very specific cultural context, I was struck by her description of the way a lack of self-worth can be a collective trauma symptom:

“I noticed collective trauma when, in my thirties, I was trying to stop blaming my parents for destroying my self-esteem. I had a conversation with a woman who had gone to Ireland to work for a priest in a small town. Her hair-raising description of the hatred and blame she encountered “resonated” with me in a big way. It was the same type of atmosphere I was raised in, and my parents before me. Something to do with the Catholic Church’s ideas about sin, and the collective self-esteem problems of a hated and oppressed social group, the Irish. Everyone was always stewing in negativity, on the inside.”

That sounds like a particularly potent example, but even subtler versions of collective trauma can leave us feeling there’s something innately lacking in us, and that we need to work hard to prove ourselves — while never quite shaking off the feeling that we’re not quite good enough.

Of course, intentional communities are more likely to start from this kind of understanding — and seek to find ways to transcend such “trauma agreements” from the get-go. But the story may be different in corporations. A cynic might argue that for profit-driven companies, a workforce that has internalised a lack of self-worth is actually a bonus. Staff become more pliant and liable to put up with treatment that people with greater self-worth would simply deem unacceptable. Though it traps the organisation at a certain level of development, a systemic lack of self-worth among employees may actually be integral to the smooth functioning of the system.

I believe that successful organisations in the future will recognise this pathology and draw on the kinds of processes developed in collective trauma work to support staff to explore how this lack of self-worth shows up in their own lives, recognise that it’s a collective problem, and develop healthier ways of relating to themselves. (See for example the work of Laura Storm and Giles Hutchins as described in their book Regenerative Leadership).

We have the tools. Do we dare use them?

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