Six Keys To Healing Systems (with 16-minute video)
How our emerging understanding of collective trauma can help catalyze social change.
Calling all Men: Building on our Power to Relate course, myself and Daniel Simpson will be hosting monthly men’s groups, starting on Sunday, December 10. Check out the details here and drop me a line if you have any questions. Hope to see you there!
“This has the potential to really help humanity to flourish. That’s what we’re inviting you to be a part of. I fall in love with other human beings, and with humanity’s true light, when I do this work.” — Laura Caldéron de la Barca.
Resonant World #55
Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend the fifth birthday party for Larger Us, a visionary organisation working to overcome political polarisation founded by my friend Alex Evans.
Alex and his colleagues Claire Brown, Kate Pumphrey and others are currently working with a broad range of groups and movements across the UK to steward creative conversations around climate change — especially between people who might ordinarily not feel like they have much in common.
What I found so inspiring about the evening, held in a cozy pub not far from London’s King’s Cross, was the amount of energy that began to flow when the conversation turned to the possible synergies between this kind of social change work and the large-group practices for integrating individual, trans-generational and collective trauma that I’ve been studying under Thomas Hübl. (Resonant World #47).
I sometimes fear that I can come across as too evangelical about collective trauma integration work, but that evening seemed to have such a magical quality in terms of the new connections I made, and the new insights I gleaned, that the whole experience felt like crossing a threshold.
Healing Systems
I was also struck by a synchronicity: A few days earlier, Laura Caldéron de la Barca, a collective and inter-generational trauma therapist, facilitator and researcher at Terapia para México, who I’d got to know as a fellow co-host of the annual Collective Trauma Summit, had shared a draft of a forthcoming paper she has written with John Kania and Katherine Milligan, her colleagues at the Collective Change Lab .
For the past two years, Laura, John and Katherine have been interviewing dozens of change leaders around the world who’ve been integrating healing practices into their work. The result is a unique perspective on the many ways in which trauma blocks the capacity of movements and institutions to evolve, and the kinds of collective practices and protocols that can be used to start channeling the necessary updates.
They’ll be publishing an article on their findings in the new year. I almost wish the article had already been live — because it would have been the perfect resource for sharing with the amazing people I met at Larger Us. The paper is just what the global healing movement needs right now: A clear, concise and easily-digestible explanation of why this work is so relevant to anyone engaged in social change, systems transformation, or bridging political divides.
In the meantime, John, Katherine and Laura have launched a free webinar series in collaboration with the Wellbeing Project to share what they’ve learned, and to offer language, tools and practices to help people involved in systems change at all scales to take a more trauma-integrating approach.1
You can hear a 16-minute excerpt from a discussion we had about their findings by watching the video above or by clicking here.
Here are some of the key points that emerged from our discussion:
1. Going Beyond Incremental Progress
Unacknowledged, unresolved trauma is one of the main reasons why so many attempts to change systems deliver only incremental results — rather than the far-reaching transformation we’ll need to preserve a liveable planet. (Resonant World #4).
As John told me:
“It’s become clear to us over the last decade or so that when you actually bring together diverse stakeholders, to work on social issues, and you facilitate deep dialogue, and that could be in education, housing, the environment or other issues, you can in fact advance progress.
“We abide by the adage that if you want to change the system, ‘get the system in the room’. It actually does work.
“But we’ve also observed that many communities and collaboratives around the world seem stuck, and unable to get beyond incremental progress, at best.
“And we started to notice more and more that one of the major things that causes communities and collaboratives to get stuck was the presence of trauma in the room.
“So for instance, when people got into tense conversations, you could see individuals get triggered, which resulted in them shutting down, or getting aggressive. .
“And that’s what caused us to begin to investigate more deeply the role of trauma and the possibilities of healing in social change work.”
2. From Margins To Mainstream
In five to 10 years, the awareness that you can only undertake effective social change work by understanding — and working through — collective and inter-generational trauma — will become a widely-accepted, mainstream view.
As Katherine said:
“A few days ago, we were talking to the head of a well-known foundation, and he said if you don’t take trauma into account, you are not going to change the system. And he might be the exception today, but we strongly believe that in five to 10 years from now, this is going to be an accepted mainstream view.
“More and more social change leaders are coming around to this idea that what we see and feel and experience in our work to shift systems towards equity and justice — the resistance, the blockages, the defensiveness, the denial, the hyper-vigilance, the aggression and so on — these are direct results of individual, inter-generational and collective traumas that we we have not dealt with, haven’t integrated and healed from.
“And if we don’t see and understand that for what it is, and take it into account in our ways of relating, in our ways of working, then we are just not going to catalyse the kinds of profound shifts in our systems that are so urgently needed.”
3. Systems Are Relational
Since trauma occurs in relation, and systems are comprised of relationships, it naturally follows that we need to integrate trauma to have healthy systems.
As Laura put it:
“Healing relationships between people in a system can actually change the system. That’s why we feel that centring how to heal trauma in these kinds of environments feels like such an essential task for us to engage with.”
4. Leaders: Do Your Trauma Work
People in leadership positions can make a disproportionately positive impact throughout the system by integrating their own trauma, and working to understand how trauma impacts the system. The converse is also true — if these leaders don’t have this understanding, they can hold themselves, and their organisations, back.
Laura said:
“People who are in positions of leadership and privilege, need to actually take a look at their impact on that relational field…While they are at the head of this organisation, whatever they bring to this organisation from themselves, will have a much stronger ripple effect.”
5. Systems Most in Need of Healing Are the Most Resistant
The dynamics found in individual healing work scale to the systems level.
That can include the fact that it’s often the people (and systems) that are most in need of healing who are least likely to seek it out. That resistance can itself be an intelligent, self-protective mechanism to avoid the risk of further hurt.
Laura notes that it’s important not to make this resistance “wrong” — but to meet a system that is feeling resistant where it is. And if we notice ourselves making a system wrong, we need to ask ourselves — what is getting triggered in us? How is this similar to something in our own past?
As Laura put it:
“The more traumatised a system is, the more it will resist healing. Being able to look at this with compassion is important.”
6. Helping Oppressed Populations to Flourish
Oppressed people are often left with the burden of dealing with their own individual trauma. Understanding the role of systems in causing this kind of trauma can open new avenues for healing.
Laura explained:
“Really looking at it systemically returns part of the responsibility to systems. To me that is a fundamental shift in our understanding, because even if everyone who has trauma on this planet decided that they wanted to do therapy, we do not have the resources to take care of that. We really need to do this in another way: through collective healing…Giving voice to those who have lived experience is so important.”
Laura spoke about how her own trauma work had radically opened up the scope of the contribution she can now make:
“Seeing the power of the transformation that’s available, how much I’ve been able to bring in my work — not just the joy that has given me, but the difference I have been able to make for others. How much human potential is being held back because of this?
“This has the potential to really help humanity to flourish. That’s what we’re inviting you to be a part of. I fall in love with other human beings, and with humanity’s true light, when I do this work.”
To register for the webinar series, click here.
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!
Laura has already presented her webinar but a recording will be made available in due course.
This is so spot on, Matthew. In my own experience last winter in addressing the deep intergenerational trauma around the management of wild buffalo, which manifests as the exertion of state control outside the boundaries of Yellowstone NP, I was rather shocked to discover that in the process of successfully shifting the narrative towards Tribal Sovereignty and control, the most difficult dynamic to manage was from within the organization I was representing. As we were achieving our mission to wrest control over buffalo herd size and range from the livestock industry whose interest the state's represent, it unleashed unresolved organizational trauma and, unfortunately, the long-time head of that organization began acting out from what was clear to me too much cumulative trauma from 25 years of watching the animals he loves killed. This was quite a shock to me - not that the organization itself carried trauma, which I was well aware of, but that it could manifest in such a way as to undermine its mission right at the time we were ACHIEVING its mission! I did my best to manage it, but it was very messy and caused a lot of fallout internally. Fortunately, with the help of our mutual friend and Lakota healer Dallas, we kept the train on the track, and recently a summit of eleven Tribes met to form solidarity around the issues of co-stewardship, which the Park Service is committed to implementing. So in the end, good results came at the expense of bad feelings and broken relationships. So sad!
After reading Dean Yates' Line in the Sand (2023) - and following your own recent posts, Matthew - I've come to see that my passion (?) for social justice is a clear indication of the PTSD/MI I have within me from a sexual assault I suffered when aged 11 - and when the perpetrator was protected by the NSW (Australia) justice system (I'm thinking a cabal of magistrates/others existing to protect paedophiles - over 60 years ago). Thank-you for your posts.