Special Series: Healing Collective War Trauma

A story 50 years in the making.

Patrick Dougherty and fellow U.S. Marines waiting for their last helicopter ride out of the combat zone at the end of their tour of Vietnam in 1971.

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Resonant World #51

I first heard of Patrick Dougherty when reading a brief account of his experiences in Thomas Hübl’s book Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds.

As a young man, Patrick had served as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam. Haunted by what he’d seen and done, he spent years in therapy, and ultimately became a psychologist himself. Patrick’s discovery of Thomas’ collective trauma work six years ago was a turning point on his lifelong quest to integrate his experiences, and support others.

In July, Patrick and I met on Zoom, and he shared an essay he’d written, which he’d hoped to publish in a psychotherapy magazine — but had yet to place. I immediately recognised it as a document of profound significance for the collective healing movement. I have never read such an intimate and precise account of how the collective trauma of war lives in societies, the impact on individuals, and how the kind of group process work that we’re both practicing can help to salve these deepest of wounds. Reading the essay for the first time, and again during editing, I was moved to tears.

In the essay, Patrick writes:

“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.”

The Woman in the Waiting Room

Since Patrick’s essay runs to almost 8,000 words, we agreed to publish it in three parts over the next few days (and will also create a shareable link to the entire version for ease of reference). The title is The Woman in the Waiting Room: What a Vietnam veteran-turned-psychologist’s 50-year healing journey teaches about collective trauma.¹

Though Patrick and I began speaking months before the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, now seems like a particularly fitting moment to publish a work that speaks so directly to the possibility of healing the traumas suffered by combatants in any war. As Patrick wrote to me in an email two weeks ago:

“This is such a good time for me to have this article come out as what is happening in Israel and Gaza has been so activating to me, as is true to so many. To have a little drop of holy water of the possibility of healing war trauma fall on the raging flames of war in the collective field feels so good to me.” 

In the essay, Patrick explores themes including:

• How war trauma lives in the body, outside our conscious awareness

• Moral injury and perpetration trauma (though without using those terms)

• How collective numbing absences those affected by the West’s wars

• The relationship between war trauma and collective traumas including structural racism, gender-based violence, patriarchal culture, and the climate crisis

• How therapy that does not recognise collective trauma can be counter-productive

• Reflections on the impacts of collective war trauma in Israel, Germany, Britain and Colombia, and apartheid’s legacy in South Africa

• Protocols for collective healing work

• How individuals can benefit from collective healing approaches

• The role of the “Citizen-Therapist”

• Acts of restoration made via non-ordinary states of consciousness

• What this work can open up, for individuals and communities

My intent in publishing the essay is to share a story of one man’s reckoning with what he did, in the hope it may illuminate the processes that can support the healing of collective trauma at every scale, and inspire others to join this work.

Ancestral Pattern

The Woman in the Waiting Room is written from the perspective of a former combatant — a U.S. Marine — which, given my own experiences in conflict zones, is perhaps partly why it resonated with me so deeply. At the same time, I am conscious that using ex-combatants as the “gate” into the collective trauma of war offers an inevitably partial perspective.

As a Reuters reporter, I was embedded with U.S. Marines as a journalist covering the invasion of Iraq, and also spent a few days with U.S. Marines in Afghanistan while working for the Financial Times. A decade ago, I returned to the UK to write Aftershock: Fighting War, Surviving Trauma, and Finding Peace, my book documenting the struggles of British military veterans and their families to heal from the trauma of war.

In more recent years, I’ve come to see the impulses that guided my early fascination with war, and later its psycho-spiritual impact, as part of a wider ancestral pattern, connected to my grandfather, who served as a British soldier at the end of the First World War, and my great-uncle Lionel, who was captured and shot in Italy by SS officers during World War Two. I believe that there is a connection between these imprints and my encounter with Patrick’s story.

Very different accounts of trauma, survival, permanent wounding and perhaps recovery could be written by the veterans of opposing forces, and civilians, who died in far greater numbers during the wars of the 20th century.

In Vietnam, the My Lai massacre of up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese, most of them women and children, conducted by U.S. soldiers on 16 March 1968 is only the best-known of America’s atrocities during the war, which cost the lives of an estimated two million civilians. The essay touches on a tiny fragment of the incalculable devastation wrought by the U.S. military in Southeast Asia — but every fragment matters.

I will send the next edition of Resonant World with Part I of The Woman in the Waiting Room on November 21, and Parts II and III in the days that follow. You can find out more about Patrick’s work as a licensed psychologist, writer, social activist and teacher at his website Moving Through It.

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I write Resonant World in my spare time from my job as an editor at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. Any support from readers is a huge boost, and helps to make my writing on collective and intergenerational trauma sustainable. Thank you!

1. Patrick’s original title had been: What Your Veteran Clients Wish You Knew. I proposed the alternative title because I wanted appeal to the widest possible audience, including — but not limited to — psychotherapists.