Why I'm Training as a Collective Trauma Integration Facilitator
Figuring out the reasons for a decision long since made.
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I’ll be giving a talk on Resonant World’s mission to build a new media system to heal our collective trauma at Kairos in London on the evening Thursday April 11. Tickets here.
Resonant World #79
How will it feel to stand in front of a room full of people and spend days leading them through an encounter with the legacy of generations of unresolved trauma?
Wouldn’t it be better to leave that past undisturbed?
Could such a process be harmful?
Why go there?
I’ve just started a year-long training with Thomas Hübl and team to learn to facilitate group processes to integrate collective and inter-generational trauma. (This builds on the two-year Timeless Wisdom Training I completed in December).
This work obviously isn’t something to rush into, and there’s a long way to go before I’ll be leading such groups myself. Nevertheless, I aim to gradually develop the competencies needed to assist experienced teams to work with collective and ancestral trauma, via organisations such as the Pocket Project, and related initiatives.
Evolving Answers
Stepping into this role might seem like a radical departure from my career as a journalist.
For more years than I care to remember, it’s been my job to report on what’s going wrong with the world — not intervene to tackle our malaise at the root.
But as soon as I read Thomas Hübl’s book Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds three years ago, I’ve felt called to support collective trauma work in any way I can, including by training as a facilitator.
That’s put me in the paradoxical position of knowing what I need to do without yet having arrived at a complete explanation of why.
Since I’ll be continuing with online training over the next few days, and with my answers still evolving, I thought I’d share an initial attempt to articulate my deep motivation for this work.
As ever, I love to hear any resonance in the comments.
Love of the Process
At the most basic level, and challenging as the experience can often be, there are few places I’d rather spend time than group spaces working with trauma.
I don’t want to dismiss what I learned about the workings of the world during my years of reporting overseas. But what I’ve since come to understand about the human condition in online and in-person retreats exploring how collective and inter-generational trauma shapes our present has given me a new depth of perspective on what ails us as a species. I feel I have a much clearer idea of what effective responses look like, and how I can better orient myself to be of service at this time. And the work — for all the darkness we confront — can be by turns humorous, playful and joyful. (Resonant World#63:What is Healing?)
My own Integration
As I’ve become more conscious of how collective and ancestral trauma lives in me, I’ve felt more committed to playing my part in supporting other people to resolve these burdens. My personal process, and the process of the group, are not separate. As a facilitator, I would ostensibly be there to serve others — but I know that I will derive deep benefits from the work myself. (Resonant World#10: How Collective Healing Works).
Shifting our Trajectory
Technical or policy fixes won’t patch our escalating crises. Something needs to change on the inside, before we can shift course. I believe that collective trauma work offers a clear process for directly supporting large numbers of people (and indirectly many more) to transcend the kinds of unconscious patterns that keep us collectively stuck, and open pathways to new possibilities that would otherwise remain closed.
Serving the Climate Movement
I’ve been to various convenings of organisations working on the climate and nature crises during the past few years. The facilitation has been decent enough by business-as-usual standards — but that’s not good enough, given the gravity of the situation. These gatherings would have been so much more potent had we grafted on the kinds of cutting-edge facilitation that we practice in collective trauma work. I wrote some initial thoughts about what the climate movement can learn from collective trauma healing for DeSmog, but there’s almost infinite possibilities for cross-fertilisation.
Serving Men and Women
My friend Jacob Kishere and I will soon be offering men’s groups under the working title of the Resonant Man Project. Men’s work serves men directly, but it also serves the women the men interact with. The skills I’m learning will make me better able to serve both.
Breaking Through With my Writing
For whatever reason, I find myself in the fairly unusual position of being a journalist who’s training in collective trauma work — a field with a high proportion of therapists, coaches, organisational consultants and other people experienced in working with individuals or groups, but with no media background. Resonant World has of course been born out of this process, and I’m hoping that as I go deeper in my understanding, I can serve the global healing movement with writing of ever greater precision, depth and impact.
Global Community
I’ve written about my process around quitting Reuters, the global news organisation with 2,500 journalists, to work at DeSmog, where we have approximately one percent of that number of contributors. Though I’ll always feel enormous affection for my former colleagues at Reuters, joining the collective trauma movement has plugged me into a global community of many thousands of practitioners from an incredible diversity of backgrounds and professional experiences. I feel I have found a new international, institutional home — built on a foundation of care, integrity and respect I feel I can trust far more than the toxic company culture I left behind.
Developing Subtle Competencies
I took some of my most significant first steps towards learning how to work with the subtle realms courtesy of the many amazing tools contained in Lisa Schwarz’s Comprehensive Resource Model of trauma therapy, which I encountered while researching my book Aftershock on military veterans seeking new ways to recover from post-traumatic stress. The more recent work I’ve been doing has helped me refine those capacities further, developing my ability to sense into a group field, as well as attune to processes within myself and others more precisely. I can’t wait to hone these skills further.
Transcending the Culture Wars
This wasn’t something I’d expected from the training, but I feel better equipped to engage across the spectrum of issues generally lumped under the heading of “woke.” That’s not because I’ve bought into any ideology or set of culturally-sanctioned beliefs. In fact, it’s the opposite: I’ve seen the veils masking people’s personal experiences of oppression pulled back enough times during the training to feel I have deepened my understanding of my own relationship to these processes, at an experiential — not intellectual — level. I’m particularly committed to developing my personal engagement with racism, slavery and colonialism in this regard, and feel very grateful to friends in the training who’ve supported me in my first tentative steps in this direction.
An AI-Proof Job?
Facilitating collective trauma integration will always be a quintessentially human task.
Aligning with Something Bigger
What I love about trauma work is the underlying assumption that Life wants to heal, and by serving this process, we’re aligning with this greater intelligence. This principle feels exuberantly alive to me, and calling for endless exploration.
Anchoring Mystical Principles
In this work, what might sound like rarefied mystical principles meet the mud, chaos and pain of the real world. This fusion of embodied spirituality and action to alleviate suffering resonates deeply in me, and I hope will one day show me a way to integrate my journalistic past with my present studies to create something new.
A 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. 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!
Integration is the core of healing trauma at multiple levels of scale. What I am learning as a participant in the Irish Pocket Project, focussed on the Great Starvation that more than halved the small island's population, is that such traumas are isomorphic at various levels of scale. If abandonment in early infancy is a core issue then abandonment of care of the vulnerable is even more disruptive at national and governmental levels. The lack of response to what is happening with the brutal killing of children, women and babies, in Gaza, is resonating with most of us. Only those unable or unwilling to access their deepest embodied feelings, are unmoved.
Matthew, all power to your bow, amigo. Where you offer that it may seem a strange step for a journalist, it seems to me a natural and more nuanced progression. The throwaway descriptor of the purpose of journalism is often "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable". This seems pretty central to working with the integration of trauma. If we are to understand trauma as the interruption or damming (that word can be spelled in a number of ways in this context) of natural, inherent, embodied processes, then assisting ourselves and each other to return to the sense of flow is going to be a relief to some, and a challenge to others. Imagine what a trauma-informed journalism would look like? Again, here is another example of where mainstream psychology fails to offer insight into how the dominant paradigm's perception of Self perpetuates trauma. I would suggest that much of this arises from the paradigm's inability to consider and include anything greater than its own anthropocentric, hierarchical, Modernist (string of adjectives here) interests when it comes to addressing Need. Where one is comfortable within this distorted sphere (the Bates Motel!), one is inevitably going to feel challenged. The longer these psychospiritual dimensions are deemed to be purely the purlieu of either religion or personal interest and expression (eccentricity?), they get left out of a conversation that could otherwise lead towards relationships lived in wonder, curiosity, spontaneity, and presence - or, as one might say, in the moment. So, again, good for you.