What the world needs now more than ever
Trauma healing is part of the bigger picture
In the face of current catastrophic world events, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the question of how to respond.
What can we do to contribute to the way forwards?
It’s a complex question with many answers.
I loved
’s response to this question in a recent conversation with , where she suggested we each find what is our gift and make that our contribution. For one person, this may be political activism, for another, it may be tending a plot of land.As I pondered what gift I can offer in the face of current global events, I realised it is my work in the therapy room, supporting individuals to heal. I believe that each of us can contribute to the healing of humanity and the planet by doing our own inner healing work.
Specifically, I think that trauma healing is crucial to our world right now.
Let me explain.
Trauma sits at the heart of our fractured relationships with ourselves, and this is reflected in our fractured relationships with the world around us.
Almost no one is immune to the impact of trauma, whether this has been through direct life-shattering events, or the more subtle but insidious effects of dysregulated relational patterns and intergenerational trauma. As we trace back through our family lines, we find that many of our ancestors faced challenges like war, oppression, global crises, and natural disaster, as well as intra-familial trauma. The effects of these events roll out through multiple generations and live within our bodies, our DNA, and our nervous systems.1
Our bodies are primed to respond to trauma in a number of ways.
We often live in a heightened state of activation and hypervigilance, stuck in the fight/flight response in our nervous system. We develop a low threshold for detecting threat and for responding with attack or defence.
On an individual level, this creates interpersonal conflict, emotional reactivity, and a sense of unsafety. On a collective level, it leads to them-and-us thinking, rigidity, and division. It sets the scene for political friction and war, particularly if the people in positions of power have nervous systems that are easily overwhelmed and reactive.
Trauma can also generate a dissociative response, where we become numb to our emotional experience and disconnected from our body. We experience ourselves in a cut-off, disembodied way. This impacts our capacity for compassion towards the suffering of another. If we are numb to our own suffering, it becomes almost impossible to inhabit the experience of another in an empathic way.
On an individual level, we see this dissociative split manifest as a disconnect and neglect of our own bodies and our internal signals. On a collective level, it manifests as neglect and abuse of nature and the planet. We experience ourselves as cut off and separate, instead of part of an integrated whole.
Patterns of unresolved trauma tend to repeat themselves across generations. On an individual level, this is the passing on of patterns like hypervigilance, anxiety, anger, addiction, and numbing. On a global level, we see traumatised populations replaying their stories of threat and persecution, fusing the present with the past, such as what is unfolding in Israel and Gaza.
The work of trauma healing requires coming back into connection with ourselves and our wholeness, recognising our needs, and learning to soothe and settle our nervous system response. As we do this, we also reconnect with the wider world, nature, and humanity.
As we learn to regulate our nervous system, we return to a ventral vagal state,2 also known as our social engagement system. Our capacity for connection, for seeing another’s experience, expands. We recognise the other as a reflection of ourselves. We see our similarities and shared humanity.
As we build our capacity for self-care, we expand our capacity to care for the world around us. We gain access to our big-picture thinking, instead of the narrow tunnel-vision perspective we inhabit when we are activated.
As our nervous system settles, we influence the nervous systems around us, inviting them out of reactivity and into safety.
As we process and integrate our painful experiences, we begin to see the present more clearly, without fusing it with layers of the past.
As we reconnect to our cells, body, and breath we become aware that we are part of an interdependent system. That we are made of the same elements as the planet around us. The oxygen we inhale is the same oxygen trees and plants exhale.
As the threat response subsides, we recognise that our needs are simple and we do not need to hoard and consume in excessive or addictive ways, or pillage the planet’s resources.
To end the outer wars, we need more people who have ceased the internal war. Who have laid down the weapons they use to attack themselves, softened the voice of the internal critic, and extended warmth and compassion towards their own most troublesome and wounded parts. When we find a way to do this with ourselves, it naturally and organically begins to flow out into our interactions with others.
When we can fully accept the disowned and disenfranchised parts of our internal world, we find a template for how to accept and welcome the disenfranchised parts of our external world.
We can operate from a less guarded heart. We can lead with care instead of fear.
In this way, the work we do in the therapy room extends beyond the personal and is deeply political.
Of course, trauma is continuing to unfold in our world right now, so there is no end point to this healing, but I believe one of the greatest gifts we can bring to the collective in these times is a regulated nervous system.
A regulated nervous system doesn’t mean we remain calm in the face of horrors that are unfolding. There are plenty of genuine reasons to feel anxious or angry right now. It means we respond in a proportionate and thoughtful way to what the situation demands.
People with regulated nervous systems are not predisposed towards bullying or violence. These behaviours come from an overactivated threat response.
People with regulated nervous systems are not predisposed to be cut off from the suffering of others. This comes from the disconnect of a dissociative response.
Imagine a world in which those in power led from a calm and regulated nervous system.
Of course, peaceful people don’t necessarily seek power (seeking power is often a defence against the traumatic wound of feeling powerless), but I can’t help but wonder what peaceful power would look like. We see glimpses of it now and again.
Some days I question how my work with individuals helps our troubled planet on a global scale. Our individual healing is clearly not the whole solution. We need change on collective, global, and systemic levels. But the world is also made up of individuals, families, and communities, and the healing work each of us do sends ripples out into the world around us and future generations.
Trauma healing (and healthcare in general) is currently often a middle-class, privileged, and scarce resource. We need to look at how to make this support more accessible to more of the population.
Trauma can make us driven, materialistic, individualistic, antagonistic. Trauma can leave us frozen, defeated, collapsed, and exhausted. Trauma healing offers us a map back to care, cooperation, compassion, connection, and curiosity. It’s a no-brainer in our current world that we need more of these qualities.
Our external world and our internal world are reflections of each other.
Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in response to this over in the comments. How do you think about responding to these complex times?
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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only, and is not a substitute for mental health treatment or advice.
I agree it's not the whole solution, but it's such a huge part of it though. Imagine if everyone did the work on their inner selves, imagine what a world that would be. I think it's a powerful message, because we might feel hopeless at times and as if the individual can't do much, but you've given us something that every single person can do.
Thank you Vicki, I have been pondering this for some time myself; feeling somewhat swamped and silenced by the many conflicted voices out there, it can feel like I have nothing valuable to say or contribute in terms of making a difference to situation of collective crises and trauma we are in. I tend to disregard the constant inner work required to keep my nervous system in ventral vagal state so that I can be in relationship without reacting defensively, and my outer work as a therapist, helping others to do the same. It can feel ineffective and insufficient in the midst of the chaos and crises and yet, I agree, our state of being is an essential part and creates the foundation for global change. I appreciate the reminder!