Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral and Collective Trauma
In Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral and Collective Trauma, Richard Schwartz and Thomas Hubl coauthor an exploration of how trauma impacts not only individual bodies, but communities and societies. They reference Janina Fisher’s definition as a helpful starting point for understanding trauma: trauma is “an ongoing, felt lack of safety, that impacts us mentally and emotionally, originating from a broad range of harmful experiences” (p 36).
Beyond the clinical symptoms that the DSM-5 (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) outlines, such as intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, attention and mood disturbances, and avoidance patterns that occur for a specific, prolonged period of time, Schwartz and Hubl suggest the following as signals there may be trauma within us that needs attention and healing:
Long terms unhealthy patterns and reactions that cause problems in our lives
Chronic numbness, disconnection
Tension, hypervigilance, other physical symptoms
Feeling stuck, blocked and longing for more
The core of Releasing Our Burdens focuses on how the impact from collective traumas can be understand so people and communities can heal from racism, war, famine, genocide and other forms of systemic oppression. These major stressors, along with others lesser but still stressful patterns can travel through generations, showing up for individuals in their felt experience of the present.
What is Collective trauma?
A reflection of interdependence: we are not separate from one another, and are impacted by what happens to each other and around us. We are impacted by our families, societies and the era we were born into
A widespread traumatic event that can impact different people in different ways, within the collective (p 62)
Trauma impacts our community’s beliefs about itself, and about the world, just as it does for an individual with trauma. We tend to absorb these beliefs and feelings unconsciously.
If these ideas are resonating for you, Hubl and Schwartz suggest the following questions to support people in exploring how they were formed within their cultural group to hold differences, and how collective trauma may have been (or still be) present:
Racism, Oppression and Collective Trauma: Questions to Consider
Systemic oppression blocks healing and causes collective trauma (p 86). Consider your social location: think about how you are located socially (for example your race, gender, culture, your family’s experiences of loss or struggle in the last few generations); consider how trauma impacts you and your family and community because of that.
What is the status quo in my culture? What is seen as ideal? How are differences perceived?
How were differences framed in your family of origin? Threatening? Interesting? (p 87)
What strategies do you use to navigate differences? Do you avoid them? Do you emphasize similarities? (p 87)
An important emphasis throughout is that connecting to the pain, loss and trauma in our cultures, and to significant ancestors in our lineage, can also help us contact cultural gifts and meaningful expressions of values that we may have not been aware of.Healing from collective trauma involves accessing both the wounds and beliefs that come from trauma, that need to be healed, while also accessing the gifts, resilience and cultural practices that we may have never learned, or have learned but were taught by society to not value. Moreover, Schwartz and Hubl offer hope that the collective itself can begin to heal when individuals widen their field of vision and pursue their own healing in connection to their culture and society: “When one person in a family or community heals, there are ripples– the whole system begins to heal” ( 73).
Notes
Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral, and Collective Trauma by Richard Schwartz, PHD and Thomas Hubl, PHD