Healing Collective Trauma


Book Description

A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding and Healing Shared Trauma What can you do when you carry scars not on your body, but within your soul? And what happens when those spiritual wounds exist not just in you, but in everyone in your family, community, and even beyond? Spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl has spent years investigating why it is that old and seemingly disconnected traumas can seed their way through communities and across generations. His work culminates in Healing Collective Trauma, a new perspective on trauma that addresses both its visible effects and its most hidden roots. Thomas combines deep knowledge of mystical traditions with the latest scientific research. “In this way,” writes Thomas, “we are weaving a double helix between ancient wisdom and contemporary understanding.” Thomas details the Collective Trauma Integration Process, a group-based modality for evoking and eventually dissolving stuck traumatic energies. Providing structured practices for both students and group facilitators, Healing Collective Trauma is intended to build a practical tool kit for integration. Here, you will learn: • The innumerable ways trauma shapes our world—from identity and health to economy, geopolitics, and the state of the environment • The concept of “trauma loyalty”—unconscious group bonds based in a pain narrative • How the climate crisis is both a manifestation of humanity’s collective trauma and an opportunity to heal • “Retrocausality”—how the power of presence can reshape the past and make new futures possible Including essays contributed by experts such as Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Otto Scharmer, Dr. Christina Bethell, and Ken Wilber, Healing Collective Trauma offers not just an advanced look at community trauma but also a hopeful glimpse of the future. As Thomas declares, “Together, I believe we can and must heal the ‘soul wound’ that marks us all. In so doing, we will awaken to the luminous possibility and profound potential of our true, mutual nature as humankind.”




Collective Trauma, Collective Healing


Book Description

Collective Trauma, Collective Healing is a guide for mental health professionals working in response to large-scale political violence or natural disaster. It provides a framework that practitioners can use to develop their own community-based, collective approach to treating trauma and providing clinical services that are both culturally and contextually appropriate. The classic edition includes a new preface from the author reflecting on changes to the field and the world since the book’s initial publication. The book draws on experience working with survivors, their families, and communities in the Holocaust, post-war Kosovo, the Liberian civil wars, and post-9/11 Lower Manhattan. It tracks the development of community programs and projects based on a family and community resilience approach, including those that enhance the collective capacities for narration and public conversation. Clinicians and community practitioners will come away from Collective Trauma, Collective Healing with a solid understanding of new roles they may play in disasters—roles that encourage them to recognize and enhance the resilience and coping skills in families, organizations, and the community at large.




Healing Collective Trauma Using Sociodrama and Drama Therapy


Book Description

"Psychodrama and Socio-drama are new concepts of therapy to resolve mental health issues in Bangladesh. Mental health professionals in Bangladesh who had been able to absorb the technique created by integrating socio-psychodrama have been greatly benefited from this intervention in the healing process... " --Mehtab Khanam, PhD Professor of Psychology Dhaka University Bangladesh When large groups of people become victims of political upheavals, social crises, and natural disasters, it is often challenging to allocate appropriate resources to deal with the stress that ensues. Of the methods employed to address post-traumatic stress syndrome and collective trauma, sociodrama and drama therapy have had a long-standing history of success. Group therapists and counselors will find this book to be an indispensable resource when counseling patients from trauma-stricken groups. This book travels across geographic and cultural boundaries, examining group crises and collective trauma in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the U.S. The contributing authors, many of whom are pioneers in the field, offer cost-effective, small- and large-group approaches for people suffering from PTSD, socio-political oppression, and other social problems. The book extends the principles and practices of psychodrama and sociodrama to include music, painting, dance, collage, and ritual. In essence, this innovative book illustrates the proven effectiveness of sociodrama and drama therapy. Key topics: The difficulties of developing trust in victimized or opposing groups Initiating warm-ups and therapeutic strategies with both groups and individuals "Narradrama" with marginalized groups Using anti-oppression models to inform psychodrama Re-reconciling culture-based conflicts using "culture-drama"




The Little Book of Trauma Healing: Revised & Updated


Book Description

How do we address trauma, interrupt cycles of violence, and build resilience in a turbulent world of endless wars, nationalism, othering, climate crisis, racism, pandemics, and terrorism? This fully updated edition offers a practical framework, processes, and useful insights. The traumas of our world go beyond individual or one-time events. They are collective, ongoing, and the legacy of historical injustices. How do we stay awake rather than numbing or responding violently? How do we cultivate individual and collective courage and resilience? This Little Book provides a justice-and-conflict-informed community approach to addressing trauma in nonviolent, neurobiologically sound ways that interrupt cycles of violence and meet basic human needs for justice and security. In these pages, you’ll find the core framework and tools of the internationally acclaimed Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program developed at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding in response to 9/11. A startlingly helpful approach.




Trauma as Medicine


Book Description

In Trauma as Medicine, Sarah Salter Kelly shares her experience of her mother’s kidnapping and brutal homicide as an inspiring example of how to distill trauma into medicine on a personal level. Chapter by chapter, she invites the reader to take their own journey of healing. Sarah’s story takes us beyond the realm of personal healing and into the collective, as she seeks to understand her mother’s murderer. This leads her to the First Nations reserve of his ancestors and real-life immersion in the history of colonization in Canada, systemic racism, and white privilege. Offering ceremonies, journaling, and exercises, Sarah leads you into the discomfort of your own suffering to be with it, determine for yourself what you need, and discover the tools to proceed towards wholeness. Areas of focus include: Connecting with your own helping spirits, guides, and ancestors Altered states, including Ayahuasca Setting healthy boundaries Tending to the victim self Tuning in to feelings Facing fear and building a strong intuition Metabolising trauma: digesting and composting the waste, assimilating the gifts Ceremonies to face a perpetrator and contemplate forgiveness Collective healing




Beyond the Trauma Vortex


Book Description

In Beyond the Trauma Vortex, Gina Ross proposes a collaboration between the media, trauma researchers, and helping officials in order to break the vicious cycle of trauma and violence. The media, Ross suggests, can use their tremendous influence to promote peace rather than violence and to heal wounded psyches, communities, and nations. Delving first into the destructive nature of the "trauma vortex" through a variety of individual and historical examples, Ross then offers her insight into an alternate, restorative "healing vortex." By focusing on the interrelatedness of personal and collective healing, the author makes a compelling case for why--and how--media professionals can play an influential role in effecting widespread healing for their viewers and for themselves.




Healing Trauma


Book Description

Medical researchers have known for decades that survivors of accidents, disaster, and childhood trauma often endure life-long symptoms ranging from anxiety and depression to unexplained physical pain and harmful acting out behaviors. Drawing on nature's lessons, Dr. Levine teaches you each of the essential principles of his four-phase process: you will learn how and where you are storing unresolved distress; how to become more aware of your body's physiological responses to danger; and specific methods to free yourself from trauma.




The Politics of Trauma


Book Description

An essential tool for healers, therapists, activists, and trauma survivors who are interested in a justice-centered approach to somatic transformation The Politics of Trauma offers somatics with a social analysis. This book is for therapists and social activists who understand that trauma healing is not just for individuals—and that social change is not just for movement builders. Just as health practitioners need to consider the societal factors underlying trauma, so too must activists understand the physical and mental impacts of trauma on their own lives and the lives of the communities with whom they organize. Trauma healing and social change are, at their best, interdependent. Somatics has proven to be particularly effective in addressing trauma, but in practice it typically focuses solely on the individual, failing to integrate the social conditions that create trauma in the first place. Staci K. Haines, somatic innovator and cofounder of generative somatics, invites readers to look beyond individual experiences of body and mind to examine the social, political, and economic roots of trauma—including racism, environmental degradation, sexism, and poverty. Haines helps readers identify, understand, and address these sources of trauma to help us bridge individual healing with social transformation.




Intergenerational Trauma and Healing


Book Description

This Special Issue of Genealogy explores the topic of “Intergenerational Trauma and Healing”. Authors examine the ways in which traumas (individual or group, and affecting humans and non-humans) that occurred in past generations reverberate into the present and how individuals, communities, and nations respond to and address those traumas. Authors also explore contemporary traumas, how they reflect ancestral traumas, and how they are being addressed through drawing on both contemporary and ancestral healing approaches. The articles define trauma broadly, including removal from homelands, ecocide, genocide, sexual or gendered violence, institutionalized and direct racism, incarceration, and exploitation, and across a wide range of spatial (home to nation) and temporal (intergenerational/ancestral and contemporary) scales. Articles also approach healing in an expansive mode, including specific individual healing practices, community-based initiatives, class-action lawsuits, group-wide reparations, health interventions, cultural approaches, and transformative legal or policy decisions. Contributing scholars for this issue are from across disciplines (including ethnic studies, genetics, political science, law, environmental policy, public health, humanities, etc.). They consider trauma and its ramifications alongside diverse mechanisms of healing and/or rearticulating self, community, and nation.




Body Kindness


Book Description

Create a healthier and happier life by treating yourself with compassion rather than shame. Imagine a graph with two lines. One indicates happiness, the other tracks how you feel about your body. If you’re like millions of people, the lines do not intersect. But what if they did? This practical, inspirational, and visually lively book shows you the way to a sense of well-being attained by understanding how to love, connect, and care for yourself—and that includes your mind as well as your body. Body Kindness is based on four principles. WHAT YOU DO: the choices you make about food, exercise, sleep, and more HOW YOU FEEL: befriending your emotions and standing up to the unhelpful voice in your head WHO YOU ARE: goal-setting based on your personal values WHERE YOU BELONG: body-loving support from people and communities that help you create a meaningful life With mind and body exercises to keep your energy spiraling up and prompts to help you identify what YOU really want and care about, Body Kindness helps you let go of things you can't control and embrace the things you can by finding the workable, daily steps that fit you best. It's the anti-diet book that leads to a more joyful and meaningful life.