Preventing and Healing Collective Traumas Must Be a Top U.S. and Global Priority

Communities Must Take the Lead in Prevention and Recovery

The constant stresses, emergencies, and disasters generate by the climate-ecosystem-biodiversity (C-E-B) crisis, along with numerous other social, economic, and political hardships, are creating collective traumas that are harming the U.S. and other nations. The mental health field has predominantly focused on treating individual trauma. This is insufficient and often unhelpful to address collective traumas. This article follows up on my October Substack article and dives further into the urgency and methods of preventing and healing collective traumas.

Individual vs. Collective Traumas

I always appreciated how noted psychiatrist Dr. Judith Herman in her book Trauma and Recovery described social, psychological, and emotional trauma. She characterized them in four ways:

· Acute trauma, said Herman, results from a single, isolated event that is so overwhelming that it shatters an individual’s sense of safety, control, and trust in the outside world, and overwhelms their capacity to cope. Examples include a one-time assault, severe car accident, or harm caused by a singular extreme weather disaster. Symptoms can include fear, anxiety, post traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD), and avoidance. Because it is a one-time event, the impacts of acute trauma are usually not as severe as other forms of trauma.

· Chronic trauma, according to Herman, is caused by a pattern of repeated and prolonged severe stressful events, or a single continuous traumatic experience. Examples include ongoing racism, childhood abuse or neglect, domestic violence, living in a war-torn region, being repeatedly impacted by extreme weather disasters, or experiencing relentless hunger or poverty. The symptoms can include PTSD, hyperarousal, avoidance behaviors, intrusive memories, and altered moods. Over time these factors can erode an individual’s social, psychological, emotional--and physical--health, wellbeing, and resilience.

· Complex trauma is closely related to chronic trauma. However, Herman said it results from repeated and prolonged traumatic experiences often caused by someone in a position of power who makes it impossible for the victim to escape. Examples include ongoing child abuse, domestic violence, or political captivity. In addition to the symptoms of PTSD, individuals may experience difficulties with emotional regulation, negative self-perception, dissociation, and impaired relationships.

· Most importantly for the purpose of this article, Herman says collective trauma produces many of the same symptoms as the different forms of individual trauma, but occurs on a much larger scale and can be far more perilous. Collective traumas can occur, for example, when entire communities, cultures, nations, or societies experience overwhelming or prolonged systemic inequalities, economic hardships, wars, genocides, health pandemics, or extreme weather disasters like wildfires or floods. In addition to the effects seen in individual traumas, collective trauma often generates widespread feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness that shatters the way populations view what is important in life, fragments their collective psyche, and in other ways fundamentally alters their culture.

Equally important is that when collective trauma builds over time, it often causes those affected to withdraw into a self-protective survival mode and numb themselves to reality. This can lead to rigid uncompromising fundamentalist thinking that causes them to believe misinformation, lies, and myths promoted by charismatic psychopathic self-proclaimed gurus as a way to make sense of their experience and cope with their traumas.

This is what has occurred among many Americans, and millions of other people worldwide, regarding the C-E-B crisis. The life-changing impacts of the crisis, and fear of the deep-seated changes in worldviews and lifestyles needed to minimize it, have led many to believe it is a hoax or not important enough to meaningfully address. As a result, despite decades of effort to reduce climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions, they remained relatively flat last year in the U.S., and increased by a record amount and rose to new highs globally in 2024.

Many working class and rural Americans have also disconnected from reality and embraced myths and falsehoods due to the decades of shame and humiliation they have experienced from the loss of meaningful family-wage jobs, skyrocketing economic inequality, and the breakdown of their community. The sense of being broken and useless has activated a desire for revenge that leads many to embraced the notions promoted by corporate executives, the uber rich, and extreme-right pundits that Democrats, liberals, the “deep state,” and others conspired to create their distress.

The continuous bombardment of misinformation and other traumatic attacks promoted on social media further disconnects many people from reality and leads them to blame different “others” for their pain and distress.

As discussed in my October Substack article, these factors have combined in the U.S.-- and in a growing number of other nation’s as well--to create the conditions that allowed neofascism to grow.

Preventing and Healing Collective Traumas Requires Community Action

Throughout her work Judith Herman emphasizes that healing from collective trauma is not a solitary journey. Recovery requires a collective response that involves community engagement and support, as well as pressure for change to address the societal causes of the traumas.

This point is extremely important. It underscores that individual mental health therapy cannot prevent and heal the collective traumas generated by the C-E-B crisis, or those produced by the widespread shame and anger produced by today’s vast economic inequity and related socio-political forces. That’s because collective traumas result from far more than individual psychological issues. They are collective wounds that require collective responses. Recovery necessitates the use of a public health approach to prevention and healing.

Core Elements of a Public Health Approach

A public health approach to preventing and healing collective trauma focuses on the entire population. This includes, but is not limited to, people deemed more at-risk and who have existing symptoms of mental health issues.

The top priority of a public health approach is to prevent collective traumas from occurring. Methods to help people heal when they experience symptoms are integrated into the prevention strategies and not addressed as separate issues.

These goals are best accomplished by working at the neighborhood and community level to actively engage residents in strengthening existing protective factors and forming additional ones. They can include social support networks, resilience skills, and other assets and resources that help buffer people from and enable them to push back against traumatic stressors, and use them as catalysts to find constructive new sources of meaning, purpose, and hope in life.

Three Protective Factors Are Essential to Address Collective Trauma

As seen in the many communities in the U.S., and in other nations around the world using variations of a public health approach, each emphasizes different protective factors. There is no one-size-fits-all method. However, there are three very important protective factors needed to prevent and heal the collective traumas generated by C-E-B crisis, and those produced by the shame and humiliation felt by working class and rural people today. They are:

o Build robust social connections and supports throughout the community.

This is the most important protective factor needed to prevent and heal collective traumas. Building social connections is vital to help people survive adversities and restore their sense of safety that collective traumas typically destroy. It also shifts the processes of prevention and healing from an isolated personal issue to a collective journey. Forming helpful social connections can also activate the release of oxytocin from the body, which counteracts the effects of the stress hormone cortisol, calms the nervous system, and promotes feelings of reassurance and contentment.

Building relationships with others is vital to help those who need physical assistance or are struggling to meet their basic needs. Fostering social connections also surmounts the pervasive social isolation and loneliness that contributes to today’s widespread substance abuse, “us vs them” thinking, political polarization, and other harmful behaviors.

One of the most effective ways to create social connections is by forming mutual aid teams in neighborhoods and communities. These are voluntary networks of residents who regularly check on each other and provide practical assistance as well as food, water, shelter, and other forms of help before, during, and after severe stresses, emergencies, and disasters. Mutual aid networks can also establish and provide access to essential resources like healthcare, financial aid, and educational opportunities. In addition, when providing and seeking help is normalized in the community, people become more comfortable requesting assistance. Volunteering to help others is also very empowering, and can enable traumatized people to turn their pain into new positive meaning and purpose.

Over time, people from all political persuasions will frequently engage in these activities because they address real-world practical issues that most people care about. This makes providing mutual aid a powerful way to overcome social divisions and build community efficacy.

Robust social connections can also be formed by engaging residents in block parties, potlucks, community kitchens, shared artistic expression such as public murals or music festivals, and other group activities. These events provide an informal setting that enables people to feel part of a larger group, get to know others, and develop trust, empathy, and understanding for each other. The events can also enable people to realize they are not alone--others are experiencing something similar--which normalizes their trauma and validate their struggles.

In sum, building social connections is vital to prevent and heal the collective traumas caused by the C-E-B crisis. It is also essential to counteract the collective traumas that enabled neofascism to grow by undermining the core tactics of isolation, division, and dehumanization used by its proponents. Neofascists leaders always exploit a lack of social cohesion and collective efficacy, and building strong community bonds is an powerful counterforce. When doing this work the ultimate goal should always be to make forming and sustaining robust social connections a community norm.

o Engage residents in other prosocial activities including building safe, healthy and vibrant, just and equitable, carbon-free, climate-resilience local conditions

Research has found that engagement in prosocial activities--meaning endeavors that benefit others, such as the mutual aid networks described above--helps overcome the hopelessness created by collective traumas and enables people to find new sources of meaning, purpose, and hope in life. This is a powerful antidote to the fear, shame, and meaningless traumatized people often feel by helping them do important work.

In addition to building social connections and providing mutual aid, three of the other most important prosocial activities needed to address today’s collective traumas include building safe, healthy, and vibrant, just and equitable, carbon-free, and climate-resilient local:

Ø Housing, transportation, public spaces, and other aspects of physical infrastructure

Ø Businesses that provide meaningful family-wage jobs, and;

Ø Forests, wetlands, waterways, biodiversity and ecological systems

In his excellent book Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places economist Paul Collier says economic development orthodoxies that prioritize market forces and top-down bureaucratic approaches usually neglect marginalized groups, ignore environmental impacts, and mostly benefit big business and the wealthy. This approach cannot build safe, healthy, and vibrant, just and equitable, carbon-free, and climate-resilient communities. Nor can it revitalize and create wellbeing in economically struggling urban neighborhoods or rural communities.

Using ample examples of communities doing this work, Collier says local residents must be actively engaged in innovating and developing their own unique bottom-up inclusive and participatory approach to enhance the safety, health, and prosperity of their community. This is backed up by research that shows that development initiatives led by local communities are more effective than externally driven programs, especially in economically distressed areas.

An example of urban community-led development is Activating Boston, which is a resident led initiative to transform parks and vacant land into inclusive public spaces to enhance social connections, health, and wellbeing in four city neighborhoods.

Another example is the community-led housing models used by Community Land Trusts (CLTs). They shift the decision of what will be built from the desires of private developers to what matters to the people that inhabit an area. CLTs have become a very effective way to construct new and preserve existing affordable housing. Research shows that properties within CLTs exhibit great stability during economic downturns and are much less susceptible to the many impacts of the C-E-B crisis.

An example of a rural community-led development initiative is Yackandandah, Australia, which has a population of about 2,000. Spearheaded by the local volunteer group Totally Renewable Yackandandah (TRY), this community-led initiative has installed rooftop solar and community batteries, and created microgrids and a virtual power plant. As a result the community now uses 100% renewable energy.

Güssing Austria offers another example of successful community-led rural development. The town of 3,600 people once had high unemployment and relied on expensive imported fossil fuels. So the community came together and decided to shift to 100% renewable energy to create jobs, slash energy costs, and reduce their carbon footprint. The town now produces significantly more energy than it consumes by increasing energy efficiency and building solar energy and biomass plants that convert local wood and agricultural waste into heat and electricity. Biogas from biomass is not completely carbon-free like wind or solar. But when carefully managed it offers huge benefits over fossil fuels. The community’s strategy dramatically reduced carbon emissions and revitalized their economy by attracting green technology companies that created over 1,000 local jobs.

These are just a few examples of how struggling urban and rural areas can use a community-led approach to enhance local conditions while addressing C-E-B crisis-related issues.

When people engage in these types of prosocial activity their attention shifts away from their own distress to the needs of others and their community. This reduces the self-focused rumination that often creates emotional distress. Participation in building safe, healthy, just and equitable, carbon-free, climate-resilient, and economically vibrant communities also helps people realize they have the capacity to create better conditions. This gives them a renewed sense of control over their lives, and enables them to realize they can transform tragedy into triumph. This is very important for preventing and healing collective traumas.

o Create ongoing spaces for residents to heal their traumas.

When residents engage in activities that strengthen the protective factors described above many will be able to prevent symptoms of trauma, and self-heal if symptoms do emerge. However, as the C-E-B crisis accelerates, and more family-wage jobs for the working class and rural communities are eliminated, large populations will still experience collective trauma. This requires communities to establish spaces for residents to heal and recover.

Judith Herman described healing trauma as a three step process. They include:

1. Establishing safety: The most important initial step is to create physically and emotionally safe spaces for people to begin to heal. This involves organizing healing circles or other types of gatherings where people can share their distress, and hear from others who have experienced something similar, in a safe and supportive environment. The process typically also includes psychoeducation that teaches people how traumas can affect their body, mind, emotions, and behaviors. Participants also often learn simple “Presencing” emotional self-regulation and co-regulation resilience skills to manage overwhelming psychological, emotional, and behavioral symptoms.

2. Remembrance and mourning: In this phase, traumatized people begin to process their traumatic memories and grief. The goal is to remember and verbalize or in other ways describe, process, and integrate their traumas into their life story in a way that feels empowering, rather than being trapped by the past. No single method exists to processing traumatic experiences. Community members often benefit from using a variety of approaches. Group discussions, grief processing, shame resilience, trauma narrative therapy, and other approaches can be used. This process enables traumatized people to realize there is light at the end of their darkness.

3. Reconnection and reintegration: The final stage of the healing process focuses on rebuilding social connections, developing a new sense of themselves, and starting a new life. This involves restoring old relationships and forming new ones, reintegrating into the community, and finding constructive new meaning and purpose in life. Feeling loss without understanding why is a common experience of people who experience collective trauma. Learning “Purposing” resilience skills to develop new life goals and direction is key to reconnection in this phase because it creates a sense of self not defined by the traumas they experienced. One common outcome is the discovery of strengths and skills to deal with adversities they never realized they had. Another outcome is increased awareness of their capacity for resilience to deal with all types of adversities without harming themselves or others.

To Enhance Healing and Recovery Herman Calls for Holding Perpetrators Accountable

In her early work Judith Herman focused on the three-stage healing process described above. In her later work she expanded to focus on helping survivors of trauma find justice. She recognized that recovery requires public recognition that the trauma people experienced is not their fault. The community needs to help explicitly shift the blame and shame from the victims to those who caused the traumas.

This can include those who directly caused the trauma such as individuals, business and government leaders, and politicians. It should also expanding justice beyond the direct perpetrators to include those who indirectly contribute to or benefit from structural injustices that allow the traumas to occur. Herman said that it is the responsibility of the community to support trauma survivors by engaging in this work and not enabling the perpetrators to escape responsibility through silence or denial.

Herman emphasized that this is not about seeking revenge. It is about beginning to repair the harm done by pressuring perpetrators to acknowledge the damage they caused, which is a crucial first step to overcome their common strategy of denial. After they are held accountable, repair can begin through acknowledgment, apology, and different types of reparations from the offenders. Restorative justice and trauma-informed advocacy initiatives are examples of different ways these principles can be implemented.

Communities should consider these options and initiate efforts hold fossil fuel, industrial agricultural and timber, and other corporate, Wall Street, and political leaders accountable for the collected traumas produced by the accelerating C-E-B their practices and products have generated.

These and other perpetrators should also be held accountable for relentlessly implementing high-tech automation, offshoring jobs, squashing unions, and in other ways eliminating manual labor and skilled trade jobs without making concerted efforts to upskill and reskill workers. The shame, humiliation, and anger this created among rural and working-class people created widespread collective traumas, even as the perpetrators walked away with huge profits and increased their wealth and power.

An Urgent Call to Form Resilience Networks in Neighborhoods and Communities Worldwide To Prevent and Heal Collective Traumas

Community-led resilience networks are the most effective way to implement the protective factors just described. These are broad and diverse networks of local grassroots, neighborhood, faith and spirituality, youth, education, emergency response, mental and physical health, human service, social justice, climate and environmental, and many other leaders. They join together to use a public health approach to implement strategies to strengthen existing and establish additional protective factors to prevent and heal all types of collective traumas.

My organization is a member of the UN High Level Climate Champion Race to Resilience Campaign. We help local residents form and operate resilience networks in neighborhoods and communities in North America and worldwide. If you would like assistance to form a local resilience network you can click here to apply to participate in the program.