There has always been collective trauma in the world – tribes have always claimed territory from others or gone to war over resources or believed that their religion or skin colour made them superior to others. But in recent years the issue of collective trauma has really come to the forefront of both public and therapeutic awareness. First there was Me Too: sexual trauma; then Black Lives Matter: racial trauma; then Extinction Rebellion: environmental trauma; then Covid; then the Russia/Ukraine war; and more recently the Israeli/Palestinian crisis. And of course the ongoing political shenanigans across the world with narcissism apparently a major characteristic of many leaders in many industries.

The impact of collective trauma was recognised by Western Therapists in 1978 with the work of Bert Hellinger, who developed Family Constellations, a discipline which has expanded enormously in scope since then. One of the basic tenets of his work is that people cannot be excluded from family systems, or someone else will carry their pain and suffering until they are recognised in the system.

And of course people are excluded for all sorts of reasons: they were deemed to be perpetrators, to be insane, they were addicts, they committed suicide, they had abortions, they had illegitimate children, they married outside caste/colour/race/gender/religion etc etc. It was Hellinger who coined the term ‘The Knowing Field’ in which you can call in the living or the dead, the family secrets and patterns, to recognise, honour and bring healing, backwards and forwards in the lineage. I will talk more about constellations in my next blog.

More recently Thomas Hubl has emerged as a leader in systemic and collective trauma, and he talks about how much of the trouble in the world today is based on the unresolved trauma of the past. But the trauma has to be seen and acknowledged in order to be resolved and healed. We cannot keep on sticking our head in the sand and pretending the atrocities of the past are nothing to do with us today! As he says, in collective trauma there are collective structures of consciousness that are much bigger than your personal consciousness, although to work with collective trauma work you need an ongoing transpersonal practice and you need to have done a significant amount of you own personal integration. You cannot bypass your own pain and then try to deal with the pain of the collective!

From a different perspective the biology of epigenetics has started to show how we actually carry the trauma of the ancestors in our DNA. Epigenetics is the study of heritable and stable changes in gene expression that occur through alterations in the chromosome rather than in the DNA sequence, as a result of environmental influences. One of the leaders in this field is Bruce Lipton and his book, The Biology of Belief describes many laboratory studies and real life cases of epigenetics at work.

So a message that is coming from many disciplines is that working to heal your own shadows and wounds may also turn out to involve interacting with and offering healing to the geneological lineages along the way. Even reaching out to all humanity. That’s a big task, but many of us are blessed to be living today in a time and a place that offers us opportunities that the ancestors did not have for this type of work.