The Evolving Map for Trauma Healing

Anna Molitor: Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Anna Molitor. You may recognize me, some of you, as one of the hosts and the poetry curator for the Collective Trauma Summit. And I’ve been an assistant in Thomas’ programs for many years and I’m a trauma healing practitioner myself, so I’m really excited for our conversation today. So we’ve had many people express interest in deepening their own healing work as well as expanding their work in the world to meet these times of individual and collective challenges in creative ways. And because of this, Thomas will be offering a six-session online intensive called Navigating the Levels of Trauma Healing: How to Work with the Impacts of Collective Crises and Challenges for Ourselves and Our Clients.

The enrollment is open for a limited time, and if you’re interested, you can check any of the emails from us for more information or if you’re watching the replay, you can click the link on this page to find out more. The course starts April 30th and will include online sessions and guest speakers as well as access to foundational teachings by Thomas on collective trauma. We invite you to explore whether this might be a good fit for you. And for those of you who are new to Thomas and his work, he’s a renowned teacher and international facilitator who has been leading large-scale events and courses for over 20 years on the healing of collective trauma. Thomas works within the complexity of systems and cultural change, integrating the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism within the discoveries of science, what we sometimes call the marriage of inner and outer science. He’s the author of two books, the most recent entitled, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma–and Our World, and his first book entitled, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds.

So welcome, Thomas.

Thomas Hubl: Yeah.

Anna: Great that you’re here. And I’m going to start by asking you to provide some context to share about why you feel it’s important now to look at the Evolving Map for Trauma Healing.

Thomas: Yeah, thank you. Well, I think it’s clear to us that we feel that there is more and more impact of what we can call or some people call it polycrisis, but multiple strong stress factors that are coming together to culminate and add up to an experience that… what I would say the biosphere is having more and more stress to buffer or there are more and more triggers that evoke stress that lives in the biosphere for a very long time. And that’s, I think, what many of us feel. And today, the reason why I want to speak about it, because I think that there are a few nuggets of reflection or inspiration that at least my work in the systems that I worked with brought to me as learning that I would love to share.

And one of them is when we look at the trauma response as an intelligent function that protects us in very adverse situations and helps us to survive better, to go through intense hardship in a way that we survive, go through it, and be able to continue our life in hopefully many cases, but that there is a price we also pay for these events if we don’t integrate it. And that’s true individually, but that’s also true for our ancestors and that’s also true for the cultures that we have been born into. And sometimes … so because we were born into a world that was systemically traumatized, I believe we normalize some of those symptoms and we say, “This is how the world is,” when in fact some of it is not how the world is, it’s how the world is when it’s hurt. And I think that that awareness of systemic hurt and normalization of systemic hurt can show us a few things.

One is that sometimes we look at an individual as if it was a separate entity within the ecosystem versus an individual viewpoint, an individuated take within the ecosystem. So the individual is not separate. The individual is always an interdependent whole with the ecosystem, but it’s a little bit different thinking or also experience. It’s not only as an intellectual framing, it’s one thing, but as a deep state of being, it’s another thing. So we’re not talking just about the intellectual conversation or the philosophy about it, we are talking about it seems like that the notion of the separate sense of self seems to be at the base of our experience that we also think that and created schools of thought or thought around it. And so one application of that is that when we walk through nature, we might experience nature as around us. When you walk through the forest, where is nature, around us or nature is through us.

When nature is through us means I’m nature, too. And this is … again, there’s a difference between intellectually understanding that and experientially being that. And I believe that trauma fragments ecosystems into separate fragments or particles and looking through the isolation of separation, we reduce the self-healing mechanism of the system. We inhibit its self-healing mechanism. That’s why in the healing work, we need to be very careful if … because if trauma says, “Here in space and time, life is not good for me,” in the traumatic moment, “Here in this moment, it’s not good for me.” So not being embodied, not being in this moment, trying to get out of the experience is very important and intelligent for many of us, either as children or throughout our life through other events. Not here, not now was the better option in certain moments.

And I think that’s very important because, as a result, we might mix the urge to develop with the certificate that says, “My ideal version is better than the real version.” And one example is or two examples. One is, if somebody says, “I mistrust,” then the better state is not to trust. And somebody says, “I mistrust,” you say, “Yes, so let’s be with what the process of not trusting, but let’s turn it into a conscious process.” Every growth of every system happens with the blessing of the collusion. The blessing of the defense mechanism allows us to go deeper, not the overriding of it. And so when somebody says, “Oh, it comes to a workshop, it’s somatic-based workshop,” and says, “Oh, the guidance is fill your body,” and somebody says, “Oh, it’s hard for me to fill my body.” So we could frame this as a dysfunction, but we could also say you managed to turn off the sensitivity of your body because that was better at a certain time than with it.

So it’s reframing the “itification” – that the symptom becomes an “it”. It’s reframing the intelligence in it versus testifying the dysfunction, which helps us to internally connect much more to the process that is also happening anyway. And so when we look at larger systems, then we see that they’re actually … let’s, for today, look at three factors. We see a continuously increase, because of climate change, of the stress level that our biosphere has to buffer in order to balance itself. That’s climate, of course, emissions, but it’s also the loss of biodiversity. There are many factors that create a strong stressor in the biosphere. And, as I said, my body is biosphere. So I will feel consciously or unconsciously part of that stress and you and all of us. Then there is an acceleration of data. Life is becoming faster as we speak, as we are here this time together.

So the more data flows through us, the faster our life becomes, the more pressure will be on the disorganized parts of our nervous system. And the parts that anyway carry stress will be amplified. The parts that are numb and absent will be amplified, too. So, we see an amplification in fragmentation, we see an amplification in polarization, we see an amplification of stressors. And the fact that we become more and more, so there are eight billions plus of us, that changes the dynamic of a way less densely populated world and turns in a way the fuel of evolution from competition into collaboration. But in order for us to collaborate, for example, on how to solve climate change, we face all the fractures of our relational ecosystemic experience. And ecosystemic means all of life. Not just natural life nature and not just humans, all of life, because society is also not around me. Society is through me. I’m also society. So the ecosystemic understanding means also that healing is always an ecosystemic function. The self-healing mechanism of the biosphere is the data flow in the supercomputer we call life. And the more isolation we see in that supercomputer, the more trauma, systemic trauma a system carry, the less carries, the less it can activate its self-healing power because there are many more inhibitions built in.

And so the more we heal, the more we activate, also reactivate the self-healing mechanism, which is in itself amazing because we do have an amazing ally that we can plug into and work with in the healing work. So when we look at the current process of a polycrisis, of course, the polycrisis will bring up a lot of stuff. And the stuff that comes up is not only personal, it will push my developmental stuff, but it will also push on my ancestral. And the collective wounds or the collectively suppressed material will try to come up. And as we see after COVID, or at least in my experience, I don’t see a massive reintegration process in our global society of the impact of two years of pandemic, shutdowns, death, loss of family members, letting go of millions of employees around the world in organizations. What’s actually our capacity to digest? What’s the capacity of being? And we look at three forces within a human being’s development, being, becoming, and belonging. Can I be where I am?

And as we said before, many times, we cannot be where we are, so we need to run. As long as we run, it’s okay. But if we stop, the past catches up. So we developed systems and we are developing systems that are not sustainable because our inner world’s not sustainable. And then we ask, “Okay, how can we build a sustainable world?” And, in fact, we cannot. And then there is, “Oh, we could have done it better.” No. We couldn’t. If that’s the way it goes, better for us to learn to be with the way things go, not with how we could have done it, because then we don’t find out what’s actually the information that drives the current process. And I believe everybody who does individual or group or larger systemic work and facilitates that well knows that the art is how to be in tune, to be in resonance, and aware of the process that is unfolding or happening and how to bring that back into our awareness because awareness means space and space means the process as a future. If not, the process has only its past, which means it’s subject to the repetition compulsion.

So a lot of developmental work or development is actually based on overriding the process that’s happening, which is effort. I need to effort to get there. Versus what Lao already said is a journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet. Doesn’t start 10 meters ahead of you. But a very important collective defense mechanism is actually that often collectively we agree that 10 meters ahead of us is better than here or might be better than here. And that’s different from I have a deep sense of the potentiality of my intelligence, of the systems intelligence, a potential intelligence of a project and the potential development of it, that’s different. That’s attuned. I’m talking about this because we cannot feel we need to create an imaginary future to hang out in.

And if that becomes a collective agreement, then it becomes a collusion. And that’s okay, it’s just important that we are aware that that’s what’s happening. And that helps us to come more and more in touch with what is. And sitting in what is is not that easy because there is a certain amount of discomfort connected to it and sometimes there’s a lot of discomfort connected. So it needs its titration, obviously. And so looking at the current state, when we talk about climate anxiety, I believe we don’t have good mechanisms as I said before like with COVID in organizations, in societies, besides marginal groups that do that. I am talking about mainstream architectures to digest the unlived unexperienced residues of our collective past.

And so the collective past will force its way into our awareness and that’s more painful. It’ll force its way up and it will be often pathologized for doing that, instead of developing individual relational and systemic practices, how we can welcome whatever wants to detox itself for the past to hand over the learning that we’ve never had. Because integrating the unlived past hands over what we call that post-traumatic learning, hands over the pearl that was stuck in the eyes. And not only does it help us to learn and mature, it brings up often the underlying ethical transgression that led to the traumatization for us to update our ethical capacity or ethical learning so that we can really meet the current developments like nanotechnology, AI, genetic engineering, all kinds of technological advancements, that we can handle that or work with it in an appropriate and aligned way that is aware of the future generations that are part of the future that communicates with us because the future generations are not here. They are here in their inspiration and in their impact that the future already has onto now.

And so when we talk about working with the polycrisis, I deeply believe that we have to have, of course, an individual approach on integration, but we have to have an ancestral and collective approach equally. We call this the IAC, Individual Ancestral Collective Fluidity or liquification of life, because where life is stuck, where life is frozen, where life cannot move, we do not develop and we complain about that we don’t develop often. See, why is that not moving? Why aren’t we not faster responding to the climate crisis? Because we cannot. We cannot. We can create more pressure on I cannot, but we can’t. And as long as we don’t own it, we cannot move forward. Once we own it, development’s going to happen. Why? Because the living system’s innate intelligence to develop is there is anyway here.

You don’t go to the tree and tell the tree, “Oh, create the leaf, create the branch, do this, do this.” The tree does it if we have the appropriate environment for it, if you have the appropriate conditions. And that’s our power. When we say healing is, on the one hand, the restoration of the original movement. So it generates movement, it liquefies life into its creative potential. And healing is the skill to create the right environment for it. The therapist is an environment for the client to heal. A group can be an environment for us to heal together. But, of course, the trauma in the therapist is also a limitation for the healing. But that’s natural. That’s not the problem. That’s part of the process.

When some aid workers go into crisis areas or conflict areas and they’re affected by the conflict, that’s a natural part of going into very traumatized environments. We just need to have the right skill to work with it. Then that mechanism is actually part of the intelligence of the self-healing. If not, then it’s a burden, then it’s a pressure, then it’s suffering. But if not, it’s the resourcing. It’s bringing intelligence and working that intelligence through intelligence systems that can resource crisis or conflict areas in a different way. And so the individual and systemic thinking that are not two, once they are two, oh, as you think about the individual and the ecosystem, that’s already the separation. I believe that’s a trauma symptom. That’s a collective trauma symptom. And so once individual and collective are an interdependent whole, then we can develop and we have to develop collective spaces in our societies where we can digest the past to get the fuel of that past for our current innovative necessities, for our current innovation that we need to deal with what’s happening right now in the world to be much more effective and much more related and much more on point with our response to the climate crisis, for example, to the inequality on the planet, to racism, antisemitism, to gender inequality and violence.

So there are many collective trauma fields showing themselves as also strangely interconnected or entangled system. It’s not just the one or the other. In the collective unconscious, the whole architecture is also interconnected or entangled.

And so developing a wider approach, that’s I believe our task. And when we can work on these different levels simultaneously, not arbitrarily specifically. When it’s needed, there are interventions or there’s a process for some time indeed that is more individual, ancestral, collective, and they become a flow, a regulated flow. And that also means individual practices that the state of our nervous system is an asset. The state of our nervous system is not just nice to have, it’s like it’s an asset. And especially for everybody who works professionally either in the therapeutic coaching, consulting, leadership, teacher, education system, medical system, in many systems, the state and the regulation that I could or can internalize is a key asset for my contribution to the world.

And not to forget the triggers, trigger shows us the split of the trauma symptom. Either it goes into hyperactivation or it goes into hypoactivation. So some people are overtly triggered, which we recognize. But some people become more distant, disengaged. They still sit in the meeting, but they’re actually not there. They left the room internally. Both is being triggered and we see both symptoms in our society. There’s hyperactivation stress in society and there is the indifference, the numbing, checking out, the nonparticipation. And for us to create collective community-based healing spaces that are able to embrace that and not to reject it. So we can say, “Well, why is it like this? We should change it.” No. The remedy, the healing of mistrust is not trust. It’s the synchronization of conscious awareness with the process of not trusting, the necessity that that was intelligence, the intelligence in it, so that out of that intelligence, trust can sprout.

It’s not to look at the outcome, it’s being synchronized with the process. And a similar approach is needed when we look at, “Oh, how can we coach with our response to the climate crisis?” Creating a pressure on what’s not moving is just creating more resistance. So what is actually a skillful, passionate engagement that is relationally attuned that has the power to create transformation and call our ally, the self-healing mechanism, into the system? I think that’s a high art, that’s a great skill. And that also says that building collective vessels and also seeing that the options we have are always relative to the traumatization state of the system. So we work with four different layers of ecosystemic upgrades from traumatizing to trauma informed, to trauma responsive, to trauma restorative, which also means that the work, the healing work, is always relative to the systemic condition that we find. So when the systemic condition upgrades itself, also the work will change. When it upgrades itself, the work will change. And that’s the beauty that every defense mechanism is always individually and ecosystemically relevant. And it never just lives in the individual.

It needs to be seen and felt as the child, two years old, the ecosystem that made that process necessary and intelligent, they’re entangled. And so once we see that that, first, it depathologizes those internal processes. And it also shows us that as we grow ecosystems, the holding space is becoming richer and richer. So the collective competence is growing. And that’s why it enables us to heal faster without pushing, but through the competence of the collective learning. And so when we face the time, I think our capacity to really digest what we wanted to run away from is super important and is not a slowdown. It’s the necessity that anyway comes up through us, through all kinds of processes, all kinds of symptoms that show up in millions and millions of people right now. And to not pathologize those but to create spaces where we can volunteer and say, “Yes, we need to digest a certain detox, individual, ancestral, and collective detox is happening, so that we can move with the evolutionary necessity and disarm the crisis to a certain extent.

So to disarm the crisis through the volunteer engagement with the past that was too much in a titrated way. And maybe the last thing to say, and then I know there were many questions that came in, and maybe Anna can bring those to us. So first … Two things. The one is the beauty that our body is not just as old as it’s written in our passports but that our bodies are millions of years old. They are amazing biocomputers. They carry a lot of wisdom. They have seen throughout ancestors so much. And we are here. I think that’s important to remember in this time how much intelligence is in the accumulation that life concentrated generation after generation for us to be sitting here right now. That’s amazing. And the wisdom that is stored there, all the healing that life has seen in all the former generations up to us is sitting in us as capacity. It’s powerful.

And the second part is that when we look at trauma, trauma creates non-emergent structures, non-emergent processes in our circular, repetitive patterns. And there are emergent processes. There are parts of our lives that are flowing. They are updating. Doesn’t mean that we don’t have challenges, but there is progress. And there are parts in us that feel like it’s not moving, it’s not developing. And to see that we create societal structures based on both, we create societal structures based on our emergent parts and we create societal structures based on the non-emergent parts.

And trauma, as long as it’s unconscious, is an unupdatable area, no updates. In trauma, when we become aware of the trauma, not just the trauma symptom and become aware of the trauma, it starts to receive updates again, like an app on your phone that you couldn’t update and suddenly you can update and open it. And we can be the environment together for each other where that update can reinstall itself. We can create an architecture, an architecture that I believe in many countries we don’t have. We know that there are enormous residues and retraumatizations happening in society, but we actually don’t have an architecture and appropriate architecture to take care of it. That needs to be developed.

And so when we bump against non-emergent structures, we might try to push it or get rid of it when in fact it needs a different attention. So the resistance, for example, to the whole climate urgency needs a different attention. And if we give it that intention doesn’t mean that climate technologies, other things are not being developed. We need that, too. We need that in parallel, not consecutive. Then it’s going to recreate systemic movement. And we see that that’s not just an obstacle, but that’s the learning we need as humanity in order to mature our being on this planet. And I think there’s a beauty in that process. There’s a beauty in the maturation. And it synchronizes us again with millions of years of wisdom that anyway live in us. So maybe that’s the beginning. And maybe, Anna, if you have some of the questions.

Anna: Thanks. Not millions of years of wisdom living in us is a good segue also to just … It’s exciting to feel how the community conversation is expanding in this moment. And there’s a lot of … I can feel there’s inspiration and questions brewing and that self-healing impulse of life is also coming in that in those of you listening with your questions and the updates that are happening right now.

And so we’ve already had a lot of questions come in and we’re just also offering … Just grateful for your participation in that way with drawing out this wisdom, this shared experience in community. And so let’s start. We’ll just have a chance to get to a few questions now, but we’ll be expanding this through the course, which is great. So Jillian brings a question. Can you describe how the practitioner can healthily manage their own trauma and feelings on the same topic while trying to help their clients? And I’m going to add another question and just you can touch maybe on this, too. Janet says, “How do I move forward when every day is about managing anxiety?” So this working with self and then working with clients and being in the world.

Thomas: I think the difference, hopefully, or in us is that when we, as practitioners, whatever is our profession precisely, but as practitioners, we develop the skill to create more space. We develop a skill that our own traumatization is a natural part of being alive for many of us. So there is not just this, “Oh, that’s the part that I want to get rid of. That’s actually the part that lives in me.” And I think that just that yes to the fact that, of course, also when we work with many clients doesn’t mean that our trauma is completely gone. And even the idea that it should be completely gone because some people say, “Will I ever be healed?” We don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no, but that’s not the question. The question is, what are we actually … What’s the next step? Not will I be ever healed. That’s me already being out there versus me seeing that being in here is difficult.

And I think the sobering, the maturity of a practitioner therapist, a coach, whoever works or a teacher, is like the maturity to hold my own wounding in a different way and being committed to work it and being committed that when it comes up in my client interaction, I need either peer to peer intervision or some supervision. I need to keep working on that in places that can really help me to make my own steps. So this means that every practitioner is actually plugged into a resourcing network of supervision that helps us to work the things that come up in us when we support our clients. That’s responsibility as a practitioner. And I think we all have to have these resourcing places or networks where we can keep on refining, not getting rid, and that I see my own identification with the perfect state I should be without that versus the movement in my healing that is part of a healthy self-assessment.

The congruency between my self-contact and my inner state, and how much I’m in touch with my inner state and how much I can reflect it back to the world becomes more and more congruent. All of that is trustworthy. And I believe, given what I said before, we need also collective spaces where we can allow our collective path to detox itself through us because the time of just one on one or individual I look at myself exclusively is gone. We will do that, but we will do that more and more, I believe, in collective spaces where one-on-one work can happen in a much higher resourcing environment and collective presencing is a very powerful fuel for healing that can accelerate healing in the good way. Not because we push it, but because the processor capacity grows. And that’s, I think, very powerful. And for collective topics or when we work with climate anxieties or when we work on with climate depression and other things, I think having those ecosystems of healing, that’s very important and the skills to create those ecosystems to become a self-healing space that acquires more and more capacity to heal.

And so the more people step into that or new people that step into that benefit from the processes that already happened and that has a positive upward spiral. But I think the maturity to hold our own and to ground our own healing process is also a role modeling for the clients to see how trying to get rid of or trying to be done with it actually changes into a new level of maturity that’s very magnetic. And I think that’s also trustworthy, that creates some safety. And I think there’s a lot of healing potential in that.

Anna: Yeah. Thank you. That’s really beautiful. And there’s a beautiful question here I think you’ve spoken to a bit, but Navneesh writes, and I’d love to hear what else you say specifically to this, “As a therapist, I’m questioning my practice, not that I doubt the effectiveness and the quality, but just wondering what is really true,” with a capital T. Do these modalities have a role or is there something else brewing that we can’t foresee right now? Am I in the preparation phase for something that is yet to arrive? And maybe speaking to what that is, it’s beautiful.

Thomas: I think the good news, we are always brewing. And the good news is that we didn’t arrive, which I think is very, very … It’s a blessing that we didn’t arrive and that we will always keep brewing. And I think if you can relax into the fact that there is always something brewing in us, which means that we are brewing and growing into new ways of doing it, that includes everything that we’ve learned so far or practice so far. You’re saying it’s some of this works, but to be a living update is amazing. And so I think it’s great that we are brewing and it’s great that sometimes the updates are not clear and that we can drop into it. And when we have doubts, I’m always looking if there is a doubt, let’s see why doubting is better than being with the process. So what’s actually in the process that brings up doubts?

And if I explore that more, I deepen my relationship to myself and to my clients even more, so that on more and more levels of my being, which means my individual development in different stages, my ancestral development, that the openness in my ancestral nervous system, because I believe our ancestors are encoded in a certain part of our nervous system, and that’s more open, I feel your ancestors more and I can be in touch with your ancestry. And when our collective nervous, the access to the collective nervous system, opens up, we are much more in touch with the systemic intelligence of the systems. So these are different levels of holding spaces. And that’s why when we drop into one level, the next level will show up. And that’s … I think every good group facilitator knows that that when you reach a certain level of harmony with a group, the next level of chaos or disorganization will show up because the safety has been put in place to let the next level of detox come up.

I think that’s what we see in a lot of democracies at the moment. But if I misinterpret that, then I think, “Oh, something went wrong.” And that’s the same for our process. When we deepen into a certain level of safety through our own work that we did, given we work with clients, of course, there will be phases when a new detox level shows up. And I think what grows over time is, first of all, the acceptance of that. Secondly, the joy to have those moments that might feel disorganized, chaotic, disruptive, that I’m looking forward to that versus I’m trying to not have it.

I think the more we are resourced, we are welcoming the edges of our conscious universe, because I know when I meet the edge, a bigger part of the universe introduces itself to me that I couldn’t see until now. And so growing the capacity to meet, which until now we didn’t want to meet, grows a grounded presence. And I think we need that grounded presence to deal with the challenges that we see already now and the challenges we know already now that are going to come. And I think the more grounded we are and the more of us are grounded in the world, it doesn’t mean that it’s comfortable, it doesn’t mean that it’s not painful, it doesn’t mean that it’s not challenging. It means that the capacity to embrace that grows. And I think that’s an amazing form of leadership that we are not jumping off the boat, but we’re staying on the boat, but in a grounded, connected way, relational way, I think that in different fields at the moment is very needed.

Anna: Thank you so much, Thomas. And also the way you consistently transmit to us how to stay on the boat and how to keep including more and more in that. Yeah.

Yeah. And thank you for sharing so deeply here right now today and opening this door to some of your deeper teachings on how we can continue to do our own healing work and also develop these new capacities for working with students and clients and groups and how we can truly meet these times of individual and collective changes in the polycrisis.