A win for the collective healing field—SSIR article from the Collective Change Lab
Plus a sneak peek of my framework on collective wounds
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I read an awesome article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review the other day. It’s by colleagues from the Collective Change Lab on collective healing:
The article is exciting for the field of collective healing for a number of reasons. One, it’s great to see such a reputable journal acknowledge this topic and take it seriously as a conversation and set of research and practice.
The authors, Laura Calderon de la Barca, Katherine Milligan & John Kania also do a really good job of offering structure to something that can sometimes feel ambiguous and therefore elusive. Topics of healing, trauma, and systems change are big and there are different definitions and interpretations of what they mean. Taking a topic like healing, which is so well-understood at the individual level and applying it to the systems level requires a degree of creativity that needs to be both expansive and grounded.
Ever since I started We Heal For All I have had the pleasure of meeting people who are also called to collective healing. We will get together, start talking about collective healing—what it is, what we’re inspired by, how we see it in the world—and then realize… we’re talking about totally different things.
This is awesome because it reflects the diverse ecosystem of ways that collective healing is thought about and manifests. I find that it pushes us as practitioners to get clearer about what this larger field of practice and research is in order to locate ourselves within it. We can have a better sense of where the specific version of collective healing we feel called to fits and relates to the other moving parts, and gain greater clarity on our unique roles.
Trauma affects systems change.. let’s acknowledge it
In the SSIR article, the authors worked with a “multidisciplinary coalition of partners led by the Wellbeing Project in Georgetown University to apply insights from the field of trauma healing to the practice of systems change.” They interviewed social change, Indigenous, and community leaders within the social sector who are incorporating healing-centered practices or a trauma-lens into the systems change work they do.
A main argument of their article is that “[T]rauma is a near-universal part of the human experience and an invisible force contributing to the “stuckness” of virtually all social systems.”
They call attention to the fact that trauma affects all of us. It is not something that is outside of us or over there, but is something that we all carry and touch to differing degrees, and our discourse about systems change needs to incorporate that.
“Humanity is submerged in layers of individual, intergenerational, and collective trauma, but we generally don’t recognize it. This prevents us from addressing the roots of collective challenges we face and keeps us from taking steps toward healing that can transform the systems around us.”
The article includes steps for beginning to recognize when trauma comes up within ourselves as individuals, as well as in the systems we are a part of. They offer a list of characteristics of systemic trauma, as well as definitions for different types of trauma: individual, intergenerational, collective, historical, and systemic. I recommend checking it out!
Offering up a framework on collective wounds
A goal-hope-prayer of my upcoming book “Collective Healing for our Complex Times: How to be in relationship with the world’s pain” is that it helps people, in really practical ways, have tools and supportive perspectives that can help them work with the weight of the world.
One of the sections I’m particularly excited about— although, to be honest, I'm excited about every section—is a framework on collective wounds. If we're talking about collective healing, then a good starting point is the question “Healing what?”
My thinking behind a framework like this is that can help someone—and has helped me—to have more of an organized way of thinking about what collective wounds are, so that when they are in the midst of feeling intense things about/from/with the world, they can have a tool to better sense into what exactly they’re feeling and take whatever necessary steps they need to based on that.
There are overlaps between the Collective Change Lab’s frameworks and mine, which is awesome and affirmational to see. Two things that are different about mine that I want to get your thoughts on are this:
1) I differentiate between collective wounds being either pain or trauma; and 2) I organize collective wounds using a temporal lens: there are ones that are related to the present, to the past, and to the future.
Differentiating pain versus trauma is helpful, in my mind, because it drives home the need for collective healing support to be more widely available and taken seriously in the world we live in. Pain is a natural part of being a mammal, and like it or not, suffering, to some degree, will always be part of the human condition. This, though, is different from trauma. We can think of trauma as being pain that hasn’t had the proper support or resources to heal. Instead, it remains unresolved and gets stuck within a person or society’s system. Therefore in order to reduce the likelihood of pain turning into trauma, we need collective healing support when there is breakdown, crisis, and ongoing systems failure.
Which ties into the temporal-lens of collective wounds I share. Organizing collective wounds by time is another way to sort through what-is-what when we’re feeling big things about what’s happening in the world. Here’s a quote from my book:
“When I'm in the midst of a big mix of emotions related to the world, using a time-based frame of reference to understand what collective wounds I might be feeling helps me untangle subtle layers of my experience. It gives me perspective on what I'm experiencing and therefore helps me discern what tools might best serve the different parts of what I'm holding.”
From this lens, we can think of there being collective wounds related to the present day—a current event, an immediate crisis. There are wounds related to the past—histories of supremacy and injustice, old family-held wounds related to identity or war. And there are wounds related to the future—what type of world will my kids inherit? Will my job be available in a decade?
Because emotions are metaphysical and can be shape-shifty, something like this has helped me understand what I’m experiencing when, let’s say, I’m feeling really strong emotions about a current event that are disproportionate in size to what is taking place. It shows me that not only am I feeling challenging feelings about the present day situation (such as a natural disaster or an instance of state violence), but that there is also other unresolved emotional pain in the form of trauma (collective or personal) that is being brushed up upon and resurfacing within what I feel.
From here, I can begin to create a lot of space for the different tendrils I’m holding, gently untangle each one from the larger knot of emotional energy I feel, and give each part customized care based on what it is and what it needs.
I go on to unpack all of this in more detail in the book, including offering specific healing-centered practices. My collective wounds framework is far from exhaustive but takes a stab at putting a little form to something that can feel formless, in hopes that it helps someone to navigate this crazy, weird, every-expanding and -intertwining world a little better.
I would love to know what you think. Leave a comment below or reach out to me. Especially if you take this framework for a spin. Would love to know how it feels.