No one was prepared for 2020, but December 2019’s public talk on collective trauma was prescient. On Harvard Medical School’s livestream “Talk@12,” Bala Subramaniam, Ellison “Jeep” Pierce, associate professor of anesthesiology, and Thomas Huebl, author and founder of the nonprofit organization “Pocket Project,” I had a conversation with Train professionals to examine the effects of collective trauma and facilitate events focused on healing. For the past 18 years, Hübl has helped hundreds of thousands of people foster dialogue and work to heal some of humanity’s worst sins. Since April, Hübl has been offering workshops to help Harvard faculty and staff meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. His next three-part series, “Practicing Mindfulness: Leadership and Communication in Challenging Times,” will be offered through the Office of Workforce Development and Wellness on his campus at Harvard University Longwood, and will be released on January 26, 2021. It will start.
Q&A
Thomas Hubl
Official Gazette: Most of us would agree that we are currently living in a time of collective trauma. What do you think about how we should think about what we’re facing?
Hubl: First, I would like to talk about collective trauma as a traumatic event that is collectively experienced by a large portion of a population, nation, or world. This results in trauma and hardship for individuals, but I also believe that there is also a shared cultural space that needs to be taken into account. While trauma is often seen as an individual problem, we are now talking about its collective or systemic aspects. There are two phenomena. One is the highly stressful current situation like COVID-19, and the other is the already intensifying climate crisis. But these events meet all throughout our shared history, which I call the unintegrated part of our shared past. In some ways, that shared past is like the sand in the engine when it comes to how we respond to the current crisis. When we talk about collective trauma, I think we are usually talking about the root causes that led to the current crisis and how we are responding to the current crisis. They’re intertwined.
Official Gazette: How do these interconnected traumas affect people?
Hubl: When we look at trauma, there are two main symptoms. One is hyperactivity with great stress and reactivity, and the other is numbness and apathy. Trauma therefore occurs, at least sometimes, with an underlying sense that we are separate. And the more stress he has in the system with two or three adversities, the more the trauma is strengthened.
Integrated history is existence, unintegrated history is past. When I refer to the past in this way, I mean the emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations that overshadow our present experience. So how can we together build an environment that allows us to be truly present, to relate more meaningfully, and to support and integrate each other’s past into our present?
Official Gazette: I met him in 2017 when he came to give a talk at the MIT Innovation Center in Boston. Then you said, “The Holocaust is now in the room with us.” I can’t say I’ve heard it before, nor can I understand exactly how it sits, but I sensed the truth in it. Could you say more?
“…beneath trauma there is always healing, and that means ethical restoration and ethical elevation. Posttraumatic growth is ethical readjustment.”
Hubl: I often say that trauma is borrowing money from your own future. This means that when we find ourselves in a traumatic situation, we become so overwhelmed that parts of us become paralyzed in order to survive. So the trauma response is a very intelligent function within our nervous system, but it also comes at a cost. So to speak, we have to pay back that debt with interest. Although the concept of trauma has become widely known in recent decades, it is also important to learn about unintegrated attachment stress in children who have been neglected or abused. Even as an adult, that adversity continues to live deep within me. We just don’t know about it because it has become so common. So you might say, “That’s me.” But that’s not me. It’s me in a place of hurt. Naming is very important.
The same is true of the millions of people who were held in concentration camps and required dissociation. Some of the atrocities we hear about people surviving are heartbreaking and unbelievable. People can survive such situations only in a highly dissociated state. However, I believe that not all suppressed and fragmented information will disappear, and that there will be more and more intergenerational transmission of trauma.
In my work over the past 18 years, whenever we encounter collective negativity in a group and encounter the collective unconscious so to speak, everyone in the room becomes aware of their body and the stress that exists within it. I’ve seen that you can feel it inside. room. Then we saw denial turn into a kind of liberation. I have observed that this form of denial lives on in our nervous system 24/7. We are simply unaware of this because our focus is elsewhere.
Official Gazette: You said that one of the symptoms of collective trauma is a chronic level of dissociation or numbness. Could you please elaborate on this?
Hubl: It starts with respecting the function of dissociation and understanding the nervous system’s ability to dissociate from overwhelming experiences. Dissociation and overwhelm in a 2-month-old baby is completely different than in a 30-year-old.I think it’s really important that we don’t just measure being overwhelmed by being overwhelmed. we. Overwhelm comes in a variety of flavors.
For example, how much can we actually absorb when we read the news? I think a lot of times we see things like war or racist acts, but we stay in the situation and wonder what it means and what’s happening to that person. It is very difficult to feel what is happening in our society. Therefore, we may decide that it is better to be absent and receive only cognitive information than to allow ourselves to feel what we really feel.
Official Gazette: In your book, Healing Collective Trauma: The Process of Integrating Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, you discuss the process of working with groups. How does it work?
Hubl: This process works on the principle that individual or system coherence is the unifying force of system fragmentation. Also, the internal consistency of the system may not be sufficient. So we need to build this through a group process. And we need to fill in the missing elements, just as trauma therapists do with their clients. Integrating with trauma requires injecting consistency into the group. This creates inner stability and structure, allowing you to develop more fluid ways of responding to the world. We have established a number of groups focused on the legacy of World War II and the Holocaust in Germany and Israel. She then expanded on topics such as colonialism, gender trauma, and racism in the United States.
Official Gazette: What kind of enthusiasm and perspective is required to tackle such a challenging and weighty topic?
Hubl: The theme of collective trauma seems heavy at first because we are facing a major ethical catastrophe on this planet. But beneath the trauma there is always healing, and that means ethical recovery and ethical improvement. Post-traumatic growth is a recalibration of ethics.
There were countless massacres, wars, and sins of all kinds. When we come to the scene of repair, there is a kind of illumination, a self-healing mechanism that heals living tissue. And I believe that collective healing supports individual healing and helps us learn more about personal health. These two systems appear integrated as is. Groups and individuals are not different. They function as interdependent systems.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
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