Healing Trauma in Systems Opens Up New Pathways to Social Change

(Illustration by iStock/melitas)

As Brazilian author Paulo Coelho writes, “You drown not by falling into a river but by staying submerged in it.” This is an apt metaphor for how trauma impacts people, individually and collectively. 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.

Trauma is a near-universal part of the human experience and an invisible force contributing to the “stuckness” of virtually all social systems—including child welfare, criminal justice, education, health care, and housing—even as humanity barrels headlong into the most destructive systemic breakdown of all: the climate crisis that threatens life on Earth.

Yet the impact of trauma remains all but absent from mainstream discourse about systems change. Part of the reason is that we have a common tendency to believe trauma is “out there”—that other
people are traumatized and need help, but we’re fine—when in fact we all carry trauma. The trauma we carry affects the way we look at the world and ourselves, and therefore plays a role in determining the future course of social systems. Unless we acknowledge trauma, engage with it, and find ways to support individual and collective healing, our systems will stay stuck.

Over the past year, we have been working with a multidisciplinary coalition of partners led by The Wellbeing Project and Georgetown University to apply insights from the field of trauma healing to the practice of systems change. Dozens of social change, Indigenous, and community leaders working in different systems in geographies as varied as Sri Lanka, Romania, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Colombia, India, and the United States shared their time and experience with us in the hopes of helping the social sector forge a common language around trauma and advocate for collective healing as integral to the work of systems change.

“Our systems don’t recognize how trauma impacts people, and as a result decision makers in those systems create trauma and hold people in a space of trauma,” Allison Wainwright told us. Wainwright is the CEO of Family Life, one of Australia’s largest family services providers working with vulnerable children and their families. “If we don’t talk about it and acknowledge it, then it’s very difficult to bring about change,” she added.

Seeing individual, intergenerational, collective, and historical trauma for what they are—powerful forces to reckon with in our present-day systems—and moving discussions about trauma from the margins to the mainstream can help the social sector discern new and effective approaches to systems change.

The Starting Point: Understanding Trauma Within Ourselves

Understanding and addressing trauma at a systems level starts with understanding our own trauma history. Once we examine and recognize when trauma is present in ourselves, we can lift our heads out of the water and begin noticing the trauma we and others are swimming in. It’s everywhere.

Trauma is an invisible unhealed wound caused by an overwhelming event, series of events, or enduring conditions that remains active in our bodies, our psyches, and our ways of relating to others. During a traumatic incident, part of the brain called the amygdala takes over, producing involuntary, reactive responses. These incidents then get fragmented off from our conscious awareness, unintegrated but out of the way, so that we can continue to function.

There is an intelligence to these responses: They help us survive life-threatening or life-altering events and circumstances while we experience them. But this comes at a high cost. If the trauma remains unprocessed and unhealed, the amygdala can send our brains into a heightened or activated state when it detects a similar threat. This can reactivate our largely unconscious, original responses, even years later and even if the threat is of a very different nature, such as a fight with our spouse or an emotionally charged meeting at work.

These responses have been popularized in recent years due in part to the work of Stephen Porges, whose Polyvagal Theory offers an explanation of how the body and the brain communicate via the nervous system to respond to perceptions of danger or safety in different situations, including everyday stressors and trauma. When we perceive a threat or danger, the amygdala instantly activates the autonomic nervous system, which mobilizes our body and our emotions to respond. We may feel stressed, anxious, or fearful and exhibit one or more of these common behaviors:

• Fight responses: hyper-vigilant, aggressive, and controlling behavior, including excessively harsh criticism, overreactions to minor infractions, unmerciful condemnation of mistakes as character flaws, withholding information, and chronic, unwarranted mistrust
• Flight responses: fragmentation, confusion and disorganization, not acknowledging an overwhelming reality, downplaying consequences, and incoherence between words and action
• Freeze responses: paralysis, dissociation, withdrawal, numbness, insensitivity, immobilized will, feeling flat or disconnected, and the inability to access emotions

Every human experiences these responses. Our evolution and survival as a species have depended on responding to threats to keep us safe. No one can outsmart them, because they don’t occur in the conscious mind.

What We Can Gain From Recognizing Trauma in Systems

Just as we must bring our individual trauma responses into our conscious awareness, we must also widen the aperture we use to view trauma. The prevailing narrative, which focuses on individuals, treats traumatized people as psychologically abnormal, rather than as having a normal reaction to abnormal circumstances. It also reinforces an individualized medical model of intervention as the solution. This is not only an incomplete frame, but also damaging and harmful to oppressed and marginalized groups, as it places the responsibility for the harm and the burden of healing from it on the individual rather than the system.

This critique has been central to groundbreaking and vital work on structural racism in recent years. Scholars, thought leaders, and activists in the racial equity, healing justice, and decolonization movements—including Resmaa Menakem, Gail Christopher, Shawn Ginwright, Brian Stevenson, Eduardo Duran, adrienne maree brown, and Edgar Villanueva—have deepened and elevated attention to structural racism and the racial trauma our systems continue to perpetuate. Importantly, these movements have heightened the visibility and examination of systemic causes as factors that give rise to trauma in specific groups of people.

Seeing trauma through a systems lens can inform strategies for social change in a multitude of ways. First, it helps us grapple with complexity and resist the temptation to reduce or isolate a person’s trauma responses to a single event or cause. Many individual expressions of trauma are at least partly collective in origin. Most people alive today carry different layers of trauma—including intergenerational, collective, and/or historical trauma—to varying degrees.

Second, thinking in longer time scales is integral to taking a systems view and helps explain why unresolved, unhealed trauma from the past contributes to the “stuckness” we experience today. As the renowned systems thinker Donella Meadows writes, “In a strict systems sense, there is no long-term, short-term distinction. […] We experience now the consequences of actions set in motion yesterday and decades ago and centuries ago.”

Put another way, intergenerational, collective, and historical traumas will remain part of our present-day systems until we collectively heal from them, because they live on inside of us and affect how we experience the present moment. This includes what we are willing and able to see, our beliefs, our openness and creativity, and our ability to grow and develop. In a very real way, past trauma influences the future course of systems.

The persistence of historical trauma in present-day systems is something that sits uncomfortably in the Western mindset; many people want to “leave the past behind once and for all” and wonder why others don’t “just get over it.” This response—what we might label collective denial in the face of an overwhelming reality—is intimately tied to white privilege, one of the most significant barriers to widespread perception and acknowledgment of intergenerational and collective trauma.

“Power and privilege are held by white men like me, so we go through the motions of change while also avoiding [looking] at the trauma,” said David Hanna of Inspiring Communities, which supports a network of people and organizations pursuing community-led development across New Zealand, including Maori and Pacific Islander communities that experience high rates of incarceration. “Even though most of us in the social services industry genuinely want to be helpful, it is one of the most colonizing industries. That’s the power of ancestral trauma still living in these systems in New Zealand.”

Many people in positions of power have “inherited an agreement to look away”—an evocative phrase to describe leaders’ tendency to identify possible underlying causes of social ills other than trauma, so as to avoid looking at it—but Hanna is one of dozens of social change leaders breaking that unspoken agreement. He and the team at Inspiring Communities use a Maori-designed frame for intergenerational trauma in their programs, support community-led collective healing rituals, and facilitate collective healing experiences among rival gang members.

Seeing trauma through a systems lens shines a light on an obvious truth: The collective dimension of trauma requires a collective context for healing. In much of the Western world, there’s an assumption that trauma healing should happen individually and in private, such as in a psychologist’s office. And while therapy is absolutely appropriate in some circumstances, it’s insufficient for healing from collective wounds.

Creating spaces for healing can nudge our traumatized and traumatizing systems toward systems of compassion and care. Collectively surfacing and dealing with trauma within organizations and across systems can repair relationships and restore the flow of ideas, leading to new ways of working and relating to each other. Many leaders of nonprofits, foundations, and collective efforts are starting by engaging their leadership team, human resources departments, and boards in conversations about historical harm and trauma-informed leadership.

Others have embarked on a collective healing process. The Irreducible Grace Foundation in Minnesota, for example, uses theatrical arts and spoken word performances to build trust between youth who face disparities and the institutions that serve them. “When we started our work, we thought only the young people in our communities needed to heal from trauma,” said Darlene Fry, the organization’s executive director. “It was such an epiphany for all of us to realize that trauma exists in us and in our bodies also. We had to go on our own healing journey to clean up our organization, our communities, and the generations that came before us.”

Five Characteristics of Systemic Trauma

As noted earlier, trauma within systems, or systemic trauma, includes the unaddressed impacts of individual, intergenerational, collective, and historical trauma, as well as fresh trauma created by harmful present-day system structures and relational dynamics (see sidebar). Left unhealed and unintegrated, the system’s response to trauma can rupture relationships, sap collective energy and creativity, and diminish the interconnectedness that serves as the lifeblood of thriving groups and communities.

But what does systemic trauma actually look like? How can we recognize it when we experience it? And how do we begin to heal it? Our interviews with systems change leaders revealed five important characteristics.

1. Systemic trauma responses mimic individual trauma responses.

Becoming aware of how trauma affects our individual nervous systems opens us up to consider how those same responses flow through our interpersonal interactions and manifest at larger scales of magnitude in our organizations, communities, and systems. The notion of patterns repeating across different magnitudes is known in the natural and digital worlds as a fractal. “Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales,” writes author and transformative justice activist adrienne maree brown in her book Emergent Strategy. “What we practice at a small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”

Using the Polyvagal Theory as a foundation, we extrapolated some of the most common individual trauma responses to larger scales of manifestation, and then tested those trauma expressions in several workshops with social change leaders working in child welfare, criminal justice, education, housing, and other systems. Many participants instantly recognized the examples of systemic trauma we provided, especially among system actors in positions of power such as government institutions.

Systemic expressions of common “fight, flight, freeze” trauma responses include:

• Dismissing past injustices as having no relevance to present-day disparities
• Withholding information and/or collecting and interpreting data in a way that stigmatizes an entire group of people
• Cultural norms that reinforce or even celebrate numbing and “absencing” behaviors (being physically but not emotionally present) when faced with agonizing or heart-wrenching circumstances
• Shaming and dehumanizing an entire group of people as inherently defective, inferior, or “broken”
• Fragmenting funding flows, protocols, and policy responses into smaller and smaller parts until it’s almost impossible to see and serve the bigger picture
• A persistent pattern of mistrust, territoriality, or lack of cooperation between parts of a system due to broken relationships and unresolved conflict

A broader set of guiding questions to identify potential manifestations of systemic trauma is available here and provides a starting point for conversations to explore where systemic trauma might reside in social systems you are involved in.

2. Systems carry trauma because they are relational.

Systems are not mechanical constructs or impersonal faceless institutions. They’re made up of the relationships between people in them. Trauma affects relationships in many ways, but most importantly, it impedes people’s ability to form healthy relationships and relate to others with compassion and empathy.

“The patterns we see in individual therapy are mirrored in the work we do with the community,” said Wainwright. “It’s the same hyper-vigilance and anger and the same detachment, whether we’re working with one young person who’s been removed from their family home and placed in foster care or whether we walk into a room full of people from a vulnerable community. If people are in pain, it flows through their connections and ripples out across their communities.”

This notion of trauma flowing through our interactions and relationships offers a powerful insight into how trauma gets amplified at larger scales until it winds up trapped in a system and encoded in that system’s behavior over time. Thus, we can think of trauma responses as both individual and collective, occurring in each and every system that involves relationships of interconnected and interdependent people.

3. Leaders must recognize both their own trauma and the systemic trauma that impacts others.

While we need to center the trauma of historically oppressed people and their descendants in the work of changing inequitable systems, we all bear the responsibility of healing from historical and collective wounds. The more influence a person has—whether via their leadership role, connections, or available resources—the more impact they have on any given system. If system leaders make decisions in an activated state or act out their trauma responses on others—for example through controlling behavior, blaming, denial, dehumanization, or numbness—the systems they influence will mirror those same patterns.

Deepening awareness of our own unconscious, default trauma responses and assuming accountability for them is a vital capacity for social change leaders, since we carry our trauma history and unconscious trauma responses into the roles we assume in the systems we are trying to change. To compound matters, many social sector professionals are exposed to vicarious trauma and even moral injury in the course of their careers.

“Doing our own trauma work” enables us to get better at noticing when we are acting out of our own default trauma responses. Similarly, it helps us identify others’ trauma responses and distinguish between their behavior when they are in an activated state and their identity as a person. It also makes it possible to relate to others in an empathetic and humanizing way and discern ways of working that reduce the likelihood of triggering or re-traumatizing other people in the system, particularly the most vulnerable.

The process also helps leaders develop more capacity to see, acknowledge, and address historical, intergenerational, and collective trauma that resides in systems and impacts others. However, many decision makers refuse to learn about or publicly acknowledge systemic trauma, because doing so might directly challenge their privilege and their position. Consequently, they may choose to redirect attention, intentionally or not, from the real source of the problem.

“Those of us working in public health and conflict resolution see all of the ways our unresolved historical trauma manifests as mental health problems, addiction, behavioral issues, and violence,” said Vinya Ariyaratne, president of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka, a country that suffered 26 years of civil war that ended in 2009. “But the policy makers do not recognize it. They say, ‘No, we don’t have trauma. We just need to create jobs.’ Since our historical trauma has not been acknowledged, people have to deal with it in their own private way.”

4. The systems most in need of healing often resist the most.

As the example above illustrates, numbing and denial are common ways of dealing with trauma as an overwhelming experience. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, if conversations around the presence of trauma meet resistance. “If you’re traumatized, it’s difficult for you to see it because your psyche will resist it,” said Andrea Blanch, former co-chair of the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice. “The dynamic of trauma is that you must begin to heal before you can see the problem you’re healing from. The same is true with systems. The more traumatized a system is, the more it will resist healing.”

The implications of Blanch’s diagnosis are profound for systems change practitioners. Structural changes alone, such as policy changes or shifts in resource flows, are not enough. Instead of continuously overlaying well-intended solutions on traumatized systems, change makers might instead focus on creating the conditions for healing and repair. The process of creating those conditions allows us to see the problem and the people involved differently, opening up new ways of relating and potential courses of action that would not otherwise be possible.

One example of this is the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) program designed by Gail Christopher, a pioneer in health equity and holistic strategies for social change. With the goal of bringing about transformational, sustainable change, the program launched a multi-year project in 2016 to create the conditions for communities across 14 US cities to heal. TRHT’s methodology includes the use of healing circles and cross-sector, cross-community conversations that help repair racial harm through deep listening, uncovering shared values, and lessening power differentials.

An important principle at work in TRHT’s process is that trauma healing and collective action are mutually reinforcing. “When people advocate for policies and opportunities that address causes of trauma, these activities contribute to a sense of purpose, power and control over life situations,” writes Shawn Ginwright, founder of the nonprofit consulting firm Flourish Agenda, which helps organizations become healing-centered. “Communities and individuals who experience trauma are agents in restoring their own well-being, and [purpose, power and control over life situations] are necessary ingredients.”

By emphasizing healing before developing solutions and continuing collective healing efforts while advocating and implementing those solutions, communities involved in TRHT are seeing progress where past efforts dissipated. Selma, Alabama is addressing harmful school discipline policies; Kalamazoo, Michigan has passed fair housing legislation; and Richmond, Virginia is finding new ways to collectively come to terms with its troubled past as the heartbeat of the Confederacy.

5. Healing relationships between people in a system can change the system’s behavior.

While doing our own trauma work is important, an individualistic frame isn’t sufficient. The collective and systemic dimensions of trauma require a relational context for healing. We heal most deeply through others and in community with others. As Kazu Haga, author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm, writes, “We’re being asked to heal individually for systemic, societal wounds.”

The healing power of relationships is perhaps the single greatest leverage point to fundamentally re-wire a system’s behavior and the outcomes it produces. The non-profit Glasswing International, for example, mobilizes youth, communities, and government agencies to address the root causes and consequences of poverty, violence, and forced migration. “Trauma lives in systems and in the individuals that provide services within those systems,” said Celina de Sola, the organization’s co-founder and president. “We are trying to rediscover the power of trauma healing in contexts that aren’t conducive to healing because shifting that paradigm could be transformative.”

Originally founded in El Salvador, Glasswing’s work has expanded to reach more than 2 million people in 12 countries. Working one institution at a time, Glasswing has provided trauma psychoeducation training to more than 100,000 teachers, police, and health care workers, drawing on cognitive behavioral therapy approaches, restorative practices, and breathing relaxation techniques. “Our methodology starts by helping public sector employees understand how trauma affects their body, mind, and behavior,” de Sola told us. “Once they have an ‘a-ha’ moment about their own trauma responses, then they can see it in others and respond differently, and it ends up shifting the dynamic. Then we give them tools to cope with the effects of trauma on an interpersonal level, because we’re trying to impact the education and health care systems they’re a part of.”

Hundreds of schools, hospitals, and law enforcement agencies now have a trauma-informed lens integrated into their delivery of services and care, including trained specialists on staff and protocols for interventions and referrals. “That’s the amazing power of relationships,” de Sola said. “In a way, this is about relearning how to harness compassion to help others heal and help ourselves heal.”

Transforming Systems Through Collective Healing

Collective healing—drawing on the power of relationships to heal together—is an approach whose time has come. In the context of systems change, collective healing supports individuals and groups within a system to distinguish and repair harm done to them and/or by them to others; transform the destructive energy left behind by trauma into higher awareness, compassion, and learning; and participate in finding new and more creative ways to thrive and collaborate with others in changing the system’s behavior.

That said, it’s unrealistic for every person in a system to participate in a process of collective healing. There usually isn’t sufficient buy-in at the outset, and there are logistical, financial, and sheer space capacity constraints to contend with. A more feasible approach is to create what spiritual teacher and author Thomas Hübl has called “pockets” of collective healing throughout the system. These consist of groups of people intentionally engaged in a collective healing process to repair relationships, restore connectedness, and deepen their capacity to stay related to themselves and each other, even in an activated state. These pockets of restoration and repair radiate outward, affecting the individual relationships, organizations, and broader coalitions and movements that members of the group are a part of.

In many cases, social change leaders who have integrated collective healing into their systems change work draw inspiration from indigenous cultures, wisdom, and spiritual traditions practiced for thousands of years, as well as present-day approaches like restorative justice and truth and reconciliation initiatives. In New Zealand, for instance, Unity House embraces an Indigenous Maori orientation toward trauma healing and restoration, placing nature-based practices at the core of its approach. The membership-led National Domestic Workers Alliance in the United States turned to somatics, an intensive mind-body modality, to help domestic workers heal from trauma and internalized oppression and step into leadership roles at the organization.

Other examples include the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka, which sponsors mixed-faith meditations on each group’s welfare. The Dunna Foundation in Colombia uses a mix of healing circles, yoga, dance, and other psychophysical mind-body techniques to reintegrate ex-combatants from the armed conflict back into society. And in California, Guiding Rage into Power builds on the principles of restorative justice to take incarcerated men on an accountability and collective healing journey. Along the way, they process and heal from abuse, violence, and trauma in their childhoods and young adult lives—an experience participants have described as “consciousness-altering.”

While there’s certainly no one-size-fits-all approach given the paramount importance of historical and cultural context, several collective healing practices cross cultural and geographic contexts, including:

• Honoring and welcoming the cultural traditions, identities, and languages of all people affected by or participating in social change processes
• Introducing embodiment practices like dancing, singing, group meditation, and somatic work to help participants reconnect to their physicality and regulate their nervous systems
• Centering horizontal, relational practices, such as healing circles, that encourage empathic listening and reduce power imbalances
• Including mindfulness or other consciousness-cultivating practices to strengthen people’s awareness of and capacity to host their own and others’ activated states
• Reconnecting to nature and its healing power as a foundational part of the process
• Stepping into the power of telling and owning one’s story and bearing witness to others’ stories
• Imbuing the process with sacredness through rituals, such as making a traditional offering or blessing, reading a spiritual text or poem, acknowledging ancestors and previous generations, or sharing traditional legends or stories

These practices may seem simple, perhaps even obvious. However, mainstream social change efforts rarely prioritize, financially support, and consistently incorporate them with intention and skill. This is often because leaders view collective healing practices as irrelevant to achieving their articulated outcomes or not a good use of time when it comes to solving problems at hand. We believe the contrary: Only by centering healing practices in the sector’s ways of working can we create the inner spaciousness and external conditions for system transformation to occur.

Toward Healing Systems

Broader awareness of and open discourse about individual, intergenerational, collective, and historical trauma in the systems around us have the potential to transform our social problem-solving efforts. Addressing trauma in our systems requires that we create space for social change leaders, teams, and collaborations to engage in understanding how the trauma inside us affects the problems outside us. It also requires that social change leaders, trauma experts, and trained and traditional healers collectively forge a common language; build trust, relationships, and alliances; and advocate together for integrating collective healing processes into the work of systems change.

Many of the healing practices articulated here are ancient, in that they draw on traditions communities have practiced for thousands of years, but they are relatively new in the context of social change. To truly transform systems, we must apply a trauma lens to the conditions that hold problems in place, take a healing-centered perspective, and explore experiences that can create collective healing. Through pursuing this path, society can connect to our deepest shared humanity, and access our full creative potential to address social and environmental problems.

This article is being published as part of the Centered Self Series in partnership with Skoll Foundation, India Development Review, Greater Good Science Center, and The Wellbeing Project

Read more stories by Laura Calderon de la Barca, Katherine Milligan & John Kania.