Collective trauma is harm done to a whole group of people, a community, a people or a culture, which damages the bonds between them as well as the people themselves, and which can carry on long after the events that caused it. Therapeutic Shamanism sees it as one of several layers of inherited wounding beneath our own history, the deepest of them being the wounds of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer that the whole of modern culture still carries.
What is collective trauma? #
Trauma that happens to a group, and not only to the individuals in it. The sociologist Kai Erikson gave the idea its classic form after studying the Buffalo Creek flood of 1972 in West Virginia, where a dam of coal waste gave way and destroyed a string of mining villages. Alongside the individual trauma of the survivors he found a second, collective trauma: “a blow to the basic tissues of social life”, damaging the bonds that had held the community together.1
Later researchers have found the same thing elsewhere. The psychiatrist Daya Somasundaram, working in northern Sri Lanka, compared the Tamil community’s experience of decades of war with its experience of the 2004 tsunami, and found that the chronic, man-made disaster changed the community far more deeply than the natural one. War, he concluded, has effects on families, communities and whole societies that are more than the sum of the harm done to individuals.2
A closely related idea is historical trauma, a term the social worker Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart applied to what colonisation did to the Lakota, harm suffered by a whole people and passed down the generations.3
How is it different from an ancestral burden? #
The two run along a single spectrum. At one end are the wounds a particular family passes down its own line; further along are the wounds a whole people or culture carries. A family burden can usually be traced to particular people and events. A collective wound belongs to everyone who grew up inside that culture, whatever their family history. How burdens of both kinds are passed down, through stories, through the body and through things more mysterious, is covered in What are ancestral burdens and how are they passed down?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand collective trauma? #
As layers. Therapy can be thought of as an archaeological dig. On top stands the building, the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer a person has constructed. Beneath it lie the layers of their recent history, then the layers of childhood, which is usually as far as psychotherapy goes. Beneath those are the layers of earlier generations, the ground of family and ancestral healing. And beneath those again lie historical and collective layers.4
In Britain, for example, these go back through the Dark Ages, the Romans and the Celts, and as far back as the first farmers, who arrived around six thousand years ago and began to clear the land for farming. These layers carry “the wounds of domestication and the Fall”, and those wounds still affect us today.5 The break from animism begins with domestication and the coming of farming, and speeds up with the Fall, the rise of the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. Every person raised in a culture shaped by that history carries something of it. See What is the Fall?
From the first farmers to the present day, the layers are also full of the noise of humanity, human-made stories that largely drown out the Stories of nature.6 So collective trauma is not only a matter of terrible events. It is also the loss of a way of being, buried so deeply that for a long time we forgot it had ever existed.
Does it show in ordinary life? #
Yes, often in ways we take for granted. In some ways the whole of modern culture, spanning around six thousand years of traumatic human history, is living with collective post-traumatic stress. Hunter-gatherer people often say that modern people are crazy, and they mean it literally: by comparison with them, our mental health is terrible. There are individual exceptions, but collectively this makes modern groups, workplaces, committees and families much harder work to be in.7
There is a baseline level of stress these days that even the most sociable people live with. We lock our doors and windows, put passwords on our phones and bank accounts, take care when out alone at night, and manage difficult people at work and in our families. Like the frog in a slowly heating saucepan, we have got so used to this that we think it is normal. Set beside hunter-gatherer life, it is not how humans used to be.8 See What is trauma, and how does Therapeutic Shamanism understand it?
How does a collective wound keep going? #
Partly through the patterns people act out on each other. The drama triangleDrama triangle. The persecutor–rescuer–victim pattern; the poison of unhealthy groups. More about this, in which people take turns as victim, persecutor and rescuer, pulls more and more people in until a situation escalates out of control. It destroys communities and rips families apart, and it can be passed on for generations, even centuries. It can also run on a mass scale, in conflicts such as those in the Middle East, Northern Ireland and the Balkans.9 A wound that is never faced is handed on, and each generation that inherits it adds its own reactions. See What is the drama triangle?
Can collective trauma be healed? #
Therapeutic Shamanism holds that something lies deeper than all the wounded layers. Below the layers full of human noise are quieter layers, more about nature and almost free of middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer stories. These are the layers Daniel Quinn spoke of when he described “the Great ForgettingGreat Forgetting. Daniel Quinn’s term for the mass amnesia by which Taker culture erased the knowledge that humanity ever lived any other way, dismissing almost all of our story as ‘pre-history’. Read the full answer”, and more and more people are now beginning a Great RememberingGreat Remembering. The counter-movement to the Great Forgetting: the recovery of the buried animist knowledge, already underway. Therapeutic Shamanism understands itself as part of it. Read the full answer. Underneath all our personal history, underneath the family and ancestral layers and all the layers of the Fall, the Soul is waiting.10 Journeying to the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer is one way of reaching those layers, and of finding there what it is to be Human that our animist ancestors knew. See What is the Lower-World?
Outside the shamanic world, researchers working with Indigenous communities point in a similar direction. A review of the research on Indigenous peoples in North America, with a focus on Canada’s First Nations, concluded that self-government, and a living connection to culture and spirituality, go with better outcomes, and that resilience is as much a part of the story as harm.11
Is the idea of collective trauma disputed? #
In parts. Fast and Collin-Vézina, who are broadly sympathetic to the idea, report a late-1990s review which found that most studies comparing the descendants of Holocaust survivors with control groups had not found significant differences between them.12 Some scholars also raise the concern that describing a people’s history as trauma can make that people sound damaged, turning history into a diagnosis.
On the other side, studies such as the neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda’s have reported measurable differences in some survivors’ descendants, though Yehuda’s best-known study was small.13 On the second concern, others in the field separate the history itself from the ways people respond to it, which can be resilient as well as harmful. Māori scholars, among them Linda Tuhiwai Smith, have suggested treating historical trauma theory as a companion that travels alongside a people’s own ways of understanding, a theoretical ally.14 For how inherited wounds pass down, and the evidence on epigenetics, see What are ancestral burdens and how are they passed down?
