Collective Trauma and Collective Healing: The Social Nervous System

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The Wounds That Belong to Everyone

When a bomb explodes in a marketplace, the shrapnel wounds the people nearest to the blast. But the trauma — the imprint of terror, helplessness, and shattered safety — radiates outward in concentric circles. The victims. Their families. The first responders. The witnesses. The community. The nation. The world, through media. Each circle receives a different dose of the trauma, but each receives something. The wound is not private. It is collective.

Thomas Hubl — a contemporary teacher of collective trauma integration and author of Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds (2020) — has spent two decades working with groups to process collective trauma. His central insight, grounded in both contemplative practice and emerging neuroscience, is that trauma is not merely an individual psychological phenomenon. It is a social phenomenon — a disruption of the social fabric that affects the collective nervous system of communities, nations, and potentially the species.

The concept of collective trauma challenges the dominant Western therapeutic model, which treats trauma as an individual’s response to an individual’s experience, addressed through individual therapy in the privacy of the clinical dyad. Hubl argues that this model, while essential for individual healing, is insufficient for the kinds of wounds that belong not to individuals but to groups — the wounds of war, genocide, slavery, colonization, forced migration, and mass violence. These wounds live not in individual nervous systems alone but in the relationships between nervous systems — in families, communities, institutions, and cultural narratives.

Healing collective trauma, Hubl argues, requires collective process — a shared, witnessed, group-based approach that allows the social nervous system to complete the defensive responses that were frozen, fragmented, or overwhelmed by the collective traumatic event.

Polyvagal Theory Extended

Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory (2011, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation) describes the autonomic nervous system as a hierarchical system with three levels:

Ventral vagal complex (social engagement system): The newest evolutionary development, unique to mammals. Governs facial expression, vocalization, listening, eye contact, and heart rate modulation. When active: calm, present, connected, safe. This system enables co-regulation — the ability of one nervous system to calm another through social engagement signals (voice tone, facial expression, attentive listening).
Sympathetic nervous system (fight-flight): Mobilization in response to threat. When chronically active: anxiety, hypervigilance, agitation, aggression.
Dorsal vagal complex (freeze-collapse): The oldest system, shared with reptiles. Immobilization in response to overwhelming, inescapable threat. When chronically active: depression, dissociation, numbness, fatigue, withdrawal.

Porges’ key contribution is the concept of neuroception — the nervous system’s automatic, below-conscious-awareness assessment of safety or danger. Before conscious thought evaluates a situation, the autonomic nervous system has already assessed it as safe (ventral vagal response), dangerous (sympathetic response), or life-threatening (dorsal vagal response).

Hubl extends polyvagal theory to the social level. Just as an individual nervous system cycles between ventral vagal (safe/connected), sympathetic (mobilized/defensive), and dorsal vagal (frozen/collapsed) states, a collective — a family, a community, a nation — can occupy these states collectively:

Collective ventral vagal: A community in which people feel safe, connected, and trusting. Social engagement is fluid. Cooperation is natural. Conflict is managed through dialogue and mutual accommodation. This is the state of social health.

Collective sympathetic activation: A community in a state of chronic threat — hypervigilance, suspicion, aggression, polarization. Think of a city under siege, a nation at war, or a community experiencing chronic violence. The collective nervous system is mobilized for defense, and the social engagement system is suppressed in favor of defensive postures.

Collective dorsal vagal collapse: A community in a state of collective dissociation, numbness, apathy, and withdrawal. Think of populations that have experienced genocide, slavery, or prolonged occupation — communities where the collective spirit appears crushed, where initiative and hope have been replaced by resignation and passivity. The collective nervous system has collapsed into freeze.

Co-Regulation at Scale

Individual polyvagal theory emphasizes co-regulation — the process by which one person’s nervous system state influences another’s. A calm, attuned therapist helps a dysregulated client’s nervous system settle through the social engagement system — through voice tone, facial expression, body posture, and attentive presence. The therapist’s ventral vagal state helps the client’s nervous system shift from sympathetic (anxiety) or dorsal vagal (collapse) toward ventral vagal (safety, connection).

Co-regulation scales. In a group setting — a family, a team, a community, a ceremony — the nervous system states of participants mutually influence each other. If enough participants are in a ventral vagal state (calm, connected, attuned), their collective presence can co-regulate other participants who are in defensive states. The group becomes a container for nervous system regulation.

Conversely, if enough participants are in sympathetic (anxious, angry) or dorsal vagal (collapsed, dissociated) states, their collective state can dysregulate other participants — pulling them out of social engagement into defensive postures. This is the mechanism of mob psychology, panic contagion, and collective depression.

The Transmission of Collective Trauma

Intergenerational Transmission

Collective trauma is transmitted across generations through multiple channels:

Epigenetic transmission: As detailed in the companion article on epigenetic inheritance, extreme stress alters the epigenetic landscape of the organism’s genome, and these alterations can be transmitted to offspring through germline epigenetic marks. Holocaust survivors’ children have altered FKBP5 methylation. Dutch Hunger Winter survivors’ grandchildren have altered metabolic programming. The trauma writes itself into the DNA.

Attachment transmission: Traumatized parents often have impaired attachment capacity — they may be emotionally unavailable (dorsal vagal collapse), hypervigilant and intrusive (sympathetic activation), or oscillating unpredictably between the two (disorganized attachment). These patterns are transmitted to children through the attachment relationship, programming the child’s nervous system for the same defensive states that the parent inhabits.

Narrative transmission: Families and communities transmit trauma through stories — or through the absence of stories. Silence about a traumatic event can be as transmissive as explicit narrative. The “family secrets” of abuse, addiction, or violence — the things no one talks about — create gaps in the family narrative that children fill with anxiety, shame, and confusion. Conversely, obsessive retelling of traumatic narratives can transmit the trauma through emotional contagion and the child’s empathic identification with the parents’ suffering.

Cultural transmission: Collective trauma becomes encoded in cultural practices, institutional structures, and social norms. The culture of silence around the Armenian Genocide. The institutional racism that perpetuates the trauma of slavery. The collective hypervigilance of Israeli society. The alcoholism epidemics in indigenous communities affected by intergenerational trauma. The trauma lives in the culture — in the way institutions operate, in the stories that are told (and not told), in the norms and expectations that govern social behavior.

The Collective Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk’s insight — “the body keeps the score” — applies to the collective body as well as the individual body. The collective body of a community — its institutions, its physical infrastructure, its cultural practices, its social patterns — keeps the score of collective trauma.

A community that has experienced collective violence may show:

Chronic interpersonal distrust (collective hypervigilance)
Fragmented social networks (collective dissociation — people withdraw from collective engagement)
High rates of substance abuse and addiction (attempts to regulate overwhelmed nervous systems)
Authoritarian social structures (rigid hierarchies that provide a sense of control in response to collective helplessness)
Cycles of violence (perpetuation of the traumatic dynamic — victims become perpetrators, each generation re-enacting the unresolved trauma of the previous generation)

These patterns are not individual pathology. They are collective adaptations to collective trauma — the social nervous system’s frozen defensive responses persisting long after the original threat has passed.

Thomas Hubl’s Approach to Collective Healing

The Principles

Hubl’s approach to collective trauma integration rests on several principles:

Presence: Trauma fragments consciousness. Healing requires the reassembly of fragmented awareness through the practice of sustained, embodied presence — the capacity to be fully here, fully now, in the body, in the group, in the present moment. Dissociation is the primary defense against overwhelming experience. Presence is the antidote.

Witness consciousness: Trauma that is witnessed — seen, acknowledged, held by another conscious being — can be integrated. Trauma that is not witnessed — that is denied, minimized, or silenced — remains frozen. The group provides the witnessing function — the capacity of multiple nervous systems to hold space for the emergence and integration of traumatic material.

Relational field: Healing happens in relationship, not in isolation. The relational field of a group — the quality of attention, safety, connection, and mutual presence among participants — is the therapeutic container. The stronger the relational field, the more traumatic material can safely emerge and be processed.

Emotional completion: Trauma is, in part, an emotional response that was interrupted — grief that could not be expressed, rage that could not be discharged, terror that could not be fled. Collective healing involves the completion of these interrupted emotional responses within the safety of the group container. Grief is grieved. Rage is expressed (safely). Terror is witnessed and held.

Ancestral acknowledgment: Collective trauma often involves ancestors — previous generations who experienced the original trauma and whose unresolved pain lives in the descendant. Hubl’s process includes explicit acknowledgment of the ancestors — their suffering, their survival, their gifts, and their unresolved wounds. This is not ancestor worship. It is emotional accounting — recognizing the full weight of what has been carried and choosing consciously what to continue carrying and what to lay down.

The Process

Hubl’s collective trauma integration typically involves large groups (50-500 participants) working together over multiple days. The process involves:

Establishing the container: Building the relational field through guided meditation, dyadic exercises, and small group sharing. Creating the safety and trust needed for deep emotional work.
Resourcing: Ensuring that participants have access to internal resources (grounding practices, breath awareness, body awareness) and external resources (partners, small groups, facilitators) that will support them during the intensive processing phases.
Collective sensing: The group enters a meditative state and collectively “senses” the traumatic field — allowing the collective body to bring forward whatever material needs attention. This is not directed or guided content — it emerges from the group field, often surprising participants with its specificity and emotional power.
Emotional processing: The material that emerges is processed through the group — grief is expressed and witnessed, rage is voiced and contained, fear is acknowledged and held. The group functions as a collective nervous system that can regulate the intensity of the process — if the activation becomes too high, the group’s collective presence helps contain it.
Integration: After the emotional processing, the group integrates the experience through reflection, dialogue, creative expression, and collective ritual. The goal is not to “resolve” the trauma (collective trauma of the magnitude of genocide or slavery cannot be resolved in a workshop) but to begin the process of conscious integration — to bring the frozen, fragmented material into awareness where it can begin to be metabolized.

The Scientific Context

Lane Beckes and James Coan (2011, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience) proposed Social Baseline Theory (SBT) — the hypothesis that the human brain’s default assumption is that social resources (other people who can help) are available. The brain calibrates its threat assessment and energy expenditure based on the perceived availability of social support. When social support is present, the brain perceives threats as less threatening (less amygdala activation) and allocates fewer metabolic resources to threat management. When social support is absent, the brain perceives the same threats as more threatening and allocates more resources to defense.

SBT implies that isolation IS a threat signal — the absence of co-regulatory others triggers the same neurological cascade as a physical threat. This explains why social isolation is one of the strongest predictors of poor health outcomes — comparable in risk to smoking 15 cigarettes per day (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010, PLOS Medicine).

SBT provides a neuroscientific foundation for collective trauma and collective healing: collective trauma disrupts the social network that provides co-regulatory support, leaving individual nervous systems without the social resources they need for regulation. Collective healing restores the co-regulatory network — rebuilding the social connections that allow individual nervous systems to regulate through the social engagement system rather than through isolated defensive strategies.

Mirror Neurons and Empathic Resonance

The discovery of mirror neurons (Rizzolatti et al., 1996, Cognitive Brain Research) provided a neural mechanism for empathic resonance — the ability to feel what another person is feeling through observation of their behavior. Mirror neurons fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe another individual performing the same action. This creates a neural basis for empathy — the direct, automatic, pre-cognitive sharing of emotional and physical states between individuals.

In a group setting, mirror neuron activation creates a network of empathic resonance — each person’s emotional state is reflected in the neural activity of other group members. This produces the “emotional contagion” that makes group processes powerful: when one person expresses grief, the mirror neuron systems of other participants activate grief-related neural patterns, allowing the group to share in the emotional processing.

Indigenous Models of Collective Healing

Every indigenous culture has well-developed practices for collective trauma processing. These practices predate modern psychotherapy by millennia and represent accumulated empirical wisdom about the collective nervous system:

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s TRC was not merely a political mechanism for transitional justice. It was a collective trauma processing ritual — a space where victims could tell their stories, be witnessed by the nation, and have their suffering officially acknowledged. The process drew on the African concept of ubuntu (“I am because we are”) — the recognition that individual well-being is inseparable from collective well-being, and that collective wounds require collective witnessing to heal.

Aboriginal Australian “sorry business”: The traditional mourning practices of Aboriginal Australians involve extended communal grief rituals — weeks of collective mourning, storytelling, singing, and ceremony. The grief is not private. It belongs to the community. The community processes it together.

Native American healing circles: The talking circle — a simple format in which participants sit in a circle and speak in turn, with the group listening without interruption or judgment — is a powerful co-regulatory technology. The circle provides the witnessing function. The structure provides safety. The collective attention provides the container.

Jewish mourning practices: Shiva (the seven-day mourning period), kaddish (the mourner’s prayer recited in community), and yahrtzeit (annual memorial observance) are structured collective practices for processing grief. The mourner is never alone — the community surrounds them, providing meals, presence, and the co-regulatory support of collective witnessing.

The Digital Dharma Integration

From the Digital Dharma perspective, collective trauma and collective healing reveal that the social nervous system is not a metaphor but a measurable, physiological reality. Individual nervous systems are not isolated — they are networked through social engagement signals (voice, face, touch, proximity), electromagnetic field coupling (heart coherence), mirror neuron resonance, and epigenetic transmission.

The health of the social nervous system — its capacity for collective ventral vagal regulation, collective presence, and collective coherence — is as important for human well-being as the health of individual nervous systems. A society with a healthy social nervous system is resilient, cooperative, creative, and adaptive. A society with a traumatized social nervous system is fragmented, fearful, reactive, and self-destructive.

The technologies for social nervous system healing already exist. They have existed for millennia — in the form of ceremony, ritual, collective mourning, celebration, storytelling, singing, dancing, and the simple practice of sitting together in a circle and being present with what is.

What has been added by modern understanding is the recognition of the mechanisms:

Co-regulation through the social engagement system (polyvagal theory)
Empathic resonance through mirror neuron activation
Epigenetic transmission and healing through stress-response gene modification
Heart coherence through electromagnetic field synchronization
Group field effects on random physical systems (FieldREG research)

The convergence of indigenous wisdom and modern neuroscience points to a unified understanding: we are not separate. Our nervous systems are interconnected. Our traumas are shared. And our healing must be, at least in part, collective.

The wound that belongs to everyone can only be healed by everyone. Not by everyone doing the same thing. But by everyone showing up — present, attuned, willing to witness what needs to be witnessed, willing to feel what needs to be felt, willing to be part of the collective nervous system that can hold what no individual nervous system can hold alone.

This is the oldest medicine. And the most needed.