Trauma In-formed

'Hurt people hurt people.'

We don’t have to look far to find evidence of this.

But I wonder if we can go further. I wonder if this simple phrase might offer a deep explanation of our world’s predicament, of why we’re in this mess.

This isn't my explanation. It emerges from thousands of years of collective wisdom, and is shared today by those who still connect with that wisdom.

The simpl-est version of their explanation is this: We are unwell, we must heal.

In a bit more detail: we are unwell, suffering from trauma, trauma that disconnects us from reality. Our systems, designed by traumatised people, are traumatising, violent, and harmful. By also being disconnected from reality, our systems clash with it, putting them in perpetual crisis. To design healthy systems grounded in reality, beyond crisis, we need to come together and heal.

Typically we apply remedies to the symptoms of this trauma (which comes in many different forms and intensities) but do not seek to see and heal the root cause. The suggestion from the collective wisdom is that while much of the trauma is fresh, it has a much older common origin – a shared root cause in an ‘original trauma’.

This suggested root cause is that when human societies were growing and experimenting with more settled social arrangements (having mainly been wanderers), and practices of agriculture (having mainly been gatherers), unprecedented events meant some people experienced horrendous trauma – likely from new diseases, famine or natural disasters. 

These experiences eroded their faith in life and life-givers – in the availability of resources and care. This was accompanied by an urge to control, to arrest and correct the conditions that were causing the harm. 

In the case of people who were dying and running out of food, this urge to control spawned several impulses:

• Accumulation: to gather and hoard resources to avoid further shortages 

• Domination: to master the life that seems to threaten, forming rigid hierarchies

• Exploitation: of 'nature', and of other communities who weren’t experiencing what they were, and had resources they needed. 

Together these 'control' impulses led to a feeling of and belief in 'separation': that the people were separate from each other, and from the world that seemed to have deserted them. 

So: these traumatised people, having lost faith in life and life-givers, sought control, by accumulating resources, dominating nature, and exploiting others. This led them to invade other communities, kill them, take their stuff, dispose of the protocols that kept our shadow side in check, establish rigid hierarchies of power, and in the process create more traumatised control-seekers. All of which began a death spiral of invasive violence, creating ever more trauma. 

The explanation offered by the collective wisdom is that we never healed from this ancestral trauma, so the violence and trauma has spread, becoming encoded in our modern systems. 

Does this sound familiar? 

Jenica Heintzelman

What are the priorities and incentives of our modern systems? 

Can you see the tendencies towards accumulation, domination, and exploitation? A loss of faith in life and life-givers, and attempts to control them? A belief that we are separate from 'nature' (the fact that we call 'it' anything is telling) and can 'master it'? A departure from what had so far led to our flourishing: cooperation and care, replaced instead with competitive individualism?

Control, Accumulation, Domination, Exploitation, Separation – all are both traumatised and traumatising.

Hurt people hurt people.

Treating the symptoms of this is not enough. The only way out of the death spiral is to heal the root cause. Healing the trauma that has been carried for generations, and relentlessly repeated and topped up by the traumatising systems that it has misled us to design. 

Hurt people hurt people, until they heal.

I can imagine two reactions you might have to this: 1) This sounds like hippy nonsense, be serious, or 2) How can we possibly heal when so much new violence is being perpetrated, surely that involves forgiveness, which surely is impossible now?

I sympathise with both questions. As the descendant of scientists, lawyers and corporate executives, I am very suspicious of anything asking me to hold hands in a room and hum. But it is also because of that background that I am now seeing the sense in this analysis, as modern sciences catch up to indigenous wisdom, much like when we realised that the earth goes round the sun.

As for the possibility of healing and the possibility of forgiveness, perhaps we should look to the example of so many of the collective wisdom holders, many of whom come from indigenous communities that are the most exploited, oppressed and violated in human history. They are often showing up today from a position of compassion and forgiveness, recognising that as we are each part of a whole, divisive fighting is ultimately self-defeating. Their beautiful example demands that we consider: if they can do this, why can’t we?

But we can't do it alone. Coming together wherever we are to face these traumas, both ancestral and fresh, to understand what it might take to heal, is our only chance of finding a way through the predicament we face today. Dispelling the misled belief in separation, and recognising – as modern science does – that we are a connected whole and must nurture caring relationships to survive.

Hurt people hurt people, until they heal – together.

How do we do this?

What will it take for us to face our trauma and the harm it is causing, and heal, when our cultures and systems are denying us the time and space to do so?

What will it take to resist the powerful people seeking the most extreme accumulation, domination and exploitation; who are telling false fearful stories of separation and control?

What will it take for us to let go of control ourselves, to see the risk in accumulation, the delusion in separation, the harm in exploitation, and restore faith in life?

What will it take for us to recognise that unless we do this, unless we make the time to heal, we will keep designing traumatising systems and keep hurting people?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, or even if they are the right questions. My understanding so far is led by the work of Vanessa Andreotti, Miki Kashtan, Tyson Yunkaporta, Sophie Strand, Bayo Akomolafe, Yuria Celidwen, Sherri Mitchell, Thomas Hübl, Gabor Maté, Lisa Schwartz, Mathew Green, Collective Change Lab, and others. All of whom are sharing their wisdom and experiences with great humility and generosity. If the simple analysis in this post intrigues you, please explore their work, which will offer a much richer and more thorough understanding. 

I am inspired by their faith.

Faith in the collective wisdom that presents this simple analysis of the root cause of our predicament.

Faith that together we can stop just medicating the symptoms.

Faith that together we can heal.

If you share this faith too, more power to you. Let's find the others.

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