“You drown not by falling into a river but by staying submerged in it.” We need to start paying attention to systemic trauma--the pain in our institutions
Photo by the blowup on Unsplash
We were alerted to this by our great colleague Matthew Green, an environmental journalist who’s also working through the implications of trauma, individual and collective, on his profession (and others’). See his archive here.
It’s a synoptic piece from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, titled Healing Systems: How recognizing trauma in ourselves, other people, and the systems around us can open up new pathways to solving social problems (by Laura Calderon de la Barca, Katherine Milligan & John Kania)
An opening extract:
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
Photo by the blowup on Unsplash
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.”
More here. Follow Matthew Green’s work at his substack, Resonant World