Three common trauma pathways

Trauma is anything that disconnects or fragments us from our authentic selves and sense of wholeness. It’s typically the result of a shocking event (or a series of repeated disempowering events) that overwhelm the central nervous system, and change how we react to feelings of threat, anxiety, and overwhelm. It can fracture our sense of safety and well-being, and imprint us with vigilant states of tracking for danger, even when we’re not aware of doing so.

You can learn more about the nature of trauma in What Is Trauma? and how it affects us in 8 Common Impacts of Trauma.

There is a growing acknowledgment of our need as a society to help one another heal from personal trauma, since we are each a part of the whole. I believe that with each person’s personal healing, we become a step closer to increased harmony and integration for the whole collective of humanity.

The three pathways of trauma are:

Personal & biographical trauma
Ancestral & inherited trauma
Collective & cultural trauma

In this article, we’ll explore the third pathway, collective trauma.

Collective trauma

Trauma that affects a community or a whole society is called a collective trauma. This includes tragic collective experiences of terrorist attacks, all forms of domestication and slavery, as well as natural disasters that leave our bodies, hearts, and souls impacted and changed.

Traumatic events witnessed by an entire society can stir collective shifts in consciousness and subsequent actions and behaviors. These psychologically poignant experiences influence us in profound ways.

In this article, I want to make a distinction between two aspects of collective trauma: cultural traumatic events and the disempowering and persistent psychological trauma that is a result of the matrix of social and cultural conditioning.

1. Cultural traumatic events

The violent destruction of communities through genocide and colonization reveals ways that humanity has been divorced from its original source of power expressed through love and care for the whole. These forms of invalidating equality and suppressing power illustrate a collective sickness.

Our collective trauma consists of the wounds we have inherited through our shared human history. Cultural traumas deeply influence our personal and collective psyche.

We recognize cultural traumas in catastrophic events, such as the twin towers attack on September 11, 2001. Or the growing list of school shootings, politically and corporate-backed sex trafficking industries, and countless forms of violence experienced by various groups of people.

Some egregious traumas become normalized and unresolved in the collective. I feel this when I turn my attention towards the impact of colonization on Native American Indians. This autumn, I drove to Santa Fe, New Mexico a few times for a training and retreat. Each time I was overwhelmed by beauty. By nature’s exquisite way of decorating the land and sky with inspiring formations of light, reflective colors, and landscape that took my breath away. I passed miles of breathtaking red rock formations that illuminated a power of presence, beauty, and wisdom. I felt allured by a sense of secret treasures hidden in the rock formation holding ancient memories of the past.

From this expansive state of awe, both times, I unexpectedly burst into tears and felt a sharp pain in my heart. It startled me. And then, the landscape revealed the source of this shock in my system as I gazed upon sprawling rows of black asphalt with yellow lines, revealing vacant parking spaces on property of enormous commercialized casinos. Not just one, but an amusement park of gambling establishments.

I wept for the ancestors who came before me. I recounted stories that I’ve tucked away in my heart, about how these people of the earth were stripped of their ways of life. Their land confiscated with a promise for something better. I wept for the intentional act to eliminate freedom in exchange for domestication and disembodiment. A cover story sold as generosity and a promise for something better, resulting in subsidized casinos and bars to provide the privileges of food and shelter for the new Native American workforce.

Addressing cultural trauma

This trauma is unresolved in our collective. It’s not a stretch to correlate the impacts of unresolved trauma due to colonization with the rising epidemics of alcoholism, violence, and gambling that has become a “new normal” for many existing Native American reservations.

Dissolving these wounds is not only a question of individual therapy, but rather, of creating social structures to heal trauma and disintegrate the practices, beliefs, and behaviors that cause violence and separation.

All of these are the result of human-induced traumas, but there are also non-human induced traumas such as natural disasters.

Floods, earthquakes, fires, landslides, tsunamis can cause significant trauma, shock, and trauma such as the sprawling wildfires in Australia occurring at this time. Some natural disasters are human-induced such as the rising temperatures in the oceans causing the extinction of many species due to new strands of deadly bacteria. Or other anomalies such as the discovery, in certain locations in Siberia, where the sea is literally boiling with methane. Some scientists attribute this “never before seen phenomenon” as a direct result of the accelerating impacts of climate change and livestock consumption.

“We as humanity need a collective soul retrieval to heal these forms of domestication and violence.”

2. The matrix of social and cultural conditioning

The matrix of social and cultural conditioning is the most pervasive form of trauma on the planet. It’s a system of mind control that manipulates us to think, feel and behave in specific ways.

Without realizing what’s happening, we become drugged by a fabricated and conditioned reality. One that recklessly distorts our feelings of wholeness and creates a sense of painful separation and aloneness.

The matrix has attempted to turn the masses into puppets dangling on strings of I should. As a result, many of us have learned to repress our authentic needs and desires.

The matrix gets us to do the dirty work, by subliminally encouraging us to internalize voices of criticism and shame. To liberate ourselves we must first see how the voices of domestication are reinforced from the inside-out. If the matrix had a voice, it might say things like this:

“You’re broken and sinful. I know better than you — do as I say and you’ll be safe, protected, worthy of love, belonging and celebration. If you try to step out of line, you’ll be punished and humiliated.”

Learn more in my article, Awakening To The Matrix Of Social And Cultural Conditioning.

What is the result of the matrix?

The matrix turns us away from our instincts, wisdom, and wholeness and towards feelings of inadequacy, fear, and compulsively seeking externally for our value.

This pulses a persistent and irritating buzz of restlessness and anxiety coursing through us. For many, the anxiety may go unnoticed because we’ve learned to quickly block and manage it through addictive behaviors and habits. You know, those swift impulses to fix, numb or strive towards something that will help you to assuage your discomfort in the moment?

As a result, we will plunge into anxiety-induced addictions such as consuming technology, food, people, sex, work, online shopping, or consistently falling into worm holes on social media and online research. These activities temporarily alleviate our anxiety until the next craving takes over. Until we examine the root of our anxiety, it’s hard to shift addictive behaviors in a sustainable way.

Is the matrix behind a socially-normalized addiction to busyness? What happens if we slow down? When we get quiet enough, on a consistent basis, will we feel the power of our quiet presence and the capacity to know answers without conscious thought? Will we feel our hearts more? Instead of protecting and judging ourselves or others, will we lean into connection and compassion?

Learn more about what I call the superhuman compulsion here.

A cultural atmosphere of fear creates trauma.

Simply by existing on this planet, we live in a cultural atmosphere embedded with fear, which leads to trauma, disempowerment, and exclusion. We can make a clear distinction between two systems of power: power-over and power-with.

Power-with is a consensual and integrated expression of power, which includes care for the whole system.
Power-over is rooted in systems, beliefs, and behaviors based in non-consensual dominance and violence, often driven by personal agendas that often not in favor of the whole.

Left unexamined, any social and cultural norms under the helm of power-over principles can cause states of disempowerment, and fragmenting cycles of domestication and disembodiment — all of which contribute to personal and collective trauma patterns.

Over time, in a slow and unsuspecting process, cultural conditioning can corrupt our minds and hearts. Without realizing what’s happening, we’ve been drugged by the illusion of social and cultural conditioning. When successful these messages often succeed by creating ignorance, disempowerment and disconnect us from our higher self. All of which has the power to curtail our ability to trust our instincts and primal intelligence.

How does mind control actually occur?

The matrix acts as a virus swiftly disrupting our mental, emotional, physical health and well-being. It’s an invisible and inherited poison — a slow drip faucet incrementally filling our mind and body with lies.

The matrix’s messages permeate our reality. As a result, we unknowingly become the gatekeeper of our own prisons. When this external oppressor becomes our very own inner critic — the internalized voice of “I should,” “I’m too much” or “I’m not enough— we’re under the spell of domestication.

This is how domestication becomes reinforced from the inside-out and why the tactics of the matrix are one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of disempowerment, manipulation, and misuse of power.

My continual exploration of uncovering how the matrix lives in me

During my health and soul crisis, which I share about in What Is Trauma?, I dug deep into my own psyche exploring wormholes within the matrix. One by one, I exposed compounding internalized pressures of social and cultural idealizations of who I learned that I should be in order to be deemed lovable, successful and worthy. I had swallowed disempowering beliefs without even knowing it.

I had indulged in a seductive buffet of externalized messages which were now my own voice urging me to follow all the shiny carrots to the promise land. After each achievement, I was rapidly pursuing the next one. One by one, I painfully realized, after being awarded each coveted carrot, that this phenomenon of striving for value and happiness through external achievements with work, relationships and life was my own self-imposed prison.

The cycle would never have ceased without the grace of seeing the game that I had unknowingly plugged into and reinforced with my own internalized beliefs, expectations, and views of reality.

“The matrix wants us to forget the radiant treasure of who we truly are.

In truth, our power innately beams from the depths of our whole being — not from what we own, do, or achieve.”

Self-inquiry: Cultural trauma

Here is a list of questions to kickstart or deepen your investigation of personal trauma.

Cultural traumatic events

What cultural traumas (human-induced or non-human induced) have your attention and tug at your heart right now?
How has your personal healing process shifted the collective trauma?
How do you think we can heal trauma collectively?

The matrix of social and cultural conditioning

How does the matrix live inside you now?
What are the thought forms that trip you up and attempt to domesticate your wild heart?
How does the matrix turn you against yourself? Do you judge your vulnerability? Do you think everything is your fault? Do you struggle setting boundaries to honor your needs and true desires?

A deep bow to each brave revolutionary leader who is healing trauma

The medicine we need to heal trauma is awareness, safety, love, curiosity, and patience. Let’s help each other pierce the cultural patterns that enable and reinforce states of desensitization, trauma, and dissociation.

If you’re one of the brave and sensitive creatures who feels cut off from your divine self, or if you’re currently struggling with anxiety, addiction, health issues, or feel broken and alone… keep going.

Everything you need to heal is within you. I believe that anything is possible with self-awareness, loving presence, and attuned, non-judgmental, caring support.

I wish for each one of us a handful of trusted allies who know how to create a safe space for us to look within and walk in the dark on the pilgrimage of embodiment and reclaiming our power. This is the holy grail of a lifetime.

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE?

If you’d like to continue to explore the journey of addressing and healing trauma, I’ve written a series of articles on the topic:

Trauma Pathways: Collective & Cultural Trauma