Harvard University Workshops

“Collective trauma has made us who we are.”

Sharing an exploration from the Harvard Longwood Campus workshop series into trauma and the core competencies of resilience.

We’ve all been born into collective trauma; our work is to integrate these unhealed wounds which chronically impact our emotions, minds, and bodies.

This was one of the takeaways from the virtual workshop series focused on building resilience through self-regulation, co-regulation, and group coherence. Approximately 50 attendees, including faculty, researchers, clinicians and staff from Harvard schools and affiliated hospitals attended the three-part series in May and early June 2020.

When investigating both the sources and symptoms of trauma in one’s life, the first step is to understand how each of us self-regulates when faced with stress.

“We are used to high chronic stress levels, accumulated over decades, that we don’t even call stress anymore.”

To carry this stress, we’ve suppressed the emotions that led us to this state. And to protect ourselves from the intensity of feelings stored inside, we mentally interpret our emotions, instead of expressing them and sensing how they impact our minds and bodies.

Ultimately, this unresolved stress can disrupt a sense of wholeness within ourselves.

“The more we pay attention to this invisible fragmentation within ourselves in our daily lives, the more we can identify and resolve these patterns before they become chronic.”

Guided meditations can help identify emotions and sense blocks in the body, so we can begin to witness how fragmentation appears first in oneself. This is an important step when trying to understand — and contribute solutions towards — larger societal disruptions and unrest.

Carrying collective trauma

“Every one of us has been born into a world that has suffered trauma over thousands of years. Collective trauma has made us who we are. The question is: where does this trauma live in myself?”

In 2016, I founded a non-profit organization called the Pocket Project to address these questions.

“As physicians, we don’t have the structure and space to dig into trauma,” said workshop participant Kristen Schaefer, a palliative care physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who felt that a conversation around learning about trauma was timely for her.

“There’s a bravado about not having trauma. Psychiatrists and social workers have a culture to navigate that, but there’s a loneliness in being in another specialty that doesn’t have this rich landscape to work with trauma.” Schaefer, who has treated patients who have experienced collective trauma including Salvadorian women and residents of the Navajo reservation, has been an advocate for palliative care medical education and currently teaches a longitudinal development course for first-year medical students. The course teaches students skills to cultivate a reflective practice to accompany the rigor of their clinical training.

Like many physicians, Schaefer has juggled the strains of attending to her patients’ fears and increased needs during this time, while managing her own stress and that of her family’s. “As I’ve cared for my patients and students during the COVID-19 crisis, I’ve been seeing in myself, students, family, peers this kind of trauma. I’ve been thinking about who I can be as a teacher, colleague, and physician within this framework of understanding trauma.”

“Thomas’ approach is ripe with warmth and gentleness that is not often experienced in a workshop,” adding that perhaps this is a model Harvard might emulate in introducing the discussion of trauma in its medical curricula, patient care, and workspaces. “You have to really practice seeing what trauma is, and not react to it, but try to enter people’s experience of it,” she says. “Seeing others step up and name a kind of deep brokenness and then offering a format to collectively approach it feels essential to healing.”

Creating group coherence

Achieving self-regulation is possible by aligning one’s emotions, thoughts, and somatic awareness. This process is aided and complemented by co-regulation, which is the process of allowing resonance to happen with another’s nervous system. “What the pandemic has taught us is that we are all interdependent. The state of a mature human being is the recognition of our interdependence.”

There are opportunities to practice this in the workplace, he pointed out, where we often face a choice: create emotional distance when we don’t want to feel people’s stress or invite them into the possibility of emotional resonance by listening (among other skills), which can then spark our true capacities as leaders.

“The latter approach, I believe, builds a much higher level of trust. But it’s more challenging because it means that I have to be willing to feel, in an authentic way, the stress of people in my environment.”

As we practice this on our teams, we strengthen our relational competencies and our ability to support one another during times of stress and crisis. When larger networks of people come together to practice these relational competencies, groups can flourish and solve problems together, creating group coherence.

In addition to the December talk on collective trauma, there are other initiatives focused on this area of research. At Harvard College, a course on the political implications of collective trauma was offered in 2016–17 by sociologist and lecturer Shai Dromi, who also attended the workshop. And for the past 40 years, the Harvard Program for Refugee Trauma at Massachusetts General Hospital has been providing services for refugees and conducting research.

After attending the workshop, the director of the program, psychiatrist Richard Mollica, said “Thomas personifies a modern-day Martin Buber,” the twentieth-century philosopher who was one of Mollica’s idols when he attended Yale Divinity School while completing his psychiatry residency at Yale Medical School.

“Thomas is a charismatic visionary who has a lot to offer all of us,” shared Mollica. “His phenomenological analysis of interpersonal experience rang true to me. Certainly, the patient is always saying ‘I know that you know that I know.’ Patients in my clinic are always attuned to the empathic quality of the relational experience. I wish the doctors were as sensitive.”

Originally published at https://thomashuebl.com