What Wikipedia Can't Tell You About Collective Trauma and Grief
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Don’t have time to read? Listen here.
You cannot turn on the tv, open your phone or computer without it right there in your face. It’s inescapable.
Yet, another police attack on a black body.
Protests. The pain is too much to hold. Voices silenced and mistreated for far too long, demand to be heard.
Violent outbreaks. Communities rooted in love, asking to be heard, to be equal clashing with those who do not and cannot understand. These people become defensive, reactive, and stuck. They are caught in a fear response. They forget to pause, to stop, to listen. They miss that the fight is for the betterment of humankind, society, and future generations.
Each day you are bombarded by traumatic events that seem never ending and inescapable.
You see everything. You know the pain. Your heart bleeds for those who suffer, who hurt, who remain unheard and unseen. You feel a call to step up, to champion change. To create a better world, a world of equality, balance, and love.
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As if the collective pain wasn’t enough, COVID feeds it, creating isolation, depression, anxiety, and grief. You are bound to your space, unable to be with those who get you, understand you, fuel you. Your heart shrinks smaller and smaller. You struggle to make sense of everything that assaults you daily. As you fight to crawl your way out of the collective hole, you still have to live your life, as shattered as that may seem.
You are living in collective trauma and grief.
What is collective trauma?
Collective trauma is when a group of people experience a traumatic event. 9/11. War. Violence. Police brutality. Genocide. Colonization. Slavery. Natural disasters.
A few ways collective trauma can manifest:
Emotional symptoms:
Anxiety
Depression
Feeling uneasy
Feeling unsafe
Anger
Shock and disbelief
Sadness
Helpless
Guilt
Mental Symptoms
Numbness
Trouble concentrating
Nightmares
Questioning spiritual beliefs
Disassociation (when you feel like a floating head with nobody)
Body Symptoms
Body aches and pain
Racing heart
Headaches
Change in appetite
Easily startled
Interpersonal Symptoms
Irritability
Distrust
Withdrawal
Feeling judgemental
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What is Collective Grief?
Collective grief is the grief of losing something larger than yourself, it expands past your personal experience into the shared experience with others. It is a loss of rights, rituals, culture, land, community, traditions, lore, and a way of life. It is the grief of a group of people who are forced to assimilate to the demands of the dominant culture or change their way of being to adapt.
Stages of Collective grief
Elizabeth Kubler Ross outlines the stages of grief as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These stages are not linear and you may fluctuate between all of them. As a society, we grieve through these stages individually and collectively.
Denial materializes when we as a group ignore the problem, pretend it does not exist. This also shows up with the belief that it is them, not us.
Anger manifests as protests and riots.
Bargaining is when we try and negotiate better terms, to come to an agreement. I’ll give you this for this. It can show up as petitions, changing laws and legislation.
Depression is when a group of people feel hopeless, feeling forced to accept life as it is
Acceptance is when the community has accepted what has happened to the community. This is not to be confused with compliance. It is accepting that something terrible has happened and the community is able to rebuild and heal (such as rebuilding after a devastating storm or war).
As a society, we are collectively fluctuating between denial, anger, depression, and bargaining. Not enough has been done to move us into acceptance, into a new norm. As we fluctuate through each stage, we can feel unsettled, on edge, anxious, hopeless, and disenfranchised.
Annamarie Fidel-Rice sees grief as a process of alchemy. Alchemy being the process of changing iron to gold. Grief as an alchemical process goes through 7 transformational stages
7 Stages of Alchemy:
Calcinatio is the fire that causes the substance to change, here the substance is being burned to ash. This is the anger towards what has happened to our community.
Solutio is the process of the ash becoming liquid. This is our community's wounds. In this stage, we sit, feel and become aware of just how deep these wounds penetrate our communities. The liquid represents the movement of ebb and flow of emotions.
Coagulatio is when the liquid becomes solid once again. For our community, this is the process of healing our wounds, tending to them, to become whole once again.
Sublimatio, the transformation of the substance into vapor. For grief, it represents a new perspective, our ability to rise above the issue and to see our grief, our community, our world in a new light.
Mortificatio is when the original substance has lost it’s form to chaos. In grief it is the death of the past beliefs, and perceptions.
Separatio is the stage where everything is separated. For grief, this means taking apart the wound. We separate into individuals impacted by tragedy. We tend to our own pains. This step is necessary to incorporate the wisdom gained from sublimato.
Coniunctio is the rejoining of elements and the coming together as a community. Our community has been rebuilt, restored and is anew. New ways of being are now possible and emerging.
Collective trauma and grief are part of the human experience. You are not alone, you are part of a community that is like you dealing with trauma and grief.
Dear one, know, that there is light at the end of the tunnel. No matter how faint or barely visible it is there. Starting now:
Take a moment.
Pause.
Close your eyes and breathe deeply into your belly. Feel the breath move in and out of the body.
Seek beauty, cultivating childlike curiosity, and awe. See the world, even for a moment, from the eyes of a child.
There is time to tend to the wounds of the world. Start with yourself.
Are you experiencing collective trauma and grief?
Want to know what to do about it?
Sign up to be notified for Part 2: 4 Ways to Tend to Your Collective Wounds, Part 3: 5 Ways to be a Warrior While Tending to You. This is the first series in a series on trauma including generational, historical and institutional. As well as, coming soon working with grief and tools for empaths, as to support you in living your best life!