Systemic Trauma Symptoms in Society 

Musings on Thomas Hübl’s invitation to consider how we can recognise the systemic trauma symptoms in society and where they show up?”

“How can you recognise the systemic trauma symptoms in society and where they show up?” This is a question we were asked to meditate on after a module of Thomas Hübl’s online course “Healing Ancestor Trauma”. As someone who has wondered why so many people put up with toxic situations, don’t seem to see them and even perpetuate them, I find the subject fertile for thought.

Symptoms of trauma include numbing, dissociation (when we feel disconnected from ourselves and the world around us), chronic stress and irritability, hyper reactivity, addictions (to avoid feeling the pain), feeling unsafe and isolated, struggling to enjoy down time. It is not difficult to recognise several of these traits in a typical “successful” executive. This person is more likely than not to be a workaholic, in an addictive relationship with e-mails and other messages, feeling he or she is in a tough competitive world where only the strongest do well.

Gabor Mate specifies that trauma isn’t an event itself, it is the way that a person reacts to an event, and it may be different for everyone, more sensitive people are more likely to experience trauma, just like burned skin might feel even gentle touch as excruciating. Trauma is the psychic wound that leaves a scar. “It leaves an imprint in your nervous system, in your body, in your psyche, and then shows up in multiple ways that are not helpful to you later on.” (https://drgabormate.com/the-wisdom-of-trauma/)

We can get more specific. Natural rhythms are largely ignored in our society. We are all Yang, with little regard for Yin. When our body wants to slow down, we don’t notice it, and if we do there is social pressure to ignore it and push through. This blind spot probably results from numbing – our own rhythms were denied when we were young, therefore we silenced our need for rest and care and are unaware of it.  My daughters’ busiest times at school were in the middle of winter, with sports commitments, choir rehearsals and performances, school plays on top of the usual academic requirements. More often than not they got sick and struggled through their schedule the best they could. An environment attuned to their needs would not schedule such a programme at a time of year where everything inside and outside of us calls for slowing down. Only if adults were themselves denied attention to their own needs as children could they impose the same treatment on others. In some countries children sit behind a desk up to ten hours a day because of classes then homework. Some thrive on it, and some who don’t develop conditions such as ADHD. 

If seasonal rhythms are not integrated in our lives, it is the case also for life rhythms. Menstrual cycles are largely ignored and PMS considered a curse instead of being seen as the source of deep intuition that it is when we allow ourselves to slow down. A woman who just gave birth is under pressure (internal as much as external) to go back to work as soon as possible, she receives more social status from her work than from her mothering. Not honouring the full gifts of womanhood is a sign of a trauma-induced blind spot. Equally, elders, in some societies the higher ranking people because of their wisdom and the quality of their presence, are often considered as third class citizens, their role as centres of a community often downplayed. Considering a human being’s worth mainly related to his/her economically productive and capacity is to me a sign of trauma: we are blind to people’s intrinsic worth, of who they are regardless of what they do, because we have always been told implicitly by our institutions that our own worth was directly related to our school grades and extra-curricular achievements, then to our salary and titles. The part of us that yearns to be seen for who we are was silenced, and the wound creates a blind spot and stops us from seeing the intrinsic worth in others.

All the aspects of our institutions that treat humans as cogs in a machine are signs of trauma. There is no reason to deny our full humanity other than not knowing we are each exquisitely unique, creative individuals, worthy of being embraced purely for being who we are, because we were never treated as such.

Machine-like behaviour is rampant. This includes workplace practices that are dull, repetitive and soul destroying and that only value workers for their capacity to obediently repeat the same task. Or workplaces or institutions that by default assume lack of authentic engagement and spend lots of resources on control and compliance. Or medical environments where patients become an anonymous number the moment they walk in and a body to be fixed in the same way as a broken machine needs its parts repaired.

Another sign of trauma is how we have allowed corporations yield great power over our lives, as providers of key goods such as food or medicine for instance, or as providers of livelihoods, without questioning their intentions. The irony is that they usually don’t have any, neither good intentions (which could be for instance to supply wholesome food at accessible prices, or provide medicine that helps improve people’s lives), nor bad intentions. The articles of association of a company are supposed to include the company’s purpose, but it is often as perfunctory as “management”, or “producing goods or services”, while including pages and pages on who owns and who controls the company. By default ownership and control become the company’s purpose, giving great power to shareholders over other stakeholders. 

A quick look at Unilever’s Articles of Association reveals 149 pages on who can own what shares and has which voting rights, and nothing on purpose. Yet Unilever employs 127,000 people, had a turnover of €60bn in 2022 and claims that 3.4bn people use its products every day. Its annual report certainly talks of sustainability and other good things, but my concern is what drives the people with power within the company? Is the purpose explicitly to improve the lives of the customers, or to increase sales? Reading the chairman’s report suggests that increasing sales is the priority, and the rest will be accommodated around it and secondary to it, including the maximisation of customers’ well-being, and that feels unsafe to me as a customer.

When organisations hold such power over our lives and the lives of our loved ones, intention seems central and it is a blatant blind spot that should be the subject of a lot more debate. If a person went about their life publicly saying their purpose is to maximise their profit and control and that their only concern for others is purely not to break the law, they would be considered as narcissist, as the film “The Corporation” suggests. Yet a company has the same legal status as a person, and often effectively states publicly that its purpose is to maximise shareholder value. This creates obvious conflicts of interest between the interests of the shareholders and the interests of the consumers, and explains the anger felt by many against capitalism. It is possible though that defining a clear purpose would remedy this, and B Corps attempt just that. Danone turned 60% of its businesses into “Entreprises à Mission” (enterprises with a mission), it will be interesting to see how aligned management has become with their purpose.

The unexamined imperative to increase sales and GDP might be itself a symptom of trauma. Diné elder Pat McCabe often says “You Were Born Into Beauty as Beauty for Joyful Life, and That’s the Truth”. How far removed from Thomas Hobbes’ famous quote that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. The first is full of trust in the abundance of life, the second is full of fear of the rapacity of others and of an unpredictable and reliable natural environment. Indigenous people who have lived sustainably for thousands of years rely on a deep connection with their natural environment and a foundational trust in it. Our modern society is rooted in a deep mistrust of others (hence the need for strong laws and legal enforcement) and unquestioned fear of not having enough to live. These are feelings and assumptions that would warrant scrutiny.

Sexism and racism are known areas of trauma in our society. Women have integrated generations of being treated as inferiors (two facts among many: in the UK women only had the right to own property in 1926, in Switzerland women were only given the right to vote in 1971) and often unconsciously perceive themselves as inferior. Studies show that the mention of gender difference before a test at school triggered stereotype threat among girls, even though they didn’t realise it, and suppressed their otherwise strong performance (Damour L., 2016, Untangled, p183). It is tempting for many women to act as men in order to feel accepted and respected, silencing their feminine qualities. It is a sign of a traumatised world that the qualities of vulnerability, sensitivity, intuition, creativity, deep knowing and insight cannot be safely expressed. The #MeToo movement is a sign that women are becoming aware of what constitutes bad treatment and are taking a stand against it, setting healthy boundaries, and sharing collective healing as victims of abuse share their stories and feel heard.

Racism is another area of trauma, well expressed in The Black Lives Matter movement. Further trauma is easily perpetuated every time we treat someone as “other”, and, in the polarised world we live in, renewed hostility towards people we perceive as different and threatening (the rich, the poor, the Russians, the Americans, the whites, the blacks, the “normal”, the “abnormal”, the old, the young…) breads further trauma.

Another symptom of systemic trauma is our culture of addiction. Addictions are a strategy to avoid feeling unprocessed painful feelings. Some addictions are glorified such as addictions to work. When someone is constantly in fight or flight mode and cannot allow their parasympathetic system to engage and bring restoration, they find themselves in a constant state of hyperactivity, whether it be work or sport or socialising. The cost of it is a lack of true connection to people around them, burnout and cardiovascular diseases.

Social media can enable addictions as well, as people feed themselves on stimulation and an illusion of connection to lessen the pain of disconnection and of not feeling seen or accepted as who they are. Other addictions such as substance abuse are well established and fulfil the same purposes as the addictions mentioned above.

Having listed some of the symptoms of trauma in our society it would be tempting to conclude we live in a deeply traumatised society. This begs the question of what would a non traumatised society look like and how can we process injuries to prevent further trauma? My feeling is we are equipped as humans with tools to attend to our trauma, it’s just that we currently don’t realise how important these are and we don’t use them. For one, we have a large untapped capacity to create communities that are safe containers for individuals to feel heard and held, and to perform ceremonies that can heal trauma. Instead of treating every wounded individual as a broken part, situations where that individual feels deeply heard by one or several others are often healing in themselves. A community where people can share freely without fear of being judged is a functional community. A community where all the parts can be heard is a healthy community that promotes the well-being of every individual. There is resilience in such a community. This can be a couple, a family, a village, a nation even. A larger group may use a tool such as a citizens’ assembly, such as the one that enabled Ireland to brainstorm the thorny issue of abortion and reach a legal decision in favour of abortion that was accepted by the whole population because all the points of views and emotions have been heard.

Many thinkers realise now that our machine model of our world has its limitations, our wonderous world has a complexity far greater than any model can grasp. Seeing our reality as a complex system seems much more adapted as a way to relate to it. Complex systems theory sees every moment and situation as different from every other. Our role as actors in this complex system is to sense the system and all its parts to enable emergence, or an outcome that benefits the whole, without any pre-established agenda. Sensing requires deep listening.

I therefore believe that technologies that promote deep listening are the technologies of the future, whether it be Otto Scharmer’s “sensing”, or Hübl’s “presencing”, or Way of Council, Non Violent Communication or the Hakomi method of loving presence, or the Buddhist capacity to be a compassionate observer to one’s own or other’s states of mind and emotions. Deep listening enables us to regulate ourselves and through resonance helps others regulate. As we do so trauma has a chance to dissolve, and we operate no longer from a place of wounding, and of parts managing our life to avoid touching that wound, but from a strong place of Self.

Scrutinising symptoms of systemic trauma in our society is a fruitful exercise in that it brings to light tacit and unexamined assumptions that are more an expression of trauma than conscious intentions that promote life. A culture that promotes work for the sake of work, profit for the sake of profit, hyper activity for the sake of hyper activity might stem more from trying to avoid feeling empty or disconnected, and might benefit from working at feeling its wounds and longings, and remembering its true purpose.