Healing from Collective Trauma
This webinar was recorded and is now available as a Talk on Demand. Click here for more details.
Friday 9 October 2020 - A Live Webinar
With Dr Sousan Abadian, Dr Doris Brothers and Dr Jack Saul
- Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 6 October
How does collective trauma impact states of mind? How does it enter the consulting room? What can we learn about resilience from past catastrophes?
While we can’t know the global consequences of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, we can predict that the felt experience of facing this particular existential threat will leave a lasting shock-wave through our emotional systems; that time and space will be needed for grief and anger. But can we also think about this processing as an opportunity for certain kinds of emotional and social enrichment?
READ MORE...Of learning from others who have faced existential crises how they have survived psychologically? To help us to explore these dynamics, we have invited three speakers with a past experience of collective trauma. Their stories will help us navigate how we can process feelings such as rage and grief around a shared catastrophe in order to recover and adapt in healthy ways – possibly to discover unexpected strengths in ourselves and others, and to protect future generations from intergenerational trauma.
FULL PROGRAMME
14:00 BST (09.00 EDT)
Doris Brothers
Altruism in the Aftermath of Global Trauma
What prompted so many white Americans to join the Black Lives Matter protests following the brutal murder of George Floyd? How is the global response to the movement related to the devastating effects of climate change and the Covid 19 pandemic? Doris Brothers suggests that acts of service toward others and a sense of greater collectiveness often follow wide-scale societal traumas such as these. For support, she draws on a study she conducted with Koichi Togashi involving survivors of the 9/11 attacks in New York City in 2001 and survivors of the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan. She offers a clinical vignette that centered around sharing altruistic responses in the aftermath of societal traumas. She concludes with thoughts concerning how the intergenerational transmission of the traumas associated with these collective traumas may be averted.
15.15
Break
15:30
Sousan Abadian
Generative Cultural Renewal: Ensuring that the Post-Pandemic New Normal is a Better Normal
We are by no means the first people who have experienced multiple crises and the co-occurring catastrophes of a pandemic coupled with massive socioeconomic, technological, and ecological upheaval. We have much to learn from indigenous peoples who experienced rolling collective traumas over multiple generations as a result of interaction with European settlers. What can their experiences teach us about how we might utilize this period as a time of breakthrough? What critical role can we clinicians play in tipping lives towards renewal rather than collapse?
16.45
Break
17.00
Jack Saul
From Collective Trauma to Collective Healing
Jack will present a research and public arts project, entitled the Moral Injuries of War, as a prototype for an arts-based ritual to promote a process of collective moral repair. This immersive sound experience presents the voices of the witnesses of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including military veterans and war correspondents. They reflect on the catastrophic consequences of these wars as a response to the terrorist attacks in the US on 9/11, and invite public reflection and reckoning to promote more effective responses to collective national traumas.
18.15
Break
18.30
Discussion, Q&A
19.00
End