Category: Understanding

Navigating through these dark times and not losing our light.

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Navigating through these dark times and not losing our light.

4 tips for helping you move through Collective Trauma and Social Despair back to an active engagement with life.

Collective trauma and social despair, like personal trauma and despair, can easily disconnect us from what is meaningful in our life and diminish our hope for the future. Now that the reality of the Republicans taking over the country and dismantling so many of the structures of human rights and environmental protections, we have to care for ourselves, in ways most of us have never had to, so we stay … Read More

Responding to and Moving Through our Collective Trauma

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(Originally published Nov 17, 2016)

RESPONDING TO AND MOVING THROUGH OUR COLLECTIVE TRUAMA

Collective Trauma is a blow or tear to “the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairing the prevailing sense of community.” For many of us Election Day was a deep tearing of the fabric that we imagined bound us together as Americans.

It will be so important in the days, weeks, months and years ahead to respond to and MOVE THROUGH the waves of emotions stemming from the collective trauma so we don’t get stuck in an emotional quagmire and

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4 Tips for Coping with Collective Trauma

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(Originally published Dec 11, 2016)

4 Tips for Coping with Collective Trauma

Collective trauma, like personal trauma, can easily disconnect us from the places of connection that make our life meaningful and diminish our hope about the future. So when you find yourself experiencing a collective trauma, like many of us are after the elections here in the US, it is important to remember there are four actions we can take to help mitigate the impact of the trauma.

1. A daily meaningful connection with another is the primary treatment. And by meaningful connection I don’t mean sharing our

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Please don’t try and act normal in the midst of insanity!

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(Originally published Feb. 25, 2017)

Please don’t try and act normal in the midst of insanity!

Denying how we are feeling to all the acts of aggression, the bullying, the attacks on human rights, the dismantling of reality will cost us dearly. There is too much to process these days so we must be fluid. When you hear, see, or read something that activates you say out loud, “That scares the hell out of me” (it does to many of us), or “I’m so fucking angry” (so many of us are) or “I am just heart broken” (how can we … Read More