Tag: collective healing

Patrick Dougherty awaits a helicopter at the end of his tour.

How To Heal Personal and Collective War Trauma

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Image: Patrick Dougherty awaits a helicopter at the end of his tour in Vietnam.

I couldn’t talk about my war trauma until 1976, which was five years after I left Vietnam. This was four years before post-traumatic stress disorder was even formally recognized as a medical diagnosis. In 1979, I went to the Veterans Affairs for help. They told me I didn’t have enough war experience to warrant any support from them; that all my trauma actually came from my traumatic childhood, and had nothing to do with Vietnam. This is what they told just about every veteran back then.… Read More

Covid comes to Therapy

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For a few years now, I’ve worked with groups around the world to address collective trauma. Our focus is usually on something that had happened elsewhere and in the past: never had I imagined that, with the advent of Covid, I’d find myself so deeply entrenched in an immediate and ongoing collective trauma. One group of men, with whom I’d been working for many years, was particularly affected.

Given how close they’d become since we first began meeting, the move online naturally came as a disruption. While it was manageable at first, the energy in the group became increasingly muted … Read More

Healing Unprocessed Collective Trauma

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This is a webinar I did on Nov 7, 2018, for a great group called Psychology for Peacebuilding (find them on FB). Here is how it was posted.

Healing Unprocessed Collective Trauma, Nov 7, 2018, for Psychology of Peacebuilding (FB)

Patrick Dougherty, M.A., L.P. is a licensed psychologist with 40 years of clinical work and social activism. He is part of an international group working with and developing models dealing with collective trauma. (www.pocketproject.org) He is a former US Marine who served in Vietnam and is leading a group specifically working with the collective trauma of armed violence, genocide and … Read More