How it Severs Our Connections to our Families, Ancestors, and Community—and How to Fix It
By Patrick Dougherty, M.A., L. P.
Nov. 1, 2025
Reflections on racism, war and patriarchal violence toward women
Ever since I became a therapist nearly 50 years ago, I’ve loved what I do. I love the feeling of continuously honing my craft, challenging myself, and finding new ways to help my clients. And over the years, I’ve watched, filled with awe and inspiration, as our field has made exciting breakthroughs in trauma treatment. But for a long time, when I was the one sitting on the therapist’s couch, the experience wasn’t so rosy. Haunted by my own trauma, I spent over 40 years searching for answers and peace—until, finally, I resigned myself to having gotten the best of what therapy could offer. And accepting that the peace I sought was not mine to have.
Then, without really understanding what I was doing, I decided to venture outside of traditional therapy and embrace healing paradigms that are radically different from the models most Western therapists are accustomed to. First as someone still suffering from his trauma, then as a therapist, I discovered the transformative power of healing that sacrifices a sacred tenet of Western psychotherapy by not centering the client, their upbringing and life experiences, as giving us an accurate picture of them and their suffering, or informing us to where we might find the solution.
And I found this by greatly expanding the paradigm I worked in to see how intergenerational and collective trauma lives in all of our bodies, and affect us in ways mostly unseen, and consequently, hinders us from the deeper healing of what seems to be our personal trauma.
Once I opened myself to unconventional forms of healing, I not only understood how these Western models can do harm, but how expansive and transformative therapy can be if we allow ourselves to think outside the box.
It took a few years to see how constricted the model of Western therapy had been for me as a client and learn how to break free of those binds that hindered my own healing. As I learned to see how my therapy bound me to a never ending inner search for healing, I could see how I had done this to my own clients, and I came to see how, time and again, I’d inadvertently harmed clients by ignoring the larger context. This was exactly what happened with my client Michael in 2017, not long before my change of mind, and heart.
Michael and I had been working together for almost a year. He’d come to therapy for help with a combination of symptoms: troubling anxiety, persistent insomnia, and stubborn stomach problems. A manager for a large corporation, Michael blamed these issues on run-of-the-mill workplace stress. But since he was one of the only Black employees in his office, I also wondered whether racial stress was a factor. When I brought this up, Michael quickly dismissed the idea, insisting that race wasn’t an issue. He’d climbed the corporate ladder and “found his place,” he told me, “and I earned it!”
But one day, Michael came in for our weekly session looking particularly distressed. He exhaled heavily as he sunk into my office sofa and nervously began running his hands over his thighs.
“I can tell something’s bothering you today,” I said. “What’s going on?”
Michael proceeded to tell me how, two days earlier, he’d been driving down a country road when he passed a parked police car and felt and listened to his new awareness of his somatic experience. He had found a fascination in therapy with tracking his body sensations as telling him something about his experience in the outer world.
“I realized that I was gripping the steering wheel,” he recounted, “and frantically checking the rearview mirror to see if I was being followed.” He clutched his chest. “I could feel my heart pounding and my breathing become shallow. Then, I realized something else: this happens every time I pass a cop car.”
Michael and I had also been working on helping him put words to his somatic sensations and stress responses. “I started to think of words as I kept driving to describe my sensations,” he continued. “I let the words come, ‘I am afraid. What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of getting killed.’”
As I listened to Michael, something inside me stirred—just a little ping, a slight activation—but I shrugged it off. I reminded him of the nondescript mindfulness techniques and breathing exercises I had taught him to regulate his anxiety when something like this happened, and I guided him through the breathing exercise as he thought about the incident. Believing I’d equipped him with everything he needed to get over this anxious hump, which one of his stated therapeutic goals, I shook his hand, offered some vague words of reassurance, and bid him goodbye till next week.
Ugh.
I still cringe when I think back on that session. I’d made a big mistake. I didn’t know what I didn’t know—and looking back now, I can see that, deep down, a part of me was fine with that, because I didn’t want to know.
When we first started working together, Michael had shared vivid details about his family. He’d told me how his father, who’d grown up in 1950s Florida, had been forced to flee home in the middle of the night after fighting back against a racist bully, and beating him badly. Believing he’d be beaten, and possibly killed in retaliation, he left to build a new life in Chicago, someplace he knew nothing about. And how he lived with a lifelong fear of the police coming to get him and taking him back to “fact the music.”
I could have brought this up with Michael when he mentioned the police car, but I didn’t. I stuck to what was comfortable. At the time, I didn’t understand intergenerational trauma, how stress reactions like a rapid heartbeat or shallow breathing or fearing death when you encounter an authority figure can be passed from parents to children. I didn’t understand collective trauma either, how, as a Black man and the descendant of slaves, Michael’s nervous system likely bore some collective scars of violence from white authority figures—and the knowledge that driving while Black could be fatal.
There was another truth I didn’t realize at the time: I’d hurt Michael. Not intentionally, of course. But I’d failed to name his experience for what it was: intergenerational post-traumatic stress. Looking back, I realize that ping I’d felt was a valuable clue about the connection between Michael’s family history and his present struggles. But by choosing to do the kind of therapy I felt comfortable doing, I’d severed his connection to his family history and collective experience.
Of course, back then, I didn’t see anything wrong with what I’d done. I’d told myself I was an evolved therapist, more enlightened than most of my fellow white colleagues. As far as I knew, I harbored no racist feelings, championed social justice issues, and was culturally competent. It wasn’t until much later that I realized my unconscious, kneejerk decision to forgo a deeper conversation with Michael wasn’t simply my own doing. It stemmed from something more insidious: a festering wound in the field of psychotherapy, as old as the profession itself. It would take years—and a moral, spiritual, and personal crisis that shook me to my core—before I realized the truth.
When Helping Hurts
Back in the late 70’s, when my therapy career was just getting off the ground, I was also a budding social activist. A decade earlier I’d returned from the Vietnam War, where I’d been in the Marine infantry, and began railing against the patriarchal, capitalistic system that had gotten us involved in the war and was responsible for the suffering and deaths of so many young American men and so many innocent Vietnamese civilians. I firmly believed that individual psychotherapy, which advocated a deep dive into the self, could be a corrective, transformative force, first on a personal level and later on a societal scale.
Obviously, I was young, naïve, and idealistic. But perhaps my greatest naivete was not understanding that the dominant psychotherapy model, the medical model, centers the individual in the healing process, and that a deeper exploration of the self only leads, predictably, to finding more of you—and less of the important context that contributes to real healing. I would soon go down this rabbit hole with my own therapists, and the more I’d explore myself at their encouragement, the more I’d become trapped inside my own suffering, disconnected from the world around me and consequently the healing I was seeking.
My first experience of this was also in the late 70’s and it was my first attempt to deal with my war trauma. I was having some symptoms of PTSD and sought help at the Veteran’s Affairs, which, at that time, were begrudgingly opening their doors to us Vietnam Veterans. I saw a VA psychiatrist for a few sessions to assess if the war had had any impact on me and warranted any help from them. In one of the sessions I talked about what had haunted me since I came back from the war – how on a particularly swelting day, I’d entered a woman’s home during a search for Viet Cong troops. When she saw me, the woman clutched her infant child and glared at me with seething hostility. Exhausted and terrified after nearly dying on patrol the night before, I instantly swelled with a face and body filled with rage, and raising my M-16, lunged at her and nearly pulling the trigger, to a woman whose face was now filled with absolute terror of a mother thinking she and her child were about to die.
I also talked about a couple of times I thought I was going to die, and some of the darker moments of my time in the war. I also shared with him, as his request, some about my childhood growing up with violent and alcoholic parents. At the end of the assessment period, the VA gave me their conclusion: the war had not harmed me, not what had happened to me nor what I had done there – My trauma could be explained as coming solely from the violent and alcoholic family upbringing and that I should pursue my own private therapy outside of the VA system.
My childhood trauma and the war continued to haunt me for the next several decades. Over that time, I had three different long term therapy’s, two with Jungians and a psychoanalyst (the most popular specialties at the time). The process with each was the same: we’d explore my very traumatic childhood, and they’d express compassion and sympathy. And that continued whenever I summoned the courage to share how I’d almost killed that mother in Vietnam, weeping in anguish, they’d tell me it wasn’t my fault, that the violence I’d experienced in childhood had simply manifested in that moment. “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” they’d say, “and I can understand why you feel so bad. I’m glad you’re taking care of yourself by sharing this with me.”
These therapists were well-meaning. But in retrospect, they all made the same mistake: they made this suffering entirely about me. Not about the mother, or her baby, or the war, or what had led our country into war, or about their own complicity to the war. They severed the connection between me and all of those pieces. And focused just me. They severed the connections to a much larger context of my trauma, just as the VA had done.
Of course, these therapists hadn’t been in my shoes. There was no way they could’ve known how I’d felt when I raised my weapon in a blinding rage, or how the Vietnamese mother had recoiled in terror. But they never asked about these details, either. What I can see now is that they were emotionally numb to the suffering I’d caused. Which made it possible for them to see me as a victim. Yes, these therapists were compassionate and validating. But in a way, they’d walled themselves off from the war, ignoring the harm I’d caused as well as my remorse. Those days, I’d leave their offices feeling worse than when I’d arrived.
Eventually I began to feel like something was wrong with me, as if I couldn’t or wouldn’t let the incident go.
As I approached 50 years of suffering with what I had done, I began to resign myself to the idea that I’d live with this suffering for the rest of my life. But then, one day, I made a decision that changed everything.
Turning a Corner
In 2017, I enrolled in a collective trauma-training retreat with spiritual teacher, mystic, and group facilitator Thomas Hübl. A former paramedic who’d developed an interest in trauma, Hübl had been hosting these retreats since the early 2000s. Over the years, he’d helped thousands of people confront their individual, ancestral, and collective trauma. I’d taken a few of Hübl’s online classes and enjoyed them, so when I learned he was offering a yearlong training on healing intergenerational and collective trauma, I jumped at the opportunity. I reserved my seat and bought a plane ticket, and a few weeks later, on a flight bound for Israel I relished in the excitement of the mystery of whatever came next.
As I walked into the facility for our first day of training, I felt a nervous energy, and something I hadn’t felt in a long time: hope. Over 150 of us had shown up for Hübl’s training, representing 39 countries. For our first exercise, Hübl asked us to pay attention to our bodies and any sensations that arose from a simple meditation where we focused on our shared intention to be together in this room, exploring collective trauma together. Many of us attendees became activated as old wounds arose—and I did too. It was stunning to feel my war trauma bubble up during meditation, of all things. I had resigned myself several years earlier of living with what it was and not expecting it to come forward unless I choose to dig it up once again.
After the meditation, and all meditations, we broke into groups of three to take turns sharing the sensations and memories that had come up, while our partners listened compassionately. In one of these triads on our third day, I was activated again around the war and the words came tumbling out of me. “What we did there was so wrong,” I told my partners. “We did so much harm, and for reasons we never understood. And I did harm.” These were words I’d been choking on for the last 40 years. I began to weep, and my partners, one from the Congo and the other from Columbia, began to cry too. “We’re so glad you’re here,” the Congolese woman said, and the woman from Columbia nodded in agreement. It was clear they had no agenda, no goal but to meet me with open and loving hearts. It felt like I was being held in a warm embrace of compassion and acceptance from these two woman who hardly knew me, but both knew the reaities of war from their own experiences and yet didn’t turn away or deny me anything. And it was unlike anything I’d felt with my therapists back home.
“Unprocessed collective traumas sometimes emerges when we’re seeking deep, body-based peace,” Hübl told us, “And these collective traumas impact us all.” Unprocessed trauma, he continued, “hinders our ability to respond to the world around us and social crises happening in the wider world.”
Eventually, some of us therapists in attendance began to ask ourselves how this unprocessed collective trauma in our bodies might be affecting our work with clients. It was a wake-up call: For one, I began to see how numb I’d been to racial trauma with my Black clients of African descent. I began to realize how I’d severed their connections to their relationships with their ancestors, and the larger communities they lived in, which could have helped us understand the trauma they carried but also possible deep healing resources. And then I began to see how my own connections to healing resources had been severed by my own therapists, starting back at the VA and over the next 4 decades.
After lunch, Hübl and I crossed paths in the hallway, and without ever having spoken a word to each other, he slowed his walk, turned to me, and flashed a radiant smile. I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Therapy on the Other Side of Healing
I returned from my time in Israel with new eyes. I now saw collective trauma in places I couldn’t see it before. I saw its threads woven into the fabric of our society. I saw it woven into the fabric of Western psychotherapy, in the long-revered models and methods developed by white men seeing and analyzing everything through the lens of the patriarchal structure that left them with the power to describe what mental health should look like, and how to treat any maladaptation to it. And how this incredible privilege and power allowed them to frame the whole model of mental health that left them (and me) innocent of doing harm, especially as a collective body.
I saw how it manifested in patriarchy. I listened with new ears as my female clients talked about how they’d been attacked, dominated, belittled, and traumatized by men in a myriad of ways, and by the patriarchal structure itself, and how they’d struggled to find their voice, and how they’d suffered as most of the world around them remained silent. I began to confront my own role in supporting patriarchy, too, as it became more and more clear I was someone who’d been swimming in its waters since I was a boy, and had benefited from it, and which I had never recognized till now the extend I was part of it.
I resolved that I would do everything I could to not harm these clients by doing therapy in a vacuum and severing their connection to the outside world. I’d listen for and make space for opportunities to discuss our broken society and culture, as well as the people and resources my clients could draw upon.
Shortly after returning from Hübl’s retreat, I took on a new client, Anna, who’d left her 25-year marriage after discovering her husband’s numerous affairs. Slowly, she’d worked up the confidence to begin dating again. And one day, she came into our session fuming.
“How can men be such fucking pigs!” she huffed. “Who do they think they are! Sending me nasty pictures and lewd texts, like that’s going to get them somewhere. I’m sick of it!”
I leaned forward in my chair and nodded. “You’re right to feel this way, Anna. Many of us men can act slimy. We’re handed a sense of entitlement, and some of us abuse it.” While I wouldn’t automatically say something like this with every women, this felt appropriate with Anna given our relationship.
This seemed to loosen her anger even more and as Anna continued to vent, I began to feel a bit nauseous, and quickly realized that what I was feeling was disgust toward these men. As I continued to listen to her descriptions of photos and texts, I then winced and my chest tightened. My disgust had morphed into embarrassment and regret. Memoires of my own past came, unbidden, where as a young Marine, I’d behaved poorly toward women I’d met in bars around the world, and now, I felt a pang in my heart, a sorrow at what I’d done, where I had been one of the “pigs” Anna was talking about. I hadn’t wanted these feelings to surface during my session with Anna, but here they were. So, as I had learned, I made room for them inside of me and imagined putting them off to the side as I had learned in my training, which allowed me to keep present and focused with her.
Years earlier, before I understood collective trauma, I would’ve distanced myself from Anna’s story. I would’ve told myself that I was “one of the good guys”—which I’d done a thousand times before while working with women. But this time, I didn’t. I knew the patriarchy lived in me and had my whole life and that if I severed my connection with it, which meant severing connection with some part of me, I would have to sever something in my connection with her too. I was meeting her now with my full presence, toward her and myself, with a receptivity grounded in a humility stemming from feeling my anger at these men and knowing how important it was to not “other” them but embrace how I was like them, with compassion, and an open heart.
The Work Continues
Many of us therapists tend to think we’ve made leaps and bounds in trauma treatment, that we understand how trauma lives in the body and how to work with it. But the truth is most of us are blind to the realities about intergenerational and collective trauma. It took me more than 40 years to see the truth—about our systemic failings as a field, about how most of us are trained in models that hurt both us and our clients, and how this was responsible for the roadblocks I hit again and again with my own therapists.
And I was able to do this, find my way out of this paradigm because I did training with a mystic leading a large group of like-minded people, with a shared intention, outside of a therapist’s office or a professional conference, and outside of the US. I had to literally step out of the paradigm to find my way out.
I’ve made a lot of progress, in my own healing journey and as a therapist. I have known that I can’t make space for clients to process their pain, shame, anger, and grief unless I’ve done the same for myself. I have found the same is true for ancestral and collective trauma. I have to do my work to make room for them to do theirs.
Even at 74 years old, my work—on myself, with my clients, and with the wider world—still isn’t finished. Psychotherapy still draws from white, patriarchal, capitalistic thinking—the same thinking that reigns supreme in our society today. How can we heal people’s trauma when we turn a blind eye to the systems that are keeping this trauma alive? We can’t.
It will take work to change the dominant models of psychotherapy and the systems that created and maintain them. I have found there are many therapists who are in this process of working with intergenerational and collective trauma and challenging the Western model. Some of us are calling for a radical reenvisioning of mental health treatment. Others are calling for a total deconstruction and starting anew. Both options sound right to me. As someone who’s sat in the therapist’s chair and on the couch, both professing and experiencing these models, I know how much they can help, and I know how much they can hurt. I know how the so-called solutions can keep us trapped, and what it feels like to have a wound that won’t heal, and to feel like it is my fault it doesn’t heal. I refuse to feel this way again. And I don’t want my clients to feel this way.
I still think about Michael sometimes. I wonder how our work might’ve unfolded had I made room for his intergenerational and collective trauma. I can’t go back, but I can do better moving forward. We all can. We can do our own work on where intergenerational and collective trauma lives in our bodies, which will make more space for our clients to explore how this lives in them and affects them. When we do this, we can tap into a larger experience of our true selves, and live with our full humanity, and invite our clients to do the same.
https://movingthroughit.org