How do we work with historical loss, upheaval and trauma, when we may not know exactly what happened, what it was like (because we may not have been born yet) and what it might really mean in relation to what we’re coping with right now?
We don’t do much except slowly and, as gently as necessary, begin to raise our awareness.
Elizabeth Halligan’s recent article, Humanity’s Unmourned Wounds: White Ancestral Trauma, the Limbic Brain, and the Making of America’s Crisis (2025), is a reminder to me that it helps to revisit the past in order to be able to understand the present, and that this operates on the level of the individual, the family, the community and the broader culture.
This subject has long been a personal and professional interest and thankfully research and academic study has pursued this. The knowledge base and toolbox for addressing this on the individual and systemic levels has grown over time.
As Halligan’s article highlights, the process of gaining awareness via sensations in and of the body and then through various phases of symbolic and cognitive mental processes, in the mind (which cannot be separated from the body) is hard work and can be painful. But this is how we change, heal and grow.
Therefore patience and pacing is very important. We try to cultivate non-judgmental observation and curiosity and to neutralize shame as best we can so it can get out of our way, and make way for something new to develop. Awareness isn’t easy and isn’t always immediately available, but when it is, it can be personally transformational; and may be the key to larger societal healing.
