Summary
Collective healing is group work on trauma that a whole population has been through, such as war, genocide, colonialism or racism, on the view that such wounds live in shared culture as well as individuals. This entry follows one account, given by Pocket Project founder Thomas Hübl in a 2020 Harvard Gazette interview.
Hübl says unintegrated history acts “like the sand in the engine in how we respond to the current crisis”, showing up as hyperactivity or numbness. His group process tries to build enough coherence to face what was suppressed; it began with the Holocaust legacy in Germany and Israel. “The collective and individual are not separate”, he says.
Rationale
Hübl says trauma “comes with the underlying sense that we are separate”. If so, the separation Part 1 describes may be a wound as well as a habit, and cultivating other dispositions means tending it.