Collective Trauma and Its Treatment — Aydin Areta
Continuation of the previous piece ....

Individual trauma occurs when we encounter an injurious experience that we cannot resolve, integrate and accept within our personal experience and identity. The result of this inability is a kind of rupture in personal identity. At that point the trauma is no longer simply a memory but part of another identity that continues to live within us—forever restless, wandering and unanswered. In its collective form, this experience similarly creates a rupture in our understanding of social identity. Society continually senses an other within its fractured identity: that restless, wandering, wounded, angry and unanswered collective spirit that is felt beneath the skin of society but whose existence is not acknowledged.

When responsible political systems recognise such experiences and officially apologise to those harmed by their actions, this is not merely a political gesture. It is recognition of the fact that, without such acknowledgment, a society can never understand the fractured part of its identity or bring it into peace and coherence within the totality of its collective identity. To expect responsibility from a political system that still considers journalists, lawyers, social and political activists—those who have given language to this experience of collective trauma—to deserve confinement and prison is a futile expectation that will receive no answer.

In the meantime, only we, the people, can rest our heads on one another’s shoulders and, by articulating what has possessed our collective spirit, sublimate this repressed anger and grief into something more valuable and elevated than violence toward one another.

The experience of collective trauma—from Indigenous peoples in the Americas to Australia, from Black communities to Jewish communities, from those injured by war in Japan to peoples subjected to despotism in the Soviet Union—has repeatedly become a long-term wound in the spirit of society. Isolation, self-harm, poorer physical and psychological health, and the isolation and violence that flow through these societies are only part of the historical consequences of such experience.

Only societies that have found a collective response and a shared meaning for this shared suffering have been able to move beyond the injury. We have no one but one another with whom to pass through this wound, and this is why a return to love and compassion is our greatest social need.

The treatment of trauma, whether at the individual or social level, never occurs in isolation, because trauma itself did not arise in isolation. Trauma can be healed only in relation to another. Only through a positive experience of genuine relationship with another person can the injured individual ultimately recover their lost sense of control, worth and human dignity.

It is precisely for this reason that the greatest thing we can do to heal our collective trauma and the deepest pains of our country is not political activism saturated with anger, verbal and practical violence, and devoid of understanding and forgiveness, but our kindness toward one another.