(This is the third article in a series of essays about how our psychological & social transformation are tied to the ways that we frame and attune to the living world.  The first was Zhiwa Woodbury's piece on Toward a Gaian Psychology and Mark Skelding's  Psyche, Psychosphere & The Feeling of Dissonance.)

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BEARING WITNESS IS A SACRED ACT.  In the moment when we are truly present to another’s pain, or listen from a place of true receptivity, emotions that seemed overwhelming, or ideological positions that seemed unassailable, can start to soften and shift. This is a fundamental principle of trauma healing, and why the spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl says:

“Witnessing is the subtlest form of intervention.”

In our hearts, all true journalists know this. We intuit that there’s something profound at stake in the way we conduct our work that cannot be captured in conventional metrics of success – whether clicks, likes or awards. At the same time, growing pressures on legacy media are making it increasingly difficult for reporters and editors to honour the core values of objectivity, fairness and courage the profession – at its best – has always prized. From a collapse in audience trust and the erosion of business models by digital advertising and now AI, to self-dealing by billionaire owners and toxic work cultures of burnout and moral injury, the industry is exhibiting analogous symptoms of decay to the corporations, governments and institutions it’s supposed to be holding to account.

In this time of chaos and collapse, it’s easy to envisage how a combination of post-truth politics, authoritarianism, and AI-powered digital manipulation and surveillance could lead to an even darker future, where the last vestiges of shared reality and democratic discourse almost entirely dissolve. But let’s assume for a moment that there’s at least a possibility that breakdown could lead to breakthrough: 

A New Angle on the News

These kinds of questions never entered my mind during the 14 years I spent working as a correspondent for Reuters and the Financial Times, deployed across Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then three years ago, I terminated my career in the corporate media – quitting Reuters in large part due to my disillusionment over what I perceived as my editors’ lack of interest in hard-hitting climate accountability journalism. I was fortunate to find a new niche as an editor at DeSmog – a nonprofit climate news service. Though run on a shoestring relative to Reuters’ $520-million revenues (earned in part by staging huge oil and gas trade shows in Houston), DeSmog grasps the gravity of the climate crisis, and is committed to shining a light on the many ways corporate interests and their political allies are blocking climate action. 

In parallel, I embarked on a course of intensive study of the many ways in which psychological trauma can manifest at the individual and collective level, with Thomas Hübl and his global team of practitioners. This was profound, intensely demanding, and inspiring work undertaken with groups of hundreds of people gathered online or in-person at a retreat centre in northern Germany. 

My experiences left me convinced that Thomas is right to argue that unresolved collective and inter-generational trauma suffered by communities, cultures and nations is a fundamental – though largely unacknowledged – root of the world’s seemingly intractable crises. Until this burden accumulating in our collective psyche is recognised, processed and metabolised, then the cycles of violence, environmental collapse, political crises and inhuman levels of inequality that dominate our news feeds are doomed to endlessly repeat.

Work on the systemic impacts of collective trauma by organisations such as the Collective Change Lab and Pocket Project suggests I’m not alone in my assessment. But what does this emerging understanding imply for journalism?

Perhaps the time has come to “hospice” (to borrow Vanessa Andreotti’s term) the kind of neoliberal journalism I was weaned on at Reuters and the Financial Times, and start building the “trauma-restoring media culture” of the future. Newsrooms in this network will serve both to illuminate the many ways individual, collective and inter-generational trauma are shaping global events – and serve the growing movement quietly working towards repair. Starting small, this new ecosystem could ultimately transform the way we produce, engage with, and respond to the news – and help shift our global trajectory in line with a more flourishing future. Because doing more of the same isn’t going to take us anywhere other than an ever more rapidly deteriorating version of where we’ve already been. 

Getting the Scoop on Collective Trauma

A decade ago, I spent two years travelling around the UK speaking to military veterans and their families to research my book Aftershock: Fighting War, Surviving Trauma, and Finding Peace. At that time, I thought of trauma exclusively as a phenomenon that affected individuals – whether abuse inflicted on a child, or horrific experiences suffered by soldiers on the battlefield. The lasting symptoms might vary – from hyper-vigiliance, angry outbursts, and chronic stress, to numbing, dissociation, avoidance and addiction. But I saw trauma as essentially a private affair, and imagined treatment almost exclusively in terms of various kinds of one-on-one therapy. 

My stint as a climate correspondent at Reuters changed that, when I came across the work of panpsychologist and Emerge contributor Zhiwa Woodbury, who used a trauma lens to explain the world’s failure to take meaningful action in response to climate breakdown. In his 2019 paper Climate Trauma: Towards a New Taxonomy of Traumatology, Zhiwa argued that the climate crisis was a “superordinate form of trauma” affecting our species as a whole. Zhiwa sees this finding as a logical extension of Gaia theory, the idea that we are integral parts of an organismic planet. And just as individuals cope with overwhelming trauma by avoidance, going numb or dissociating, Climate Trauma is triggering an equivalent ‘psychospheric’ reaction — on a planetary scale. 

Zhiwa’s argument made intuitive sense to me. But it was only when I began to spend weeks immersed in trainings with Thomas that I began to understand how partial my focus on individual trauma had been. I was amazed to witness people from many different countries and cultures come into contact with the myriad ways in which the legacies of past wars, genocides, colonialism, racism, slavery, totalitarianism and gender violence shaped their experiences in the present – colouring their perceptions, texturing their emotional landscape, and shaping their sense of the possible. 

Thomas argues that just as individuals split off overwhelming emotional energies to survive traumatic events, a fractal version of the same mechanism occurs at a collective scale. In the struggle to survive, our ancestors pushed their most painful experiences down into their collective unconscious – accumulating a “dark lake” of stagnant energy from the undigested past. This process happens outside of ordinary awareness – so people typically have little idea of the way the contents of this dark lake flatten their vision, or harden their heart, until these processes are brought into shared awareness through collective healing work. 

In my own case, I was able to excavate deep wells of anger and grief stemming from scars left in my ancestral tree by the World Wars. The simultaneous experience of accompanying so many other people as they connected with the living legacy of such a vast range of historical injustices –  the Holocaust; slavery in the Caribbean; forced conversion in Iran; settler colonialism in the U.S; the Great Famine in Ireland, to name a few – provided an unforgettable glimpse of the extent and complexity of these inter-generational transmissions, and how they live in our collective body. 

In his 2020 book Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, Thomas writes that these kinds of collective trauma fields distort social narratives, rupture national identities, and hinder the development of institutions, communities and cultures – just as personal trauma can disrupt the psychological development of a growing child. He explains how we then encode, and thus pass on, these traumas through the many dysfunctional ways we relate with one another:

“As cultural traumas occur and accrue, distortions in societal perceptions are amplified. The resulting misapprehensions and misperceptions become cultural agreements: limiting or harmful stereotypes, a belief that this is ‘just the way things are,’ or other unconscious codes, values, and language built into a society as a result of collective distortions.”

Looking back, I was aghast at how little awareness I’d held of these dynamics while working as an international journalist – often in countries that had once been colonised by my native Britain. I might have known the basic historical facts, but I’d had very little capacity to perceive the many ways that the unresolved past was shaping my interactions with the people I was encountering in the present. I can now appreciate that this “not seeing” was itself a result of the “fog” – as Thomas often calls it – caused by the collective trauma living within and between us. 

Neither did I realise that collective healing work not only offered a pathway to address this collective trauma, but was a growing field of practice. From Israel to Mexico, Germany to the United States, collective trauma integration processes are taking root at varying scales on every continent, whether through Thomas’s network, or many other initiatives. But like the advent of any revolutionary new technology, these processes are as yet confined to limited numbers of early adopters. A question trauma-restoring journalism would continually seek to explore is: How to make collective healing accessible on a much larger scale?  

David Young, a facilitator and creator of the Art of Collective Integration, and a fellow student of Thomas, described the challenge when appearing on the What Is Collective Healing? podcast: “We have a therapy session for an individual, but there's no collective therapy session. A therapist can say, ‘oh, you're having a childhood flashback,’ or ‘you're having a regressive moment right now. We know that this isn't actually having to do with your adult functioning life, but let's go ahead and feel through this right now.’ We don't have that for the collective. So you can't just take these 20 people [and say] ‘right now you're experiencing what happened in the Civil War of America. Let's pause. We know that you guys are safe, your relationships are good. You're not threatening each other, but let's go ahead and feel this right now and move through it’…We don't have spaces like that.”

As long as we lack opportunities to acknowledge and unearth the inner archaeology of our collective trauma, we remain prisoners of it – repeating the same patterns. And as long as the media continues to “absence” the reality of this undigested trauma, there is far less chance of transmuting the enormous psychic energies trapped in the dark lake into the impulse to make fresh, emergent, and salutary choices.  

Towards a “Trauma-Restoring Media Culture” 

There is now a growing recognition in newsrooms of the need to protect journalists from incurring psychological injury in the line of duty – as demonstrated by the presence of senior industry figures from CNN, Reuters, Al Jazeera and other major media at the third annual MediaStrong symposium on journalism and trauma, held at City University in London on July 2. 

In a similar vein, pioneers of trauma-aware journalism are sharing interview tips and other techniques to help reporters avoid inadvertently inflicting further trauma on their sources – an all-too-common phenomenon encapsulated in the shocking title of foreign correspondent Edward Behr’s 1978 memoir Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? (A reporter had apparently shouted this question to a group of Belgian nuns being airlifted out of Stanleyville during the Congo crisis of 1964). 

There is now an opportunity to build on this vital work by laying the foundations for a truly trauma-restoring media culture. Such a culture would make it journalism’s business to investigate the pervasive role of inter-generational and collective trauma in our societal and global challenges. And it would produce coverage that could serve as a catalyst for collective healing. 

There is already much good work to build on. Almost fifty years ago, Helen Epstein, a journalism professor at New York University, spurred a global awakening to the reality of inter-generational trauma with her book Children of The Holocast. The work grew out of a magazine story she had written for the New York Times showing how descendants of Holocaust survivors who had been born in the U.S., Israel or other countries outside Europe suffered many of the same symptoms as parents who had survived the death camps. From coverage of the post-traumatic stress suffered by soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare workers, and Cara Buckley’s recent story for the New York Times on Ho‘oulu ‘Āina, a 100-acre preserve in Hawaii, where patients at a community health centre find healing by restoring the land, there are many notable examples of journalists exploring trauma in nuanced, compelling and hopeful ways. 

And yet, discussion of our inner lives is still largely regarded as the kind of human interest story best confined to the features section – rather than as an integral part of the coverage needed to paint an accurate picture of what’s going on in the world. An analogy could be drawn with the way that many news sources fail – even today – to reference the role of fossil fuel-driven climate change in super-charging extreme weather in their coverage of hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. 

Imagine if legacy media approached the rise of Donald Trump through the lens of unresolved individual and societal trauma – exploring how his own attachment wounding resonates and activates the wounding experienced by many in his MAGA base, as Gabor Maté did in this 2016 column (which also profiled Hillary Clinton)? Or a reporting project to explore the relationship between Britain’s unresolved colonial past, Brexit, the rise of the populist Reform party, and the country’s chronic political malaise? In Gaza and Ukraine, to name two active examples, historical cycles of oppression, victimisation and perpetration seem to run on repeat – yet are mostly presented without the context required to grasp their deeper causes. Meanwhile, there is a vacuum of coverage devoted to exploring the many ways in which people are intentionally coming together to activate our in-built capacities to help each other to heal, and reclaim the impulse to take concrete steps towards ethical repair that lies on the other side. 

The first step towards establishing a new journalistic culture would be to provide opportunities for more people working in the media to gain an experiential understanding of inter-generational and collective trauma – how it has shaped their own lives, and how it plays out in the stories they cover – by engaging in collective healing work themselves. 

For a modest amount of funding, it should then be possible to assemble a small team of these professionals to establish the world’s first “trauma-restoring newsroom” – providing rolling coverage of events through a collective trauma lens. The first “global healing”, “post-traumatic growth” and “ethical restoration” correspondents would be deployed. Coverage would be rooted in an understanding – derived from collective healing work – that what we see arising in the external world is always a reflection of what’s happening within, and that – as quantum physics teaches – observer and observed are not separate, as classical “view-from-nowhere” journalistic values maintain, but form one, integrated and indivisible system.  

Such a newsroom would be part of a bigger shift, as more people in more professional disciplines question the limits of the materialist-reductionist paradigm that has ruled science since the Enlightenment – and contributed to the collective blindness to soul and spirit afflicting industrial societies, and the newsrooms that serve them. Editors and reporters would keep returning to the question posed by Karen O’Brien in her book You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World: what if we are radically under-estimating our capacity for social change? 

The quantum newsroom of the future would rest on the commitment of the people working there to continually refine the kinds of core practices that support collective healing processes, from precise relational attunement and transparent communication, to meditation and shadow work. In contrast to the top-down, stressed and dissociated cultures of conventional news organisations, newsrooms founded on these practices – pursued in small groups, or by whole team – would naturally generate a “field of coherence” characterised by a high degree of connection, warmth and openness. This atmosphere would, in turn, support journalists to more readily attune to the many ways collective and inter-generational trauma may be relevant to the stories they are covering – and produce deeper, more informed analysis as a result. 

This newsroom could also apply a practice known as Global Social Witnessing – where groups of people come together in community to attend deeply to overwhelming events in the news. Instead of getting hijacked by the continual activation or constriction we naturally experience in relation to shocking events, Global Social Witnessing helps us to slow down and soften enough to actually metabolise the impact of what we’re seeing – an embodied process that naturally starts to crystallise new ways of perceiving and responding. That doesn’t mean that participants immediately start to shoulder the burden of all the world’s woes – but it might open up surprising new pathways to act, perhaps to address problems closer to home.

“What you are meant to do is recognize the one sacred thing that you are called to do next. And I think our hearts resonate with that one thing,” Kosha Joubert, chief executive of the Pocket Project, which holds regular Global Social Witnessing calls, told me. “And the more we are in a space of softening, opening, melting, slowing down, relating precisely, the more the chances increase that we are able to see it.” 

In February, 2022, as Russia invaded Ukraine, I attended a Global Social Witnessing call when more than 5,000 people logged in to witness testimony from people in Ukraine, Ukrainians who had fled to other European countries, and Russians. The degree of intimacy that was established – and the emotional impact these live transmissions had – was of an entirely different order than anything conventional news coverage could offer, like moving from a two-dimensional vision of the world into 3D.

Picture a time in the future when a billion people tune in to a live event not to watch an Olympic Opening Ceremony or Royal wedding, but to form a globally synchronized, “collective nervous system” capable of hosting the unique quality of the suffering caused by a particular geopolitical flashpoint or climate disaster. If Thomas is right – if witnessing really is a subtle form of intervention – then it is not such a stretch to imagine that such a process might have world-changing consequences.

From a media system that mostly serves as a vector for propagating trauma and polarization, by amplifying anger, fear and division, this new media culture would support our collective capacity to sense into the deeper dynamics at work behind today’s headlines, while also providing opportunities to digest and integrate the realities of what we’re seeing. Not only do emerging collective healing practices mean that this new vision is now entirely possible to implement, it’s hard to see how the world is going to navigate the intensifying impacts of the metacrisis without it.   

Organic Renewal 

Having worked for years in the corporate media, I know how conservative these organisations – and the people who run them on behalf of their owners – can be. As I painfully discovered, you get to the top not by challenging the status quo – but by diligently serving it. Fortunately, the near-monopolies such organisations once enjoyed on people’s attention have long since dissipated, and in the dynamic online landscape of ‘new media’ there is a fertile opportunity for a mycorrhizal, trauma-restoring media culture (a ‘psycellium’?) to take root in the compost of the old.  

Recognising that existing media structures are an integral part of our dysfunctional political systems, Indra Adnan and Pat Kane at the Alternative UK have been hosting explorations by journalists of what a future media system they are calling News from Planet A could look like. Outside the legacy media, trauma-restoring storytelling is finding a voice. In February 2024, John Kania, Laura Caldéron de la Barca and Katharine Milligan published an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review called Healing Systems, exploring the role collective healing can play in unlocking systems change. The article has been downloaded more than 80,000 times, making it the most popular published by the journal last year. 

In a recent episode of What Is Collective Healing? Laura elaborated a vision for “healing-centered systems change” – explaining that once an organisation develops a capacity to heal itself, it can play a role in catalysing changes in other orgnisations as well. “And so then that organization becomes a transformation and healing agent for the whole of the ecosystem,” she said. The systemic influence of media organisations make them obvious candidates to initiate such evolutionary processes. 

Smaller publications and Substacks such as my own newsletter, Resonant World, the Collective Trauma Summit, the Climate Consciousness Summit, and the What Is Collective Healing? Podcasts are already lighting up the first nodes in what could eventually become a 24/7 trauma-restoring media network, serving people around the globe.

Journalists and editors could also draw inspiration from pioneers introducing a deep understanding of collective and inter-generational trauma dynamics into other fields. Working in public schools in New York, Dr Angel Acosta has pioneered the development of what he calls the “Healing-centred Turn” in education. This incorporates an understanding of collective trauma into a much wider vision of the relationship between education, community resilience and systemic change. An equivalent “Healing-centred turn” for the media could provide newsroom leaders with pathways to deepen their understanding of the role trauma-restoring journalism can play in opening portals for collective healing. 

Global Response-Ability

James Scurry is in the unique position of being both a senior producer at Sky News and a practicing psychotherapist. He is also one of the conveners of the MediaStrong symposium, and co-founder of Safely Held Spaces, which offers training in trauma-informed journalism. 

A few months ago, recording a podcast on trauma and journalism, I asked James what he saw as the wider impact of our collective tendency to get caught up in doomscrolling the media’s incessant news cycle.

He paused and said: “I think we forget that the universe is benevolent.”

It wasn’t the answer I had been expecting.

James went on to describe the burnout he had experienced, and how he had recognised the need to step back from handling coverage of Gaza to find solace surfing in Cornwall. The ocean had seemed to remind him how important it was for the media to go beyond simply telling people how hopeless situations seem – and to convey deeper truths. 

“I think remembering goodness, remembering human goodness is what the world needs more than ever right now,” he said.

In Healing Collective Trauma, Thomas notes that a skilled and sensitive trauma therapist can recognize the symptoms of trauma in a client and follow those symptoms back to their origin, “the ground zero” of trauma. “Is it possible to accurately read the symptoms of collective trauma as well?,” he writes. “As we enter a world afflicted by escalating suffering, a whole new expertise is needed.” 

A trauma-restoring media culture would support journalists and editors to develop this expertise – and evolve newsrooms capable of telling the greatest story never told: We are all endowed with profound, innate capacities to support one another to escape the long arc of collective and inter-generational trauma, and reclaim the capacity for intimacy and agency that’s needed to midwife the more benevolent future that’s waiting to be born.