The Aftermath of Collective Trauma and How Therapy Can Help
When thinking of trauma, people often assume it is something that is highly personal, happening far from public eyes. But many types of trauma are not only public, they are also collective. Things like pandemics, wars, natural disasters, mass violence, social riots, or political instability impact whole communities, nations, or cultures. And when large groups are exposed to continuous threats, losses, or uncertainties, the result is collective trauma.
In times when it seems as if the world is taken over by injustice, I decided to write a blog dedicated to collective trauma. In it, we will first explore the impact that collective trauma has on the mind and body. From there, we will tackle how it reactivates earlier wounds or worsens existing mental health difficulties. Last but not least, we will focus on the therapeutic solutions that can help clients find their stability, meaning, and connection. Let’s start from the beginning.
What Is Collective Trauma?
While individual trauma happens to one person, collective trauma is experienced by a group of people. It causes great emotional and psychological distress after an overwhelming event, be it a one-time experience like an earthquake or an ongoing one, like a war. Interrupting everyday life and affecting many people at once, collective traumatic experiences shake the collective sense of safety, predictability, and belonging. Unlike individual trauma, collective trauma often has no clear beginning or end. It may develop slowly, recur repeatedly, or remain unresolved for long periods of time. Some examples of collective trauma include:
Global pandemics
Wars and armed conflict
Forced displacement and migration
Natural disasters
Mass shootings or terrorist attacks
Systematic oppression or violence
A collective traumatic experience is shared by many people, but the impact it has on each individual is highly personal. Two people may live through the same crisis, but their nervous systems may respond very differently, depending on their personal history, attachment patterns, past experiences, and the available support at the time.
Furthermore, collective trauma can be prolonged and oftentimes bring retraumatization to the people involved. When a collective negative experience happens, there is often constant exposure to threat signs and triggers. It is often broadcast in the news and on social media, often shared or talked about. The people who have lived through a traumatic experience are often subjected to ongoing reminders, so their nervous systems are on constant alert, causing prolonged responses to the event.
When the traumatic experience is collective, it impacts many individuals of the community. Even people who have never experienced a single, defined traumatic event are likely to have heightened anxiety, emotional exhaustion, irritability, numbness, or feel as if the world is no longer safe. And in the cases where the person has experienced a personal trauma before the collective one, the new, collective trauma doesn’t erase their personal experiences. The collective trauma just layers on top of the individual one, deepening the complexity of the symptoms, thus complicating the efforts of managing and healing.
How Collective Trauma Affects the Nervous System
Collective trauma primarily affects the autonomic nervous system, the one responsible for identifying danger and safety. When the threat is ongoing, the nervous system doesn’t get an opportunity to return to its baseline. It continuously stays alert, and the emotional and nervous system responses stay active longer. This results in chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, difficulty sleeping or relaxing, emotional shutdown or numbness, irritability, anger, hopelessness, or a sense of disconnection from oneself and others.
From a Polyvagal perspective, prolonged stress can trigger two opposing nervous system states. Sympathetic activation, also known as the fight-or-flight state, creates constant urgency, worry, agitation, or anger. Dorsal vagal shutdown, the so-called nervous system collapse, may prompt the person to feel fatigue, numbness, withdrawal, desperation, helplessness, or hopelessness. This is why, often, in the aftermath of a collective trauma, some individuals seem “checked out” or like they easily “moved on,” while others experience prolonged anxiety and fear, seeming like they can’t “let go of what happened.”
Over time, these states can make people feel “not like themselves.” The nervous system becomes less flexible, less able to transition between states of activation and calm. And this is not a personal failure, but a logical, biological response caused by an unnatural state of prolonged stress.
Identity, Meaning, and Collective Trauma
Beyond causing distressing symptoms, collective trauma disrupts something deep. It changes the personal and collective sense of meaning and identity.
Large-scale crises challenge fundamental assumptions about the world’s safety, trust in others and institutions, the possibilities of the future, and the sense of belonging in an unstable, uncertain, unjust, or cruel world.
Trauma research shows that when safety is disrupted at a societal level, people may experience confusion, grief, survivor’s guilt, or shame for “not doing enough.” Others may feel helpless or morally overwhelmed. As Herman (2015) describes, these responses appear as a result of the brain’s attempt to make sense of chaos and retrieve some sense of agency and control.
When collective trauma persists, identity shifts from growth, curiosity, and connection toward survival, vigilance, and endurance. The longer the experience lasts, the more identity disruptions happen, and trauma survivors often feel like they “can’t recognize themselves and their communities.”
If you want to read more about how trauma affects identity, our Journal has blogs on that topic too.
Collective Trauma Reactivates Personal Trauma
Collective trauma, as a new traumatic experience, can swiftly reactivate unresolved personal trauma. So, a pandemic isolation may trigger early attachment wounds or abandonment fears, war imagery may awaken memories of childhood threats, or natural disasters can remind one of their sense of helplessness.
The Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model explains how this happens. Shapiro, the founder of EMDR, explains that traumatic memories are stored in networks. Similarly to a trigger, when current events resemble any past danger (even symbolically), those brain networks get activated, and they flood the system with emotions and sensations. So, the person reacts to the current event as though it is their past traumatic experience. This is why someone may feel “overreactive” without understanding the underlying reason. The response often belongs not only to the present moment, but also to the past.
EMDR Therapy Helps with Collective Trauma
EMDR is a therapeutic modality that was initially created for trauma. Today, it is perfectly suitable to address stress and triggers that get activated by collective crises. EMDR stabilizes the nervous system and helps clients process past and present triggers. It uses bilateral stimulation to engage the brain while it also reprocesses earlier memories, which are intensified by the current distress. The traumatic material is processed is stored in the long-term memory, so it no longer feels immediate or overwhelming. This process helps clients lower the emotional intensity of triggers and build their coping resources. They often report that the distressing events feel “farther away,” more contextualized, and less defining.
Importantly, EMDR can be adapted even when the stressor is ongoing. Therapy focuses not on eliminating reality, but on restoring flexibility, agency, and adaptive meaning, even during distressing experiences (Shapiro, 2018).
Other Trauma-Informed Approaches That Support Healing
While EMDR is a powerful tool, collective trauma recovery is often best practiced and best supported when it's done integratively and holistically. Understanding the complexity of trauma, and collective trauma in particular, at EMDR Therapy Nashville, we practice a holistic, integrative model of healing. We combine different therapeutic modalities and create individualized treatment plans and therapeutic interventions, helping each client work through their experience with tools and actions that are designed particularly for them.
In the case of collective trauma, we use Somatic therapies to help regulate the body, support grounding, breath, movement, and the release of chronic tension (Levine, 2010). We may also use Attachment-focused therapy, which helps clients find relational connection, especially in times of distress, mistrust in others, or isolation (Siegel, 2012). Lastly, group and community-based support can help whole communities reduce shame and restore connection through shared witnessing and validation.
Practical Support During Times of Collective Trauma
In addition to therapy, small daily practices can help trauma survivors widen their window of tolerance:
Grounding in present sensory experience (mindfulness)
Limiting exposure to distressing media and engagement in distressing conversations
Maintaining predictable routines that promote safety and control
Seeking moments of connection with supportive, understanding individuals
Naming emotions without judgment
Practicing self-care and self-understanding
If distress becomes persistent, overwhelming, or begins to interfere with daily functioning, trauma-informed therapy can provide crucial support.
Ending Words
When the world feels unsafe, it makes sense that our bodies respond with fear, grief, or shutdown. These reactions are signs of humanity, and not individual signs of fragility. Collective trauma changes our perception of the world abruptly and drastically, so it’s only logical to react with distress.
With trauma-informed therapies like EMDR or somatic therapy, collective trauma survivors can lower their symptoms and heal their nervous systems. They can regain some sense of control, steadiness, meaning, and connection, even during uncertain times or in the hectic aftermath of collective traumatic experiences.
At EMDR Therapy Nashville, our therapists are trained to help collective trauma survivors to recreate their sense of safety and direction. By combining different modalities and approaches, we create individualized plans that are not only effective but also considerate, relational, and safe-paced. Contact us today, and we can jointly walk the road to recovery and connection.
References
Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.
Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy: Basic principles, protocols, and procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.