Collective Trauma and Human Suffering: Energizing Systemic Change through Collective Healing Action

Collective Trauma and Human Suffering: Energizing Systemic Change through Collective Healing Action provides readers with a compassionate and research-based framework for collective healing in an increasingly fragmented world.

The text recognizes how the traumatic uprising of colonization and industrialized civilizations has subverted our foundational, social, and cultural knowledge of being human in favor of political, military, and materialistic needs for control and supremacy. The book outlines an original collective healing model that demonstrates how bringing intercultural communities together can integrate deep-seated trauma through collective resilience, healing action, and hope.

Wisdom and knowledge of earlier world cultures has sustained the survival of human experience. This writing uncovers the ways in which systemic racism, natural disasters, mass trauma, agricultural development, slavery, control of resources, military power, and the evolution from village to the global has created fragmentation within our modern culture. Today, over half of the world's children do not have access to a healthy development.

Readers will learn how the reclamation of interconnectedness, cultures, languages, and rituals can restore our systems prioritizing heart, humanity, and nature, thus infusing greater levels of human acceptance, compassion, communication, and love into the systems raising the future, our children.

Bruce St. Thomas is a child and family psychotherapist, art therapist, and consultant/educator. He has spent over 40 years specializing in complex loss, intergenerational trauma, collective trauma, and collective healing frameworks in both private practice and community-based programs.

Paul Johnson is a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Southern Maine. Previously, he taught at Lehman College, part of the CUNY system. His teaching expertise includes social work practice, social welfare policy, research, fieldwork and group work.

Marie Sheffield is an art therapist, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, and adjunct professor at the University of Southern Maine. She has spent the last two decades working at the Center for Grieving Children in the field of complex and collective trauma with children and families. Currently, she and St. Thomas are creating Bridge to Belong (bridge2belong.com), a consulting collaborative focused on infusing collective healing action into the world.