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As Brazilian author Paulo Coelho writes, “You drown not by falling into a river but by staying submerged in it.” This is an apt metaphor for how trauma impacts people, individually and collectively. Humanity is submerged in layers of individual, intergenerational, and collective trauma, but we generally don’t recognize it. This prevents us from addressing the roots of collective challenges we face and keeps us from taking steps toward healing that can transform the systems around us.

What if a major source of the “stuckedness” of our systems — the resistance, blockages, defensiveness, denial and distrust so many of us experience and are stymied by — is unresolved, unintegrated trauma that remains in the system? It’s a provocative question. And even though it will be greeted with skepticism by many, for millions of others who continue to be traumatised by systems aecting many aspects of their lives, it often comes as a relief to name and acknowledge their lived reality. “The collective trauma of colonization shows up every day in the lives of my people,” said Louise Marra, a descendent of the iwi Ngāi Tuhoe and Co-Founder of Unity House in New Zealand. “A white Western audience may nd this challenging to absorb, but for colonized people and people of indigenous descent, it is actually a relief to name trauma and acknowledge it — because when our stories can be heard and our pain can be met, that’s when the work of repairing and healing can begin.”