Collective Trauma, Shared Sorrow, and the Path Toward Healing

Content Note: This post discusses collective trauma, displacement, war, state violence, and loss. Readers are encouraged to engage at their own pace and care for themselves as needed.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” -  James Baldwin

On Thursday, January 8th, 2026, the Iranian government activated the internet and phone “kill switch.” In a single moment, a nation of more than 90 million people was plunged into silence. Curtains were drawn over homes, cities, and families, severing connections not only to the outside world, but to one another.

This was not the first time the Iranian government imposed widespread internet shutdowns, digital throttling, or platform bans such as Instagram and WhatsApp. These tactics are routinely used to disrupt protest coordination, isolate the population from global witness, and control the flow of information. Yet repetition does not lessen impact. Each shutdown reverberates through the collective nervous system, overwhelming coping mechanisms and rupturing a basic sense of safety.

For Iranians inside the country and across the diaspora, the silence itself became terrifying. Contact with loved ones vanished without warning. Verified information dissolved, replaced by rumors, fragmented reports, and unanswered questions.

What if something bad is happening and I don’t know about it?

This kind of uncertainty activates a uniquely destabilizing form of collective trauma. For Iranians in the diaspora, it manifests as transnational grief, helplessness, survivor’s guilt, compulsive news-watching, and the sudden loss of relational anchors. Psychological and social consequences often include hypervigilance around connectivity, distrust in media, fractured social bonds, depression, dissociation, and burnout. Trauma travels across borders, even when bodies cannot.

Collective trauma describes the emotional, psychological, and spiritual impact of traumatic events experienced by an entire group of people. It can stem from pandemics, natural disasters, war, genocide, displacement, systemic oppression, colonialism, and sudden tragedies. These events harm not only individuals but also fracture the connections, traditions, and shared identities that hold communities together. Collective trauma lives in the shared nervous system of a people. It becomes the water we all swim in.

When collective trauma is never acknowledged, grieved, or healed, it does not remain in the past. It embeds itself across generations, within families, cultures, and communities. It shapes identities, beliefs, and worldviews. It can create a deep sense of not being worthy, safe, or protected. Communities carry shared stories of survival, belonging, and worth, often without realizing how deeply those narratives were shaped by harm.

“Pain does not see and cannot be seen: it is the nothing growing full.” -  Mahmoud Darwish

When harm is not repaired, collective stories can solidify into identities rooted in trauma. Under systemic oppression, people may internalize harmful messages, roles, and power dynamics. These internalized beliefs often influence a person’s sense of self and how they navigate the world.

Some of the defense mechanisms that commonly emerge in oppressive environments include:

• Projection

• Introjection

• Dissociation

• Reaction formation

• Identification with the aggressor

• Internalized surveillance

These defenses are adaptive responses to unsafe conditions. Over time, however, they can reinforce oppressive systems and interrupt healing. This often shows up as deep caution in relationships outside the community, distrust of authority, and patterns of self-protection that limit connection. The wounded story becomes cultural inheritance, frequently misinterpreted as individual psychological issues rather than collective wounds.

Collective trauma can also weaken the cohesion of a community. It fuels distrust, resentment, and emotional distance. Cultural traditions, rituals, and practices that once sustained collective identity may be lost. When grief is silenced or denied, it often transforms into depression, emotional numbness, or internalized anger and shame. Communities learn to survive rather than thrive.

Collective Trauma Across Contexts

Palestinians live with a form of collective trauma that has unfolded across multiple generations, shaped by displacement, loss of land and community, systemic violence, and chronic instability. Because these harms have rarely been acknowledged or repaired, their effects continue to echo emotionally, physically, and structurally across families and communities.

In Gaza, trauma is not episodic; it is continuous. Repeated military assaults, siege, forced displacement, and deprivation of food, water, healthcare, and electricity have created conditions in which there is no clear “after” in which recovery can begin. Entire families and neighborhoods have been erased. Social institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and places of worship, have been destroyed, dismantling the structures that typically help communities process grief and restore meaning. What remains is not only profound loss, but existential insecurity: the persistent sense that survival itself is under threat.

In Sudan, armed conflict between rival military forces has produced one of the largest displacement crises in the world, with more than 12 million people forced from their homes. Cities have emptied almost overnight as civilians flee urban warfare, looting, and ethnic violence. This mass displacement retriggers historical trauma from earlier conflicts, layering new wounds onto those never healed.

Similarly, in Somalia, decades of conflict and instability have resulted in protracted displacement. For many children, instability is the only reality they have ever known. Chronic malnutrition, disrupted education, and exposure to exploitation shape development under conditions of sustained threat.

Despite different political and historical contexts, these experiences share striking similarities. Civilians bear the cost of political and military failure, with women and children disproportionately affected. Displacement often intersects with climate vulnerability, compounding loss and precarity. Beyond physical movement, displacement generates deep psychological and collective injury; people are losing continuity, safety, identity, and the ability to imagine a future.

In all of these contexts, return, stability, and protection remain out of reach. Prolonged uncertainty creates a permanent state of transition, which the brain experiences as an ongoing threat. Trauma becomes embedded not as a momentary response, but as a way of life.

Displacement does not merely remove people from land or homes. It disrupts memory, relationships, identity, and the nervous system itself. For this reason, displacement so often becomes collective trauma, a shared psychological and social wound that reshapes how communities experience safety, belonging, and hope.

Collective Healing as a Path Forward

“Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.” - Bell Hooks

The same force that wounds can also catalyze profound restoration. Collective trauma can ignite resilience shaped by ancestral survival, community organizing, cultural traditions, and solidarity. These collective narratives hold both pain and power, grief alongside perseverance, loss alongside connection to lineage, place, and belonging.

“All human beings are parts of one body, Created from the same essence. If one part is afflicted with pain, The others cannot remain at peace.”- Saadi of Shiraz

Communities experience loss together, whether the loss of a loved one, a shared sense of safety, or an entire way of life. When grief has no place to go, it becomes internalized and carried forward through generations. Trauma cannot be healed solely through individual therapy. True healing requires collective acknowledgment, community connection, and cultural practice.

Shared Sorrow as Collective Medicine

Shared sorrow is the act of carrying grief together rather than alone. Collective grieving emerges when people gather to witness one another’s pain without fixing, judging, or minimizing. In these moments, grief becomes a bridge rather than a barrier.

Candlelight vigils, altars, songs, poetry, art, storytelling, and ritual allow grief that is too vast for one person to be held by many. When sorrow is shared, its weight becomes more bearable. Connection becomes medicine.

We Are Connected in Our Healing

With all the challenges in the world, we are called to show up for one another. Our suffering does not isolate us; it connects us. It is a bridge back to ourselves, to one another, and to our shared humanity.

We are swimming in this water together.

If you are feeling the weight of trauma, personal, intergenerational, or collective, you do not have to face it alone. Therapy can provide a supportive space to process grief, rebuild connection, and cultivate resilience.

If you’re ready to take the first step toward healing and restoring a sense of safety and belonging, we invite you to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation with one of our client care coordinators. During this call, we’ll explore your needs and help connect you with a therapist who can support your journey.