When we had to return to Israel, the relevance of these connections became even clearer to me. My wife is a professor of art and very prominent in Israel. Her brother was kidnapped by Hamas and was missing for three months. The whole country was looking for him before he was found dead. And that is just one of countless examples of collective traumatization. For Israel’s history, with all its wars, is also a history of collective trauma. And in its aftermath, there are strong radicalization movements that, because of their traumatization, don’t want peace to happen at all. That’s what made my wife and me activists for peace. And that’s why we founded the Pocket Project, whose goal is to establish a nationwide trauma awareness and information campaign in Israel. In politics, education, medicine, the army – so that the unconsciousness of collective trauma is transformed into a collective competence. Because if you know a few things about how trauma works, that alone can help people.

So what is collective trauma?

Most people are used to talking about trauma when something bad happens to us or other people. Be it an experience of war, abuse, a car accident…. So an experience of total overwhelm. But actually, trauma is just what remains after the overwhelm. People are able to split off this experience of being overwhelmed from their consciousness and thereby immobilize it – freeze it, so to speak. But that does not mean that this damage, this injury, is thereby gone. What remains continues to have an effect on the individual level as well as on the collective level. Like unhealed wounds that chronically affect our emotions, our minds, and our bodies, even when we don’t feel them or suppress their pain. And we are not only affected by trauma we have experienced ourselves, but as humans we are born into collective trauma. Trauma floods our culture and seeps into the culture that influences us. It’s like the permafrost of our social fabric.

How can we imagine the effects of collective trauma?

Trauma has the property of immobilizing and rendering imperceptible the pain and fear that remain from terrible experiences in everyday life. This is as true on the individual level as it is on the collective. The real pain in the collective is always where it is silent. The real traumatization no longer has a language. It can’t call for help either. It is totally frozen. But this immobilization has a high price. I always compare it to a freezer where we freeze things. We don’t think about the freezer while we’re doing something else. But it’s constantly consuming energy that we have to pay for. And all too often, we pay for that energy on credit. And when things get tight for us and we run into problems in life, at some point we can no longer afford this energy consumption on credit. And then the following generations have to continue paying the loans. In Germany, there are very few generations between the young people and the enormous catastrophe of World War II. And they are still paying off the loans. But we are just getting into the situation as a society that the things that we have somehow kept cold and quiet are coming to the surface in more and more places. And we’re getting into a tremendous amount of stress because we’re just not getting the social and global problems that are resulting from that, that everybody knows we need to solve, solved. Whether it’s social inequality, the exploitation of our planet’s resources, or climate change.

How are these related to each other?

For me, one main reason is that people experience themselves as separate in their trauma – from other people as well as from nature, of which we are an indissoluble part. And this experience of being separate leads to enormous stress and energy consumption. And it’s the same with the fossil fuel we consume in our society. If I don’t experience myself as connected, sharing with others and only consuming what I really need in a community, but as isolated and disconnected, then I’m simply consuming more resources and not really living sustainably. Not even if I can understand sustainability intellectually or even advocate for it activistically. And what we consume more of is what I call trauma fuel. In addition, people who suffer from traumatic attachment disorder, for example, often can’t regulate themselves or regulate themselves less well. That’s also why we have such an insatiable economic system in which people strive for more and more, even if that is no longer well regulated in the overall system. And when we are caught in such chronic over-activation in our society as well as in our economic system, we burn up the resources of the system at all levels. And everyone is stuck in this higher level of stress. This stops the self-healing mechanisms of our bodies and the entire system in which we all live. At some point, the substance is burned up and the body and society become sick. The same thing happens, I believe, in the biosphere. One of the burning problems we have gotten into in this way is precisely climate change. The only way we can change this development is if we go back to a natural way of living and adapt our use of resources together. But we won’t get this social change off the ground if we don’t look at the traumas that got us into this situation in the first place.

So how can we do that?

The problem is that for evolutionary social change, it is not enough to just change our behaviors and habits, or to be activist so that other people do the same. Because that doesn’t resolve the traumas. On the contrary. The problem is that when I put pressure on traumatizations, I generate resistance. This is exactly what climate activists have to understand first: That they are running against ice walls of frozen traumatizations. And the harder they run against it, the harder they bounce off, because that creates counterforces. Both sides are damaged by this. The activists get frustrated – the others shut down and block all the more. In short, banging against the ice walls only creates more stress in the system and awakens more counterpressure.