How does collective trauma shape decision making?
How societal pain influences the choices we make

What children and moms have told me

About collective trauma

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What is collective trauma?

Collective trauma is a wound that a whole group of people carries together. It arises from events such as war, persecution, famine, slavery, sexual abuse, the oppression of women or discrimination. It affects individuals, and it also changes the way a group sees itself, its history and the world around it. Psychologist Gilad Hirschberger describes how collective trauma shapes the identity and memory of a group, and how it influences the way that group perceives threats and makes choices, long after the events themselves.

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Our society carries many of these wounds. One of the deepest is the femicides during the Renaissance (around 1450 to 1750), known as the witch burnings, in which thousands of women were killed. A great deal of knowledge about women, life, healing, children, the spiritual world and the Earth was lost. Women learned to adapt and keep their knowledge to themselves. Motherhood trauma is another example. Almost every mother carries one, which makes it a societal wound rather than an individual one: a painful wound in the soul of almost half of our population.

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Trauma lives on across generations

Societal trauma often shows itself one or more generations after the events themselves. When it remains unprocessed, the pain lives on in stories, emotions and bodies, and is passed on from generation to generation until it is healed. The way our foremothers and forefathers lived still influences our mental and physical condition today. It even influences the choices we make as a society.

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What my mother experienced in her life influences your life. The traumas of my grandmother are present in the background of my body. Traumas, family patterns and lessons are passed on through the women's line, so that the next generation gets the chance to heal them. When one woman heals a trauma, she can change the lives of seven generations.

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Science shows that the effects of collective events can indeed pass through generations. Children who were in the womb during the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944–1945 still showed changes in how their genes were regulated sixty years later, according to research by Bastiaan Heijmans and colleagues (PNAS, 2008). A shared experience of a whole population left traces that were still measurable in the next generation.

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Visible and hidden traumas

Some collective traumas are well documented. World War II, for example, receives extensive attention through museums, films, books and commemorations. These rituals give the pain a place in our culture.

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Other traumas remain unseen: sexual abuse, discrimination and the oppression of women. They persist in silence, and through silence and condoning they slowly become normal "codes of conduct". Healing these hidden traumas usually takes at least three generations: the generation that endures it, the generation that inherits it, and the generation that stands up and speaks out.

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How trauma shapes the identity of a society

Societal trauma becomes part of who a society is. You can see it in museums and memorials, where pain is given a cultural form. You can hear it in language and habits: jokes and discriminatory remarks often express suppressed pain and fear. And you can feel it in behaviour: a society can become withdrawn, distrustful or aggressive, which can show up as racism, nationalism or intolerance.

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After World War II, many people said "never again". Decades later, patterns of exclusion and conflict return. Societal choices today are still influenced by the trauma of 75 to 80 years ago. Just as personal trauma can make someone block healthy decisions, societal trauma can explain unexpected protests or seemingly illogical reactions to policy. When trauma remains unrecognised, it can quietly turn into a normal part of a culture's identity.

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Survival strategies of a hurt society

After centuries of persecution and accusations, women stayed on their guard and adapted. They developed survival strategies to be able to live. The consequences are still visible today. Women still sometimes find it hard to speak up and tell their truth. Because of our history, women sometimes see each other as competitors instead of allies. By calling the persecution "witch burnings", a wedge was driven between women: women wanted to keep their distance from other women to protect themselves.

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These survival strategies also exist between groups in society. I grew up in villages where religion decided who your friends were. My school consisted of two parts, a Christian and a Catholic one, and I was only allowed to play on my own side. Later I learned how easy it is to avoid people or speak badly about groups when you learn as a child that you may only mix with your own "kind". This is the ideal breeding ground for conflicts and feuds, and for keeping groups apart. Today's social media bubbles work in a similar way: you are fed only with stories that match your own view.

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Deciding from scarcity and fear

When energy in a society is out of balance, people make choices from "shortage" or "fear". We search for extras to make our own temple shine, or we want to destroy the temples of others so that ours still looks beautiful. These are metaphors for war, money and materialism. We literally feed ourselves with shortages and surpluses: loneliness, hunger and disease on one side, pollution, obesity and stress on the other.

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Research shows how strongly scarcity and worry influence our thinking. A study by Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and Jiaying Zhao (Science, 2013) found that financial worries take up so much mental space that people's ability to solve problems dropped by an amount comparable to 13 IQ points. When people live in stress, their brains focus on surviving today. There is less room for creativity, long-term thinking and empathy.

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The same applies to societies. Choices are often made for the short term, and often the cheapest solution wins. Decisions are made mainly from reason, while intuition is just as important. A society that has healed its wounds can look further ahead, to the wellbeing of the next generations.

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Why today's changes trigger old wounds

Many changes in our time touch old, dormant pain: a feeling of losing control, changing demographics and shifting roles between women and men. Rising nationalism and conflicts about gender often reflect these triggered fears more than a reasoned policy debate.

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Technology works in two directions. It helps people with the same trauma find each other, share their stories and feel recognised, which is an important step towards healing. It can also amplify fear and pain without offering real healing. Leaders who understand this can guide their society through change with calm, recognition and trust.

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How collective trauma shows up in policy

We create many problems because our systemic traumas have not yet been healed. You can recognise it in the language of policy. We speak of defence instead of peacebuilding, and of poverty policy instead of wellbeing policy. We speak about other countries with suspicion instead of respect. Negative communication, such as criticism, threats, manipulation and lies, is used to exercise power, and it is always a form of imbalance.

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Collective trauma also shows up in the stories a society tells. The history you learned is the history that is easiest and safest for those in power to tell. By telling specific parts of history, you can steer the present and the future. When only the stories of men are told, it seems as if women played no important role in the past. Women then miss part of their self-esteem, and men miss part of the picture of who women really are.

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Organisations carry trauma too. When a team has experienced reorganisations, conflicts or unsafe leadership, people become cautious, stop sharing ideas and protect themselves. Decisions then serve safety in the short term rather than growth in the long term.

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Leaders, money and societal trauma

People accept leaders based on their aura and frequency, even more than on their words or actions. A society chooses leaders whose frequency matches its own collective energy. When a society carries unhealed trauma, its frequency lowers, and it tends to choose leaders with a similar frequency. That frequency shapes the norms and values of a society, the choices that are made, and the freedom, health and opportunities of its citizens and future generations.

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Leaders also make choices based on their own traumas and experiences. A leader who is used to conflict tends to make defensive, military choices. A leader who is experienced in dialogue tends to choose negotiation. That is why it matters to look at leaders' knowledge, their fit with today's challenges and the outcome a society truly needs, as well as their frequency.

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The way societal trauma develops depends on leadership. Leaders can choose to spend money in ways that increase societal trauma, or in ways that heal it. Leaders who carry unhealed trauma often recreate familiar patterns through the way they allocate budgets. This is rarely intentional; it follows the natural law of attraction. When a country invests its resources along the paths of its trauma, the result is more control, more fear, fewer chances and lower health. When it invests in healing, the result is more trust, freedom, opportunity and health.

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The cost of holding on to trauma

Holding on to trauma costs an enormous amount of energy. Letting go asks for a change of identity and for accepting that past suffering cannot be undone. For one person, this is already difficult. For a whole society that invests billions every year in structures shaped by old pain, it is even more complex.

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Healing starts with three steps. First, acknowledge the trauma openly. Then, start a public dialogue about how it can be healed. And finally, respond differently to today's triggers once the root of the pain is recognised. Engaging in the conversation about healing, whether it concerns war trauma, sexual abuse or the oppression of women, is already the first step.

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Healing opens the way to wise decisions

Generational blockages, role patterns and intergenerational trauma hold everyone in society back from reaching their full potential. Only when this pain is healed can people and society as a whole live in balance again. You can only heal pain once you recognise it. That is why recognising collective trauma is the first step for every leader.

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As humanity, we have forgotten the knowledge and skills to deal with emotions such as pain, fear and sadness. Yet your reaction is always a choice. Do you become angry with someone, or do you try to understand their point of view? Do you stay calm or do you attack? People who scream from fear or insult from their own pain rarely mean to hurt you; it says a lot about them. The same is true for groups and countries. When you look from the side of the sender, you can respond from understanding instead of fear.

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I learned that people are much happier, stronger and more powerful when they can let go of their traumas. Societies are no different. Every trauma that is healed lets a little more light, trust and wisdom into the choices we make together.

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Decision making in the Matriarchal World

In the Matriarchal World, masculine and feminine energy are in balance, and concepts such as war, oppression and discrimination have no place. People are connected in love, support each other and encourage one another. When opinions differ, people listen. Where does your opinion come from? Is it fear speaking, or urgency, knowledge or ambition? How can our opinions be united? People with a different opinion are embraced and heard, as long as they speak from a pure heart.

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A society in balance makes conscious choices from both masculine and feminine energy. It protects its people and its environment and cares for them with love. It makes long-term decisions as easily as short-term ones, and both nourish each other. Elders share their wisdom, and every voice is equally important. People who have healed their own pain take on positions of economic and political responsibility. This is how a society makes choices that serve the next generations.