Michelle: What if I told you that your anxiety isn't just yours? A growing body of research, including some wild studies on mice, suggests you might be carrying the stress of your grandparents. And that's not even the strangest part. Mark: Whoa, hold on. My grandparents' stress? That sounds like a very convenient excuse for my late-night doomscrolling and questionable pizza habits. "It's not my fault, Michelle, it's my ancestors!" Michelle: I know, it sounds out there! But that's exactly the provocative territory we're diving into today with the book Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds by Thomas Hübl. Mark: Okay, I'm intrigued. But "collective trauma" sounds huge and academic. Who is Thomas Hübl to be tackling something this massive? Michelle: That's what makes him so interesting. He’s not your typical spiritual guru. He actually started as a paramedic in Vienna, dealing with life-and-death situations daily. That experience led him to a four-year meditation retreat, and he later earned a PhD and became a visiting scholar at Harvard's Wyss Institute. So he's constantly trying to bridge the gap between raw human suffering, scientific rigor, and mystical insight. Mark: A paramedic turned Harvard scholar and mystic. That’s quite the resume. It does explain why the book has this reputation for being both profound and, let's be honest, a bit polarizing. Some readers find it life-changing, others find it incredibly dense and theoretical. Michelle: Exactly. He’s not offering easy answers. He’s trying to create a map for a territory most of us don't even know we're living in.

Mark: So let's start with that map. What does he even mean by "collective trauma"? I always thought of trauma as something deeply personal—a car crash, a loss. How can a whole group of people be traumatized? Michelle: That's the core idea. Hübl argues that trauma isn't just an event that happens and then is over. It's an energy, a residue, that gets left behind. When a massive trauma happens—like a war, a genocide, or a period of intense oppression—it creates what he calls a "psychic wound" or a "fracture" in the collective field. It's like an invisible architecture of pain that shapes a culture for generations. Mark: An invisible architecture... that's a heavy concept. It still feels a bit abstract. Can you make that more concrete? Michelle: He does, with some incredibly powerful and difficult stories. One of the most haunting is from the American South. In 1918, in Georgia, a young Black man named Hayes Turner was lynched. His pregnant wife, Mary Turner, publicly condemned the murder and vowed to have the men responsible brought to justice. Mark: That took unbelievable courage in 1918. Michelle: Unbelievable. And for that courage, a mob hunted her down. The details are horrific. They hung her upside down from a tree, tortured her, and then... they cut her unborn baby from her womb. The baby fell to the ground, and a member of the mob crushed its skull with his heel. Mark: My god. That's... I have no words. That's just pure evil. Michelle: It is. And Hübl's point is that an event like that doesn't just disappear. The pain, the terror, the injustice—it seeps into the land, into the community, into the cultural memory. He describes it as creating a "dark lake" of unhealed pain that future generations are born into. They might not know the specific story of Mary Turner, but they feel the effects: the systemic racism, the unspoken fear, the broken trust between communities. That's the architecture of collective trauma. Mark: Okay, now I get it. It’s not just a memory; it’s a living, breathing wound that never properly closed. It explains that feeling you sometimes get in certain places, that heavy energy you can't quite name. Michelle: Exactly. He calls it "disrelation." Trauma breaks our relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with our own history. We become fragmented. And science is actually starting to back this up. The Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs study, showed a direct link between childhood trauma and adult illness. Collective trauma is like a society-wide ACEs score. Mark: So we're all walking around with these fragments of history inside us, affecting our health, our relationships, our politics, without even realizing the source. That's a staggering thought.

Michelle: It is. And it leads to the next big question, which is where the book gets both fascinating and, for some, controversial. If the wound is this deep and this old, how on earth do you heal it? Mark: Right. This is where I imagine some people start to check out. The book doesn't just stick to psychology. He brings in mysticism, spirituality... things that are harder to pin down. How does he bridge that gap without it sounding like pseudoscience? Michelle: He calls it his "double helix" approach—weaving science and spirit together. Let's start with the science, because it's pretty compelling. There was a study by a neurobiologist named Isabelle Mansuy on mice. Researchers subjected male mice to unpredictable, stressful situations early in life. Mark: Poor mice. What happened? Michelle: As adults, these mice showed symptoms we'd recognize as PTSD—anxiety, risky behavior, antisocial tendencies. But here's the mind-blowing part. They then had these traumatized mice father a new generation. The offspring, who were raised in a completely normal, safe environment, exhibited the exact same anxious and depressive behaviors as their fathers. It was even passed down to the third generation. Mark: Wait, how is that possible? The baby mice never experienced the trauma themselves. Michelle: Epigenetics. The trauma literally changed how the father's genes were expressed, specifically a gene that regulates stress hormones. And that change was passed down through his sperm. The trauma became a biological inheritance. Mark: That is wild. So the idea of inheriting my grandparents' anxiety suddenly doesn't sound so far-fetched. It's literally in the code. Michelle: It's in the code. And that's the scientific strand of the helix. But then Hübl weaves in the mystical strand. He talks about concepts like "divine light" and "retrocausality." Mark: Okay, 'retrocausality' sounds like something out of a Christopher Nolan movie. Are we talking about time travel? Healing the past from the future? Michelle: Not literally time travel, but it's a similar idea. The theory, which is being explored in quantum physics, suggests that the future can influence the past. Hübl uses this as a metaphor for healing. He says that when we experience trauma, the energy of that moment gets "frozen" in time within our nervous system. It's stuck. Mark: Like that dark lake from the Mary Turner story. Michelle: Precisely. Healing, in his view, is the act of bringing the "light" of our present-moment awareness—our compassion, our presence, our safety—to that frozen past moment. By doing that, we "thaw" the frozen energy. We're not changing the event, but we are changing its energetic hold on us in the present. It’s like finding a buried, polluted stream and "daylighting" it—bringing it to the surface so the sun and fresh air can purify it. You heal the past by integrating it into a conscious present. Mark: That's a beautiful analogy. So it's less about changing history and more about changing history's power over us. That makes the mystical part feel much more grounded.

Michelle: Exactly. And that leads to his most radical and practical point. If trauma is collective, then healing must also be collective. Mark: So what does that mean for how we approach this? Is my one-on-one therapy session not enough to deal with my inherited-from-a-mouse-ancestor anxiety? Michelle: It's essential, but Hübl would say it's incomplete. A collective wound needs a collective witness. He tells this incredible story about a man named Patrick Dougherty, a Vietnam veteran. When he came back from the war, he was met with silence and shame. The American public didn't want to hear about the atrocities, so the veterans were left to carry this immense international trauma all by themselves. Mark: I can't even imagine that level of isolation. To go through hell and then come home to be treated like a ghost. Michelle: For decades, he carried that. He became a trauma therapist himself, trying to make sense of it. But his deepest healing didn't happen until he attended one of Hübl's workshops in Israel. He was in a group with people from Germany, from Palestine—people with their own deep histories of collective trauma. Mark: That sounds like a recipe for conflict. Michelle: You'd think so. But in that space, something else happened. The other participants didn't have the American cultural filter of denial. They could see his pain clearly, and they mirrored it back to him with compassion. A German woman looked at him and said, "I can feel the perpetrator energy in you, and I can also feel the deep pain underneath it." For the first time, he felt truly seen in his entirety. He said he realized he didn't have to carry the war alone anymore. The group was carrying it with him. Mark: Wow. So it wasn't about finding the right words or the right technique. It was about creating a shared space where the truth could finally be held. It was the collective witnessing that healed the collective wound. Michelle: That's the heart of it. And that's the work his nonprofit, the Pocket Project, is trying to do. They have this motto: they treat the world as "one client." They believe that all these different historical traumas—the Holocaust, slavery, colonialism—are interconnected wounds on one global body. Mark: It’s a huge, almost impossibly ambitious idea. But after hearing those stories, it feels less like a metaphor and more like a diagnosis.

Michelle: It really does. He's essentially saying that so many of our modern crises—our political polarization, our ecological disasters, our mental health epidemics—are symptoms. They're the fever of a world suffering from unhealed, unacknowledged collective trauma. Mark: So, the big idea here is that we're all swimming in the waters of history, whether we know it or not. And ignoring the pollution doesn't make us immune; it just makes us sick in ways we don't understand. We're haunted by ghosts we refuse to name. Michelle: Exactly. And Hübl's ultimate challenge to us is this: What if healing isn't just about feeling better? What if it's an "ethical upgrade"? It's about consciously deciding to process the pain of the past so we don't pass it on. It's about becoming the ancestors our descendants will be proud of. Mark: That reframes everything. It’s not just self-help; it’s a generational responsibility. Michelle: It is. And it leaves us with a pretty profound question. We're so curious to hear what you think. Does this idea of collective trauma resonate with your own family or community history? Can you see its architecture in the world around you? Let us know on our socials. We'd love to continue the conversation. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.