Collective Trauma

Spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl has spent years investigating why it is that old and seemingly disconnected traumas can seed their way through communities and across generations. His work culminates in Healing Collective Trauma, a new perspective on trauma that addresses both its visible effects and its most hidden roots. Thomas combines deep knowledge of mystical traditions with the latest scientific research. "In this way", writes Thomas, "we are weaving a double helix between ancient wisdom and contemporary understanding".

Too often, we assume that our trauma is an individual wound, and that we can only heal it through individual work. In truth, our trauma is shaped by so much more than our own experience—we’re impacted by ancestral trauma from previous generations as well as collective trauma from the world around us. Beloved teachers Thomas Hübl and Richard Schwartz bring together their wisdom to chart a new path forward that addresses all of these sources of pain, so we can heal ourselves and also our communities and world.

When Dr. Tim Lewis was twenty-eight years old, his father shot his mother while she was sleeping in his childhood bedroom, and then he turned the gun on himself. As he sat in the hospital waiting room while his mother clung to her life, his friends and family seemed to have only one question for him: "Why?" This book is his attempt at an answer. While Daddy is the story of Dr. Lewis's trauma, substance abuse, and his lifelong dedication to PTSD research as a clinical psychologist, it turns out it is also the story of America and American men.

When your work is inextricable from your identity, your community, and your own liberation, you need a unique praxis of care to sustain it—and for mission-driven activists, organizers, and changemakers working under oppressive systems, making space to center vital needs like rest, self-care, and healthy boundaries isn’t as simple as clocking out. Practicing Liberation reorients collective justice work toward a model that transforms the effects of injustice, harm, and oppressive systems into resilience, joy, and community care.