Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral, and Collective Trauma

Therapist Schwartz (You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For) and Hübl (Attuned), cofounder of Pocket Project, an NGO dedicated to trauma-informed therapeutic care, team up for a mixed-bag guide to tackling trauma. They define trauma expansively, noting it can be triggered by individual experiences or by broader tragedies, like wars, systemic oppression, poverty, or natural disasters, whose effects trickle down through generations or across populations. Such traumas create a “frozen” or shut-down part of oneself that either “finds a way to pull us back down and screw up our life” or constructs barriers to keep the individual from dealing with its consequences. To heal, Schwartz and Hübl suggest, one must become aware of the frozen “part” and mindfully reintegrate its “layers of experience and relationality” via practices ranging from meditation and self-inquiry to “collective healing” via group support and dialogue. While the narrative can slip into vagueness and feel repetitive (the mindfulness prompts instruct readers in only slightly varied ways to calm down and listen to themselves), the authors’ definition of trauma is valuably broad and complex, and their concepts are unpacked in nonjudgmental terms. It’s a solid addition to the rising tide of literature on trauma. (Dec.)