Thomas Hübl: Processing Our Collective Past
Thomas Hübl is one of the most incredible, spiritually oriented teachers working in the trauma space today. Thomas primarily works with large groups, where his process focuses on transmuting dark, collective energy—typically old, dense energy that’s held by cultures and places. He has worked all over the world in zones where there is much dense despair, using a collective holding space to transmute and metabolize this energy, arguing that it’s essential fuel for our evolution and growth. When we deny this energy’s presence, or refuse to acknowledge what’s happened in humanity’s past, we are stuck reliving these stories and patterns, not understanding where they even come from. The beauty of Thomas’s work is that you don’t need to be directly affected by these stories in order to help move and release them. He explains how this works in his book, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, and we dive into the journey here. This conversation was very powerful and moving to me—it’s one of my favorite on this podcast so far. So let’s get to it now.
MORE FROM THOMAS HÜBL:
Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds
Thomas’s Website
Follow Thomas on Instagram
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
So glad we could make this happen. You are busy.
THOMAS HÜBL:
That's really true. I'm busy, at least in the last, I don’t know, for the last two years or something, I'm really busy.
ELISE:
I guess it makes sense when you look at what's happening in the world. It feels like it's all coming to the surface. I always say it feels like we're getting, this is such a terrible metaphor, and I kept inserting this in my book, which my editor kept taking out, cause she was like, this is too gross…[but] where it's like we're getting a facial and we have terrible cystic acne. And it's like, the stuff just has to come up. Like we have to move it up.
THOMAS:
True. It's there. I think it's very true. You should have that in your book.
ELISE:
You can have that metaphor. You are welcome.
THOMAS:
No, I mean, you should have that in your book. It's so true. I think that's the time we are in, right?
ELISE:
Right. And I think people can relate to that or understand that you can cover it up and you can foundation over it, but it's begging to emerge.
THOMAS:
Totally. Yeah. Right.
ELISE:
Well thank you for your book. I loved it. And I've read many, many books about trauma and I felt like your articulation of what's happening on the emotional and spiritual level, this idea of, you maybe describe it as a fabric, but the way that these things are part of the collective consciousness, but even sort of baked into the soil of the earth and have to move was one of the most beautiful descriptions of it. And so maybe we start there. Can we start with your world view, this idea of the causal realm energy and structure?
THOMAS:
Yeah. So like when you look at a small child and the child's developing something new, so your children crawl around in the living room and then at a certain time it's like they're hypnotized by somebody that walks around and they're like kind of internalizing what they see outside because their inside is ready for it. Because people were walking around before, too. And that's, by the way, true for our development too. We are always on fire when we find something new that excites us. But many of these things were around before, too. We just didn't see them. And once something is ready in us, like there is energy in us, it's an internal developmental impulse. We notice something outside and then that creates like the impulse to learn something together, inside and outside together, are the impulse for growth.
And then, from the moment on, the child is practicing, getting up, walking a bit, falling down, getting up. So 3D in a way, we internalized that as a function. So the impulse that is what is energy information in movement. But in order to have information, we need a space. So in a way, consciousness is also like a space function. It's the space for a creation, for something to be created, in order to create something. We need a space for it. So there's space which many people experiencing contemplation, meditation moments when you walk through the forest, when you feel, you relax a bit, your insight and you have time to reflect, to digest, to integrate, which are very important functions, which in a progress driven world, we often don't have enough of. And that's why we are experiencing a lot of chronic stress.
But coming back to the energy, so information in movement, which is energy builds itself like a pipe system and in a wiring that, that information can be channeled through. And we called it grounding. We called it manifestation. But it's the same when I have a startup idea and I need to create a startup, like a company. So the company is also manifestation. It's matter, it's people working, it's a structure, legal structure, financial structure. It's the same process. So innovation, actually what's innovation? I have a great idea. Like I can think it, I get excited, which is emotional. I work for it, it's physical, and I turn my idea, I code it into a physical world. And so the same process that works that way, works the other way in the healing process. When we want to heal something, return in at tendencies, into lighter and lighter tendencies until they disappear. And we are not expressing those tendencies anymore. So that's when in the moment, information arises, and that's maybe true for the entire universe and the creation of the universe, but that's at least true for us as human beings that learn in this world also from one another, that impulses need an internal readiness to land like a fertile ground. And when that works well then mentorship works well, then learning works well then, you know, having a life where we update ourselves constantly, and when we update ourselves, we feel happy because we feel we are progressing, expanding, growing.
ELISE:
And so when we're talking about collective trauma and group healing, one, my understanding from looking at your work is that there are these mass traumas that perhaps our generations behind us that we need group energy to access and process those collectively. Is that the idea? It's like too much work or wouldn't be possible for one person alone to really make a dent and the energy that needs to be processed? Is that the idea?
THOMAS:
Of course. It's like, I can take care of my share. You know, my parents, my grandparents were soldiers in the second World War in Austria, I grew up in Vienna. So we, the Austrian society, got hit by the war and has after effect. So I carry that naturally in me through my genetics and epigenetics, through the environment that I grew up in, through my parents, my attachment process. So I needed to do, and still doing a lot of work to integrate it step by step as I live my life and as I grow in my life.
But on the collective level, if you just take Holocaust or slavery in the U.S. and racism, these are massive wounds. These are the like six millions of people in concentration camps. This is so painful. And what I hurt is a tiny little bit of the whole. And it's so intense that there is a lot of suppressed, disassociated, split of fragmented information, what I would say is the collective unconscious and it's stored there. And it's being kept down by collective defense mechanisms. Because if all of that information were to arise now, I mean, I think many people would be hospitalized in mental hospitals because it's so intense. Because it'll burn us. But skillfully as groups coming together and having an internal process, everybody for him or her themselves, having an Idol process in building relational containers, co regulative containers and building we spaces that develop a certain level of coherence or awareness of themselves, of itself—that's a very powerful tool.
And I would even take it as step further and say in a hyper-individualized or in a realistic world, individuation has often been mixed up with separation. Like we are on the planet and I would say, no, we are the planet too. My body is the planet. Like nature is alive in me when we walk through the forest, nature is not just around us, it's also through us. And so we mixed a bit individuation where I think individuation is a specific expression. You are a specific expression, but of the whole, you know, you're part of the whole, me too. And we have individual intelligences that we express, but it's not that we are separate from. And that separation, I believe is a collective trauma symptom, that we live in a world where we experience some separation, that's the beginning of othering, that's the beginning of racism, antisemitism, polarization and so on. And, I think when we, in the group healing process, we reversed it and we actually use, I call it I at C like individual is always an inherent part of the collective. They're never separate. They're always connected. That's why when there are hundreds of thousands of people presenting a process really with the process, then that's a tremendous acceleration of healing.
And I believe some of, not all of it, but some of the one on one work is going to move into more collective containers because that's a new wave that I see coming in the healing work in general. And it also has a tremendous power. And we as a group, let's say hundreds of people have the power that, because through us, some of that suppressed information, if it's done skillfully, can emerge, as much as we can digest together, like it's, again, destruction needs to be strong enough to channel the information. So we need to allow part of it to come up, digest it, and integrate it. Because what's integration, is something that has been split off in the nervous system, is being reintegrated into the central nervous system, my spine and my brain, and increases my perspective. So it's posttraumatic learning. That's why having spaces that have capacity to reflect, digest, and integrate are key to any kind of learning process from the past.
ELISE:
I want to go deep into how the group process works, but before we do that, the very definition of nature, I wanted to pull this up, going to this idea of extreme individuation. And the way that I see it is we have a culture of rugged individualism, then we have this culture of codependency. And we've never really been taught proper interdependence or what healthy relating really looks and feels like. But the definition of nature itself is: the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape and other features and products of the earth as opposed to humans or human creations. In our very definition of nature, we don't include humanity, which is insane. But this is the dictionary definition of nature, that we hold ourselves separate. So I just wanted to flag that. And then I wanted to go a little deeper into, you write: “What we think of as destiny is in fact the unintegrated past and the fragmented unintegrated past appears always as a false future of repetition, a pre-programmed path along which every individual and every culture sets out until the contents of the past have been brought into the light of consciousness reconciled and healed.”
And so it's that you talk about it, the repetition, compulsion, but so that's sort of what's at stake for us, right? Like slavery is not in the past, genocide in North America of native people is not in the past. This stuff just will continue to surface until it's metabolized. Is that the right understanding?
THOMAS:
Amazing. Yes. Very much so. Because I say there's a misconception of history, because many people say history is the past. And I would say, no, integrated history, like history that could be integrated into the whole, is what has this conversation right now. We didn't come up with most of the stuff that we are talking about, people before us talked about this. I didn't develop a liver or joy or anger. Nobody did. So there are no patents because humanity developed it or life developed it over a very long period of time. And that bio computer is sitting here having this conversation. So we are just adding a little bit to humanities achievement. So integrated history is not the past, its presence. It has the capacity to have this conversation and our relation right now and comprehending parts of the world that are unnecessary for that. And split of information, trauma creates split of information, fragmentation in the nervous system, that stays as a spinning, circling information that is repetitive. So everything that's built on repetitive processes, and many people know this, how often do you have maybe video of your intimate partner, the same conversation, the same argument over and over again?
ELISE:
I don’t what you're talking about <laugh>.
THOMAS:
No, I know <laugh>, but I heard about that <laugh> that index still exists. And then tomorrow, if I have the same conversation with my wife that I had already at 10 times, tomorrow is not the future. Tomorrow I drive into the past. And once we get that, we say, wow, society is both emergent processes that are innovative, that are relational, that warm, compassionate, connected, and this related processes that are just repetitive and those don't live now. And I think if we cannot make the distinction, we are shadow fighting. And I think one place where we see that trauma dramatically is climate change. Like the climate change conversation, I believe doesn't take enough into account that the frozen past doesn't want to change. And activism can change trauma. It just creates counter, like counter movement or a friction. We need to have other tools for it. But that's just one example.
ELISE:
Wait, tell me more. Tell me more. Like what's baked into that? Is it just, is it fear, and guilt? And how would you think about that?
THOMAS:
Yeah. That the trauma creates three, three sets of symptoms. One is hyper. There are a lot of stress. We see there's a lot of stress. We need to be very fast. And some of it is true, you need to be fast. And some of it is trauma stress, it's exceeding stress. Like that burns actually the resources that we use and people that experienced almost the burnout know what I'm talking about. It literally burns the substance of our body, the way we live. That's not sustainable. Andmany people noticed it. So then the other part is fragmentation, it is like a crack in the window when you throw a stone at the window and you see a crack. So that's fragmentation. And the symptom that they create is that we feel separate, like you said before, humans are not included in the definition of nature.
That's severe because we are biosphere and we're not just looking at the biosphere. So that's one symptom where it arises. And I think it's crucial for the climate change conversation, by the way. The disembodiment that we experience. And the third one is absence. So we shut down part of our nervous system. But, so that means where I am shut down, I can feel you, where I'm shut down, I don't feel nature, then I need moral rules to tell me how to behave. If parents don't feel their children, we need rules. What should I do with my child? But if I feel my child, I know what to do. It's naturally built in parents for very long time. So the for the climate change conversation, because I think there are three forces in us. One is the evolutionary drive that which drives us to move forward as humanity. And that's very exciting because it's connected to updates, to innovation, and we feel good when we are creative. The other part is habits. We need to create habits. Like walking is a deeply internalized habit. And it's great that we don't have to learn to walk every day again. So that's a great thing, you know, but some habits become old and they create a tension with evolution, and there's a bit of attention. So it's painful to open up habits, but it's doable. And that's what activism does really well. Education, push forward. We need to move, you need to change. And in order to change habits in society, that's really great. But what doesn't work well if the frozenness of trauma, the holding, when you see trauma in the body and in the nervous system, it's holding. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. First of all, it says here in space and time, it's not good for me.
Everybody who experiences traumas is being present is not good for me. So being dispersed in the past, in the future, and not here. Out of my body, retracted in my body is better than feeling that tremendous pain. And, and the other part is this holding doesn't want to change. It's not safe for me in the world. And if activism comes and says, you need to move, you need to move, then that part in us is like ice. And it will be painful to bump against ice. We can't move it that way. So even if it sometimes sounds paradoxical, but for trauma, we need to slow down, include it, create the right containers, especially the people that in the culture know how to do that. That's their job. It doesn't mean that climate scientists don't do their job, but we have a multidisciplinary job at the moment. And if we push trauma, it creates a counter movement or a counter pressure. If we address it skillfully, it'll move along. It will melt. That's why often call it's the electrification of our world, that our world becomes more liquefy, more fluid, more changeable, and these are exactly the qualities that we need in this uncertain times, in this volatile times, in this fast changing times.
ELISE:
And so is that sort of an explanation for why we're becoming increasingly polarized? It's that activism hitting all of that suppressed, darker material that wants to come up and it is just causing just everyone to spin out?
THOMAS:
Yeah. Because why do we do that? Because we don't feel that we are hitting trauma. We think we are talking to people, but we also talking to the trauma in the people. And if I don't feel that, then I'm very enthusiastic about my whatever I want to change in the world as an activist, which is great. But if I'm not mindful, then I create a counter pressure that, as you say, creates polarization because when, when trauma is frozen and evolution moves on, the space between them becomes more and more tense. And we know this in our own life, if you don't change things that we already feel we should change, or we feel called to change, if you're holding onto our job too long, or to a relationship that is toxic or to whatever, because we are afraid to change, then it becomes stronger and stronger. And when the, the tension is too big, then we call it crisis. Because then the system needs to rebalance itself through a painful process. But there's a conscious version of it too, which means we support each other in the change process and we create societies and environments that are actually supportive of change and create safety for change. And we can do that together. If we invest in it. We need to invest something. And you know, the super individualistic culture that we have is not supportive of that. If everybody lives in his or her silo, then we don't create the right compassionate space between us. And I think anotherplace where that shows up that also contributes a lot to the polarization is the way how our social medias hit the collective trauma in the culture, and also often sensational media. And it's actually toxic because it triggers a lot of trauma in the culture. And then the trauma responses like absence, indifference, and stress, agitation, and fear are just growing. And that's not a good equilibrium to be in too long. And that's why I often say many of the social media platforms actually need to be collective trauma inform, because that's what I think many of them really struggle with. And, without knowing that that's what it is.
ELISE:
So clearly, you know, I've done personal trauma work, et cetera. I wanna talk to you about this group work as well, I know we can't process each other's personal trauma, but if enough people are informed about collective trauma and are doing the work to sort of calm our collective nervous system, I guess, or get us more embodied and less disassociated, is therea tipping point that you can imagine where not everyone needs to do this but if enough of us are doing it, we can raise the vibration or get people to a place where they can un-clench really? Or feel safe enough to?
THOMAS:
You said it yourself. I mean, that's what I would say too. It's a great summary, that every trauma that gets integrated into the central nervous system stream expands the perspective. If thousand people do that, it expands our perspective too. If millions of people do that, we just grow all the time. I call this bottom up innovation. It's the learning that we've never had, you know, we've never had that learning because it was frozen in the ice. So when we de-ice the ice, learning starts to show up through integration. So that's innovative too. And I believe actually that the ethical learning that we have to have when we deal with the bigger wounds of the past are actually the ethical development that we need in order to deal with AI or with nanotechnology or with genetic engineering.
Because if the ethical development legs behind the technological development, that's dangerous because it opens the door for another re-traumatizing cycle of abuse or misuse. And so healing is not only like a personal wellbeing factor, it's actually taking responsibility as citizens. I actually think that collective trauma work should be that society takes care of its legacy, it should be written in the constitution. Like for, for the states, the immigration, the civil war, slavery and racism, the Native American genocide and all the other wars that happened on the way, like this are major impacts that need a skill, a collective skill to integrate that. And if we don't do that, generations will have individual trauma because that's what it causes later on. We'll have all kinds of abuse, all kinds of domestic violence, all kinds of health issues, physical and mental health issues.
So either we hand it over to the next generation or we say, okay, we can do at least our part and it's a citizen's responsibility. And then I believe, yes, there is a tipping point because the more we liquify trauma, that information that's being set free becomes creativity. And so not only do we release some of the past and harvest its learning and become wiser, we also liberate a lot of creativity to build a different world. Then the old structures that we have, that we see are not functional anymore because it makes us more fluid. And I see that we are in the face, as you started the conversation, like a lot of stuff is coming up because we see two things. We see that data is accelerating through technology and the data is accelerating in consciousness in our nervous systems.
There's more faster data flowing up because it's stressed, because we are upgrading the collective coherence. And the more the coherence rises, also the individuals grow within that collective. And that's a positive upwards spiral. And I think only like that because often trauma is painful and the symptom of trauma is not to deal with it, you know, I want to get away from it. But actually what we need is relational support to deal with it. And we all have that remedy that we can support each other in the places where it's difficult and professionals can support us when it's complex and difficult and like that we create an ecosystem that is healing. And I think we need many more of this big healing ecosystems in order to go through this transition that we are in right now as humanity.
ELISE:
Trauma is painful, but the catharsis of it is amazing. You know, and I think so often am thinking about, and I want you to walk us through how you create that collective coherence and build structures in groups for this stuff to come up, which, and the way that people can start to resonate with memories that are not their own, but that they can represent and bring up. But also I think the importance of group trauma therapy is that I think a lot of people are so disassociated—This was my experience and I'm not that particularly traumatized as an individual, but I didn't realize I'd been disassociated from my body for maybe most of my entire adult life, maybe since the age of eight.
So when I was finally sort of re-in my body, that alone was, wow. But I needed to have that experience. And then this was with MDMA in order for me to even understand somatic experiencing. And then once I understood that, I was like, oh, I can now talk to my body. Like I made enough connections where I understood how to do this for myself. But I think a lot of people, when you're explaining it to them, they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. And, but I think even watching or participating in a group experience would connect people to their ability to put themselves through the car wash and do it for themselves. And that, that's another big part that we're missing. So can you take us through how you do this as groups?
THOMAS:
Yeah. That's beautiful. How you summarize it is so lovely. And also in the trauma healing work, we only find out what we were missing when we find it.
ELISE:
It's true.
THOMAS:
Yeah. Because you don't know what you don't feel. That's the nature of the unconscious. We don't know that it's missing. We see only strange symptoms in our life. And then we ask, why is it like that? And why does this happen all the time again? And why am I not able to respond to that and why do I get reactive here and triggered? But we don't know what we are missing until it heals and then say, wow, life is so much richer when I'm in my body than when I'm out of my body. It becomes almost like 2D and in my body's 3D or 4D. It's so much richer. And once we get it, then we actually, like yourself, then we become the advocates because we speak from experience. And what does experience do? It, it synchronizes the word and the energy. When you speak about your healing, you transmit it. And that's one way also for the group facilitation, because I think group facilitation needs a deep grounding in the capacity to host a group.
When I work with a group, I need to be able to be really dialed in to the group space and be able to feel the movements in it. It's not just me standing there having intellectual knowledge, it's me being able to intellectually be informed, but that that's combined with my heart, with my body and it's synchronized. So when I speak that, what I say and what's in me, is the same that models like a coherent nervous system. And what does that do? It creates trust and it creates like a safe space. So we can only facilitate the group process when we are resting in a safe space in us. because that transmits safety into the room. And that's rule number one, I would say is because the nervous system is very intelligent. It says, I will hold on, because as I said before, in the trauma moment or the traumatic moment, what trauma says is here in space and time, it's not good for me because it's overwhelming, painful, abusive, violent, whatever, or neglecting or whatever it is. It's here, it's not good for me. Or here it was not good for my ancestors or here it wasn't good for a city that has been bombed, here, it's not good for me. Which means trauma disperses energy, it's like in space and time fragmented. That's why we hang out often in the future, in the past. And we can't be fully here in our bodies.
So when people try to be present, I often say it's great that you have a contemplative practice, that you want to be more present, but to respect the part of you that needed not to be present also, because that's not stupid or a mistake, that's intelligence. To protect ourselves was intelligent. Many people pathologized themselves, oh, I can do it or I can feel my body well or I can do that. But not feeling myself in an overwhelming moment was the best I could do for myself, even if I didn't do it consciously, because it happens in fractions of seconds. But like re-owning our defense mechanisms as prior intelligence is a de-pathologizing way of looking at oneself, of looking at each other at a group. And that allows to create even more safety because our respect, even nervous system, doesn't want to release information. It has a good reason for it. And so when I run groups, I always listen to, okay, what's actually ready, what is safe enough that will come up? And if we create through relating, relating is also co-regulation. One nervous system—I feel you feeling me, I feel you feeling me—creates a synchronicity between two nervous systems that create safety.
So we facilitate lots of small group work where people connect in that way, share something maybe about their life, the motivation, why they come here, but in a felt sense. So that creates micro units, within a large group, of safety. So we build a lot of safety and from a certain level of trust, information wants to detox itself. So we don't even need to induce it because if you do it right, it comes up by itself, because there is the environment for it. That's why I often say healing is often building the right environment for healing to happen. Even a therapist with a client, this therapist is the environment for the nervous system of the client. The group is an environment. So how we build those ecosystems with the right small interventions and by being in an organic relationship that is able to, like a surfer, to be with the unfolding of the group.
So because if I come with my mental framework, oh, this should happen here and now we do this and now we do that, and now we do that. But if the river goes somewhere else, I'm stuck as a facilitator. But if I'm intune with it, I will go with the river because I trust humanities and humans intelligence, always intelligence. Often we don't understand it because it's hurt and because it's covered and it's absenced. But I think the, the capacity to be really attuned, to be really dialed in, is a whole body function. It's not just an intellectual process. And if it can provide that, that's a holding space, that's a hosting space for a group. And then the group doesn't just happen outside of myself, it also happens inside myself. It's not just, I'm looking at the group, I'm also interdependent with the group.
And so we are sitting as one space. And so I think then individual and collective detoxing, because life has a self healing mechanism, it wants to detox trauma, but it doesn't do I if it's not safe or it's potentially retraumatizing, then the contraction and the holding is stronger than the detoxing. But when it's allowed and we do it in a skillful way, then information comes up. Often memories, even memories from our ancestors or that are in the collective sphere can come up; emotions, sensations, perceptions, and we can feel when we do it right, we integrate it as we go along. And then you can feel an expansion, and a group can only do so much, but a group is thousands of times stronger than an individual. And that's why group healing I think is the next level. And the more we learn and master that quality, the groups can also grow because we develop bigger capacities of holding spaces and that accelerates healing and the electrification.
And I have seen groups with hundreds of people or thousand people, and you could hear a needle drop when one person spoke and everybody else was dialed in. And it's so beautiful because we also work with many therapists and we also train many therapists. And many of them say, when we work in this large groups, the amount of healing that happens in 20 minutes or in one session is so much more than you can do when you meet per people one on one in your practice. Because the whole group isn't a tremendous amplifier in a good sense. So it reduces the time that we need. And that's why as we go along as humanity, every, you know, every progress we make, we'll adapt a bit the way we do it so that now we know how it works. Now we know maybe how it works for now, but it means in one year it might be different. We don't know because the collective is growing. So we need to see again how it works in one or two years.
ELISE:
Yeah. And you talked about the intellectual part of this, but so much of this is the feeling body, right? Like so much of it doesn't need to be thought out or processed mentally. This is an emotional experience, a feeling experience?
THOMAS:
Yeah, it's of course, an emotional experience. Even I think in our time one because I love to display or show collective trauma symptoms because that's the thing that we often say, that's how life is. And I would say no, most of it is how life is when it's hurt. For example, yeah, you can write a PhD on attachment trauma, but it doesn't mean that your PhD isn’t going to heal you. You can still be very traumatized and have written a PhD. Maybe it will help you because you have so much access to resources, but you need to do your inner work. And that's a, a somatic process. But we say, yeah, it's true. Many people read many books about many things, self-development, meditation, but we can't walk our talk. And then we say, yeah, that's how it is.
I know many people like that. I said, yeah, but that's not how it is. That's how it is when in the nervous system there's a fragmentation between the mind and there's suppression of experience in the body, an emotional overwhelm, a physical overwhelm, a lot of stress in the body. That fragmentation, we can consume intellectual information that doesn't go in. That's why I like the word information, it goes in and down formation. So when I look at you, your information, your social agency informs me. And I have you and me and you have a Thomas in you, in your central nervous system. And you know, they clear those internal, what I call the intra existence of each other in each other. That creates intimacy. And so when we do the healing work, my body is a tremendously intelligent biocomputer, yours to everybody's body because it's millions of years old. And sensing is on the one hand feeling emotions, but it's much more than that is sensing life.
And I think often in a hyper intellectual world. And I love science and I love intellectual conversations. That's all great. And it's important because we can build great stuff with it, but in order to do trauma healing, it's not enough. We need to be embodied in order to hold and embodied space. And I would even say we train a lot how to use our own nervous system and we can modulate our own nervous system that when a trauma happened to one of my clients at age two, the trauma is the word at age two. And I need my nervous system not only to talk to a 40 year old person, but to meet the place where the real hurt is stored. So I need my body and all my development to match other people's development in a way that creates closeness, intimacy, safety, compassion, love, warmth. And that's a place where we can heal together. And so I think that's a very important question, because often we know how it should work, but we can't live it.
ELISE:
Yeah. It's interesting because you think about too, we have Freud, we have Jung, and then we had Reich, right? We had Willam Reich, and then he was abandoned. I mean, he went maybe a little nuts, but his work was so powerful, you know. It's amazing, for people who don't know him, it was a somatic experiencing. But if he had emerged and he was a peer of Freud or one of his mentors, I don't remember, but he was part of that world. But this was what he did, right? The Venn diagram of the world in our bodies and early trauma, I don't know that they would've explained it that way, but we would be farther along.
THOMAS:
That's right. He didn't explain it in the same language, but he explained very important principles. And it's funny that you mentioned it because Reich was a very important course change in my own, because at that time I was still studying medicine in Vienna and then I read the first book of Reich and I said, Oh my God, that's so true. Like there's a truth in it. And even if he took it maybe too far or in his own life, but the principles he described I think were very, very powerful and also met a lot of the mystical traditions, the knowledge and mystical traditions and indigenous traditions, which I think through colonization have been often suppressed. And kind of radical a percent. And I think we need to decolonize the world again in order to harvest what we already know for thousands of years. It's not that we are the first ones coming up with that stuff but it's very important to honor that ancient wisdom that is around for such a long time. And I think that's why I love, you know, we could name it many things, but trauma and collective trauma is a way that speaks the language of our time. And actually neuroscience describes some of the processes that you find represented in some wisdom traditions as well in just another language. And I think that's really promising.
ELISE:
What would you call it? I'm with you. It's sort of code for, and it's a shorthand that people now understand, but what do you think that the more accurate description of accessing the shadow and the dark matter and mixing it with light?
THOMAS:
Yeah, I think in some of the spiritual tradition, the word karma is also used. And I think trauma and karma are very similar and interesting. What is karma or trauma—is postponed experience. So what I can process with my computer power in the present moment, I need to delay. I park it, maybe I shut down the part of my nervous system. And there it's waiting, but it's not gone. It's just, I don't feel it anymore. I often say trauma is like you have a TV screen and there is a war scene going on. It's noisy loud. And then you take the remote control and click. And you still see the scene, but without sound. And then you take the entire TV and throw it into the ocean, and then it slowly sinks down into the ocean, but the scene is still playing and then it disappears in the dark. But down there, there are millions of screens. The holocaust is millions of screens. There are random genocides, millions of screens still playing, but in the dark of the ocean. That's a collective unconscious. And, so when we say postpone the experience, but that's not gone, that's what we said before, the repetitive past that keeps repeating. And so in a way we could say that that presence is the power that has the power to onboard the past, and it has the power to receive the future. Because when do we have a good idea only now, even if that now is in three weeks, it's now, it's in a present moment.
I receive an insight, but I believe when we look a bit deeper, most of the human made trauma is actually terrible transgressions. So yes, we talk about trauma work, but underneath resolving PTSD and the after effects of trauma and traumatic stress and pain is actually a deeply ethical question. So, I believe we can't heal trauma without restoring our ethical fabric. And actually the restoration of ethics is the restart of the self healing mechanism of the tissue of life, like the tissue of the world. And because we see ourselves separate from the biosphere, but the biosphere is one big data network. And even saying I'm relating to you is great for this time, but is actually already a bit participating in the symptom because like we are all plugged into the super computer that is a data network of a conscious data network.
And so data is always here, but we are separate in space and time. And so the ethical correction of our ancestors and our ancestors' lives and our culture's lives, I think is a deeper part of how we upgrade the way we live together. Because without that learning, we just repeat the same things and if we learned it, then we actually open up our bodies, our emotions, and then emotions are not separate properties, but mutual lands, then our body, my body, is the land. And I think the more I live in and on the land that my body is, the more I can negotiate out the land, not fight over it. The more we are disembodied, the more conflicts we create about land somewhere, external land.
ELISE:
You had mentioned the work that needs to be done, as we think about things like AI, et cetera, these ethical values and the articulation of them or the weaving of them into this tapestry. And it's true, our technology is way ahead of our evolution, we haven't been able to keep up. I mean, it's understandable in some ways, but it is beyond us. Our technology is too powerful for us to manage. And we see this clearly, right? And it's getting weirder and stranger by the day, but that we have to figure out how to rise to meet this challenge. Otherwise, I don't know what happens. We shut it all down? I don't know. It's funny too, people are always talking about saving the planet, but I'm not actually worried about the planet, I'm worried about us. Again, these two things are not mutually exclusive. The planet will endure. It's unsure, it's unclear whether we will and yet it's that form of othering, of focusing on, well, she's in trouble. And yes, of course, but we're the ones who are in complete peril and four leggeds and birds. Right?
THOMAS:
And as you said, so I think what we said before is that the ethical learning that's still frozen in the collective permafrost, if that's missing, we will not only recreate wars like now in Europe or in other places on the planet, but we also won't have the inner maturity to handle the technology, but also to develop technology. It both needs maturity and it both needs wise choices. And so we need that ethical learning in order to be wise enough. And then technology and human consciousness are not separate. You know, the develop is one sphere, but there is an experience separation. And that experience separation is also reducing our way to deal with it paradoxically. And then we have fears of abusing or misusing it and not knowing how to handle it.
And then often those fears become true. And then as you see, it was true. It was good that we were not afraid. And I would say no, we were afraid. But the issue is somewhere else, buried because learning is also integrating the past is not just dealing with the past the whole time. That's the unskillful way of doing it. But integrating the data of the past into the stream of data in our central nervous systems is actually updating now because we didn't have those updates yet. And that's why certain functions are not fully ripe and mature or the next level would be wise, because wisdom is how much of the world I can include in the way I live. So the more of the world I can include and not other, the wiser I will make my decisions.
I will walk in the world, I will talk to you, I will include parts of society that maybe are marginalized, excluded, live in deep inequality resources wise or in their right place and dignity. And so the more I feel that I will naturally care, you know? And the less I feel it, the more I feel this, I say I live my life and I can't deal with that now. And I'm not saying we should deal with everything, but we have to deal with the things that life puts in our hands to deal with. And if you all work together, then it's not just a massive amount of work, then it's the right amount of work for everybody. And maybe the last thing that fits to this is also that in our capitalistic worldview, sometimes we see purpose is career, but in the mystical understanding of purpose, the part, like you said before, you did your own trauma work, that's also purpose development. Because part of our purpose is integrating the portion of the past that is in our life. And part of the purpose is our contribution to society or life. But it's not that only the career part is part of our purpose. All of it is our purpose. And that's why our healing work is not just taking care of the difficulties until we get to our purpose, but taking care of the challenging parts in us is as much our path as is all the great stuff that we bring into the world. And I think that's very important because we're not waiting to get there. We are already going, you know, we are already walking.
ELISE:
Totally, and even as you just did, exchanging the word purpose for contribution as this ongoing effort. Effort sounds too effortful, but that we are living it, it's not a finite, fixed idea about what we're here to do. It is this ongoing contribution. I love that.
THOMAS:
Exactly.
ELISE:
Well, thank you. This was amazing. Thank you for your work, let's do it again.
THOMAS:
I would love that.
ELISE:
Wow. Hopefully you could feel it in your body, but Thomas has an incredible energy and knows how to build resonance and coherence in every interaction that he has, which is how he is able to hold the space for so many people to process collectively. And, if you’ve never done group work, I’m dying to do a Thomas workshop, I am figuring out how to do that. But group work, meditations, etc., can be so powerful, even when you think you want that individual attention, but to be able to feel everyone else’s energy, I think is really, really moving. And, I think if we each do our own part and then maybe a little bit of extra, for those who aren’t yet equipped, we can really start to turn this, to metabolize this material. As he writes: “Like truth, shadow always outs. Suppressed energy doesn’t go away and even dark or disowned energy cannot be destroyed. It needs to move, to become, to transmute. It must find an expression. In this way, unconscious material rises again and again to the surface seeking to be met, detoxed, and clarified. Until trauma has been acknowledged, felt, and released, it will be experienced from without in the form of repetition, compulsion, and rejection from within as tension and contraction. Rejection of life, flow, illness, or disease.” So we all have to get moving to thaw, to become liquid, and I think that’s where our greatest inventions and the font of our creativity will emerge. Thanks, as always, for listening.
