We Need to Talk About Collective Trauma and Moral Injury
A White Therapist’s Perspective on What We’re Actually Living Through
Since COVID first upended daily life, I’ve been thinking a lot about collective trauma, how it touches every session and every part of my own day.
Are you and your clients struggling to stay grounded while the world feels like it’s coming apart?
Right now, we’re not just supporting people through personal challenges. We’re helping them survive in a reality shaped by constant crisis, conflict, and collapse. And we’re not on the outside looking in. We’re in it too, trying to find steady ground alongside them.
What is Collective Trauma?
Collective trauma occurs when a group or community is subjected to a shared experience of overwhelming threat, violence, or systemic betrayal. Unlike individual trauma, it reverberates through cultural norms, institutions, and shared narratives.
As sociologist Kai Erikson first noted, collective trauma “damages the social fabric of community life.” It disrupts not only personal well-being, but the trust and cohesion between people—and between communities and the systems they depend on (e.g., government, healthcare, education).
It embeds itself in collective memory, public rituals, and even institutional policies. Over time, it can erode social trust and fracture a group’s sense of safety, identity, and belonging.
I often think of Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory, which explains how prolonged threat drives communities into hypervigilance or shutdown, harming our ability to connect, regulate, and act together.
💔 What Is Moral Injury?
Moral injury occurs when we're forced to act against our values or witness harm that we feel powerless to stop. It's not just what happens to us; it’s what we’re asked to live with.
Initially studied in military contexts, it is now applied across healthcare, education, immigration, and daily life. It's the deep rupture that occurs when we're expected to function within systems that contradict our sense of right and wrong.
📦 Historic Example
The Holocaust left deep scars not only on survivors but also on generations that followed. Descendants of survivors often inherited unspoken grief, chronic fear, or a fragmented sense of identity—what some call postmemory. In contrast, children of perpetrators, including former Nazis, have described inherited shame, silence, or moral confusion—growing up in families where the truth was denied, distorted, or too painful to name.
Collective trauma affects both the directly harmed and those whose moral development is shaped by complicity, silence, or unresolved histories. These patterns don’t just live in the past—they’re repeating in different forms today.
Collective trauma marks both the harmed and those complicit, silent, or misled. These patterns aren’t just history—they’re happening now in real time.
🔥 What We’re Living Through
We’re not facing a single crisis—we’re enduring overlapping systems of harm:
COVID-19 exposed systemic neglect and isolated grief
The genocide in Gaza unfolds in real time, implicating us morally and politically
Trans communities face legal erasure and targeting
Immigrant families are being kidnapped, separated, and criminalized
Black Americans continue to face police violence and systemic racism
Women’s rights are under attack, reviving reproductive trauma
Book bans erase Black, queer, and trans histories
Social safety nets are being dismantled
Climate collapse intensifies grief, especially in marginalized communities who are hit first and worst, yet are least responsible. It’s not just the loss of land or weather; it’s the erasure of culture, future, health, and safety.
Gun violence continues with no meaningful reform
DEI efforts are being rolled back, silencing progress and equity
Each of these creates both direct trauma for affected communities and moral injury for witnesses who feel powerless to intervene effectively.
🧠Theories about Collective Trauma
🔵 Polyvagal Theory:
Polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges, explains how our autonomic nervous system shifts between states of safety, mobilization, and shutdown in response to perceived threat. While initially focused on individual regulation, therapists and trauma theorists have extended this lens to groups and communities.
In collective trauma, entire communities may enter chronic states of survival hypervigilance (fight/flight) or collapse (freeze/shutdown). Over time, these states shape culture: anxiety, distrust, and emotional numbing become widespread.
Community rituals, such as storytelling, vigils, music, or protest, can serve as co-regulation, offering a sense of safety and connection that helps begin to restore nervous system balance.
🔵 Attachment Theory:
This theory explores how we form bonds and feel secure with others, particularly those we trust.
How it relates to collective trauma:
When institutions (like governments, religious groups, schools) betray people, especially marginalized groups, it’s like a parent betraying a child. That breaks the trust society depends on. Communities lose faith in the systems that are supposed to protect them.Widespread insecurity follows: people no longer feel safe in schools, courts, or hospitals, because they’ve learned that those places may harm rather than help.
🔵 Narrative Psychology:
This is about how we make meaning through stories.
How it relates to collective trauma:
Traumatized communities often lose or suppress their stories because of shame, silencing, or cultural erasure. Without these shared narratives, we lose a sense of identity and purpose. The result? Disconnection, confusion, and the feeling of being lost as a people.Why it matters: Healing often begins when stories are reclaimed, like through oral history, community art, truth-telling, or media representation.
🔵 Betrayal Trauma Theory:
This describes the unique pain that comes when harm is caused by someone or something we rely on for safety.
How it relates to collective trauma:
When trusted systems like police, churches, or governments hurt people, the trauma is more profound. The betrayal shatters our internal compass; we no longer know who or what is safe. That affects identity, trust, and the ability to heal.
🔵 Witness Trauma & Complicity:
Even if you aren’t directly harmed, witnessing trauma—and doing nothing—can damage you too.
How it relates to collective trauma:
When people with privilege (racial, economic, social) witness harm against others and remain silent or inactive, it creates moral injury. This is especially painful because it violates your values. Over time, it can lead to feelings of shame, numbness, or denial, ultimately harming both the individual and the community.Healing requires acknowledgement, reparative action, and solidarity.
🚨 How It Shows Up
In Clients
Numbness mistaken for burnout
Shame for not doing more
Anxiety without clear cause
Grief that feels unnameable
Cynicism masking despair
Isolation despite being around others
What Clients Say
“The world’s falling apart.”
“I feel guilty and helpless.”
“I keep doom-scrolling but can’t look away.”
“Nothing I do feels like enough anymore.”
In Us as Therapists
We’re living through the same collapse of safety, connection, and meaning, carrying our moral injuries while trying to help others.
🔧 Creating Conditions for Healing and Hope
Here are a few practices I’m leaning on:
Naming It Clearly
Call trauma and moral injury what they are.
Validate that distress about injustice is healthy.
Making Space
Allow grief, rage, and numbness—without rushing resolution.
Normalize collective emotional responses.
Reconnecting to Values
Explore clients values in session
Explore small, daily ways to honor those values.
Celebrate acts of resistance, no matter how small.
Offering Steady Presence
Be the calm in their nervous system storm.
Model that we can feel everything and still function.
Sharing Resources
Connect clients to mutual aid networks, activist organizations, and creative spaces.
Encourage community over isolation.
Supporting Creativity as Resistance
Art, music, writing, rituals—ways to process and transform pain.
🌌 The Bottom Line
This isn’t just about mental health; it’s about living through moral injury, institutional collapse, and collective grief. Healing won’t be a solo project—it’s built through connection, accountability, and sustained care.
What are you doing to support yourself and your clients right now?
I’d love to hear what’s working, even just a little.
I’m a therapist with 30 years of experience, originally from New York and now based in Charlotte, NC. I specialize in working with neurodivergent women, and one of my greatest joys is writing newsletters—I currently write four of them!
I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on collective trauma.
Warmly,
Kristen McClure MSW, LCSW
This is powerful. That distinction between trauma and moral injury really hits. So many people I know aren’t just hurting, they’re stuck in roles they never chose.
Lately I’ve found that naming the pattern, not just the feeling, helps. When people see that their grief or numbness has context, something starts to shift.
Healing doesn’t always mean returning to normal. Sometimes it means naming the world that broke us, and beginning to imagine one that wouldn’t.