As the trauma revolution builds, I find myself not just wanting to help individuals heal, but to help more people and even societies to heal.
Because what we’re witnessing today, across Britain, Europe, and much of the world, isn’t just political polarisation. It’s collective trauma in motion.
The rise of certain figures and the growing normalisation of far-right rhetoric doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in a system where the nervous system of the nation is dysregulated. Where fear is being stoked rather than soothed. Where identity becomes a battleground and ‘the other’ becomes the enemy.
And this isn’t new. It’s an old trauma pattern playing out on a global stage.
When people feel unseen, they grasp for visibility, through nationalism, blame, or rage. When people feel disconnected, they cling to dangerous forms of unity based on exclusion rather than inclusion.
This is how the adapted self takes the mic.
We are watching, in real time, the externalisation of unprocessed grief, shame, and fear. Instead of healing the wound, we are electing it. Idolising it. Weaponising it.
But here’s what trauma teaches us:
what we disown becomes dangerous.
When we don’t face our pain, it controls us. When we don’t integrate our shadow, we project it. And when we don’t heal our fight energy, we outsource it to others and even to supposed strongmen who promise to fight for us, but often do so by hurting others.
This is not about left vs right.
It’s about fear vs truth.
Fragmentation vs integration.
The real revolution isn’t political, it’s psychological. It’s somatic. It’s spiritual.
It’s in choosing to face our inner dictators rather than electing outer ones.
It’s in learning to feel our fight energy and transmute it, not silence it or act it out.
It’s in moving away from a culture that worships money, power, and celebrity, and towards one that values authenticity, connection, and repair.
We are in a vacuum because the old systems are breaking down, but the new ones haven’t fully emerged yet. This is the in-between. The messy middle. And in trauma work, we know this space well. It’s the void that comes before transformation.
And so I say this not as a political pundit, but as a trauma therapist, a human being, and someone who has walked the path of personal healing:
The way forward is not through more fear.
It’s through more feeling.
More curiosity. More compassion. More courage.
If we want to heal the world, we must first recognise that what we’re seeing isn’t madness, it’s adaptation.
And adaptation can be understood. Held. And eventually, transformed.
But only if we’re willing to look beneath the noise, and into the wound and help our Leaders become able to do the same within themselves.
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