An Integral Theory View of Individual and Collective Trauma

Ken Wilber
(from: Thomas Hübl: Healing Collective Trauma)

Human beings, of course, are part of an overall evolutionary unfolding. Going back billions of years to the big bang, there’s a series of common patterns that evolutionary unfolding takes. It starts all the way back with subatomic particles, quarks, electrons, and protons, and it goes all the way up through human beings and how human beings grow, develop, unfold, and evolve. The stages of evolution tend to be, what Arthur Koestler called, holons. And a holon is simply a whole that’s part of a larger whole.

Pretty much everything in the universe is a holon of one sort or another. We have whole subatomic particles, electrons, protons, neutrons. They come together as parts of a whole atom. Whole atoms come together as parts of whole molecules. Whole molecules come together as parts of whole organisms and so on. That goes all the way up through human beings, and human beings continue to evolve in terms of the biological and objective components. But they also begin an interior growth and development and evolutionary unfolding.

These consist of various stages of development — stages of unfolding that have been studied pretty carefully by a large number of very bright, very gifted developmental psychologists. These stages of development that human beings go through, starting at birth, are also holons. In other words, the whole of one stage becomes part of the whole of the next stage. That stays for a while, and then as development continues, the whole of that stage becomes part of the whole of the next stage and so on. It is a process of transcending and including and then transcending and including. This is the same evolutionary process continuing forward.

In complex biological and psychological organisms like human beings, because these stages are organic, because they’re unfolding, and because they have moving parts, so to speak, they can break down. Things can go wrong with these stages of development. Whenever that happens, there’s usually some sort of trauma involved. As you get to each higher stage, it transcends, in some sense, the previous stage — it goes beyond it. It’s more expansive. It’s more inclusive. It includes some sort of new capacities. Some sort of new emergent realities come into being, and that’s the transcend part. Molecules transcend atoms because molecules include atoms, but they also move beyond them. They have other characteristics that atoms don’t and likewise, molecules are transcended and included in cells. So, cells include molecules. They literally enfold them, but then they also go beyond them. They do things that molecules by themselves can’t.

Given the fact that there’s this transcend-and-include, this going-beyond-but-enfolding or integrating, something can go wrong with either one of those aspects. The transcendence part can break down, and when that happens, you don’t actually move beyond the previous stage like you’re supposed to. You don’t transcend it. You remain stuck in the previous stage through a type of attachment or a type of fixation to that stage. You’re still holding on to that previous stage when you should have been able to let go of it. And if that happens, there’s a secret attachment, a kind of addiction that occurs, in a sense. You are still seeking what that previous lower stage gave you and you’re not ready to give that up.

On the other hand, sometimes you can transcend okay, but then not include. In this case, you’re not remaining stuck at some aspect of the previous stage, but failing to include it. Rather than transcending and including, you’re transcending and repressing or sealing out or dissociating. And instead of causing an addiction, it creates an allergy. You actively recoil from some aspect of the previous stage. You don’t like it. You push it out of yourself. You try to deny it. Both scenarios are really problematic, and they directly address some of the problems that are associated with trauma.

When we look at evolutionary unfolding, we find that there are at least four fundamental perspectives that we can use to view these processes, and all of them are equally important. We call them the four quadrants, and they are as follows: subjective, objective, intersubjective, and interobjective. You can take almost any human discipline, whether it’s history or medicine or psychotherapy or spirituality, and apply just one of those perspectives and say that it’s the one and only correct way to look at something. For example, in the scientific worldview, the most common perspective is the exterior view of an individual holon. What’s real is fundamental particles like electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and strings, and those are looked at in an objective third-person way.

So, if we looked at trauma just in terms of an exterior, third-person view (objective quadrant), then we would reduce everything to some sort of brain damage or biological material component damage. You can also look at just that exterior third-person view on a collective basis (interobjective quadrant), which includes all the institutional aspects of the cultures we’re in, as well as the technological infrastructures. Things like monetary systems, transportation systems, birth rates, death rates—objective facts that we use to look at exterior realities. Of course, those exterior third-person plural systems (interobjective quadrant) are very important, because they’re carriers and hidden holders of various types of collective trauma.

Then there’s the collective dimension (intersubjective quadrant) that is looked at from within. It includes a cultural component—our social systems—and of course many, many traumas from our past history are embedded in our cultural systems. When we look at the interior individual subjective component (subjective quadrant)—how people actually feel their trauma—it’s a psychotherapeutic approach. Almost every major discipline that has something to say about trauma will say it from one of these perspectives.

So, say you were sexually abused as a child. This, of course, can deeply traumatize your individual subjective psyche (subjective quadrant). It’s also going to traumatize your exterior neurophysiological nervous system (objective quadrant), including its actual growth process, which is going to be disturbed. But then there’s also the family culture that you were brought up in, which was disturbed enough to become a nexus for this kind of behavior (intersubjective quadrant). You will end up internalizing that, which will give you the tendency to repeat the trauma that happened to you because it was a pattern that you learned in the intersubjective quadrant. Then, of course, there are the exterior components of your culture (interobjective quadrant). What was your family structure? What was its income? Were your parents addicted to drugs or alcohol? You can see that all four perspectives have something extremely important to offer.

But there’s another kind of trauma as well, which also has to do with development. Here, the cause of the trauma is not something that has already emerged in a person but results because of higher stages that have not yet appeared. Because of this, a person may unintentionally harm or oppress others, without even being aware of it. It’s not that something went wrong for the oppressor necessarily, or that they had some early childhood shadow material that they were working out (although that can often be a cause). It’s that their incapacity to take a bigger view inflicts trauma on those they interact with, particularly if they’re in positions of power. Both slavery and the Holocaust are examples of this, and clearly, both are severely traumatizing events to the people that they were inflicted upon. So, a great deal of the trauma that has been perpetrated upon humankind by other humans happened because the oppressors had not yet developed or evolved to higher stages that were more inclusive and thus had a larger morality, a more inclusive morality.

This is one of the problems that we have to deal with when we’re looking at the ongoing generational trauma in today’s world. One of the slightly frightening pieces of data is that worldwide around 60 to 70 percent of the population is at an ethnocentric or lower stage of development. That means all of those individuals will be willing to do damage to other groups simply because they can’t include them in their broader moral embrace.

Plotinus said that sin is not a “no,” it’s a “not yet.” And there’s a certain truth to that statement on the developmental side. The sin here is not that there was a no, that something bad happened and they repressed it, but that they have not yet developed to a stage that wouldn’t want to “do” the Holocaust or slavery in the first place. Everybody is born at square one and has to go through all the stages of development.

And you can get stuck, fixated, or dissociated at any one of them. Things can go wrong that slow your growth and development, making it harder for you to reach higher stages of development that will allow your own moral sense to expand, to truly include all human beings and to not judge them on the basis of skin color or sex or gender or ethnicity or religious belief and so on.

And, yes, one of the main problems that slows that development is trauma, whether it’s individually experienced or a more collective kind of trauma. When you’ve been traumatized, the energy that is meant to continue moving up as it transcends and includes and transcends and includes, just freezes. It no longer functions as it should because there is damage. And for the traumatized part, growth usually stops there. You may still kind of bump along in other areas, but whatever part of you has been broken, damaged, or hurt, is dysfunctional—and it’s not going to grow. It’s not going to move forward.

This creates shadow content, and almost no individual gets out of childhood without some sort of shadow material. And these shadow elements maintain essentially the same chronological age that they had when they were created, which is one of the reasons they are dysfunctional. You can have shadow elements from age three, and those elements are themselves three years old. They have the wants of a three-year-old, the impulsiveness of a three-year-old. They have a three-year-old’s lack of capacity to reason. And you can have other shadows that are seven-year-old material. Others that are twelve years old. As you continue to go through adult development, you can generate shadow at any of those stages as well, and that material will remain at the age you were whenever that shadow was created.

That is one of the reasons that working with trauma is so important: to help humanity actually move forward into future issues so that we can help with the real problems that we’re facing now. The tendency is almost always to say, “Okay, well, what do we have to do technologically or what do we have to do economically or what political systems do we need or what kind of food production?” Instead of looking at all these exterior material things, we need to look at the interiors of individuals who are actually responsible for doing those things. That’s where working with trauma, to release trauma, can help consciousness to continue moving forward.