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Tending to Collective Trauma
Article collated by Jo delAmor from the notes of Stephanie Pizarro and Laura Calderon de la Barca, along with contributions that participants shared through the chat
On March 28, 2026 the WTR Network was blessed to host the webinar: Tending to Collective Trauma with Laura Calederón de la Barca and Stephanie Pizzaro.
The session was facilitated with grace and spaciousness, emphasizing safety, and allowing room for emergence. They began by acknowledging the conscious use of the word “tending” to indicate that we are not setting out to fix what is broken, but to stay present to what hurts — together. They invited participants into a practice of cultivating awareness, relational care, and the capacity to respond with integrity in the face of shared wounds.
Activating Our Resources
As we entered into this shared practice they guided us to become aware of the current state of our bodies, emotions and minds to get a base-line sense of ourselves on the following spectrums before consciously gathering our resources.
Body: relaxed ↔ tense (1–10)
Emotions: calm/connected ↔ overwhelmed (1–10)
Mind: quiet ↔ busy (1–10)
When they spoke about “resources,” they were referring to anything that helps us feel a little more steady, a little more held, a little more able to stay with what is.
Resources help soften what is hard. They don’t take away the challenge—but they make it more bearable, more navigable.
In the context of collective trauma, this becomes especially important. Because when something feels overwhelming, our nervous systems can move into protection — disconnection, shutdown, reactivity. And from there, it becomes much harder to stay present, to relate, to respond with care.
Resourcing ourselves is what allows us to remain in the room. To stay connected—to ourselves, to each other, and to what is unfolding—without being overtaken by it. They then introduced the following Three Dimensions of Resources: Interior/Self, Relational and Earth/Territory
To explore our inner resources they invited the group to respond to the question: What is a resource you can rely on within yourself? Below is a cascade of answers that came through the chat and a wealth of resources that many of us can access within our own bodies, minds and hearts.
- Breathing
- Stopping and taking a deeper breath, breathing in deeper and breathing out slowly.
- My hand in my heart
- Connecting to my bones, feet, sit bones and spine
- Mindful breathing, grounded yoga positions
- Feeling into feet – grounding
- Stretching
- Listening to birds & feeling wind on my hands & feet
- Hand on heart and breathe deeply
- Felt sense
- Adjusting perspective
- Singing
- Hand to heart and connection to breath, being mindful of posture
- Butterfly hug
- Stopping
- Connecting to senses – see / hear / taste / smell / touch
- Talking to my plants
- Using and observing with my senses
- Dancing
- Shaking
- Practice conscious dance – 5Rhythms
- Humming, intoning
- Deliberately slowing down
- Walking in nature
- Crying
- Open heart, radiant body, emergence and creativity, synchronicity
- Dreams, friends
Then we moved into breakout rooms to connect with each other and explore our relational resources. We shared stories about the people, other beings, relationships and communities that support us and help us through difficult times. Stephanie shared how talking with her sister is a great resource for her when she’s struggling and Laura shared a relationship she has with a particular tree that helps to ground her in tough moments.
This led into the exploration of the resources of Earth and territory. Laura explained that this goes beyond a relationship with a particular being and opens us more deeply into the awareness of the interconnectedness of the ecosystems of beings and cultural contexts within which we are woven.
This question was posed to the group with the following responses: What in nature brings you back to balance?
- Hiking and forest baths
- Listening to birds
- Ocean
- Speaking with water, walking by the river
- Walking near Cedar River
- I play my flute and tell the other than humans how beautiful they are
- For me, after years with earth sorrow, it has been giving me so much comfort to grow my own vegetables in a regenerative way, connecting to the soil, making new soil, composting…using seaweed
- Going to the forest when I am able, and going to the orchard we have here nearby home
- We are grateful to live in a forest, and when I go on a walk, seeing out to the panorama of treelined mountains, and looking up to the pines and firs and cedars surrounding me…I feel I have a place with them, shorter to be sure! – still a place to breathe more deeply.
- Mountain hiking, walking and sitting in the forest every day, swimming in the lakes, bird watching, wild camping, rock climbing.
- A flower named Lady Night is very special to me. (Dama de noche)
- My sit spot in the forest. My ancestral lands in Sweden. Garden beings.
- Fruit trees in my ancestral village… many memories
- I am a landscape architect. Cultural landscapes are resources. When we think about how we are altering our ecosystems as designers, how we impact the earth and thus our very selves, it forces us to consider our integral place in nature, to consider our bigness yet to consider our smallness.
- Listening to the wisdom of the Trees, speaking with the Waters, gazing at the Moon. Walking and observing the Plant Kin around me and naming those I know while taking notes to familiarize myself with those I do not.
After reflecting on these three dimensions of resources we were invited to check back in with our bodies, emotions and minds. Laura guided us to notice the subtle sensations and shifts in our inner landscape. There was a palpable shift in the energy in the zoom room – a sense of being nourished by this wealth of resources.
Just as we begin the WTR Spiral by grounding in gratitude, this gathering of resources prepared us to move more deeply into reflection on the pain we experience and how it can manifest in us as trauma – both individually and collectively – in moments when we are not adequately resourced.
What is Trauma?
Stephanie shared that trauma is an intelligent, adaptive response of our autonomic nervous system that prioritizes survival over connection—and it stays active until the experience has been integrated.
But what do we mean when we say that trauma is intelligent?
The intelligence of a trauma response is that it maximizes our chances of survival in the face of overwhelming experience. When something feels too much, too fast, or too soon for our system to process, the body steps in automatically—without asking for permission—to protect us.
For example: Imagine you’re walking outside and suddenly see something on the ground that looks like a snake. Instantly, your body reacts—you jump back, your heart starts racing, your muscles tense, your breath quickens.
Only a moment later, you realize…it’s not a snake. It’s just a garden hose.
But notice what happened: your body didn’t wait for certainty. It didn’t pause to analyze or gather more information. It responded immediately, organizing for survival. Because from the perspective of your nervous system, it’s much safer to assume danger and be wrong than to assume safety and be wrong.
That’s the intelligence of the trauma response. It is fast, automatic, and protective.
And sometimes, even after we realize “it’s just a hose,” our body may still be activated—heart still racing, muscles still tense. This is how trauma can linger in the system: not because we are choosing it, but because the body is still trying to protect us, and hasn’t yet received the signal that it is truly safe. In these moments, the nervous system is not concerned with connection, reflection, or nuance. It organizes the whole body around one priority: to stay alive.
And this doesn’t only happen in moments of physical danger. In situations of emotional overwhelm, conflict, or prolonged stress, the body can respond in similar ways with “The 4 F’s of Trauma Response”
- Fight (sympathetic): moving against
- Flight (sympathetic): moving away
- Freeze (dorsal parasympathetic): shutting down
- Fawn (mixed response): appeasing to stay safe
These responses are not signs that something is wrong with us. They are signs that something in us is working very well—doing its best to protect us with the resources it has. And yet, what once helped us survive can continue to live in the body, even when the threat is no longer present. That is why we don’t approach trauma as something to fix, but as something to gently support, tend, and eventually integrate.
Laura then shared that trauma can be understood as information that did not have the opportunity to update in the moment and therefore remained frozen in time. She mentioned that Thomas Hübl has referred to it as a loan from the future – a future in which we have enough resources to handle the stresses and overwhelm that we may not be able to manage in the moment.
Trauma is not an event itself. It is what happens within our nervous system as a result of an event or events.
Two people can go through the same experience, and one may be deeply impacted while the other is not. What matters is how the body receives, processes, and stores what happened.
When faced with an overwhelming experience, our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) interrupts the flow of information to the hippocampus, the part of the brain that consolidates the sensory information to weave together our experience into a coherent whole. The sensory information is then stopped in the body and remains there. We do not get to tag it as “past”, so when it becomes activated by a trigger, we feel as though the original experience was occurring in the present. The past becomes active in our trauma response, even if the actual event is long gone.
Healing involves creating the conditions and gathering resources which were not present in the original instance, and that allow this information to update through safety, regulation, relational support, and a steady, attuned presence.
This creates an additional possibility – beyond the 4 F’s of Trauma Response:
- Regulation (ventral parasympathetic): connection, presence, and safety
Layers of Trauma
Trauma is not solely an individual phenomenon, and it is not often a simple, separate result of a single experience. It exists in nested layers that are in relationship with each other. Individual trauma exists within intergenerational family systems, and are shaped by collective, historical and environmental conditions.
Individual trauma arises from experiences that directly overwhelm a person’s nervous system—events that are too much, too fast, too soon, or too little for too long. It lives in the body and nervous system as unintegrated information and shapes how a person perceives safety, connection, and choice in the present.
Intergenerational trauma is carried across generations. When overwhelming experiences are not processed or integrated, their impacts — patterns of regulation, beliefs, coping strategies, and stress responses — can be passed down through family systems, caregiving dynamics, and even biology. What was once adaptive for survival may persist long after the original conditions have changed. For those interested, you can look up epigenetic research on trauma.
Collective trauma impacts entire groups, communities, or societies following events that disrupt shared systems of meaning, safety, and belonging (such as war, colonization, displacement, pandemics, or environmental destruction), as well as the systems that support our way of life, such as the health, education, production, transportation, etc. Besides these social systems, collective trauma affects relational trust, cultural narratives, and group behavior—and it often amplifies individual and intergenerational trauma.
Environmental trauma refers to the harm inflicted on the more-than-human world — land, water, air, ecosystems, and non-human beings — as a result of human activity. This harm is not only ecological; it is relational. When ecosystems are damaged or destroyed, the systems that support life, orientation, and belonging are disrupted. Environmental trauma is often chronic, not only acute, and it unfolds over time — through climate disruption, displacement, and the erosion of the conditions that make life feel predictable and safe.
Collective Healing
When we come together to deepen our awareness and strengthen our resources, we activate collective agency and coherence. As we develop the capacity to self-regulate and practice together we can create a resonance of co-regulation and collective regulation that is essential for the healing process of tending to collective trauma.
During this part of the webinar, some powerful stories of healing were shared and we were invited back into breakout rooms to reflect on when we have seen healing happen and how we knew it was happening?
Stephanie and Laura emphasized that healing is not a fixed endpoint. It is an expanding capacity to relate, to feel, and to build more conscious forms of community.
Some indicators of healing include:
- Greater trust in one’s own intuition and inner wisdom.
- Traumatic memory no longer defining identity, but becoming integrated as part of one’s life story.
- The ability to look back without becoming overwhelmed by intense emotions.
- Increased resilience in the face of adversity.
- A deeper sense of inner peace and emotional stability.
Collective Healing is our shared capacity to live with the fragmented parts of our past, consciously connect them to the present, and create a coherent narrative — one that is embodied, hopeful, meaningful, beautiful, transcendent, and deeply human.
Honoring the miners, I released ancestral weight from my lungs and breathed freely again.
Laura Calderón de la Barca is a psychotherapist specialized in individual, intergenerational, collective and systemic trauma. She is a Senior Associate at Collective Change Lab, and has her own private practice. She ran 3 Collective Trauma Exploration Labs for Latin America in 2020-21, and was a host at the Collective Trauma Summit 2020-2023. Laura is lead author of “Healing Systems”, an article on the presence of trauma in systems which was the most read in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2024.
Stephanie Pizarro is a Colombian executive team coach, educator, professor, and collective trauma healing facilitator with expertise in Transformational Leadership, Organizational Development, and Change Management. She supports regenerative initiatives centered on mutual care through the Pocket Project and the Academy of Inner Science. She is the author of Al baño María, a guide for women’s self-knowledge and purpose. A social communicator, she holds master’s degrees in Corporate Social Responsibility and Inner Science and is pursuing a PhD on collective trauma.