"Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past. Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview.”  ― Dr Gabor Maté

HEALING RELATIONAL TRAUMA 

ON THE PATH OF VERTICAL LEADERSHIP


The following is an outline for the Integral Europe Conference that was held in Hungary May 24-29, 2022.


Our collective human past is full of beauty, love, tenderness and kindness.  Tragically, it is also full of horrific acts that us human beings have done to one another.  

As a result most if not all world cultures and societies are deeply affected by collective trauma.  Those of us who were lucky enough to have with wise and generally loving parents have been shielded to some extent, but no one is immune to this suffering that is being carried forward from our collective past.


The distortions caused by collective trauma in culture and social systems imprint themselves in our individual nervous systems (physical body), show up in the form of an unhealthy relationship with one or more of our emotions (emotions), distort our thinking and sense of identity (mind), and degrade the quality of our love in our families and other intimate relationships (heart). 


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This workshop will offer a taste of how we work with early developmental trauma (aka relational attachment trauma) in our transformative Integral programs.

After establishing a foundation using the Hara/Heart/Head approach that informs our approach to cultivating embodied Integral development, we will move into an exploration of how developmental trauma has made the last few years challenging for almost everyone.


The perhaps outrageous propositions that I'll be inviting us into are: 

  1. We all have developmental trauma because modern systems and culture are soaked in collective trauma (Thomas Hübl)
  2. To a significant degree our adult personalities are a response to our early developmental trauma - raising the question of who we each would be if we healed? 
  3. Our personal reactions to COVID and COVID precautions have been almost mechanistically determined by our developmental trauma profile?


We will be trying on new perspectives, getting old stuck energies moving, and possibly dis-identifying with aspects of our identity that no longer serve.

Those who prefer their own vertical development over defending the current organization of their self-system may find an opportunity to start to shift in the direction of greater developmental maturity and more internal-external coherence.

At minimum, my intention is to cultivate a fertile vertical learning space in which each of us has a chance to intuit a possible next step in This developmental journey that is our lives.