Collective Trauma and Grief with BJ Miller and Ladybird Morgan

Our podcast is hosted on Spotify and Anchor.

2020 brought old and new pains to the surface. These losses are compounded because we don’t know how to grieve. Unprocessed grief becomes trauma and trauma leads to more grief in a vicious circle that’s been going on for hundreds of years. In this session BJ Miller and Ladybird Morgan answer attendees questions and discuss how trauma and grief are related.

Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

3:33 Defining “Trauma” and how we tend to think about it

7:44 Defining “Grief” and how it links to trauma

11:18 Trauma is more than a moment in time, it becomes part of our experience

13:00 Generational trauma and how things are passed down

15:10 Considering our ancestors when thinking about shared trauma and verbal lineage

19:10 Re-relating/re-connecting to your body after experiencing trauma

21:03 Who gets to experience trauma?

25:05 The relationship of trauma to safety

27:00 How the trauma of others affects us

28:20 Having experiences that are hard, and constantly being shown the trauma of others: has a compounding effect

29:08 Trauma in our individual bodies happens as a moment, but then becomes part of our experience

30:08 How tending to yourself helps improve the experience of others, taking responsibility for how we participate

33:04 The difference between "listening" and "doing"

34:28 Sympathy vs Empathy as a response to someone else’s experience

35:35 Not necessary to have the same experience to support someone who is dealing with trauma

38:00 What can someone experiencing trauma do when they lose their existing support system?

41:30 Navigating trauma from childhood. How do our stories affect our experiences? The importance of asking for help

45:35 Imprinting safety in the body after childhood trauma - creating safety in your body anew

46:20 The importance of recognizing the experience of trauma experience of others, but also strengthening our own resilience

48:45 There isn’t a right or a wrong way to tend to ourselves, it’s a relatively new concept

49:40 Collective and societal trauma related to world events like COVID

52:30 Having shared events and living through forces that affect all of us

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