Releasing the Prisoners of War-Trauma

Taken from Healing Collective Trauma: a process for integrating our intergenerational and cultural wounds, by Thomas Hübl.

At 18 years old, Patrick Doherty signed up for the US Marine Corps and volunteered for the war in Vietnam. What he encountered overseas with nothing short of an atrocity, the trauma? of which left an indelible mark, “Yet returning home,” he says, “was shattering. Americans everywhere were adamantly protesting, not just the war, but their country's soldiers…

…? people needed to distance themselves from veteran experiences in order to maintain their own sense of innocence, their belief that Americans are good.”

Dougherty says that Americans mass outrage and collective denial meant that its veterans were forced to carry the burden of an international trauma alone. We continue to see the effects of this today.

I spent 5 years cleaning myself up a bit after returning from the war before I started to notice two things that no one was talking about. The first was what we call collateral damage. In Vietnam, collateral damage was profound. And I knew personally, having walked through its villages and towns, that the Vietnamese people were devastated, traumatized. I knew that the country itself was traumatized.

?The second thing Dougherty observed was the impact this had on veterans.

When we came home, we weren't the same people we'd been when we left. Some were more affected than others, but we were all changed. Like the Vietnamese, we'd been deeply traumatized, but our families and loved ones, and the American public as a whole, had no idea what we'd seen or done while we were away. These things just weren’t talked about

No one wanted to feel it. We couldn't touch it. And I believe this was the consequence of our collective trauma.

As a psychologist I started to see that the prescribed way of addressing trauma in clinical practice wasn't helpful enough. We've been taught how to take people back into their traumatic memories. I had my clients cry and scream and beat pillows, but none of those exercises had completely healed them.?

Over time, Dougherty recognized that by openly expressing with his face and body language his empathetic reactions and personal emotional responses to the difficult and wonderful things his clients shared with him in therapy, he could foster deeper relational connection. As a result, more profound levels of healing emerged. “Clinicians are taught to remain distant and impersonal, but everyone needs love,” Dougherty says, and it's love that heals.”

Because of his interest in the subject of collective trauma, Dougherty traveled to Israel where he attended one of the Collective Trauma Integration Process trainings…?

Precisely because most of the attendees didn't share his native cultural filters, they were able to speak directly to his trauma in a way he'd never before experienced.”?

What they said to me was essentially this; as a member of your nation's army, you were sent by your giant country to invade a very small country. Your giant country occupied that small country for 10 years. Your country killed millions of its people, devastated its countryside, and destroyed its economy. and when it wasn't comfortable anymore, your country went back home. Yes, it was an atrocity, Patrick, an atrocity you participated in.

“These things were stated plainly, simply as facts. Dougherty says, “In my body, I already knew the truth they were speaking to me, but no one had ever gotten so close to that truth, or did to do so with such clarity.”

Every American in the group witnessed silently as I experienced the awful grief and terrible sorrow of the war, feeling myself as unredeemable as I had directly participated in the atrocity. On the last day there, I got in touch with how angry I felt with them, and I was able to share that too

?Then, he says, something profound happened

Three American women sat me down and one by one, they spoke to me: Patrick, I'm so sorry, simply by being an American, by paying taxes, I now realize that I bought the uniform you wore, I helped to put bullets in its chamber. and I sent you there so that I could have a safe, quiet, easy life at home. And I never wanted to know a thing about what you did there, what happened to you when you got back.

They were crying and I was crying. Those three women were seeing and feeling a terrible cultural shadow, one that they never wanted to see or feel before. But by presencing it, they could now see what the burden of that shadow had done to me. I'd spent 40 years carrying its grief and sorrow and now I was weeping from relief, because these women were acknowledging their part of the responsibility for it. And they were promising to continue carrying their part without turning away.

?I could only come to terms with the fact that I directly taken part in an atrocity because there was so much love in the room, so many people supporting me. Their presence made it bearable. and those three other Americans could only hold that burden with me because of the deep degree of connection we were experiencing with the larger whole.?

No one I know could have imagined that I'd become a Marine or volunteer to go to war! But I was told; something compelled me.?

That something, he can now see, was an unconscious compulsion to escape the violence and alcoholism of his early home life by heading directly to the opposite of freedom or peace or anything he'd ever willingly desire for himself.

Like so many, I was living out my family's intergenerational trauma, and I unconsciously followed that path as deeply as I could– until I couldn't go any further. Along the way, I became violent. I crossed my own line and did terrible things. but I couldn't shut out the pain I was causing people; I could always feel it. So I stepped back from that line and turned around. And I'm pretty sure I was the first in my ancestral line to say, “No more.”

As a result of his experiences, Dougherty chose to focus on understanding the nature of both personal and collective trauma, and took a new path: one toward healing. “The work that I do heals my ancestors, too," he says. By meditating every morning with the presence of his ancestors, a conscious and mutual act of love and repair occurs.

His eyes twinkle with mystery and truth.” I've heard them say to me, you were the one we've been waiting for.’”

Patrick Doherty’s work can be found atMovingthroughit.org .