Systems that are designed to exclude and oppress people frequently cause pain and trauma across generations. Intergenerational trauma stalls growth and progress within individuals, communities, and movements for liberation. How can we unlock new opportunities for transformational social change through healing and repair?
Four practitioners and innovators came together at the 2024 Skoll World Forum to share their lived and learned experiences of what happens when “the pain becomes the medicine.” Together, they weaved personal stories into a communal exploration of trauma from historical events like slavery and colonization—and opportunities for reshaping destructive systems. Collective healing takes place when historically-excluded communities are invited into policy-making conversations and individuals are able to reclaim and nurture their wellbeing.
Watch the session and read the transcript below for an inspiring conversation about expressing pain, reclaiming your story, and prioritizing wellbeing for the greater good. This panel was curated in partnership with The Wellbeing Project and moderated by David Bornstein, co-founder and CEO of the Solutions Journalism Network. Bornstein was joined by Laura Calderon de la Barca from Collective Change Lab; Zarlasht Halaimzai, co-founder and CEO of Amna; and Serene Thin Elk, community program director for South Dakota Urban Indian Health.
Transcript from “Understanding Intergenerational Trauma and Healing in Social Impact,” filmed on April 11, 2024 at the Skoll World Forum:
David Bornstein: This is a really important session. I started reporting on social entrepreneurship and social innovation almost 30 years ago. And it’s extraordinary to me how many of the people that I’ve interviewed, hundreds of people over the years who are innovators or social entrepreneurs or working in this field, have a history of woundedness or trauma. And in some ways, there’s this kind of human alchemy of turning their pain into love in the world in many ways. And it’s been this extraordinary through line that I’ve noticed for many years, but without a language for it. So I think we’re coming to a language for what is actually happening in the social sector.
This issue affects everything. All of the systems that we create in the world are a reflection of the lived experiences of people. And we’re now at a time in history where we’re beginning to understand this. We have tools coming from spiritual traditions, from somatics, from neuroscience, from developmental psychology that are coming together to help understand and give us much more power over how to work with trauma. And so, I think that’s really the focus of this session here. It’s very relevant to people working with any community, but also the wounded healers in the social, a phrase that we were talking about in our previous phone call. So I’m going to introduce the panelists.
All of them have very particular lived experience and come at this from different angles and in different histories. But there’s a really a common through line of care and skillfulness that runs through this, which we’re going to get to. So to my right is Serene Thin Elk, who’s the Community Program Director of South Dakota Urban Indian Health. Serene is a Lakota and Dakota clinical addiction and mental health therapist and mother to four beautiful children. She’s a member of the Yankton and Rosebud Sioux tribes. And in her current role as a Director, she’s part of a team that’s integrating culture and spirituality into community healing models.
To Serene’s right is Laura Calderon de la Barca, who is a psychotherapist, linguist, consultant, educator and cultural analyst specializing in collective intergenerational and attachment trauma. She is one of the hosts of the Annual Collective Trauma Online Summit, which reaches hundreds of thousands of participants. And she’s really focused now on the presence of trauma in social change systems and how we can turn them into healing systems.
And Zarlasht Halaimzai is the founder of Amna, which works with communities that have experienced enforced displacement, providing trauma and culturally-informed psychosocial care to support their healing from violence. It started with pitching a tent in Northern Greece in 2016, and it’s now working in 13 countries around the world and growing. And it’s first of a kind healing network for local community and refugee-led organizations whose focus is healing from trauma.
And I’m co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and have reported on social innovation for many years. So, let’s begin with how you came to this work. Who wants to jump in first? Laura.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Jumping, okay. I came to this work out of my own need for healing. I am Mexican and I’m a mestiza which means that I’m part Indigenous and part Spanish. And living in an environment where being Indigenous is seen as less than, I got to experience racism, bullying when I was younger. And this combined with other kinds of trauma that I experienced, you know, from birth and attachment trauma left me with a really heavy load when I was younger and it was really hard. For example, I could not speak in public without, like, my heart just pounding out of my chest and just ending exhausted. And learning how to deal with that has been part of my journey.
And one of the most important insights that I got through this journey was that, yeah, I, Laura, needed to heal, but you know what? So does Mexico because we have not finished accepting our Indigenous roots with honor and respect. And so, that gave me the inspiration to do a PhD research where my thesis is a written therapeutic session for my country. And then from there I went on to, you know, deepen my work in my own trauma. Because I thought at the end of that PhD, “Okay, God, where’s everybody else? Let’s do this.” But like, my own trauma was still there, very present. I did some healing through that thesis, but there was a lot more that needed to happen.
And learning through the body and in relationship was what led me then to be capable of starting to engage with others and start to become a resource. You know, there’s this concept of, from a man that I, a friend of mine called Hector Aristizabal who experienced torture and then became somebody who could help others with that, the pain becomes, the wound becomes the medicine. So that’s what I experienced. My wound became the medicine.
And through that trajectory, I met my wonderful colleagues from the Collective Change Lab, John Kania and, well, Juanita came later, but Katherine Milligan, who co-wrote with me the article on healing systems. And that’s what led me now into the world of systems change and how can we weave these conversations in a way that empowers systems to truly transform at a level that it has not been possible up until now? I’ll leave it there.
David Bornstein: And that article is in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. What’s the title of it?
Laura Calderon de la Barca: It’s “Healing Systems” and I included it in the links that I suggested are shared with us, resources for this session.
David Bornstein: Great.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Yeah. Thank you.
David Bornstein: Thank you. Yeah. Zarlasht?
Zarlasht Halaimzai: Good morning, everyone. So I was born in Kabul, Afghanistan during quite a brutal war. So my formative years was spent trying to make sense of what was happening to me and my family and the situation that we found ourselves in. As a child, I experienced the war as total destruction and total terror. What was happening around me is that, you know, children like me were being killed, hospitals, schools, mosques were being destroyed. Everything in our lives was under assault. And so, it got to the point where my family had to make the decision to leave. And so we left. And after quite a few years of exile, we sought asylum here in the UK.
And as an adult, when I understood the politics of the war that was happening in my country, it was a proxy war between U.S. and USSR. When I understood the ideology and the motivation of the war, it still didn’t make sense to me. You know, it was senseless, violent war that hasn’t made the U.S. better, it hasn’t made Russia better, and it has resulted in destruction of Afghanistan. So that made me incredibly angry, but also really curious about what compels a person to pick up a weapon and kill a child? And that led me to healing and trauma because the way that I see it is, behind every violent act is a really terrified human being. And the way to come back to communal safety, trust, and joy is to help those people face their fears and to help them feel safe. And I genuinely believe that the call of our time is to face our fears and to come back to trust.
And, you know, as I’m in a room with lots of change makers, it starts from facing our own fears. It starts here, it doesn’t start out there. And so, that’s been both my personal journey, but also how the work that Amna does in creating communal spaces and creating spaces for people who have experienced, you know, unimaginable horrors to come together, you know, to connect again and to come back to a sense of joy.
David Bornstein: Good. Thank you. And I neglected to mention that this panel was co-curated in partnership with The Wellbeing Project, which is a project that was, it grew out of the need for social innovators to face their fears, to really actually, you know, focus on radical self-care for themselves, because whatever is going on internally would get amplified through their lives, through their institutions and their work. So.
Serene Thin Elk: Good morning. Hihanni waste. That’s how we say good morning in Lakota and just want to greet you all. [foreign language – no translation available: 00:09:45 – 00:09:47]. In my language, we are always taught to do two things when we’re standing in front of a group of people or a circle, we always acknowledge our elders that are in front of us and ask for forgiveness in a humble way that there are many things that you know, that I’m still learning. And that if there’s anything that I say that maybe I’m not understanding fully, to please, you know, we have a conversation together.
And then also just to acknowledge the people we come from. And given the effects of historical traumas and intergenerational traumas, the ability to be an Indigenous woman, a Lakota and Dakota woman sitting here at an amazing gathering of people like this, it makes me proud, it makes my family proud, and I know where I come from, very proud. And so, I always do my best to represent in a good way, you know, the voices of our people who, if they were here, the things that they’d want to share, I like to bring them in the room with us as well.
So what really brought me to this work was a deep sense of kind of empathy from the time I was born. This really intense experience of experiencing another person at times and their emotions. And also hearing and knowing and seeing in my life the effects of trauma. I didn’t have the language or I didn’t have the understanding of it when I was younger. But now being a therapist and being in this line of work, I recognize that the deeper that I dove into understanding what we call Turtle Island or North America, the history of our people and the genocide and the systematic attempt to eradicate our language and our culture, everything about us, all of those government policies through colonization, to be able to sit up here today and still have parts of our language, to have those teachings and values is truly a miracle. And I think of that every single day as a mother and as a professional.
And so, what brought me into the work was truly just a passion for healing. And at first it became very external. So I went to school, I got all these tools, I started working with people. And what I realized is that through that process, there was so much healing that I had to do. And it’s been a really hard, painful but rewarding– And like you said, we had a conversation earlier today that now can be a resource, hopefully to other people, to know that there’s hope. Because I can remember that there were many times that I didn’t feel hope, I felt depressed, I felt stuck in my grief. And the more I had a cerebral understanding of trauma and the body and what happens in our nervous system and ways that we can calm that and heal, it brought me to a stronger place of hope. And so, that’s what brought me to the field and also really encourages me to continue so that we can help one another in finding healing through all the things we face individually, in our communities and globally.
David Bornstein: Hmm. Can we– Maybe just to come up with a simple explanation or definition of what we’re talking about here. Because there’s language that I’m sure is not understood in the same way by everyone.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Okay, so maybe, you know, trauma, starting with the word. So trauma comes from the Greek and it means wound. And the reason why I believe that it’s important for the social change sector to engage with trauma is because what trauma does is it creates, it alters our perception of safety and of danger. So, you know, the wound that stays kind of open in an invisible way lives in our nervous system, in an autonomic nervous system, that’s the part of the nervous system that controls survival functions like our digestion, the functioning of our kidneys. And that’s not something that, you know, depends on our will to happen, to function.
And so, trauma when it gets to be activated in a later moment where the threat is no longer present, but the reaction, the survival reaction is, and so that makes it very hard for us to create collaboration. So often collaboration will break down in a place where trauma got reactivated. And again, because it’s an invisible wound, and, you know, there’s not a natural threat to the lives of people. Like, it doesn’t make sense why people are having the reactions they have.
So having that lens of understanding that somebody’s feeling threatened and that it might be about the past, but the reaction is being here and now, and what’s needed is for people to feel safe, can give us avenues to actually start creating different kinds of interventions that take the creation of that safety into account. And that can also help normalize the presence of trauma in all of us. Because I mean, we already had trauma from before the pandemic, but once the pandemic hit, a lot of the trauma that was underneath, you know, rose to the surface, plus all the impacts that the pandemic had. So that’s part of what– I mean, I’d love to hear from you guys, but that’s what I would like to share initially around trauma.
Zarlasht Halaimzai: I think the only thing, you know, I would add to that is for people who are experiencing trauma as children, your system adapts to a dangerous world and you develop all kinds of behaviors that are actually really smart. You know, our system is really intelligent. The reason we develop those behaviors is to survive. So for example, if you are an Afghan woman right now in Kabul, it serves you really well to be very hypervigilant because your personhood and your safety is at threat all the time. So your system will do absolutely everything that it can, it has the capacity for, to protect and defend you. Or if you are a minority, you know, I grew up as a child refugee in this country, and you’re living in a system that is hostile and dangerous. So it makes sense that you assess and strategize and have an antenna for threat.
But it’s really important, as Laura said, is to face that at some point. Because these patterns of behavior prevent us from, you know, experiencing our lives fully, from being fully alive, from being present. It can, you know– You can contract in a moment when what it’s called for is expansion, it’s trust, it’s, it’s creativity, and, you know, so it’s really hard. It’s really important to both know that, but also deliberately and consciously untangle those patterns of behavior when you are experiencing safety and when that danger is not that present. And when you can look inward and begin to face some of the things that was set as a child.
David Bornstein: You were saying, Serene, when we were speaking last time that the survival skills, the resiliency that we discover, after a while, that begins to be the very thing that’s holding us back. And it needs to be, the phrase you used was metabolized. Can you talk about that?
Serene Thin Elk: Yeah, I think it speaks to what you were just saying that, in some ways in your healing process, you start to– At first when you become aware that, gosh, these patterns of either fight, flight or freeze, right, those things that we tend to do in different situations, you look at them and you can sometimes have shame about them. For example, I can think at times in my life when I completely froze, completely froze in a moment where I should have in my mind reacted to save someone or to do something different.
In my healing process, I learned that that was just an automatic thing that happened to me. I had no control over that. And so, I think a part of what we call metabolizing it, learning how to take these things that we experience and integrate it into our stories and recognize that we might have those activation points or triggers that come up through our life, but the more healing we do, we recognize them and we almost have compassion for that part of ourself because it did, it was resilient in a moment.
You had that resiliency to, sometimes it was to dissociate or to leave your own body to survive something. Other times it may be, again, it’s completely shutting down, whatever it may be, it’s looking at that without shame. Looking at how that’s just an automatic thing that happens. And when you recognize it happening within yourself, what are things and tools, maybe people, ceremony different things to use your senses.
We talk about using the basics. So in our healing ways, we talk about water being one of the most healing things, praying with the water, acknowledging that this is a part of Uŋčí Makȟá, it’s a part of the Earth. We also need that water to heal, right? And so, there’s so many ways to– In this book called “My Grandmother’s Hands,” which if you haven’t read that, it’s a really powerful book on healing trauma and looking at systemic racism and how we all hold in our lineage, as far back as we can remember, cycles of violence that were there. And at some point, those cycles of violence are reenacted towards another group of people, often an attempt to gain a sense of control over once feeling powerless, being oppressed, right?
And so, I think as, just globally within our communities, within our own beings, to recognize when we may be enacting those cycles and perpetrating oppression and violence through policies, through leadership and reactivity, there’s a lot of ways to look at that. And so, our ability to, again, take the wound to first look at it and become aware of it, try to take the shame out of that and replace it with compassion in order to move through that. And then, you know, you’re able to integrate that into your story in your own unique way.
All of us, I’m sitting up here and everything they’re saying, I’m like, “Oh, it’s so powerful,” the things that we have all been through and your story is powerful. So to be able to work through those things and when you feel compelled to then use your voice in whatever way you do that, it’s very healing. So I think metabolizing it. It’s just really the integration of that and to be able to recognize that it’s not something we can extract from us, right? It’s a part of who we are, our collective story as human beings, but also individually.
David Bornstein: Hmm. Hmm.
Zarlasht Halaimzai: Can I add something to that?
Serene Thin Elk: Yes.
Zarlasht Halaimzai: Because trauma is very much, it’s in your body and the healing starts from healing your body. And sometimes when you talk about metabolizing, I literally feel something click. It’s like an experience completes and is no longer active or reactive. I feel it in my body when I’m going through moments of that metabolization and the people that we work with, it’s sort of, they report similar things that it’s in your body and one day a tiny reactivity somewhere that was a contraction or a tension, it just relaxes. So that’s how I experienced that metabolization of trauma.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me as well. And I’d like to pick up on the intergenerational dimension of this, because as you were speaking about, you know, the shame coming up and then, you know, your mind ceasing up, I’ve had that happen to me. And part of what was really challenging is that at the time I didn’t understand that having birth trauma really could have such a tremendous impact. So I was like, “What the heck is wrong with me? Why can I not be present? And why did my mind just go blank?”
So my only explanation available is like, there’s something wrong with me. And there was this horrible shame that I felt, and, you know, I could not own up to it because to me that meant that I was admitting that I was flawed. And so, I’m grateful to my mom for, you know, inviting me into family therapy initially so that I could have, you know, my ego could be spared of the shame of admitting that I had shame, you know? And then, you know, that journey started. And as, you know, I did this PhD and I was like really excited because now I was going to heal and then I did these series of identity workshops with Indigenous communities and we did all this amazing work and I still felt the same. I felt like such a failure again.
And so, I called up one of my teachers and I explained to her what was happening and she came with me to Oaxaca, which is a place where I did this research. And she sat with me on a stone, on a beautiful day. And she asked me, “So tell me a bit about your life.” So I explained, and she’s like, “Okay, tell me about your parents.” And my parents were both children of single mothers. And in Mexico, in that generation, that was like a massive no-no and that– And so, when she hears, like, “Okay, I know what’s happening to you, it’s called shame and a lot of it is actually not yours.” Oh my God. The relief I felt in that moment, it’s like all of a sudden, my whole life made sense, why I had this very intense sense of shame and why I couldn’t find it in my life. The answers were not only in my life.
So, you know, I’m so grateful that now people who are studying epigenetics can help us find more scientific explanations for something that those of us who work in therapy have known for a long time. But we couldn’t explain exactly what’s the mechanism that transmits this information. So I just wanted to make sure that, you know, of bringing this here.
David Bornstein: That’s fascinating. Who does this feeling belong to?
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Exactly.
David Bornstein: Yeah. Yeah.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Exactly.
David Bornstein: By the way, the book “My Grandmother’s Hands,” there’s a wonderful interview on “On Being” that Krista Tippet does with Resmaa Menakem, the author. So if you don’t have time to read the book that’s only an hour or 90 minutes or something, you can get the, you can get the key points. So there’s a personal dimension to all this that is probably relevant to every person in the room at some level. And then there’s also a work, you know, we’re working with communities, we are running organizations. How do you connect that to the work of social change when we think about these, understanding what you’re talking about healing and how we can sort of, you know, bring that into, you know, Monday morning, after-school kind of thing.
Zarlasht Halaimzai: Oh, I’ll give it a go. What Laura was talking about intergenerational trauma in your experience, I just wanted to pick up on that because it’s very relevant to the work that we do. And just to say that we pass trauma biologically to our children. We pass it through familial and communal dynamics and we pass it through stories that we perpetuate and practice.
So I’ll give you an example of a story that’s part of my community, the Afghan community. And that is that we’re– There’s a story about Afghans being warriors, people that are built for war. And it’s something that many Afghans, and I will get killed for this online, take pride in. They really take pride in being fighters, being warriors. But if you dig a little, you find out that it’s actually propaganda that was perpetuated by the British when they invaded Afghanistan for the first time in 1838. And the British newspapers started printing, you know, these stories of swarthy Afghan tribesmen that were built for war and through, you know, fighting successive invasions, this story stuck and it’s now part of the identity that we have.
And it’s a deeply dehumanizing story because it allows people to– You know, Afghanistan has been in a perpetual state of war for the last 45 years to go in and bomb because these are people, this is a place where war is inevitable. Before that, Afghan identity was very, very different. I would always describe it as camp, it’s all about roses and poetry and Sufism. And then, you know, the British arrive and that kind of changes. So a lot of the work that we do with the communities is a decolonizing of their stories, of their body.
You know, a call to re-humanization is to create opportunities for leisure, for joy, you know, for cultivating a sense that you are precious, that this human being is a precious being and that you are completely allowed to make choices that prioritize your wellbeing, your safety, and that you don’t owe anybody anything.
You know, one of the things that I’ve recently disentangled myself from as a social entrepreneur is that, I don’t actually have to do this work. You know, like it’s completely okay for me to sit on the sofa and eat Doritos all day long. And that’s fine. And my intrinsic value does not disappear because that’s what I’ve– You know, I took a sabbatical and that’s all I did. I watched reruns of “Friends,” which is a terrible show and ate junk food. And that was great. And that’s the thing that we are trying to get people to feel that we have an intrinsic sense of worth, which is not dependent on your utility, it’s not dependent on an imposed identity. It’s just something that it is, it’s your birthright.
Serene Thin Elk: And I think that when you say Friends, by the way, yeah, it’s one of those things that helps you get through and just forget about some of the intensity of the work. Because it’s true as a trauma therapist for so many years, and also seeing within my own family and community, so many deaths and so much loss and so much unresolved grief, as soon as you start getting over one death, another death, and it just becomes complex and compounded. And those are the effects of historical trauma, you know, which is defined very generally as a massive group trauma to a group of people emanating across lifespans.
And we know within America, it’s government policy, the boarding school era, for those of you who don’t know, was a very, very painful thing in recent history that has happened to Native people in America that has– You know, in the government documents, their mission and their goal and their statement was, “Save the man, kill the Indian.” And so, our children were kidnapped, our children were taken, and it was government policy to take our Native children and put them into these boarding schools, which were Christian and very focused on the first step, cut their hair off because we know that their hair is sacred, we know that’s a part of their identity. So all the kids, their braids were cut off. No longer allowed to speak your language, you may not know how to speak any other language, but you are not going to speak your language. And if you do, you will be beat. The abuses that our children suffered, and so many of them including my relatives.
I have a grandma who tried to run away several times and was severely beaten, relatives. And it’s just one story. And I have the honor and privilege to sit with some people who tell their stories about the boarding school and it’s heavy. And you think about, I think of my own children and if they were to be taken away from me today and go through the things that our ancestors and elders went through, the grief is just always right there. It’s always right there. And I think it’s important in leadership and, you know, when you’re in the community trying to cultivate change, that we recognize how to hold that heaviness and that pain that we see day in and day out that we’re fighting to change. And it has to be that balance of holding that grief and understanding and doing things to release it. Because if we don’t, it’s heavy.
And I’ve had to take breaks from therapy. I mean, I entered into my own therapy, but I took breaks as being a therapist for sometimes two to three years at a time because I recognized that the grief was so immense and activated in my DNA and then I would lose people in my own immediate family and the grief would be even more so. And so, paired with that is anger and rage that can come up. How long can we go doing the work without sometimes being completely disillusioned and just in a place of rage of seeing the inequities and the things that continue to happen.
So I think that a part of healing, if you’re doing the work on the front lines, or maybe you’re a policy maker, is to recognize that if we aren’t going– You mentioned kind of that contraction and expansion, which is interesting because that’s the exact language that we were using this morning when we were having breakfast. And I think that we have to learn how to, again, open our hearts when we’re going inward to heal. It’s okay to go inward, to take sabbaticals, to take care of ourselves, if we are on the front lines, it is so important. And then you can– Again, your heart starts to open in a new way, right, after you’ve kind of integrated some of those lessons. But I think it’s a process, it’s a dance of being in the collective, going inward and all. I think that’s such a huge part of sustaining sustainable change so we don’t get burnt out and walk away completely.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Thank you, Serene, for that. And what I’d like to take from there also is that, there is the part that needs to be healed in those of us who have lineages who have been impacted by oppression. But I also see how there is the need for healing on those who belong to lineages that have committed oppression.
Serene Thin Elk: Yes. Right.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: You know? And how the trauma gets reenacted. You know, as I’m hearing you, what comes to mind is an interview that I recently heard on a book by Earl Spencer, Diana Spencer’s brother. And he was speaking in his book about the kind of abuse that he experienced in the boarding schools in the, you know, highest echelons of British society. And, you know, it just felt to me how much courage it took this man to actually be able to start to share this, to start to turn and face what he had experienced.
And in this interview, one of the things that he mentions that really speaks to me of how dehumanizing this dynamic is, one of his classmates when he started to open this up, told him about that, yeah, he had experienced this too. And he remembered the ride in the car from home with his father and no, no, yeah, from home to the boarding school and how his father told him, “There are some predators there, so you need to be very careful.”
So I was just shocked that, oh my God, the father knew what he was bringing his own child into and he still did it. So what has to happen to one that one is willing to do that? You know, there has to be a really big break there in that heart such that this– And this is something that I’m certain was not the only person who was doing this. And so, there is trauma there, even though there might be a lot of privilege, a lot of beauty around. And, you know, in my case I see how I had a lot of trauma, but I was very fortunate to have also a lot of resources. And so, I also had a lot of beauty in my life, but that did not take away from the trauma and the consequences of it. You know, so it’s not a linear thing that you either have privilege or you have trauma. No, you can have both.
And I think it’s our, at least I take it as the obligation of my heart to look for how can I heal myself and be there for others? How can I be an ally and bring this privilege that I do have for the healing, the support of others who actually don’t have it and might not be able to show up or do things? Like if I had not had access to therapy, I would not be able to speak here today. I would not be able to bring this message. So it’s not just because, you know, I can do this today now because of who I am. I can do this today because of the love I received, because of the support I received. And I feel, like, compelled to pay it forward.
And I would invite anybody who has privilege and who has, you know, maybe some wounds there to really look for ways of healing. Because the other thing that I’d like to bring in is, leaders are– I feel it’s so important that we normalize the presence of trauma, that this conversation comes from the margins really into the mainstream. Because until we feel that we don’t have to be ashamed, when we have something that we have no control over, that there’s a reason for that. That doesn’t mean you are flawed, it just means you’re hurt. And just like, you know, if I have a broken leg, it doesn’t mean that I will never be able to walk. I need to heal it, you know, so I don’t need to get rid of it or, it just needs to heal. We just need to heal. Yeah.
David Bornstein: And, you know, I’m from Canada and we had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission some years back, and I learned, which I had never known, that the Canadian residential school system, for Native Canadians, First Nation, was the inspiration for apartheid in South Africa. Never knew that. Having recently read, last year, Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste,” seeing how the Nazi concentration camps were inspired or modeled after American segregation practices in the South. So this kind of, the systems that create trauma are sort of viral. They spread, they jump from location to location. So that’s– I’m thinking about the systemic analysis that you’re bringing to it in your work now.
But going back to the last point, Zarlasht, you made a point when we were speaking last time about how, what was the phrase, people are often embodying the very system you’re trying to dismantle and it not only leads to say burnout and other things like that, but the kinds of solutions that you come up with or the way you try to advance those solutions have the DNA of problem built into them as well. Can you elaborate?
Zarlasht Halaimzai: Sure. So I think, you know, first of all to say that we all embody, you know, our upbringing and our story. I think, you know, sometimes when we talked about lived experience, it sounds though as if only Black and Brown people have lived experience, but actually everybody does. And everybody bring their own, you know, history and privilege or poverty into the dynamic of whatever they’re doing. And for me it’s never about blame. It’s about making those things conscious. So if you do come from a privilege, a background of privilege, and I’ll give you an example of what you’re asking, David, is that if you are–
I know lots of people in the public policy arena who have never used the public system. They’ve not gone to, you know, a public school. They’ve not used their public hospitals and they’re making policies that are impacting those people. And that doesn’t mean that people who haven’t used the public system shouldn’t work in those positions. It does mean that they need to be conscious about who else needs to be involved in the conversation so that the policies that are coming out of that include the voices of people who know what it’s like right now to struggle with the cost of living or in this country, I know I’m speaking to an international audience, but our health system here is completely falling apart. And so, it’s recognizing your own privilege and what you’re bringing.
And for someone like me, and I will speak for myself because I think this has, you know, manifested in lots of different ways for people, I had deeply internalized the dehumanization I felt as a child. And the way that I did that was I kind of– You know, I sort of joked with my sister that I used my body as a ladle. It’s useful, cheap and totally disposable. And the call of healing for me is a call of rehumanizing myself. It’s coming back to my body, coming back to my own– You know, what would my identity, what would my needs and wants and aspirations be if I took away the label Afghan and woman, what would that be like? How could I play with that? You know, what would I want to do? And it’s a very difficult thing to play with and to confront.
And then– You know, and the work that I was doing, I think probably a lot of people in this audience will resonate with that, is that I constantly felt the sense of urgency and that I needed to do more and more and more. And that in itself is an expression of dehumanization. And so, as I am maturing in my leadership, two big questions for me are, how am I limiting notions of wellness within my work and my team and how can I continuously expand it? How can I continuously expand my concept of wellness, both in my mind, but also in my body?
David Bornstein: Hmm. So let’s open it up for questions. And wait for the mic. If you have a question, just wait for the mic to come to you. And could you please, yeah, introduce yourself.
Zolelwa Sifumba: Hello? Hi, my name is Dr. Zolelwa Sifumba and I started off watching this online and then I ran here. I literally ran. And so, I need to meet you all. So please afterwards– I literally ran, I’m still sweating, but the things that called me, the wound becomes the medicine. We need to help them to face their fears and it starts from facing our own fears. Passion for healing, you said your passion for healing started externally as an external process, and then it showed you the healing that you needed to do. And somebody else said that there is hope.
I am here at the Skoll World Forum to speak, I’m part of the closing plenary, so please come watch me. But the reason why I wanted to speak, I’m a health worker, right? And I got multi-drug resistant TB from being on the front lines. I got into a car accident after a 36-hour shift at work. Anxiety, depression, I eventually had to run away. But the TB saved my life. The TB almost killed me, but it allowed me, or rather, I started allowing myself to express the pain that I was in. I started allowing myself to actually look at the pain.
And I come from a community of people that don’t look at their own pain. We look at the pain of others. And pain, the world tells us to forget about it. The world tells us to suppress it, to put it away, and it causes so, so many problems. And so, my work is to show my pain and in that, to also create spaces where other people can look at my pain and also look at their own pain.
It’s interesting that health systems are falling apart in high-income countries and low-income countries. And I go to all these conferences and they’re talking about tech. They’re talking about, oh, what– And they completely forget about the people that make up the health systems who are in desperate need of rehabilitation right now. So that is the work that I want to do globally, I think. And it’s not even just the health workers, I think we’re all gripped by pain, some kind of pain. And when we push it away, we’re far from ourselves. And that makes it even harder to connect with others. And so, there is hope.
My story, the work that I do in facing my pain and taking courage to express my pain and encouraging others to express their own pain is such important work. And I had this realization that it’s not just our pain, generations and– My great-great-great somebody who the land was taken from is reeling in pain. The kids of that person are reeling in pain and it goes even beyond. And we’re here and I feel we have a responsibility to actually change that culture. To say that we’re not going to put our pain away, we’re going to look at it. From a country where we also have TRCs and they’re the worst. They say, “Forgive, forget.”
And my last thing I’m going to offer, the wound, I’ve seen many wounds as a doctor and the wounds that often cause people to die are the wounds that are just covered and not looked at. I’ve seen people die from wounds. I’ve seen people live from wounds. And so, it is very important that we start as– I mean, even being in Oxford is painful. It’s painful being here. And I have to grapple with this gratitude and pain. Like, I’m grateful to be here and thank you Skoll for bringing me here. Please, please, I’m very grateful. But to be in the UK as an African, I’m faced with so many emotions. I’m so excited to be here, but I’m so nervous to spend money here. You know, I’m so nervous.
Looking at the buildings thinking this is gorgeous. But thinking to myself, some of the stuff came from home. And so, it’s painful to say this stuff. I’m used to this, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, but it’s still so painful to express my pain. But I do it to allow others, to show others that it’s okay to do this. And we’re all in pain. Whether we are descendants of the colonized or descendants of the colonizer, it’s all pain. We’re all here in pain. So please carry on the work, please, let’s work together. Pretty please.
Serene Thin Elk: Absolutely.
Zolelwa Sifumba: There are no jobs for this, but there is work. I’m like sweating now. I’m so sorry, I’ve taken over this-
David Bornstein: Thank you.
Zolelwa Sifumba: whole thing.
David Bornstein: Thank you.
Zolelwa Sifumba: But it’s time for us to face our pain and I think once we start and continue to do that and allow others to do it, I think we will be able to realize that hope and we’ll be able to– I feel a lot freer, even now having just said this. I ran to say this. So thank you for each and every one of your contributions and everyone who’s here because we’re here having this conversation together. So please, after this I’d like to connect with you all and anybody else in the room. This is our work.
Serene Thin Elk: Yes.
Zolelwa Sifumba: Thank you.
David Bornstein: Thank you.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Well, I just want to say how my heart is very touched and deeply grateful that you came, that you ran here and that you brought your voice in because this is exactly why we’re doing this work so that we can heal together by, you know, doing this together, you know. And trauma, the same event might be traumatizing for somebody and not traumatizing for someone else depending on the resources they have. And when we are able to face these experiences together with the resource of having people that care and feeling that care, oh, it’s like something can finally land, you know, that release that Zarlasht was talking about. And we can do this together when we have that intention and when there’s enough resource. So thank you for also showing us how it’s done because it’s this, having the permission to bring this in and, you know, having our hearts here is a crucial aspect of this. So thank you.
Luana: Hi. Hi. Yes. Hola. Good morning. So thank you so much for the panel and, Doctor, thank you so much for sharing what you just said. That really resonate a lot. I’m Luana, I came from Brazil, from Rio de Janeiro and I work with racial justice, climate and gender. So the intersection of all this. And basically, we really work to heal this collective trauma of inequalities, especially in the Global South. And it’s really important to look at that.
And I would like to hear from what you said after Doctor was talking a lot about hope. Basically, for example, we do have like the main TV show there that award climate action stories or, you know, racial quality, great stories to spread hope across the country. So we want to basically, you know, enforce the collective action against this collective trauma we have by showing great stories. And I want to hear from you about, you know, how can trauma may sometimes prevent us to collaborate and act and, you know, I think, you know, two questions.
So how can we collaborate to transform inertia that collective trauma may cause to us into actions as part of the healing process? So this is one question. And also as we were talking about sabbatical or wellness, you know, most of people we deal with, they think that that’s very unaffordable in terms of how can I actually stop doing what I’m doing to heal myself? And I want to hear from you. So how can we turn healing and wellness as a more accessible path for us to heal and, you know, to take care of ourselves? Thank you.
David Bornstein: Thank you.
Zarlasht Halaimzai: I honestly don’t know where to start actually. Again, I’ll just speak from my own experience. You know, it’s really a cliche to say that stories are very important, but I think it’s true. They are really important. And part of my devotion to the work that I do is to come up with new stories. So not just get stuck in the stories that I was brought up with and stories that I was told, but just personally, what if my story wasn’t about a war? You know, what if that was just part of my story? What if it was, you know, an addition to the things that I’ve experienced? It’s also about, you know, the friendships that I’ve had, the service that I’m committed to. So it’s just remaking your own story and, you know, reclaiming that power when you do that. It’s been incredibly important for me. And I think that is what’s called for us as a collective.
I mean, one thing just to go back to the systems is that there has been a concerted effort to dehumanize people, you know, and lots of countries including my own, you know, when there’s been invasions or colonization, there was a concerted effort to find spiritual leaders and to put them in prison and to take that away from people. And, again, I say that not to kind to blame because I think that’s part of the problem. We keep blaming and I think we need to get to a point where it’s like we understand that that’s been a concerted effort. So the effort to rehumanize all of us has to be as deliberate and as conscious for it to come back, for all of us to come back to a place of connection, safety, and security.
I totally hear you on the, you know, affording a sabbatical. I was incredibly lucky to be able to afford one. One of my trustees, former trustees is in the audience and she made me take a sabbatical. It was kind of non-negotiable. And, you know, looking back, I think it was a really important, you know, experience for me to be able to just do that. And I was very privileged to be able to do that. What I noticed when I was making that decision, I totally recognized that not everyone is in that position is that I kept repeating the same dehumanizing story when I was thinking about taking a sabbatical. I was like, is it worth it? Can we afford it? What is the value? Instead of thinking I was on the verge of, you know, I was about to keel over. And so, my thinking was not about my wellbeing, it was about my budget lines and it’s something that I will never do again. You know, it will always be about how well I am and how well my team is and how we show up to our work.
Serene Thin Elk: So along the lines of taking a break, I did other work in a similar field, but I recognize that one-on-one hearing, eight hours a day, different people’s pain after years took its toll. So I stayed in my line of work, but I just did something that was less intense for me to kind of care for myself. And so, I think that’s one way is, if we recognize that we are experiencing vicarious trauma because at one point I started to actually have dreams as if I was experiencing the traumas that I was hearing. So I knew that I needed to change. So I did some work that was more, it was less intense in hearing those stories. One way of self-care is trying to pivot and find another pathway.
In terms of, I think of the different layers of trauma. And if we look at collective trauma and we go to community, family and then individual, what we call lateral oppression or lateral violence when we’re sort of working against each other when we’re all trying to create change, but we all have those personal narratives and pain between families within communities. It’s extremely hard to get anything done when our reactivity and personalization of what someone is saying because maybe their mode is attack, right? Because they’re feeling defensive. And then our mode is to shut down or also to attack.
And we see this a lot in our Native communities where there’s a lot of, because of that internalized oppression, we carry those belief systems about ourselves. We have a scarcity mindset, for example, because of being forcibly removed from the land onto these little pieces of land and living in consistent poverty and all of those things. We unknowingly, through the generations, have taken that on as a mindset. And so, what we see sometimes within our communities is people kind of fighting to be heard and to be understood and the ones advancing things, but we end up just fighting each other.
And so, I think there’s no easy fix to that except for we would see a huge decrease in that lateral violence if we were truly able to go inward and have mainstream conversations objectively, right? Like, what is your– What’s happening for you right now? What’s your reactivity? And that, for me at least, I’ve had to face it so much in my life and face myself that I can have those conversations fairly easily. And sometimes I forget that to be like, just be in your body, like, what do you think, you know. No.
But sometimes it’s just about having the context for healing with our own healing work that even if someone is not there, our reactivity in those situations, maybe it’s putting up a boundary in that setting or in those meetings or whatever, where you recognize that I’ve tried this approach, I’ve tried that approach, and that seems to not really be happening. So what are other alliances or pathways that maybe I can do to sustain my own energy in this?
So there’s really practical ways to navigate that. But I think the biggest piece is with that internalized piece, I still feel moments of my defensiveness come up, because I’ve been attacked online. So I know what that– Just, I think when you’re seen sometimes as someone who’s trying to make change or a leader, especially in a Native country, you, for rightful reasons, are scrutinized and looked, are you worthy to be in that position? Are you someone who really lives the values? Are you someone who we can trust? Are you stable? Are you who you say you are? And all of those questions stem from deep pain of distrust, disruption, and trauma. And so, I understand those questions, but there are times where I think we have to care for ourselves and trust our own journey and our own voice, even when there are people who don’t like our work, don’t agree with our work or think we’re not worthy.
So I don’t know if that answers your question, but I think the lateral violence is real. It’s really hard when there’s a lot of misunderstandings and sometimes through time, I’ve seen those dynamics change if we continue to cultivate the safe spaces to have conversations. And even then, we recognize that there aren’t going to be times where someone understands us or we understand them, it’s just sort of the nature of how things go. But in the end, being okay with that and understanding that okay, that for whatever reason isn’t going to transpire in a certain way.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Well, one more thing that I’d like to add is that, you know, it takes really changing the environment. So for me it’s an evolution of consciousness that needs to happen at a collective level and being able to distinguish the lens that we are looking through and that it has– You know, it reminds me of some work that I did for an organization that serves an Indigenous population in a Latin American country. It’s a small organization, but between them, the team that I was invited to support, the attitude was, that’s not my work.
And so, you know, when I arrived, I shared about my own journey, becoming conscious of how colonialism had impacted me, the shame that I carried, how bad it got and, you know, what I did. And so, that kind of opened up the permission for people to look at these things. And then we had a session with each of the people that were on the team. When I came back to check how it was going, there had been a complete change of attitude. People were now, “What can I do for you? How can I help you?” And they were hanging out and going out– So, you know, this was a small team, so it was easy to do, but really, I think it needs like a change in consciousness.
David Bornstein: I see, we have just about 10 minutes left and there’s probably like 20 hands up. So I guess we can take one more question. I also just want to– The root of sabbatical is Sabbath and it’s a day of rest. And it’s not once in a while, every seven years, it’s on a regular basis. It’s at least once a week kind of thing. So that is, you know, just– It’s a more quotidian kind of thing. So let’s take one more question and then we’ll think about how to conclude this. Okay. Who had their hand up first? Be honest, okay? I think you– Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
Rana Dajani: As-Salamu Alaykum. Peace upon you all. My name is Rana Dajani. I’m a Professor of Epigenetics of Trauma. And my research, we look at intergenerational trauma and we are actually the first group, we just sent our paper for publication showing an epigenetic pattern of 34 genes differentially methylated from grandparents to grandchildren in a maternal line.
David Bornstein: Wow.
Rana Dajani: So stay tuned and we’re also looking at, can interventions reverse that? Because that’s what we want to know as well. And we just finished an RCT, a randomized control trial. So of course the data needs analysis, it takes a couple of years, but stay tuned to that. And I’m a Skoll Fellow, as well. So my question to the panel and everyone in the room to think about is, you are speaking of trauma in the past, but there’s also a continuous trauma, whether it’s what you’re describing as the consequences of the trauma that happened, whether intergenerationally or in a past, earlier life. But today, we still have continuous trauma.
And I’m a Palestinian, I come from Jerusalem, so that’s a continuous trauma, right, in front of us for the past 75 years. So the question is, what can we learn from your experiences to inform what’s happening now? Because trauma is not a one event, it’s a continuous thing. So how do we frame it as a continuum and deal with it? So that’s number one. And then what can we learn from whether the consequences of colonization in Africa, the end of slavery in Brazil, and any of these examples of the past, what can we learn so we stop it from happening now?
What scares me, really scares me is when I hear these stories and I think you are living the consequences of all the discrimination that happened for Native Americans, for end of slavery, for colonization. And what’s happening in Palestine is kind of scary. Am I going to tell that story 100 years from now? Or are we at a point in history where we can save it? Because we’re all aware, we’re all here, we are all witnesses, and we have a moral duty to try to stop it.
So what are we doing collectively, are we drawing the courage to stand up? It’s uncomfortable, it’s typical, there’s a lot of censorship, but can we work together now as a collective voice? And that’s a way of healing because we can pay it forward. When we say never again, never again for anyone and everyone, and what can we do, so when we talk to our grandchildren, we say, “We stood on the right side of history,”? So that’s my question to everyone.
David Bornstein: So let’s take that question and combine it with the closing comments addressing that and also how people can, when they go home, can continue this exploration for themselves after this panel, places that they can go to continue learning about this. Yeah.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Zarlasht?
Zarlasht Halaimzai: We’ll go this way now. Eid Mubarak. By the way, it’s Eid today. Just for those of you who didn’t know, it’s the end of Ramadan. My family’s celebrating and I’m actually being told off for not being at home at the moment. So a lot of Afghans have a similar story and that we have experienced continuous trauma, I would say from, you know, mid-19th century when the British colonized Afghanistan or attempted to colonize. So my community’s history is very much riddled in that ongoing trauma. And a lot of the communities that we work with are experiencing ongoing trauma.
And Amna doesn’t work in a clinical way. We work in a community, by building community. And some of the things I can share about what we’ve seen and it also reflects my own experience, is what works in containing trauma in some ways it’s happening. And the first one that it’s in the body, so you really need to pay attention. And the kind of psychoeducation that we do in our spaces is to help people regulate when they’re constantly overwhelmed by emotions as much as possible in their context.
The second thing is that it happens in community. So keeping that communal ties strong and together is really important. And something that encourages me deeply is seeing the solidarity movements around Palestine, around the world right now and how people are coming together to speak against what’s happening. I think that’s the enormous encouraging act of solidarity that we’re seeing. And then the final thing, and this will be my closing remark, is that it requires expression.
You know, we need to express, we need to have safe spaces. We can feel safe enough to express our feelings so that that emotion that’s going through our body gets completed. I have an anger practice, my go-to emotion is anger. And so, I have a foam bat, and when I feel a surge of anger, I take my bat and I start hitting my pillow. My neighbors have no idea what goes on in my house. But I love imagining the stories that they’re weaving and, you know, what happens when you give yourself the permission to express an emotion like that is that, A, you get used to emotions that previously have been overwhelming. And B, you kind of realize that after that emotion goes, which usually is like only a couple of minutes, that the instructions are pretty simple, you know. And what that emotion wants you to know, it’s actually pretty simple and usually, for me, it’s like just say no. You know, you don’t need to go to that thing. You don’t need to do that. And then, you know, it’s okay. And I would really encourage everyone to get a foam bat. I have sent about 10 or 15 of them to my friends. So that would be my practical suggestion for everyone in the room.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: Well, it’s such a rich question and we don’t have a ton of time, but, so, you know, I concur with everything that Zarlasht has shared. And one more thing I’d like to say is that, you know, movement, because part of what trauma does is, you know, the getting caught in something and then being able to move that energy. So moving collectively, maybe dancing collectively.
One thing that I have done with communities that have experienced colonialism is, we gather together in a circle and in the center, we take a moment and connect to those things that have been hurt and we put them in the center and we move together in ways that are defensive. And so, I’ll leave it at that for right now and thanks, everybody, for your attention and over to you, my dear.
Serene Thin Elk: Okay. I just want to say thank you. I know we’re out of time. What I’ll say just from a Indigenous perspective is that we have over, you know, 500 years, like so many other places around the world, but on Turtle Island, over 500 years of that active genocide and things. And now we continue to experience it systemically, but it would be great to connect and share more about the things that I think our people have a wealth of resiliency. We still have our language, you know, there’s lots to say about that, but the essence of it is getting back to your spirit, your practices and prayer, if that’s a part of your life ways. It carries you through all of the unbearable, unimaginable things that we face collectively, so.
Laura Calderon de la Barca: And thank you for what you’re doing.
Serene Thin Elk: Yes, thank you.
David Bornstein: Thank you. Well, let’s have a big round of applause for these wonderful panelist. Thank you. Thank you.
