The Nervous System of Nations

Understanding Trauma

As a counsellor with some education about trauma, I’m witness to the way systemic trauma shapes lives and communities. Trauma is a complex psychological and physiological reaction to deeply distressing or overwhelming events. Fight, flight, freeze, flop, and fawn are all survival strategies, and they play out in our behaviour: fleeing a threat, freezing when powerless, or fawning to keep ourselves safe.

Ideally, once the danger passes, we return to safety, and our nervous systems reset. But when threat is constant, such as in war, child abuse, discrimination, or other chronically distressing circumstances, the body can’t fully relax. It stays on alert. Over time, even neutral situations can feel dangerous.

Generational Echoes

Research shows that trauma can echo through generations — what’s sometimes called intergenerational or transgenerational trauma. Our cells can carry biochemical traces of ancestral pain. Epigenetic studies suggest trauma may influence gene expression and stress responses in descendants. And unresolved trauma in parents often affects how children learn to regulate emotions and trust the world.

Compassion as Medicine

Many Indigenous traditions speak of trauma as a spiritual wound — a loss of life force and integrity. Yet just as trauma spreads, so can compassion. In my work I teach HeartMath, which is biofeedback technology that helps people restore emotional regulation and coherence to the heart–brain connection. It's one small way that love can go viral. 

Palestine and Israel: A Mirror of Pain

Just as I see trauma play out in individuals, I see it mirrored in nations, and nowhere is this more evident than in Palestine and Israel.

I know how heavy and divisive this subject feels. People are grieving on all sides. I’m not a political expert, but I am a human being, and I belong to a field that understands something about trauma, and what is needed for healing.

After the Second World War, many Jewish people, traumatised by centuries of persecution and the Holocaust, fled for safety. In 1948, Israel was established, and neighbouring Arab states invaded almost immediately and the Israeli-Arab war began. Over 700,000 Palestinians were displaced or expelled from their homes, an event remembered as the Nakba (“catastrophe”).

Trauma runs through both peoples’ histories: Jewish and Palestinian. One fled genocide; the other lost homeland. Fear and grief hardened into defence and retaliation. What we witness today is generations of trauma playing itself out through policy, ideology, and violence.

I acknowledge the complicity of my own country, the UK, through its colonial history, its role in partition, and its ongoing arms sales. Instead of profiting from the killing of innocent people, I hope that the UK and more nations can play roles that encourage peace, non-violence and reconciliation.

A Path Toward Healing

I don’t know the perfect political solution. Maybe a two-state model, maybe something more integrated, two people sharing one land with dignity and equality. What I do know is that any future worth building will require truth-telling, reparations, and the space to grieve together.

Forgiveness can’t be forced. But when grief is truly witnessed, love and well-being has a way of returning as the natural order. This applies to individual healing as much as it applies to collective healing.

I pray for the day when Palestinians and Israelis live in safety and kinship. They may call the land by different names, but may they be united in humanity and tenderness. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu reminded us through the African word ubuntu:

“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”

The photo below was taken in 2017 on Palestinian ancestral lands, near where I was briefly detained by Israeli forces for walking in the woods like a fool near what turned out to be a restricted military area. They asked me what my religion was. My answer was simple: my religion is love.

Note: No robots (or humans) were harmed in the making of this blog. This is one of a small number of articles where I’ve experimented with using AI to proofread and edit an original draft for readability—allowing my executive functioning to be reserved for other tasks.

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