Collective healing is the process of tending to trauma that a group, nation, or population has undergone together — restoring the shared coherence that mass violence, oppression, or catastrophe has fractured. The term is closely associated with Thomas Hübl, facilitator and founder of the Pocket Project, who in a 2020 Harvard Gazette interview describes it as an ethical restoration underlying every wound: “underneath trauma there’s always healing.”
For Hübl, collective trauma surfaces as either hyperactivity — stress and reactivity — or numbness and indifference, and its unmetabolised residue works like sand in the engine of how a society responds to present crises. Healing therefore cannot be purely individual. Because a fragmented system often lacks the inner coherence to integrate its own wounds, groups must build that coherence through facilitated practice — an infusion of coherence that a therapist might otherwise supply to a single client. Skilled facilitation helps a group touch its collective denial and reach the collective unconscious, so that suppressed material can surface, release, and integrate into greater inner stability and a more fluid way of meeting the world.
Hübl’s work has moved from the Holocaust legacy in Germany and Israel outward to colonialism, racism, and gender-based traumatisation, treating individual and collective healing as entangled rather than separate.
Also see Collective TraumaHealing and Collective Unconscious