Expired Addressing Collective Trauma and Moral Injury in Clinical and Community Settings

Collective Trauma, the shared injuries to a population’s social life, may damage the bonds that attach people and impair their sense of belonging and communality. Whether the social disruptions are a result of war, disaster, communal or structural violence, these experiences may also affect people’s sense of being moral beings and of living as members of a moral community – what is referred to as moral injury. These challenges of conscience, guilt, witnessing and betrayal may lie at the root of addressing trauma and restoring one’s sense of humanity.

This workshop will demonstrate useful clinical and community-engaged approaches based on a resilience framework. Audio installation, expressive art exercises, and case studies will be used to illustrate how this approach is widely applicable to families of various classes and cultures.

Learning Objectives:

• To expand the understanding of trauma as an individual and collective experience, requiring both individual and collective responses including the strengthening of collective resilience
• To attain concepts and research on moral injury in individuals and exploring how moral injury can be a collective experience requiring collective social action
• To examine methods of working with collective trauma and moral injury in clinical and communal contexts

Presenter:

Jack Saul, PhD is the founding director of the International Trauma Studies Program (ITSP), a research and training institute based in New York City. ITSP is committed to enhancing the natural resilience and coping capacities in individuals, families, and communities that have endured and/or are threatened by traumatic events. He has served on the faculties of New York University School of Medicine – Department of Psychiatry, the New School for Social Research – Clinical Psychology Program, and Columbia University – Mailman School of Public Health. As a psychologist and family therapist, he has created a number of programs both in NYC and abroad for populations that have endured disaster, war, torture, and political violence. His book Collective Trauma, Collective Healing, documenting his experience, was published by Routledge in 2013. Dr. Saul is currently working on a public arts and conversation project entitled Moral Injuries of War about the need to have a national public reckoning about United States war-making and war culture. See www.jacksaul.org

← Return to Workshops