We set out to explore collective trauma patterns within an organisation or company to understand how the collective dimension of trauma manifests within the day- to-day operations of an organization and as a consequence impacts the fabric of our economy.
The founders, leadership team. staff and all network members of the Collabsoul Community.
After interviewing a number of organisations we settled on CollabSoul (https://collabsoul.com/), a Brazilian network organization. We chose them because their founders showed the clearest motivation, investment and dedication to dive into a deep process with their organization and involve all their members in it. Another reason we decided to work with CollabSoul was its own mission to help unlock dormant potential in companies by fostering collaboration both internally, with external partners and stakeholders that resonated deeply with us. All of us on the facilitation team have a strong interest and dedication to bring the collective trauma work into organizations and companies. We are motivated by the possibility to change how we create value within our current capitalistic society and potentially change the culture of how we and organizations collaborate with each other. <br /> We started out with a group of 15 participants and completed with 11 participants. We met for 13 group sessions from March 2024 - February 2025.
We invested a lot in educating the group about the role of resources in this process and building trust by:
Framing our approach to create understanding, f.e. also explaining these steps
Always starting with a check-in
Always doing a guided meditation to become more present
Regularly do triads to create more intimate spaces
Invite them to triads in between the sessions
Explaining resourcing and spending time to identify and share resources
As this group had little prior exposure to and experience with (collective) trauma we gave them an introduction to trauma in the first few sessions and then explored with the group in guided meditations, plenary sharing and in triads. We also invited the leaders to share first, to create a sense of safety.
We went into deep explorations of personal trauma through guided meditations, homework for the participants to dig into their family and personal history and many sharing sessions. Many of the participants, while being Brazilian nationals, have long immigration backgrounds primarily from Europe. We dedicated a few sessions to exploring and sharing these backgrounds as well as their experience of cultural and societal frameworks that they encounter in their personal as well as professional lives. A lot of the deeper exploration was done personally by the participants in homework we gave them to dig deeper and observe these patterns directly in their lives.
Our main tool here was to dive into guided meditations and then share in the plenary as well as in triads. Especially the combination of guided meditations and plenary sharing unearthed a lot of deep patterns.
We did not have as much time for the last two themes since we had to do a lot of trust building, education about the notion of trauma and establish basic tools of transparent communication etc. Most of all the group realized that in order to help other organizations collaborate better they needed to start with themselves first and address a number of issues internally. They had a number of concrete ideas on how to reshape their internal culture. The main theme was to empower members/employees outside the founders and leadership team:
To learn and deepen skills that are required for deeper collaboration (transparent communication, deep listening, etc.).
Re-shape internal structures to allow members/employees to participate in defining the direction of the organization.
Give members/employees more agency in decision making etc.
Create spaces for members to get to know each other better and exchange about their wishes, challenges and ideas.
The transformations of a number of participants was deepened through the triads they organized themselves and therapy they arranged for themselves throughout the lab.
We observed quite mixed results within the group.
A handful of participants had quite deep transformations, learned a lot about themselves, their filters and seemed to have made some pretty drastic shifts in their lives both personally and professionally.
Most participants perceived that they had tapped into another way of being, interacting and collaborating with each other but since they could not fully reduce those notions into a clear cognitive framework they were still in the process of digesting the experience both for themselves as well as their professional lives.
The founders/leadership team had a quite confronting experience meeting their own shadows, how they bring those into the organization and what effect that had/has on their work environment. Throughout the process they transformed quite a bit, evolved as leaders and made a number of changes in their organizations.
A small number of participants decided to leave the CollabSoul network since they realized that they are not as aligned with the overall goal of the CollabSoul and the flavor of collaboration.
In addition to personal and immediate organizational changes the whole group realized that their big ambition to change the economy and companies in Brazil gave way to more empathy and the realization that they needed to start amongst themselves.
Thank you so much for your interest in participating in an Integration Lab of the Pocket Project! We appreciate your time and consideration in filling out this application. Because Integration Labs are intensive, you can only apply to one lab.
You are welcome to fill out the form in the language the lab is offered in.
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Підпишіться на наші інформаційні листи. Допоможіть нам зцілювати колективну травму та зменшувати негативні ефекти для нашої глобальної культури.
Reinier Tilanus 
English