Hosted by Kosha Joubert. Produced by J’aime Rothbard.

What’s the impact on women when men bring the war home? And how might military veterans, their families, and the societies that sent them to fight engage in collective healing?

As a journalist, Matthew Green spent years reporting from conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and across Africa before returning to his native Britain to write Aftershock: Fighting War, Surviving Trauma, and Finding Peace, a book documenting the struggles of former combatants and their families to find new ways to heal from psychological scars of war. 

In this episode, Matthew and Kosha Joubert, the Pocket Project’s CEO, explore the dilemma so many women face when the task of caring for husbands or partners suffering from post-traumatic stress makes it impossible to stay – but equally impossible to leave.

Matthew and Kosha go on to reflect on the ancestral dimension of war trauma — including how traditional concepts of masculinity have long been used to stigmatise expressions of vulnerability, and the enduring impact of the World Wars on the collective male psyche. The dialogue also explores Matthew’s work in the Resonant Man, a visionary men’s initiative he co-founded with Jacob Kishere, which grew in part from their shared call to address these unacknowledged wounds. 

Matthew wrote Aftershock before he discovered Pocket Project co-founder Thomas Hübl’s work on collective and inter-generational trauma. In the light of these new perspectives, Matthew and Kosha ask how a more collectively oriented approach might help many more military families to integrate the burdens they carry on their nations’ behalf, and what role the Pocket Project might play in making this work more accessible to veterans and their loved ones. 

With Aftershock soon due to be translated into Ukrainian thanks to a grant from the Peterson Literary Fund, Matthew and Kosha, building on recent Ukraine-focused episodes of What Is Collective Healing? also imagine what new possibilities there may be to expand the Pocket Project’s 

Ukraine Trauma Relief Project. 

“Ultimately, I think it is our destiny individually and collectively to become catalysts for healing. We’ve forgotten who we are through centuries of war, of oppression, of all the systems that we know so well that are dividing us from one another,” Matthew says. “[But] if we can remember our true identity underneath all these layers of conditioning, all of these historical injustices, all of the stories, we are exactly the medicine that each other needs.”  

This episode will be a resource for anyone who wants to understand how the trauma of war travels into the heart of the family, and the nuanced ways in which victim and perpetrator identities so often collide in individual soldiers. With military families left to carry these wounds alone for generations, this conversation will also inspire all those ready to explore the new potentials that emerge when we recognise that just as we’re all shareholders in the systems that wage war, we all have the potential to serve as agents of healing.

This dialogue was recorded for the World Women Summit 2026.

World Women Summit 2026: Registration is Open

Pocket Project World Women Summit 2026

Further Resources:

Resonant World (Matthew Green’s Substack newsletter)

Resonant Man

Aftershock: Fighting War, Surviving Trauma, and Finding Peace

Peterson Literary Fund

The Enemy Within (Audio Documentary by Falling Tree)

DeSmog

About Matthew Green: 

Matthew is a journalist, author and co-host of What Is Collective Healing? He is also co-founded of  co-founder of the Resonant Man  visionary men’s initiative. 

In a former career, Matthew spent 14 years as an international correspondent for the Financial Times and Reuters, covering conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and reporting from countries across Africa. His book Aftershock: Fighting War, Surviving Trauma, and Finding Peace documents the stories of military veterans and their families seeking new ways to heal from the psychological scars of war. 

Today, he is deepening his exploration of trauma-restoring forms of media as global investigations editor at DeSmog and creator of Resonant World, a newsletter serving the global trauma healing movement. He lives in London with his wife Genevieve and their daughter Matilda.