A dear friend and colleague of mine Myron Lowe says: “Given any group, trauma is always present, and when it shows up it demands to be addressed.”

We generally think of trauma in terms of an individual’s mental health capacity or wellness, but rarely are we aware of how it drives group dynamics. A group can be of any nature: friends at a bar, colleagues in a business meeting, family at a reunion, students in a classroom and/or protesters at a march.

When trauma drives the meeting, the “wound” is pressing toward the surface because it is trying to be healed. It is by repeating the same wounds over and over again that we learn them, and eventually, through practice learn to transform the trauma and make different choices.

But how do you know that trauma is driving the conversation? The main signal is that people are no longer responding to each other, they are reacting to each other. The difference between responding and reacting is most easily described as the difference between inquiry and survival. This video by the Conscious Leadership Group lays this out clearly. The image below by Discovery in Action, sums it up, too:

But how can we tell that people are reacting instead of responding?

When trauma is in the driver seat, the trauma triangle of perpetrator-victim-savior is being perpetuated. In my forth-coming book Give Me Back My Child How the USA System Kidnaps Children I write about some red flags that let you know trauma is in the driver seat:

• Constant Criticism: When one is constantly criticizing and there is no formative insight, the person criticizing often ends up the role of perpetrator, or perceived as such. If you have nothing positive to say about something, you’re likely in survival mode.

• Blame: When we are blaming others, we are not taking responsibility for how we are contributing to the dynamic. When we blame, we are also assuming we are victims in the other person’s hand.

• Victim Narrative: The victim narrative is perhaps the strongest of all the symptoms of trauma. When we perceive ourselves as victims, we are generally revisiting an earlier experience of trauma, where were victimized. While sometimes the trauma is current, it is most often the recollection of a prior experience. When what happens in the present connects our brains to a traumatic event in the past, our brains and bodies are in a trigger state and cease to be present to what is actually happening.

• One-Way Help: When we try to help someone from a place of I-know-better, without genuine curiosity for what’s happening in their world, we are actually behind “helping” is a pretense of superiority. That superiority is demeaning and inevitably triggers trauma and is triggered by trauma. Expecting to be the indisputable “expert” is often the way professionals react to their triggered trauma.

When one of these four red flags are raised, it’s usually because trauma has already started driving or is about to. When we experience Individual trauma, the responses are freeze/fight/flight or tend-and-mend.

In other words, people try to survive the trauma by, freezing, fighting, fleeing or tending to others to rescue them. These four reactions happen in groups as well, but look slightly different:

• Hypervigilance (Freeze): our primal brains can sense danger, and triggered trauma can become violent. When this a trauma is triggered, suddenly the room can feel like the air got sucked out of it and everyone is sitting on the edge of their seat. Quiet
• Raised Voices (Fight): While anger is an emotion on typical emotion-scales like Plutchik’s wheel of emotions, psychologists are calling it a secondary emotion because it is generally hiding other emotions. Raised voices typically indicate that a button has been pushed and that there are agitated emotions under the surface, that relate to past hurts. There is a range to what raised voices may look like: from a slight increased volume, to a full-blown rampage. How dare you?
• Checking-out or Leaving (Flight): People can leave a group mentally or physically. Mentally, they may simply disengage, physically, they may leave the room. I’m getting out of here…
• Attempting to Fix Feelings (Tend-and-Mend): Mediation is an honorable tool, but when it’s practiced as a trauma-response, it is ineffective because it is driven by fear. True mediation is grounded in allowing people to be heard, so they can transform the conflict into an opportunity for the group to learn, grow, and expand. When mediation is offered inside of a reaction to trauma, it typically ignites the trauma further, because it is used as a way to silence others, not to truly listen. Let’s all calm down, I’m sure we all have good intentions…