By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Last updated April 2026

Taking Care of Ourselves and Each Other After Charlottesville

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • August 19, 2017

Last updated: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

When the World Breaks Open

There are moments when the world breaks open in a way that makes it impossible to pretend everything is fine. Charlottesville was one of those moments. The images, the rhetoric, the violence, and then the response from the highest office in the land that refused to name what had happened clearly, created a kind of collective rupture that landed differently depending on who you are, what you carry, and what you’ve already survived.

You may be sitting with this right now, not knowing quite what to do with the weight of it. You may be cycling through grief and rage and numbness and a kind of disoriented sadness. You may be wondering whether to post, to protest, to call your representative, to text a friend, or to simply close every screen and tend to your own corner of the world. All of those responses are legitimate. All of them are human. And none of them requires your apology.

This post is for everyone who’s feeling the weight of what happened, who’s trying to figure out how to care for themselves while also caring about the larger world, and who needs a grounded, honest place to start. There are no tidy answers here. But there’s genuine care for where you are, and some practical guidance for moving through this particular kind of heaviness.

What Is Collective Trauma?

Collective trauma is the shared psychological and physiological response to events that threaten the safety, dignity, or survival of a community. Unlike individual trauma, which is processed in a primarily personal context, collective trauma is experienced in relationship, the fear and grief are shared, amplified by the responses of everyone around us, and shaped by the social meaning we make of what happened.

What makes Charlottesville a collective trauma event isn’t just the violence itself, though that’s significant. It’s the constellation: an organized gathering of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in a major American city, a fatal attack on counter-protestors, and a national response from political leadership that refused to name white supremacy as the evil it is. This combination, violence, organization, and the failure of protective systems, is the specific signature of collective betrayal trauma. And it lands particularly hard on those who have already learned, in their own histories, that the systems designed to protect them can fail or refuse to do so.

For Black Americans, for Jewish Americans, for LGBTQ+ communities, for immigrants and people of color, and for all who love someone in these communities, Charlottesville echoed a pattern of harm that’s not new and not historical. It’s present and ongoing. The visceral response to watching it unfold isn’t dramatic. It’s honest. And it deserves to be named as such.

What distinguishes collective trauma from ordinary distress is the way it disrupts the most fundamental of human needs: the need to belong to a community that’s safe. Sociologist and trauma scholar Kai Erikson, professor emeritus at Yale University, described collective trauma as a “blow to the basic tissues of social life” that damages the bonds of community that hold people together and provides the scaffolding for individual healing. When those bonds are damaged, when we look at the people around us and are no longer sure who’s safe, who shares our values, who will stand with us, the isolation compounds the original injury.

This is why community is so essential right now. Not community in the abstract, but actual, present, specific human connection. The phone call. The gathering. The shared meal. The physical presence of people who understand what you’re feeling. These aren’t luxury items in the aftermath of collective trauma, they’re medicine. And for women who have learned to manage everything alone, who have built their self-sufficiency into an identity, the act of reaching out and receiving care can feel almost as hard as the original injury. It’s worth doing anyway. The community of readers is one place to find that kind of connection.

The Neurobiology of Witnessing Violence

One of the most important things to understand about the response many people felt in the aftermath of Charlottesville is that it wasn’t merely emotional, it was neurobiological. When we witness violence, even through a screen, our mirror neuron systems activate as though we’re present in the scene. The nervous system doesn’t cleanly distinguish between watching harm happen and experiencing it directly, especially when the people being harmed share our identity, values, or community membership.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, writes that the body’s response to threat is automatic and precognitive, occurring before the thinking brain has fully processed what’s happening. These weren’t melodrama. They were the honest expression of a nervous system that had registered something threatening and was responding accordingly.

The amplification that occurs when prior personal trauma intersects with collective trauma is also clinically significant. A woman who grew up in a household marked by unpredictability, targeted harm, or the failure of protective systems, and who then witnesses that same pattern playing out at the national scale, isn’t just processing the current event. She’s processing the current event on top of every earlier experience of the same emotional texture. That’s a different and heavier load. And it deserves to be acknowledged as such.

How Collective Trauma Shows Up in Driven Women

In my work with driven women, I’ve observed that collective trauma events like Charlottesville tend to activate one of two primary responses: collapse or compulsive action. Both are understandable. Neither is the whole story.

Zoe is a 37-year-old attorney at a large firm. She’s organized, disciplined, and extraordinarily capable under pressure. In the days after Charlottesville, she found herself completely unable to concentrate. She’d open a brief and stare at it. She’d write an email and not be able to remember what she was trying to say. She told me: “I know logically that I have work to do and it can’t wait. But my brain keeps going back to those images and I can’t make it stop.” What Zoe was experiencing is exactly what the neuroscience would predict: a nervous system that’s using its cognitive resources to process a threat signal, leaving fewer resources available for the complex executive functioning that her work requires.

For women who have learned to use achievement and activity as their primary regulatory strategy, this particular kind of incapacitation can feel deeply destabilizing. The thing they rely on to feel okay, their competence, their capacity, is temporarily offline. Working with a therapist who understands both relational trauma and nervous system regulation can help you build a wider repertoire of regulatory strategies so that when your usual methods fail, you’re not completely without resources.

The second pattern I see frequently is the opposite: compulsive engagement. The woman who can’t stop reading, can’t stop scrolling, can’t step away from the terrible news because stopping feels like complicity or abandonment. This compulsive checking is also a trauma response, the vigilant scanning for new information that the nervous system believes will somehow make the threat manageable. It doesn’t. More information doesn’t resolve the grief. It just keeps the nervous system activated.

Both collapse and compulsive action are forms of dysregulation. The goal, not easy, but worth working toward, is regulated engagement: staying present to what’s happening, allowing yourself to feel it, taking purposeful action when it’s available, and deliberately protecting your capacity so you can sustain engagement over time rather than burning out in the first forty-eight hours. Executive coaching built around nervous system regulation can help you develop exactly this kind of capacity.

Self-Care That Actually Helps When Nothing Feels Okay

There’s no one right way to respond to what happened. Our individual trauma histories, our varying emotional capacities, our different relationships to the communities most directly harmed, all of these shape what each of us needs right now. What I want to offer isn’t a prescription but a range of options, and an invitation to check in with yourself about what’s actually going to support you.

Some things that genuinely help:

Limit your media consumption strategically. There’s a difference between being informed and being continuously activated. You can set windows for when you check the news and protect the rest of your day. You can designate one or two trusted sources and avoid the rest. The compulsive checking, the return to screens again and again as though more information will make it better, is a nervous system activation pattern, not a coping strategy.

Feel your body. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Cook something. These aren’t escapes, they’re regulation strategies. The nervous system heals through the body, not around it. Movement, especially rhythmic movement, activates the parasympathetic system and creates space for the emotional processing that needs to happen.

Be in community. Grief is social. Find the people who share your values and your grief, and be with them. Not to fix anything, just to be witnessed. The isolation of carrying this alone compounds it significantly. Connecting with a community that holds similar values is one of the most protective things you can do.

Channel your energy concretely. If the energy of anger or grief is overwhelming you, find one concrete action to take, a donation, a phone call to a representative, showing up to a community event. Concrete action counteracts the helplessness that’s one of the most destabilizing features of collective trauma.

Both/And: You Can Grieve and Still Show Up

Here’s the Both/And of this moment: you can be genuinely devastated by what happened and still be someone who shows up, who engages, who doesn’t give up on the project of building something more just. These things aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, the grief, when it’s felt fully rather than bypassed, is often what fuels the most grounded and sustained engagement.

Both/And also means: you can prioritize your own nervous system right now and still care deeply about what’s happening. You can take a break from social media and still be a person of conscience. You can not have the answers and still be trustworthy. The pressure to perform certain kinds of visible engagement in the immediate aftermath of a collective trauma event is real, and it’s often a pressure that does more harm than good, pushing people into compulsive activity rather than allowing the grief to move through at its own pace.

Mira is a 40-year-old nonprofit leader who told me that after Charlottesville, she felt pressure to immediately post, to respond publicly, to demonstrate her solidarity visibly. She did, and then felt exhausted and hollow afterward. What she actually needed was to sit with her own grief first, to feel the full weight of it, before she could act from a genuine place. “I was performing allyship instead of actually being it,” she told me. “And I couldn’t tell the difference until I stopped.” The Both/And isn’t permission to disengage. It’s an invitation to engage from an honest place. Building the capacity to tolerate difficult feelings without bypassing them is fundamental to this kind of sustained, grounded presence.

There’s a specific kind of Both/And that I want to name for the driven women who are reading this who have also historically been the people who hold things together for others. You may be the one your friends call. You may be the one your family looks to. You may be the one your colleagues expect to be composed and functional even when the world is on fire. And you may be doing all of that while simultaneously carrying your own grief.

Both/And for you looks like this: you can be someone others rely on and you can also need support. You can show up for others and also be held. You can be someone with enormous capacity and also have limits that deserve to be honored. You don’t have to be the one who doesn’t get to fall apart. And if you never fall apart, if you never let the grief move through, you’re not actually coping, you’re storing. And stored grief doesn’t disappear. It accumulates. It shows up later, in your body, in your relationships, in the patterns you can’t quite explain. The work of healing includes making space for your own grief, not just as a favor to yourself, but as a prerequisite for the sustainable engagement the world actually needs from you.

The Systemic Lens: Why Racism Is a Trauma Issue

White supremacy and racial violence aren’t separate from the work of psychological healing, they are, in fact, some of the most profound sources of collective relational trauma in American life. The clinical community is increasingly naming this clearly: racism, experienced over a lifetime, is a form of chronic traumatic stress. The vigilance, hyperarousal, and somatic symptoms documented in populations experiencing racial discrimination mirror those documented in other trauma populations.

For clinicians and therapists, it’s not enough to address individual symptoms without acknowledging the systemic context that produces them. A Black woman who comes to therapy carrying anxiety, hypervigilance, and difficulty trusting, and who’s experiencing those symptoms in part because of the lived reality of racism, isn’t simply managing an internal disorder. She’s managing the psychological cost of navigating a system that hasn’t been safe. Naming that clearly, and validating it as the appropriate response it is, is the beginning of genuine clinical care.

Charlottesville is a reminder of what many communities already know in their bodies: the promise of safety isn’t equally distributed in this country. And the systemic forces that produce that unequal distribution, racism, white supremacy, economic inequity, are psychological issues as much as they’re political ones. I don’t have the answers to these systemic problems. But I believe naming them clearly, and refusing to sanitize them into individual pathology, is part of what it means to do this work with integrity. The first step toward healing, collective or individual, is always honest acknowledgment of what’s true.

The systemic lens also asks us to consider the role of witnessing in healing. We can’t individually fix the systems that produced Charlottesville. But we can refuse to look away. We can name what we see. We can insist on the language of justice rather than the language of “both sides.” And we can invest in the communities, therapeutic, political, spiritual, local, that are doing the slower, harder work of building something different. That investment isn’t separate from personal healing. For many people, engagement with justice work is itself a form of healing, a way of transforming grief into purpose, and helplessness into agency. What matters is that the engagement comes from a grounded place, not a burned-out one. Which is why taking care of yourself right now isn’t a detour from the work. It’s the work.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written extensively about how relational trauma changes the way the brain processes threat, attention, and self-perception. The amygdala becomes hypervigilant. The medial prefrontal cortex. The part of the brain that helps you contextualize what you’re feeling. Goes quiet. The default mode network, where the felt sense of self lives, becomes muted. None of this is metaphor. It’s measurable, and it’s reversible. The therapies that actually move the needle for driven women. Somatic work, EMDR, IFS, attachment-based relational therapy. Are all therapies that engage the body and the implicit memory systems where this material is stored.

How to Care for Yourself and Others Right Now

There’s no one right response to what happened. But there are things that help, and things that don’t. Here’s what I want you to know:

You’re allowed to not know how to respond. Confusion, ambivalence, and not knowing what to do are all legitimate responses. They don’t mean you don’t care. They may mean you’re overwhelmed. That’s different, and it’s allowed.

Take care of your own nervous system first. You can’t show up for others, whether that means your children, your community, or the larger work of justice, from an empty tank. The self-care that allows you to remain functional and engaged over the long haul isn’t self-indulgence. It’s infrastructure.

Find your people. Right now, being with the people who share your grief and your values is one of the most healing things available to you. Don’t carry this alone. Reach out for support, to friends, to community, to a therapist, if you need it.

Take one concrete action. If you’re feeling helpless, identify one small, specific thing you can do: a donation, a call, a letter. Helplessness is one of the most destabilizing aspects of collective trauma. Concrete action, even when small, restores a sense of agency.

The wound is real. The grief is real. And the capacity to move through it, not around it, is also real. You don’t have to have this figured out. You just have to keep showing up, in whatever way you can, to the work of caring for yourself and those around you. That’s enough for today. And it’s not nothing.

If what you’re reading here’s landing with a particular kind of recognition, if the patterns I’m describing feel familiar not just from the news but from your own life and history, that’s worth paying attention to. Collective trauma often serves as a doorway into personal healing, precisely because it strips away the ordinary defenses and leaves us more permeable to what has always been there. Understanding your own relational patterns is a good place to start. Working with a therapist who can hold the complexity of both your personal history and the current cultural moment is an even better one.

Collective trauma reminds us that healing has never been purely individual. It’s always been relational and communal. The work of tending to ourselves in the aftermath of violence isn’t a distraction from justice; it’s a prerequisite for it. You can’t sustain the long work of being present and engaged in the world if you’re running on empty, if your nervous system is perpetually flooded, if you have nowhere to put the grief. Caring for yourself is how you stay in the fight. That’s not a luxury. That’s a strategy. And if you need support in building the internal capacity to do that sustainably, I’d welcome the conversation.

We don’t have to have the answers to do the work. We don’t have to be okay to be present. We just have to keep showing up, to ourselves, to each other, to whatever small corner of the world we’re responsible for, and trust that the cumulative weight of all those small acts of integrity will matter. Because they’ll. And you matter. That, too, isn’t nothing.

The cultural water that driven women swim in deserves naming explicitly. Joan C. Williams, JD, distinguished professor at UC Hastings College of Law, has documented extensively how women in high-status professions face what she calls the “double bind”. Judged harshly when they’re warm (read as not competent enough) and judged harshly when they’re competent (read as not warm enough). Add a relational trauma history to that bind, and the inner monitoring becomes nearly continuous. Healing has to include a clear-eyed look at how much of the exhaustion isn’t yours alone. It’s a load you’ve been carrying for systems that were never designed to hold you.

Warmly, Annie

Stephen Porges, PhD, the developmental psychophysiologist who developed Polyvagal Theory, describes neuroception as the way the autonomic nervous system continuously evaluates safety beneath conscious awareness. (PMID: 35645742) For driven women raised in environments where attunement was inconsistent, that internal safety detector tends to run on a hair-trigger setting. The room may be objectively calm, but the nervous system isn’t. Healing isn’t about overriding that signal. It’s about slowly teaching the body that the rules of the present are different from the rules of the past.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PMID: 38198456.
2. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. PMID: 19795402.
3. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. PMID: 40735382.
4. Neff KD, Bluth K, Tóth-Király I, Davidson O, Knox MC, Williamson Z, et al. Development and Validation of the Self-Compassion Scale for Youth. PMID: 32125190.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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