As a trauma therapist who spends her days working with folks healing from complex relational trauma, this week I found myself sitting with client after client, all of them experiencing the same thing in their bodies: the hot heat of anxiety in our stomachs, lead limbs, the fog of overwhelm descending like a heavy blanket. Collective trauma.
And between sessions? I felt it too — bone-deep exhaustion, a pit in my stomach, and a scattered feeling in my mind that no amount of Athletic Greens or Kava drops in my water could touch.
The Biology of Collective Response
Look, when we talk about collective trauma – and yes, events like contested elections absolutely create collective trauma – we need to understand something profound happening at multiple levels: in our bodies, in our genes, and across generations.
Recent epigenetic research reveals something remarkable: trauma doesn’t just live in our memories or manifest in our symptoms. Trauma literally changes how our genes express themselves, creating biological alterations that parents can pass down. When researchers studied children of trauma survivors, they identified specific epigenetic markers—particularly in genes regulating stress response—that their parents’ experiences had modified before conception.
Those physical sensations you’re experiencing? The difficulty sleeping through the night? The compulsive news-checking and IG scrolling? The feeling of being simultaneously shut down and ramped up? These aren’t signs of weakness or failure. They’re evidence of an exquisitely tuned nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do in the face of threat.
When Personal History Meets Political Present
If you have a history of relational trauma—if you grew up in an environment where safety felt conditional, power shifted unpredictably, and others often invalidated your voice or experience—your responses may feel especially intense right now. Your nervous system draws on its hard-earned wisdom to detect threats, even when you’re no longer in danger.
As preeminent trauma clinician Bessel van der Kolk, MD, writes, “The body keeps the score.” But what’s fascinating is how deeply this scoring goes. Social baseline theory suggests something profound: our nervous systems aren’t designed to regulate in isolation. We’re wired for co-regulation, for sensing and responding to collective threat. And this explains why political trauma can feel so viscerally personal. Our bodies recognize threats to the collective as threats to survival itself.
Let me share some data that might help normalize what you’re experiencing: According to the American Psychological Association’s 2024 Stress in America survey, 69% of Americans report significant physiological stress around elections. For marginalized communities who have historically faced systemic oppression and violence, those numbers climb even higher. This isn’t just about statistics—it’s about survival circuits lighting up in response to genuine threat.
