00:01:15 Matthew
For me, the real edge of this is asking what role journalists can play in recognizing the role of trauma underneath the crises that we see in the news. Whether they’re big geopolitical crises or breakdown in our community or sensational crimes, even the way our politics is conducted, we see trauma, individual collective, ancestral trauma playing out on the world stage again and again. But that’s not really a conversation that most journalists have really had.  For me, and then this is really the the edge I’m at is really the question I’m walking is how can I take my growing understanding of these mechanisms and how trauma works at a collective level and integrate that with news coverage, both in terms of what we write about, how we write about it, or cover it, and also how we present and receive the news? How can we steward the experience in a more trauma informed way? How can we create spaces to come together in community and really relate to these overwhelming crises we’re now facing in a way that extends co- regulation to the group and allows us to really meaningfully relate to what’s going on in our world rather than feeling overwhelmed, numbing out, understandably disconnecting because it’s all too much. There’s many layers of exploration that I’m now engaged in, but I feel that there is a vision wanting to materialise of an entirely new media system actually, rooted in this understanding, and dedicated to trauma restoration and integration, and I think that’s the update that our industry now needs.

00:03:13 Rosemary
This is The Gifts of Trauma Podcast, stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry.

00:03:26 Kevin
You’re very welcome to this episode of the Gifts of Trauma podcast from Compassionate Inquiry. My name is Kevin Young and today I’m with Matthew Green. And Matthew, just to let you know, I am very curious. I’m very curious about you. I’m very curious about what you do. I’m very curious about your desires and hopes and aspirations for the field of work that you find yourself in or fields, I think that’s definitely appropriate. There are many fields of work. I have a question that just arose for me during the grounding and I wonder would it be OK that I ask it, just as we begin?

00:04:05 Matthew
Please, Kevin, I feel very honored to be invited on this amazing podcast and I warmly welcome your curiosity. So everything is on the table.

00:04:16 Kevin
Thank you. I’ve just returned from a trip to India, visiting the temple of the Dalai Lama, and doing other lots of lovely Buddhist things in the north of India. And a particular interest of mine is consciousness, spirituality, and I mean that in a very grounded sense. So it’s not some aloof transcendence sort of or, or physical form. And you said, I want to take a breath to remind myself that I am in a body. Tell me a little bit more about that statement.

00:04:47 Matthew
I’m just taking a breath to remind myself I’m in a body before speaking to you. I think what I’ve learned or what I’ve begun to appreciate on my journey of healing and my exploration of consciousness is just how often I haven’t been in my body, how I’ve been cut off from my emotions. And I’ve been, all my experience has been dominated by my thoughts, my mind, my cognitions, or my stories about the world. And I think this is a pretty common predicament that we find ourselves in, in our modern culture. And in a way it’s reached such pandemic levels that it passes as completely normal. We don’t even recognize how disembodied we’ve become a great deal of the time. And there’s an intelligence often for this level of disembodiment. If we’ve experienced trauma. If we’re facing continual stress, then of course we will retract or energetically remove ourselves from that experience and go up into our head. So I don’t want to make this response wrong, but it certainly has a cost. And I know that in my own life, particularly as I was working overseas as a journalist, working in conflict zones, I paid a heavy price for that disembodied month. I became cut off from my intuition, from my emotions, and repeatedly over the years that led me to crash, essentially. And it was the final crash, if you will, the worst and in a way, in some ways most humiliating for me as a journalist. That really forced me, I would say, to start walking a healing path which has led right up to the doorway of the conversation we’re about to have.

00:06:53 Kevin
Thank you. You mentioned it a little bit there, Matthew. And one of the central points of Compassionate Inquiry and Gabor and Sat Dharam’s work is not what happens with these things. You talked about the crash and I’ve read about periods of depression and difficulties that you might have faced. But one of the really important questions that we like to ask is: How did it help? How was it useful? And, and I heard you mention it a little bit, I wonder if you would elaborate a little bit on how, in your experience might it be useful for someone to disconnect? How might that help them?

00:07:32 Matthew
I think when the body is overwhelmed with fear, survival, terror, shame, grief, we have an inbuilt mechanism that helps us to continue to respond to the situation we’re in to survive, but at the cost of splitting off that overwhelming emotion and pushing it down into the unconscious. And that works in the moment, because it’s kept our species alive. It’s how our ancestors have survived through all the trials and tribulations that they’ve experienced over thousands of generations. The problem is that when we don’t have spaces where we can acknowledge what’s happened, where we can safely unwind that stored trauma from the body, we start to suffer symptoms. And of course those can show up in a wide variety of of forms, from depression to anxiety to addictions to phobias, compulsions. I would argue that virtually every phenomenon that we categorize under the label of mental health problem, at its roots is a trauma response of some kind. And I know in my case, you mentioned depression, the overwhelm. When my system was no longer able to continue processing what I was holding, I would just shut down. Basically. I would go into a really deep depression that often didn’t really make any sense to the people around me because the ostensible trigger or event, although negative, wasn’t necessarily in proportion to my reaction. And I think I realised as the years went by, recognised, that actually what was happening to me in those moments was a trauma response. But it wasn’t helping me. It had stopped being adaptive and had actually turned into a huge source of suffering for both myself and people around me.

00:09:29 Kevin
It’s really interesting, what you say just there, because quite often when people move along through their life and decide to heal, it is when this adaptation that you’ve mentioned, that having the adaptation is more painful then doing the healing work. And you talked about it. It was useful because it helped you deal with what you were having to see and report on. And then at some point that adaptation became too painful and you realized that you needed to do something about it. Would that be fair to say?

00:09:59 Matthew
Yeah, that, that’s exactly right. I could perhaps bring the story into sharper focus, if you like, by just telling you a bit more about what happened at a particular moment in my career. I spent years working as an international correspondent for big media organisations, Reuters News Agency, the Financial Times. I worked all over Africa. And then I was based in Pakistan and Afghanistan at the height of the military intervention, the NATO intervention in Afghanistan in around 2009 onward. And it was really at that point where I hit a wall. And I hit the wall, actually, not in Afghanistan, but because I had pressed my editors so hard to send me to Libya, where the civil war had just broken out. Because Afghanistan was no longer exciting enough, in my own twisted logic at that time, when as a journalist my sense of self-worth was defined so tightly in relation to the attention the story I was writing was receiving, that to be marooned in Afghanistan when the civil war was breaking out in Libya seemed like torture to me. Which sounds unbelievable to my older and wiser self looking back. But that was the reality. 

And I’d certainly been in stressful situations in Afghanistan. One time I was in a hotel that was attacked by suicide bombers who killed the guards but were then themselves killed by other guards, which was, I can recognize now, a trauma that I hadn’t processed at all at the time. And there were other incidents also, obviously, that led to that accumulation. But the real issue, if I’m completely honest with you, is that it was actually a relationship breakdown. A week into arriving in eastern Libya, as the rebels were rising up against Colonel Gaddafi, I learned that my recently ex-girlfriend had started seeing another journalist. And that actually sent me spiraling into a very deep depression and I had to go home. I had to put my hand up and say I can’t deal with this. I have to give up on this assignment that I pushed for and literally go back to my parents house as a sanctuary and try to put myself back together. And then I think about a week later, Osama bin Laden was killed by the US Navy Seals. Undoubtedly one of the biggest stories of my career. In some ways, the whole justification for me being a correspondent based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and I missed it because I was so in pieces that I wasn’t able to function. 

And that of course then sent me spiralling even deeper. And it was that experience of really feeling, and this is a very strong word, but it felt like a crucifixion to me. I felt like I had lost the relationship that I believed was crucial to my well-being, and I felt like my career had collapsed. And in retrospect, I can see that perhaps neither of those stories were entirely true. But at the time, that was my experience and it plunged me into a dark night of the soul which took me many months to recover from. And it was actually that dark night that prompted me to go to North India and undertake a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat, which I would say was a turning point in my life and a direct portal, if you like, to the journey that I’ve been on ever since. I can trace it back to almost one moment in that meditation wall, which I had only gone to because I had been brought to my knees by events, the circumstances of my life. Even though in the eyes of many around me, my life was still intact, basically. But in my own mind, in my own story about myself, everything had fallen apart.

00:14:05 Kevin
Just curious, Matthew, was it in Tushita? Were you in Tushita Meditation Centre?

00:14:10 Matthew
It was actually, if I can remember the name, it’s in Mcloyd Gange, which is just outside of Dharamsala.

00:14:17 Kevin
Wow. That’s where I was just last week. I spent some time in Tushita.

00:14:21 Matthew
Yeah, it’s a long time ago. It was back in 2011, I think it was a few years ago now, but it was a life changing 10 days for me, no question about it.

00:14:32 Kevin
Matthew, the mre you speak the more curious I get, which is fascinating. And, and I loved how you described Afghanistan. Not exciting enough: There were just suicide bombers killing the guards and killing themselves and yet this isn’t exciting enough. And then the idea of this crucifixion of missing the biggest story in the last 20 or 30 years in that type of media. And the question that arises for me is what did you make that mean about you? What did that mean that you had missed that? What were you telling yourself about yourself at that stage of your life?

00:15:05 Matthew
Well, I felt like a failure. I felt I failed in my relationship and I felt I failed as a journalist and I felt suicidal as a result. I really felt a sense of failure that, it defies logic, but it’s an irredeemable failure, a sense that these failures are irretrievable. There’s no chance of repair. There’s no way to get this back. That’s that. And, and I can recognise now that’s a young part absolutely that feels this is forever, that this suffering will last forever, that this is just how life is. And that’s the difference, I think, between sadness and depression. It’s that if I had been able to grieve in a healthy way, if I’d been able to feel the grief I was in and experience that and let that move through me, I could have recovered. I could have processed what had happened and recognised that life goes on both in relationships and career. But I can look back now and see that the depression was actually protecting me from those feelings. It was the depression that was almost a, it was like a wall to stop me from feeling. But of course the cost of that was that I was like the living dead. I wasn’t able to function, I wasn’t able to think, I could barely read. 

So this defence mechanism was so extreme that it was actually causing me far more harm than the healthy emotions that it was defending me from. But at that time it was just, the experience was just engulfing darkness of hopelessness, of despair and feeling like actually I might be better off dead than going through this. And that sounds now, in retrospect, melodramatic. But in that moment, the feeling of being engulfed, of being almost enmeshed in this dark web is real and persuasive. That it does feel like maybe death is the only answer to this. And that’s, for me, the essence of depression.

00:17:15 Kevin
Matthew, thank you for sharing what you just shared. I really appreciate your authenticity and your honesty. And I know you haven’t trained in Compassionate Inquiry and I know that you’re doing some facilitation training around trauma. And the phrase of Gabor’s that that speaks to me just as you were talking is that he says that “It’s not feeling your feelings that will kill you. It’s trying not to feel your feelings that will kill you.” Yeah.

00:17:41 Matthew
That is such a beautiful statement of my then predicament, and I can see it now. At the time, it’s just unending. It’s so obvious as we sit here. Like looking back, that was the mechanism, the protective mechanism that was actually killing me. But when you’re wearing that headset in a way you can’t see out of it, there’s no way to realize that this is something that I was actually doing to myself and I couldn’t connect with the grief that I needed to feel. And that was the disembodiment and that was the disconnect. And I recognize now that I’ve been living most of my life like that. I’d been running around in these conflict zones in Africa, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And at one level I was having a good time. Actually, I was telling myself, this is great. This is my career. I’m doing well. I’m getting recognized. And I enjoyed the work.  I really loved being a journalist. And no question about that. I felt a very deep call to that work, but at the same time, I look back at that younger version of myself with a lot of compassion. There was some fundamental disconnect between the story that I was telling myself about who I was and who I actually was, what I really felt. And the two were not meshing. And I now recognize that my crucifixion experience and I recognize that’s a big word to use. But at that time, it really felt that way to me. It felt like I was forsaken. I’d lost everything. And I recognize now that some wiser part of myself knew that I needed that. I needed to be brought down. The false self, if you like, actually had become so misaligned with my deeper soul, if you like, the essence of who I am and my real needs, that it almost staged the intervention, a cosmic intervention. 

And of course, I didn’t realize this at the time, but now I can look back with more peace around that whole episode and recognize that it was something that actually had to happen. It was ultimately what set me on the path I’m on now. It was absolutely necessary and that’s why I like speaking to other journalists who often go through something very similar, because it can be the doorway to an awakening to a much higher level of awareness and consciousness. But it’s like going through the eye of the needle, as my friend Stephen Marshall would say.  At the time it’s all being torn down. We resist and cling and we’ll do anything to avoid that pain. But it is the portal to a more authentic way of being if we can find the support and the practices and the communities that can help us to arrive there.

00:20:28 Kevin
Thank you, Matthew. Matthew, I saw you and breathing a little bit deeply a moment or two ago and can I check in with you? What are you doing?

00:20:36 Matthew
Yeah, I feel connected to that younger part of myself or that part of myself who was going through that ordeal. And actually, I’m recognizing how painful it was and I feel compassion for him. I feel, I feel, almost like I’m reaching back in time now as we’re sitting here recording a podcast, speaking to many listeners, attempting to, in a sense, refine what was being taught to me, that was such a painful lesson to learn, and yet one that I think does have value in the sharing. I’m almost reaching back with a healing intent to my younger self. It’s almost as if there’s a kind of connection established through time that is nourishing me, back then. And there’s a real joy in that. There’s a real sense of here’s the circle turned. If I could have told you back then when you were languishing in that depression, and I’ll say the word self pity, in the story of me and my life gone wrong, me as a failure, the victimhood, yeah, all of those patterns and shadows were really very alive in me. If that version of myself had known that this conversation would be taking place in late 2024, it would have put a very different complexion on that ordeal that I was going through. So I have a sense that my younger self is also here and listening. And maybe that’s why I feel a sadness in myself, I feel a kind of almost tears and a sense of release, yet also a kind of joy and a welcoming and A and appreciation Kevin for you asking that question and letting that part of our process together come alive in that way.

00:22:31 Kevin
Thank you for sharing. I just wanted to honour it. I just saw it. I saw it on your face and just thought, yeah, that’s a beautiful moment there of witnessing another human being reflecting on a difficult time of their life that was obviously very painful. Again, thank you for your, your authenticity, Matthew, this is a point where you know, you’re already beginning to speak about your healing, your journey, the work that you’ve done. And I really want to focus on the work that you’re doing in that world of journalism. And you talk about a tipping point around trauma informed journalism. Before we do that, would it be OK if we go just a little bit further back? Because I’m really curious about your story too. And you said something there that to not get this big scoop, not get the big scoops of the century, that meant I was a failure. So that belief, to not succeed at that very highest level. The little that I know of journalism, I know how competitive it can be to get the first story and the deadline and the big headline, etc. Would you be willing to tell us a little bit about how far back does it go, that you might have believed that if you didn’t do amazingly well, that you were a failure? How far back does that go?

00:23:45 Matthew
I would trace that pattern in my conscious memory to, I would say 7-8 years old. I remember I was incredibly diligent at a very young age about my spelling homework, and I had to get 20 out of 20, correct. And if I didn’t get 20 out of 20, it was just terrible and a catastrophe. And I was fortunate in that, in a way, the school system rewarded that, in a sense, because I was able to study hard and I was able to achieve good grades. And in that system, in the education system, I was able to create a scaffolding for myself because I was able to earn the validation and the sort of standing within that system. I don’t want to say easily, but I worked hard and I got good results. And that felt like a virtuous cycle to me. As I look back, I could certainly recognize that even quite young, I was very attached to doing well and being regarded as among the best, if not the best. 

And that story of having to be the best was later on a source of huge pain and suffering. And I can look deeper now, and again now, going back to that even younger version of myself and recognize that there was something else missing. There was some ground or some capacity to land within myself, within my family system, to feel secure, or innately secure, regardless of fluctuating fortune if you like, that hadn’t come online and a big part of the reason I’m now co-leading a men’s group is that I see that as partly to do with my father and the trauma he suffered. The trauma that my grandfather suffered in World War One, the trauma that my great-grandfather who also served in World War One as an older soldier, suffered. A kind of frozen-ness in the male lineage. And there’s a bigger story here about why I was attracted to war zones and why I was effectively in uniform as an embedded journalist in Iraq and Afghanistan,  in some senses, and what was playing out at a kind of bigger ancestral level. But to answer your question, yeah, I can really see now that because I lacked that kind of masculine ground within myself, I was looking for it outside, and that was always going to be a strategy that was eventually going to fail. And it failed in a pretty spectacular way. There’s still a smudge and a trace of pain over it, but I can also see it in a much bigger perspective. And this kind of conversation helps me to see that actually there was a much, much bigger story unfolding, and that episode was part of something much larger.

00:26:51 Kevin
Matthew, the beautiful thing that I’m noticing about sitting with the journalist is you’re almost doing my job, because you’re asking the questions that I’m about to ask. And I’m conscious I want to spend a lot of time talking about your work. But you’ve brought us to a point and I’m really curious as how does a young man yet took this where there’s a quote I was reading from you and you mentioned that already, the idea of living the dream. Which was reporting in Afghanistan and suicide bombers and war and and Palestine and Africa and during Iraq and etc. And calling this living the dream, because I would call that living the nightmare. How? How does that happen for a young man? What drives that?

00:27:38 Matthew
In my case, I think I would answer this question differently as a result of the trauma work I’ve done. But at least the kind of official version that I would have told until relatively recently is that as a teenager I was listening to BBC journalists reporting on the first Gulf War in 1990, hearing their dispatches from Baghdad on the radio and watching images of them riding around on armoured vehicles in the desert. And I thought that looks like a lot of fun, getting paid to travel abroad and have adventures. But you don’t even have to join the army. You can come and go as you please. I never had any intention of joining the military, but there was a part of myself that was very drawn to war zones. I used to read books about war correspondents. I even, when I was at university, did an internship in the Nairobi Bureau of Reuters, which was an amazing experience getting closer and closer to these conflict zones. And I was really fully committed to witnessing war. So when the Iraq invasion was getting underway in 2003 and I was among a small group of Reuters journalists to be picked to be embedded with invading U.S. forces, this was like a winning lottery ticket to me. In fact, I remember I was in the US Marine unit, and I actually requested to be moved to a more forward unit than the one I was in, which was already pretty forward. 

And I was fully signed up for this experience. And so that’s why I refer to it as living the dream. It was a kind of Teenage Dream come true. And I also paused as I say that because we’re talking about wars in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, countries devastated by appalling suffering. Yet to me at that time that was almost incidental, that the desire to be a war correspondent, to be in the thick of the action, was so strong that these were background considerations. It felt to me like a very legitimate ambition to hold and to achieve, in fact. Why did I see the world in that way? My dad was baffled by this. I can look back now and recognize how disturbing it must have been for him when I was signing up for all these assignments. And I’m a parent now myself. I’d be absolutely terrified to see my daughter going off into these kinds of situations, and he had no inclination in that direction. 

But I’ve now recognized that I had my military grandfather, great grandfather, and perhaps most significantly, my great uncle who was killed in World War 2, actually murdered by the S S after being captured as a prisoner of war in Italy. And he rode across the desert in armoured vehicles with the Allies in North Africa. He was in the thick of the action. He was in proper combat, so were the others, but he actually ended up paying with his life for that. And I recognize now that there are too many overlaps between the themes in these previous generations and my own fascination with war and conflict and even the places that it led me to, for that to be coincidence. And it’s only now that I’ve gained that perspective and managed to feel like I have more of a connection with these ancestors and have really felt the grief that my family carried that was unready, unacknowledged and unexpected. Unprocessed really for generations, but which I’ve really connected with. But it’s become clear to me like the story of my 14 year old self was part of something much, much deeper than I had any idea of at that time. And it’s only in retrospect that I can see that there was a lot more going on in that ambition than I realised.

00:31:42 Kevin
Thank you, Matthew. And just there I noticed in my own mind this version of yourself a few years ago that wasn’t able to achieve what was coming down through that lineage, why it felt it so hard, and I wonder, could we just check in with the version of yourself that was crucified by this inability to get this big story and just say to him, dude, I get it. You were holding up four or five generations of desired achievement. And he wasn’t able to complete that. I’m sure that devastated him if that’s what he was carrying.

00:32:20 Matthew
Yeah, and also there’s a feeling of release from it because what I, what I’ve also recognised, I think I’ve perceived much more clearly since I’ve actually stopped working in conflict zones and in war situations, is the evil of war, the actual energy of war. And it sounds like a strange thing to name, but I’ve had flashes of, of just the depths of the darkness and the evil that war actually is. How we avoid that as a society How quick we are to wish our forces into action in some form, How often shallow our grieving or our attempts to reintegrate military veterans are. And how much of a historical legacy as a former empire we have, for the wars that we’ve waged all over the world at enormous cost to the inhabitants of these lands, not to mention our own forces, but the shadow perpetration, if you like, that we carry collectively due to this imperial past. All of this kind of has become more available to my awareness, and the depth of it and the horror of it is almost, it is overwhelming. It’s not something I could hold on my own. And it’s only in these doing the group collective trauma work with Thomas Hubl that I’ve had glimpses of that. It’s almost like a like an altered state of consciousness where I’ve really felt, wow, this is what the truth of war really is. And so that fascination with the idea of proving myself in those environments dissolves at that moment, because actually the horror of it is my great uncle being put up against the wall and shot. Or my granddad in the Western Front being wounded, or my great-granddad as a machine gunner. The horror of that is really the story here, not the lack of glory or the failure to achieve. It’s recognizing that story of achievement is the illusion and releasing it in the most ancestrally, culturally, collectively. And if I had to feel like I was being crucified for that, and I used that word again, like it’s a strong word, but that was the feeling I had at that time that I was being impaled on this, in this experience. If that’s the price to process some of that and wake up out of that illusion and see that’S actually an illusion and in a sense, download that realization and let that ripple out through the collective, then yeah, I’ll take that on. And that was my job and my piece to do. And that’s the healing for me. And that’s, I think the nature of healing at a much deeper level, is to recognize that we’re all carrying a piece of something collective. 

We privatize our pain. We imagine that the suffering we’re carrying is our story. It’s something that is about our life. If only I could have been different. If only I could fix myself. If only I hadn’t done this or that. Like we, we individualize our pain and trauma, but it’s never an individual experience. It’s always part of something ancestral, collective. We’re always carrying a piece of something on behalf of these fields, if you like. And when we recognize that reality, our process, our healing becomes a gift to the collective. And I think if there’s one part of my work or my understanding that has really clarified in recent years it’s this. And it’s finding a way to help people who are really in the middle of this journey, who are really in the depths of their former to understand that they’re not alone with it, that the nature of the experience is collective. It’s just that we’re socialized not to see it. When we realize, that’s when something much bigger opens up and we can open to our role as healers in our own way as well.

00:36:31 Kevin
Thank you. And I can hear your passion around that, Matthew. I it’s beautiful to hear as you’re speaking. I’m sure you have, but I’m just curious, have you read David Hawkins, Power versus Force?

00:36:41 Matthew
I actually haven’t, but I probably should.

00:36:45 Kevin
He just talks a lot about that, those fields that we’re talking about. And the measurements in his book, it’s all about measuring those feelings and how that happens. But yeah, understanding that this collective trauma is a field. It’s a shared field. Yeah. And it is more than one young man’s burden to carry.

00:37:04 Matthew
Yeah. And when you’re in it, when you’re in it, it feels exactly like it’s just my burden. No one can understand. I’m on my own, I’m alone, I’m the odd one out. I’m the failure. Part of the nature of the trauma is that we individualize the experience, that’s encoded into the mechanism that’s part of the trauma. So when we can recognize that and start to dissolve that and build cultures that know that, so that when I’m presenting with my collapse, my crucifixion experience, however, that shows up for us, yeah, we may seek one-on-one therapy and that’s super important, but that doesn’t, the danger with that is it consolidated this idea that I’m the one holding the problem and this person’s going to come and help me and make me better. Whereas actually, when we recognise that we’re shareholders in these collective trauma fields, that we’re inheriting this trauma, that it’s the latest manifestation of a very old pattern that is now ours  to work with and clear. It changes the whole story of what healing is and also what trauma is. And it’s so much more empowering to recognize that truth. Once we’ve recognizes that truth, that in a sense is the healing, because we can’t hold the trauma in the same way. And we have a natural impulse to connect with other people, to move towards ethical restoration, to build healing communities, to have conversations like this. And we find that capacities that we didn’t even know we had start to come online. We start to be able to connect to people, to relate with much more precision, to attune more effectively, to be in a relationship with people in a different way. And that’s the reward. That’s what we can embody once we’ve moved through the eye of that needle, even though when we’re in the middle of that process, it feels like it’s never going to end.

00:39:05 Kevin
Yeah. Thank you. That’s beautiful. And I really want to offer here, Matthew, that for anyone that is at that point, in the eye of that needle, there is hope that there is a way forward. There are things, people like you talked already about Thomas Hubl, that your other work will touch on. There are ways of helping yourself come to the realization this is not mine to carry. “This is not mine to carry by myself.” And there are few people with similar experiences who may be a little further up the path, who may be 10 or 15 years from the breakdown that may be able to say to you, I get it, dude, I get it. This is how we feel when we’re in this state. So Matthew, you talk a lot about this tipping point, this tipping point in journalism and how the media presents itself or presents a version of the world to itself how it did do that. And then with the tipping point, there’s obviously then a post tipping point. What’s going to come after that tipping point? Tell me a little bit about your thoughts around that. So this pre tipping point and post tipping point and what can we do when when we’re at the tipping point?

00:40:17 Matthew
In terms of journalism, recognizing the importance of trauma and its role in trauma and mediating the conversation around trauma.

00:40:26 KevinIn terms of journalism, being able to more broadly speak in the language that you you’ve just used over the last 10 or 15 minutes.

00:40:34 Matthew

Yeah, I love this question. And, and and I’m by no means the only person thinking about these questions. There are many others working on this I think. Let’s start with where the industry has been and I’m talking now particularly about big media organisations of the kind that I used to work for. For a long time there was a real lack of awareness of trauma. I remember doing, I think it used to be called hostile environment training, which we used to be given before we deployed to war zones. And there would be ex British Army soldiers teaching us about land mines and flak jackets and how to bandage limbs and all these kind of first aid and security protocols, which is super helpful. But there was very little about psychological injury or the risk of trauma. And actually in my experience since then, in all the years I was working in these environments, it was often people who actually suffered mental health problems, trauma, addiction, breakdowns of various kinds who were much more likely to be casualties than anyone actually being physically injured. That of course happened, but I think in World War One, the casualty rate of psychiatric casualties versus actual physical casualties was like 3 to 1. It follows that even in journalism, the number of people who are psychologically wounded or injured is far more than the number who are actually physically injured or killed, although of course that does also happen. 

But for a long time the industry was really in denial about this. There was this kind of macho culture, a fear that if correspondents started to talk about their psychological distress that they wouldn’t be sent on big stories. I wrote a book about military veterans and looking for new ways to heal from trauma. In many ways I think the British Army, although it’s often been criticised on this front, was way ahead of the media industry in actually recognizing the reality of psychological injury and putting in systems to try to prevent or treat it. 

So for a long time the media was in denial. I think more recently there is much more recognition that journalists can suffer trauma and not just those who go and work in dangerous places. For a start, working in even mainland US has become pretty dangerous as a journalist, right? And whether it’s a climate disaster, or mass shootings or just the level of political polarisation and threats and intimidation of journalists, you don’t have to go somewhere thousands of miles away to be at risk. 

But also there’s a recognition in more newsrooms that of the risk of vicarious trauma, of secondary trauma. I’m thinking of video editors who look at horrific footage from the Middle East, for example, or from social media feeds. Even data journalists who may be doing a huge project combing over graphic reports of police killing in US can potentially suffer vicarious trauma. 

Then there’s a growing understanding now that this is an issue. And my colleague James Scurry, who’s a senior producer at Sky News and a psychotherapist, was part of the team who organised a conference called Media Strong London earlier this year, which was very well attended by senior newsroom management who really did get that this is something that needs to be taken seriously. 

So there are some encouraging signs and I don’t wanna pretend that is now all resolved. There’s still a lot of work to be done in providing the right support for journalists. But in a way that’s only the very start of the conversation. Because for me, the real edge of this, is asking what role journalists can play in building a trauma informed society. In recognising the role of trauma underneath the crises that we see in the news, whether they’re big geopolitical crises or breakdowns in our community or sensational crimes, even the way our politics is conducted. We see trauma, individual, collective, ancestral trauma playing out on the world stage again and again. 

But that’s not a conversation that most journalists have really had. And for me, and then this is really the the edge I’m at is really the question I’m walking is how can I take my growing understanding of these mechanisms and how trauma works at a collective level and integrate that with news coverage, both in terms of what we write about, how we write about it, or cover it, and also how we present and receive the news. How can we steward the experience in a more trauma informed way? How can we create spaces to come together in community and really relate to these overwhelming crises we’re now facing in a way that extends co-regulation to the group and allows us to really meaningfully relate to what’s going on in our world rather than feeling overwhelmed, numbing out, understandably disconnecting, because it’s all too much. So there’s many layers of exploration that I’m now engaged in, but I feel that there is a vision wanting to materialise, of an entirely new media system actually rooted in this understanding and dedicated to trauma restoration and integration. And I think that’s the update that our industry now needs.

00:46:14 Kevin
As you’re talking, I’m realizing something about myself. I have a deep curiosity about the world and current affairs and what’s going on. And I also recognize that in the last, you know, 6 or 7 years since I’ve become trauma informed, I feel absolutely repelled by media. So recognizing that I am missing out on understanding the difficulties, the grievances, the grief of people all around the world because I just can’t watch how it is all given to me. I can’t watch how it’s fed to me, which is a really interesting paradigm. I’m very curious and want to know, but I just can’t take anymore how it’s given to me in that way that is not trauma informed. There’s something else I’d love to ask you, Matthew, that I’m really keen about, just to see where, see how this lands with you. Gabor and, and Bessel and some of those others Peter Levine and other people, they talk about studies around veterans. Now they’re talking about soldiers. But I imagine exactly the same applies to journalists returning from war who then go on to be diagnosed with PTSD and Complex PTSD. And the studies showing that those veterans who go on to develop PTSD have very high ACE scores, so Adverse Childhood experience scores, almost as if they are bringing their trauma into the war zone. And that’s why I was asking you about how does a young man get himself wanting to go to Afghanistan and call it living the dream? How does that land with you to describe the people like yourself and other journalists… Fergal Keane? I’m sure you’ve heard of Fergal, he’s an Irish journalist who wrote a lot about this. How does that land with you that the people that are presenting the news are actually people who were traumatised before? The very reason that got into presenting the news is because they were traumatized and that is now being mirrored back through their trauma.

00:48:23 Matthew
I think that is 100% correct, because when I look back, I laugh because when I look back at the days that I was out in these environments and the kind of community of correspondence that I was part of, it was pretty dysfunctional. We’re talking about lots of broken dysfunctional relationships, myself included in that, addiction, drinking particularly, and a kind of way of functioning that was adaptive to those roles, but not necessarily adaptive to having a very happy life, actually. 

I say this with a lot of love and appreciation for what my former colleagues do, and many of them are still doing it all these years on. But I think it was Anthony Lloyd, who’s a war correspondent who works for the Times, who’s revered within the industry. And I think in one of his books, he makes this point and he uses a line along the lines of we were like damaged children or, I can’t remember exactly the quote, but he makes this point exactly about himself and his peers. So it’s not just me saying this, I suppose I’m trying to say. But yeah, we end up then with a situation where the kind of industry that is in trying to inform society about these situations, or these crises, is itself staffed to a large extent by people suffering from trauma, which then of course shapes the way that that these crises are covered and therefore potentially reinforces the trauma at all scales and levels of the process. 

And this is something that’s very hard for me to explain in a way, and hard, I can hear almost colleagues listening to me and wondering what I’m actually talking about, because we’re so immersed and we take the system that we’ve built so much for granted that it’s hard to imagine any other way of working. So I agree with you. Just like in the military, we find lots of people with adverse childhood experiences, childhood trauma. I think we would find very similar characteristics in the hardcore group of journalists who chase war zones or chase conflicts around. So that’s for sure. 

But the other thing I wanted to mention, you mentioned your own difficulty in receiving the news because of the way it’s presented. One of the practices that we use in the work with Thomas Hubl and the Pocket Project nonprofit is something called Global Social Witnessing, where we intentionally come together as a community to mindfully attend to an event in the news, often with interlocutors from the ground from Ukraine or from the Middle East or from Africa, who can actually speak to their experience, into a field of listening that we have established, which can be a very nourishing experience for that speaker to be heard in that way. But also for those of us in the audience or facilitating, we’re able to digest and receive what they’re saying at a much deeper level. And our own perspective shifts in a much more profound way than we would experience perhaps just watching CNN or doom scrolling on Twitter. So there are processes and social technologies, if you will, that we can use that really speak to that news fatigue that you’re describing. And that’s, I think, part of what the media industry needs to start exploring as well.

00:51:44 Kevin

What we’ll do is we’ll add some links to that to the show, Matthew, because I would like to explore that further myself and I’m sure there are lots of other people that would like to as well. Matthew, I’m really conscious that we haven’t spoken about Resonant World. You touched a little bit about Resonant Man and, and the men’s groups. There are some takes. We haven’t touched on ad smog. We haven’t touched that. You mentioned a little bit about being an author and the wonderful book that you’ve written. We haven’t talked about the Collective Trauma Summit. We mentioned Thomas Hubl’s name a little bit. So maybe as a final short segment of our conversation, what of all of those things that I have just mentioned is important to you? And I love you to present that to us in a way that might help our listeners connect to you and what might be the best way for them to do that. So what’s important in your work right now?

00:52:32 Matthew
The intention driving all my work now is to really serve as a catalyst to advance the healing of collective trauma at all scales. And by that I mean at the individual level, how it lives in each of us individually, but also how it lives in communities, nations. The whole planet, I feel, is suffering from trauma. That’s why we’re in the predicament we’re in. And the start of that is to make this visible, to make this relatable, to bring this into awareness and communicate about the healing work and the kind of process work I’m involved in with Thomas Hubl and the Resonant Man and the Pocket Project to a broader audience. And that’s really the mission of Resonant World, my newsletter, is to support this growing global movement, which of course this podcast and Compassionate Inquiry is part of many other modalities, communities, teachers, networks all around the world now. Recognizing that we can’t keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. And that underneath so much of the dysfunction and conflict that we are confronting is a legacy of unresolved intergenerational and collective trauma. And I’m talking now in all domains, whether it’s in the wars that we’re seeing, the climate crisis, racism, slavery, colonialism, forced migration, human trafficking, almost every form of human suffering and every flashpoint we read about in the news, underneath it we can find a trauma history. But it’s very rare that the stories are presented in that way. So the goal of Resonant World is primarily to support people who are involved or interested in this work to to provide a meeting point, to write about individuals doing great work in the field, to look at the news through a trauma informed lens, where I share some of my own process of learning and evolution in this field. But more broadly, it’s also to catalyse this biggest shift in the media and to start to build the kind of trauma-integrating media system that we’re going to need if we’re going to start responding to these crises in a way that actually stands a chance of resolving them at their roots rather than continually trying to tackle the symptoms. Resonant World is the best place to find me. That’s my weekly newsletter and the Resonant Man initiative as well, which is a men’s group where we try to put these principles into practice for men.

00:55:10 Kevin
I signed up for this week to Resonant World. So you have one more subscriber from this week. 

Matthew: Fantastic. 

Kevin:
Yes, and I hope many more and particularly as were two men speaking to people that identify as meal. And when I do work… so when I do Compassionate Inquiry circles or even when I hold meditation groups and I do some sound bathing groups, it is usually me and 25 women except when I do men only stuff man tan to show up. But we are vastly outnumbered by the number of women who seem to be prepared to move towards understanding trauma, healing trauma. What can we do about that as a men, to use a very patriarchal statement, What, what can we do about that? What are you doing about that? How do you see that?

00:56:03 Matthew
Yeah, it’s such a huge question and you’re right because I see exactly the same thing in most of the circles and communities that I’m engaged with. But I also have had experience, and I’m sure you have as well that what can happen in a men only space can’t happen to anywhere else in terms of the healing. And I think about what I spoke about earlier, about my ancestors connecting with ancestral wounds that I’ve carried, but also the gifts of my male lineage has happened in men’s spaces. It’s really been fundamental to my own process. And this is a frustration, me and my collaborator Jacob Fischer, have a men’s group called the Resonant Man, which has started relatively recently and has already, I would say, created a really powerful field of deep sharing and commitment among a small group of participants. And I’m literally I was coming home on the train earlier and I was sitting on the train and I was looking around the carriage at some of the guys. I was thinking you just don’t know what you’re missing,  because so many men have heard about men’s work, but it’s just not for me. And I was like that until I went to a men’s retreat, which was actually organised by a friend of mine, David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom back in the day, that opened up men’s work to me. And it was at that retreat I met another guy running a men’s group that I then joined and I was hooked. 

But that was after years of being involved in healing work and self development and spirituality. Now I’m not only an advocate but a practitioner of men’s work. But it took me years to come to it. So I know how big the resistance can be and how many misconceptions there can be around men’s work now, particularly because we’re in a culture where in some ways it’s almost seen as wrong to be a man. There’s this whole narrative around toxic masculinity, which I think is, a super unhelpful term. And there’s a kind of almost a kind of wariness about engaging. Even posting about a men’s group on LinkedIn can feel like quite a transgressive act, right? Yeah, we’re men and we work together. But there are some people who would see that as quite a edgy thing to do. So it’s not easy, but I think all we can do is keep doing this work, offering it, and hopefully it begins to rub off. 

It’s often the men who’ve joined the group, not all of them. Some of them have been subscribers to Resonant World. They’ve seen my evolution and they’ve felt there’s something in that signal that is speaking to them. Others are people I know who have a sense. Oh, yeah. There’s something in this, like the way Matthew talks about this work, the enthusiasm, the way he lights up in talking about the potential kind of. Yeah, maybe I’ll give that a try.  So I think we just have to be our own ambassadors for it and keep offering it, not evangelizing. It’s not for everyone, of course. But I do feel that there’s so many men out there who if they only knew what it was, what it meant to be in a men’s group and what the openings and the potentials and the healing and the expansion and the new ways of relating with women that can come out of that. Because I will say, being in a men’s group transformed my marriage. It was huge, and I’ll say it here for my sex life, it really helped my sex life to be in a men’s group, and maybe that’s for another podcast Kevin but, simple as that. It’s had a huge impact in that domain of my life. And that’s not the only, we’ve barely touched on that topic in our men’s group, but there’s so much that can grow out of it in terms of creativity, how you manage money, how you communicate. Like it’s just almost any issue that you’re struggling with as a man, if you bring it into a men’s space, you’re going to find a level of integration that you’re going to struggle to reach on your own. I’m very certain of that. I think we’re meant to come together and support each other and our culture just doesn’t provide those spaces very often. So we need to build them and keep leaving the door open and hoping that more will hear the call.

01:00:06 Kevin
I hear you they’ll and agree and, and it’s a real passion. It’s a real passion of my own. I, I always celebrate when there’s another token bloke in the room, without any offence to our female defining, or otherwise defining listeners. When I see someone who defines himself as male showing up in one of these spaces, I really go out of my way to celebrate that and say well done because you’re swimming against the tide. So Resonant world is open to all. 

Matthew: Yeah. 

Kevin: And we, we especially welcome people signing up to the newsletter who might define themselves as male or male defining. We want them to come on board because we cannot, I totally believe, Matthew, we cannot heal this world that is traumatized without our, our male population. It just can’t happen.

01:00:51 Matthew
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree entirely. And I, and this is the beauty of the work, is that when we’re almost as men together, we are able to connect in ways that just don’t happen in a mixed group. And it’s often that unlocks something that we then carry out into the world. So we then relate to women in a different way. We serve women more skillfully, more effectively. We’re present to what’s going on in our communities, in our workplaces and our families in a different way. And we have this resource and in the Resonant Man, it’s every week, every Sunday evening in UK time, we come back to that space each week and get a kind of recharge, a power up almost that we know as the week goes through, we have to look forward to. It’s like a kind of oasis or island of coherence in the week that really supports our work in the world. So yes, we want to heal and grow and feel empowered individually, but we’re doing it so that we can show up and participate to serve others. We’re doing it so we can be in service in a more skillful, relational, attuned way. 

And so that’s really what motivates me because I know that it doesn’t just support the men themselves to grow, but it’s supporting everyone they come into contact with. I would never have imagined a few years ago that I’d be co-leading a men’s group. It just wouldn’t have been something that I could have imagined being called to. But now it is something, like even if it’s just me and Jacob turning up like my colleague, we always joke, but even if it’s just us 2, we would feel the flow and feel the energy and the inspiration and feel the kind of spirit of the resonant man with us. But we’re fortunate that we have a small committed group and we do run mixed groups as well of men and women. We bring the men and women together in a different way at times. So we welcome women to follow the resonant man as well because there’s opportunities to participate there too. It’s the first first men’s group to allow women.

01:02:53 Kevin
And I can really hear… you talked about how people recognize your passion and enthusiasm and excitement, and I can really hear it right now. As a final, playful, yet serious question, maybe, Matthew, if you could whisper sunbathing into the ear of humanity, O words of knowledge, wisdom, what would you whisper into the ear of humanity?

01:03:19 Matthew
I would whisper you are not who you think you are. You are so much more than you realize, and if you could just slow down a little, and listen, you would hear what’s calling to you. The call of your authentic future.

01:03:42 Kevin
The call of your authentic future writing. Nothing. I promise not to steal it.

01:03:49 Matthew
I probably stole it from someone else, so I think it’s fair enough to share.

01:03:53 Kevin
The call of your authentic future. How beautiful is that, Matthew? I am so conscious that I haven’t been able to ask you and speak to you about many topics, but I’m just curious, is there anything that you haven’t said that you would really like to before we close our conversation? Anything that I’ve neglected to ask you?

01:04:12 Matthew
I would like just to add that on this healing path, one of the insights that has been most powerful for me to integrate has been that we are not fixing ourselves or somehow attempting to return to a prior status quo, or moving towards an imagined state of perfection. When we are really stepping into our pain, stepping through that portal of a real deep confrontation with that darkness that lives in us, those shadows, those ancestral and collective trauma fields, we are becoming somebody new. We are going through a literal process of death and rebirth. That old self, that old restricted persona, is dissolving in some sense, and allowing our true self to emerge. And when we recognize this, when we realize that the work of healing isn’t repair, or papering over or dressing a wound, it’s actually transforming ourselves into who we were always meant to become. And in that journey, the pain and the trauma that we suffered was not only inevitable and unavoidable, it was actually part of what we needed to experience to unlock the door to that authentic self. Then the whole process takes on a different quality. 

And I feel that recognizing that and integrating that understanding, even hearing these words perhaps, can help those of us who are still really working through the most painful parts of that journey to connect with a sense of something bigger, a greater resource. And we may call that a spiritual connection or a connection to a higher cell or something greater, a quality that is wanting us to heal, wanting us to integrate all that troubles us and all that we would label as failure or defeat or anything in our lives that has gone wrong. 

When we recognize that we are in a transformational process, that we are waiting to be reborn at the other end of this, then that, I think, is a frame that can really sustain us when we’re in the darkest part of that tunnel, if you like. And we don’t always hear about healing in those terms. But I feel like that lesson for me has been one of the greatest resources, even as I struggle now in my daily life with whatever trigger, whatever old wound is coming back up, whatever turn of the spiral I’m on. When I remember that this is all part of something bigger and that there is a larger force or connection supporting the process, then it all becomes much easier to bear. And thank you for giving me the space to to speak what is often part of my experience, but doesn’t always find the place to be invited to be said. So I really appreciate you Kevin, for opening such a space of depth and wisdom between us today. So thank you.

01:07:27 Kevin
It has been an absolute pleasure. Matthew Green, thank you so much for appearing on The Gifts of Trauma podcast from Compassionate Inquiry. We are deeply indebted. Thank you.01:07:39 Matthew
Thank you, Kevin. It’s been a pleasure to spend this time with you. Thank you. Thank you so much..