Living Between the Waves

What if the most important work of our time is not preparing for the next wave—but strengthening what lies between them?

It can feel as though the world is holding its breath.

Before we've had time to recover from one tragedy, another arrives. Natural disasters, war, racial violence, forced migration, political upheaval, and economic uncertainty no longer feel like isolated events. Increasingly, they continue to arrive in waves.

Between these waves lies a liminal space—a threshold between what has happened and what is still unfolding. This is where many of us now live.

Collective trauma is more than a shared experience of tragedy. It is the cumulative impact of living through repeated uncertainty. Over time, it changes how we relate to ourselves, to one another, and to our communities.

Our awareness narrows.

Psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and literary scholar Ian McGilchrist suggests that under prolonged stress and uncertainty, we naturally become more focused on certainty, control, and categorization while losing access to equally important human capacities such as curiosity, imagination, context, and relationship. We become more reactive than reflective, more drawn toward certainty than curiosity, and more focused on control than connection.

In turn, collective trauma separates us from ourselves, and in doing so, it separates us from one another. When we lose our capacity for self-reflection, we also lose access to the empathy, imagination, and creativity that healthy relationships require.

This is a deeply human response. Yet it is not the only one.

Again and again, disasters reveal something extraordinary. In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores how communities responding to disaster often discover generosity, cooperation, and a profound sense of belonging. In our own work, we have witnessed the same truth. During times of crisis, people instinctively move toward one another. Compassion, courage, and shared purpose emerge naturally.

The question is not whether this capacity exists. The question is what repeated waves of collective trauma do to our ability to sustain it.

In one of the final chapters of Collective Trauma and Human Suffering, The Collective Truths Within the Waves, we suggest that every wave reveals something essential about our humanity. The waves do not create connection—they uncover it.

The tragedy is not that our humanity emerges during a crisis. It is in the fading afterward. At Bridge to Belong, we believe the space between the waves is where our most important work begins.

Collective healing is the restoration of awareness. It is the process of reconnecting with ourselves while reconnecting with one another. As awareness expands, so does our capacity for reflection, compassion, collaboration, and hope. As we reconnect with ourselves, we become more capable of reconnecting with others. Healthy relationships are not simply the outcome of collective healing—they are its expression. This is Collective Healing Action.

Rather than waiting for the next disaster to remind us that we belong to one another, we intentionally strengthen the relationships, trust, and shared practices that allow communities to navigate uncertainty together. We build belonging while isolation threatens. We cultivate trust before it is tested. We create spaces where differences become sources of wisdom rather than division.

The waves may be inevitable. But the awareness we restore, the relationships we strengthen, and the communities we cultivate between them are still ours to shape.Perhaps this is the deepest collective truth within the waves:

Our future will not be determined only by the crises we endure, but by how intentionally we choose to reconnect—with ourselves, with one another, and with the living systems that sustain us.

The invitation is not simply to survive the waves. It is to use the space between them to nurture the awareness, compassion, and collective capacity that allow a more connected future to emerge.

Because perhaps the greatest opportunity of our time is not learning how to control uncertainty. It is learning how to grow together within it.

References

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world. Yale University Press.

Sheffield, M., St. Thomas, B., & Johnson, D. (2024). Collective trauma and human suffering: Energizing systemic change through collective healing action. Cognella Academic Publishing.

Solnit, R. (2009). A paradise built in hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster. Viking.