12/09/2025
Healing Together: My Deepest Lesson from a Lifetime of Listening
For most of my life, I believed that the world’s problems could be solved with knowledge, system thinking, and better leadership. I applied my engineering knowledge to studying human biology, hi-tech medicine, and the function of healthcare systems. As a doctor and health leader, I spent decades trying to make a difference in this way. However, the new insights that I gleaned in my more recent work as a trauma therapist have changed my beliefs forever.
I now see the same root cause behind so many of the crises that terrify us today: the widespread hatred, violence, loneliness, greed, inequality, ecological and climate collapse, and even the hollow drive for power and control. That root cause is trauma.
When you sit with enough people, as I have, and hear the raw truth of their stories then a pattern becomes obvious. Ordinary childhood wounds of emotional neglect, bullying, loss, humiliation, social exclusion, and feeling unsafe, leave scars. These scars don’t just shape individuals; they ripple out to shape families, communities, and whole societies. Worse still is the actual abuse, such as physical violence or sexual trauma, that some individual suffer.
Trauma disconnects us. It disconnects us from our own feelings, from trust in other people, and from a sense of belonging in the natural world. A disconnected human being is left frightened and hungry with an ache that can never be filled. That ache is met with all kinds of personal strategies to ease the pain: inflated egos, achievement at any cost, grasping for wealth, power-seeking and endless consumption. It also turns into numbness and despair. Behind every mask of greed or cruelty is someone who is still in pain.
I see it clearly now. The billionaire elite who exploit our planet and create staggering inequality are not simply ‘bad people’. They are deeply traumatised individuals. Greed is what happens when trauma is in charge.
And the rest of us? We live in a society that reinforces our pain. Hyper-individualism has become a religion. We are told to fix ourselves, all alone, with self-help books or apps, as if healing were a private project. But that is the opposite of what our biology needs. Human beings evolved as social creatures. We are wired to calm each other’s nervous systems through touch, through compassionate presence, through love.
I cannot count the number of people who have told me, with deep shame, “I should be able to fix myself by now.” And yet what they really needed all along was someone who felt safe enough to hold them while they unravelled.
Here is the good news. Healing does not have to take years. It does not require complicated techniques or professionals with advanced qualifications. I have seen people who have carried the heaviest pain for decades find relief within minutes—when they are supported with the right conditions.
This is the work I now call Somatic Compassion (https://somaticcompassion.org/)
It’s not therapy as most people think of it. It’s a way of coming together, person to person, heart to heart. When two people create a field of safety and trust, something remarkable happens. The body lets go. Memories that have ruled a life lose their sting. The heart begins to feel again.
I’ve seen it in mothers and sons, in best friends, in couples on the edge of breaking apart. I’ve seen it in people who walked into the room weighed down by years of shame and walked out with tears of relief and a deep breath in their lungs. That’s how powerful connection can be.
And I believe this matters not just for our personal lives, but for the survival of our species.
What would happen if enough of us healed together? What kind of leaders would we choose? What kind of decisions would those leaders make if they were no longer driven by fear? How much more courage could we devote to caring for each other and for the Earth?
If trauma lies beneath our global crises, then healing is not just personal work. It is planetary work.
This is why I am dedicating the rest of my life to this: showing ordinary people how to come together, gently and safely, to help each other heal. No one needs to be an expert. No one needs to do it alone.
Every time two people reconnect in love, it ripples outward. It changes families, communities, and, eventually, the world.
This is where hope lives.
It lives in us, together.
