
Contributed by Patrick Dougherty
10 Results
New Perspectives on Intergenerational and Collective Trauma
Our growing understanding of intergenerational and collective trauma is challenging therapists’ standard treatment methods. Recognizing that some trauma can be inherited—or be shared by groups, communities, ethnicities, and nationalities—can open up new avenues of healing, especially for clients who otherwise seem hopelessly stuck. In this recording, you’ll learn to identify and process the subtle signs of intergenerational and collective trauma in your clients, and potentially yourself.
Read More
The Collective Trauma of War
Focusing on the symptoms of PTSD is not enough when working with veterans. We need to help them understand the larger society that wishes to forget the horrors of war and its shared responsibility for them, and how that reinforces their intense feelings of isolation and difficulty integrating back into the civilian world. This recording will offer an innovative way for vets to gain agency and bring a clearer awareness to understanding the emotional burden they carry.
Read More
New Perspectives on Intergenerational and Collective Trauma
Our growing understanding of intergenerational and collective trauma is challenging therapists’ standard treatment methods. Recognizing that some trauma can be inherited—or be shared by groups, communities, ethnicities, and nationalities—can open up new avenues of healing, especially for clients who otherwise seem hopelessly stuck. In this recording, you’ll learn to identify and process the subtle signs of intergenerational and collective trauma in your clients, and potentially yourself.
Read More
The Collective Trauma of War
Focusing on the symptoms of PTSD is not enough when working with veterans. We need to help them understand the larger society that wishes to forget the horrors of war and its shared responsibility for them, and how that reinforces their intense feelings of isolation and difficulty integrating back into the civilian world. This recording will offer an innovative way for vets to gain agency and bring a clearer awareness to understanding the emotional burden they carry.
Read More
Covid Comes to Therapy
Navigating Collective Trauma
For a few years now, I’ve worked with groups around the world to address collective trauma. Our focus is usually on something that had happened elsewhere and in the past: never had I imagined that, with the advent of COVID, I’d find myself so deeply entrenched in an immediate and ongoing collective trauma. One group of men, with whom I’d been working for many years, was particularly affected. Read More
Therapist Peer Groups, the "Emotional Lifeboat"
Doing Self-Care by Yourself Isn't Always Enough
In the sea of trauma that surrounds us in our daily lives and in our offices, self-care is a life jacket. But collective trauma needs a collective response. Being part of a group of therapists dedicated to talking about vicarious trauma and sharing their own experiences is more than a life jacket—it's a human lifeboat, one with more resilience than we could ever generate alone. Read More
The Heart Speaks
Does Love Have a Role in Psychotherapy?
The Bridge
Facing disaster in your own backyard

Patrick Dougherty
Patrick Dougherty, MA, LP, has over 40 years of clinical experience. He is also working with an international nonprofit that works with intergenerational and collective trauma around the world (pocketproject.org). He has just completed his 3rd book, a teaching memoir,My Trauma Was Never Just My Trauma: We Had It Wrong. Learn more at movingthroughit.org.