Community Healing

Groups counter trauma-related isolation by letting people share vulnerability, learn together, and see others suffering and healing. The article treats trauma as something that can affect whole communities, cities, schools, and countries. In the Kosovo trial, trained rural high school teachers led mind-body skills groups with students, and more than 80% no longer had PTSD afterward. In Gaza studies, 80% to 90% of participants with diagnosable PTSD no longer had it after ten or eleven weekly sessions, with gains holding over time. In Gaza, 900 local people were trained and the model was shared with about 170,000 people. For war zones and disaster areas, the article favors training local people over relying on outside experts to treat everyone individually.