We built our democracy on trauma responses. Here's how to rebuild it on healing.
When the tools we need don't exist, we must create them.
Signs of trauma are everywhere. In the burnout epidemic gutting newsrooms. In the hypervigilance seeping into our politics. In the 64% of Americans carrying childhood wounds into boardrooms, classrooms and communities where they may unconsciously respond to new challenges like old battles. When I walked away from The Washington Post last year, my body was saying what my mind previously had refused to admit: The systems we've built to inform, govern and care for each other are running on the same adrenalized, scarcity-driven stress responses that nearly crushed me.
But here's what I've learned since leaving daily news — the same forces that create vicious cycles of collective trauma can be redirected to create virtuous cycles of healing. And we finally have a roadmap to do it.
My awakening to this began with a hard truth. For decades, the competitive pace of deadline-driven newsrooms had been perfect cover for the hypervigilance and high tolerance for stress I'd developed growing up in an unsafe home. These survival skills were superpowers that gave me an edge throughout my career. But after covering the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, I realized I didn't want my success shaped by chronic stress responses — the fight, flight, freeze and appease modes that had become my default.
The more people I talked to about this — from CEOs to politicians, academics to activists — the more I realized how many of us are caught in dysfunctional patterns we didn't create but can't seem to shake. What I was hearing wasn't individual weakness; it was evidence of systemic breakdown. Perhaps the silver lining of America’s mental health and democratic crises is that we are finally acknowledging something is drastically wrong and we can’t pin it on one person’s moral failure.
The root of our collective crisis
I left daily news to develop what I needed but couldn't find: stories, resources and tools that address not just the symptoms of our collective dysregulation but the roots of it: Trauma.
Trauma is a wound from overwhelming experiences that affects every part of who you are — your body, brain, relationships and sense of meaning. It's woven into how our institutions operate, how our communities function and how we relate to each other, creating patterns of reactivity that touch everyone, even those who didn't experience the original wound.
If you’re skeptical of the scale of this, please know that the economic burden of health conditions associated with adverse childhood experiences among U.S. adults is $14.1 trillion annually. And if you survived childhood unscathed, about 70 percent of people will still experience a potentially traumatic event, and six percent of Americans will have PTSD, at some point in their lives, according to the Veterans Administration. This deserves our attention — both in prevention and intervention.
For the past year, I've been working to address the trauma compromising our collective wellbeing. I've also had the honor of helping bring a powerful new tool into the world through Georgetown University’s Red House, a research and design unit led by Dr. Randall Bass that develops new educational and social paradigms for healing and justice.
A framework born from collective wisdom
The Red House Journey Framework is designed to help communities, organizations and institutions become places where people naturally thrive by addressing obstacles they might not even know exist. It synthesizes three established approaches:
Trauma studies: How overwhelming experiences affect people
Community psychology: How groups of people think and behave
Transitional justice: How societies heal after conflict or harm
This isn't just another wellness initiative or workplace improvement plan. At its core is rehumanization, the process of restoring human dignity and recognizing the inherent value of all individuals. The framework synthesizes decades of research from trauma studies, systems thinking and healing movements from the Global North and Global South into accessible approaches to understand how trauma begets trauma and, more importantly, how healing can beget healing.
The framework captures the virtuous and vicious cycles that evolve when we do — or do not — meet adversity with individual, communal and systemic support to ease harm and foster repair. It is a roadmap to design a healthier future. Along with it, we provide navigation tools: lenses for understanding trauma and its transformation, intervention points and paths to repair to identify, disrupt and reorient vicious to virtuous cycles. The tools are not exhaustive and we consider them an offering to be adapted to each users’ context and culture. I will explore them more in future dispatches as well as in workshops and keynotes. If you’re keen to turn anxiety into agency and action, we should talk.
Paradigm-shifting is often left to science fiction writers. But this work emerged from a collaboration between the Red House and The Wellbeing Project, a global network of changemakers, during the covid-19 pandemic, when wars, state violence and political upheaval were pushing frontline workers beyond their ability to cope. My co-developers — convened by Bass, the Red House director and Georgetown's vice president for Strategic Education — include Dr. Mays Imad, a neuroscientist and Connecticut College associate professor who's a nationally recognized authority on the neurobiology of learning; Dr. Kathy Powers, a University of New Mexico political scientist recognized for her work in transitional justice and global reparations; Red House Senior Program Developer Duncan Peacock; Red House Research and Program Associate Kendall Bryant; Red House Senior Learning Designer for Transformational and Inclusive Initiatives Ijeoma Njaka; and former Red House research associate Kate Barranco. Our work also draws on the wisdom and counsel of global trauma and social change practitioners including Prof. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Prof. Rhonda V. Magee, Dr. Richard J. Davidson and Dr. Suraj Milind Yengde, among others.
The power of recognition
Last month, I had the privilege of co-presenting this work with Imad and Bryant at The Wellbeing Project's Hearth Summit in Ljubljana — a gathering of 900 changemakers, artists, entrepreneurs and philanthropists from 90 countries. I worried that my story would be too U.S.-centric to resonate internationally. I was wrong.
After our workshop, people from Bangladesh, Bosnia, Cambodia, Canada, Senegal, South Africa, the U.K. and beyond found me to say that my story was their story, too. They had experienced, witnessed or perpetuated trauma's effects in their institutions and communities. They needed the paths to repair we were illuminating.
Standing on that stage, I felt profound validation of a choice that once seemed impossibly risky. I was candid about the inner healing I had to embark on to lead to outer change. In doing so, I gave hope and, in return, I received it from kindred souls who know we deserve better than the status quo. This, in a way, is the framework in action.
It recognizes that healing happens simultaneously across three interconnected levels:
Individual: How trauma and healing manifest in our bodies, behaviors and beliefs.
Communal: How our relationships and shared resources either perpetuate harm or cultivate wellbeing.
Systemic: How broader structures and institutions either support human flourishing or undermine it.
The power lies not in addressing these levels separately, but in understanding their dynamic interconnection. Personal healing strengthens our capacity for collective care. Trauma-informed communities enable individual thriving. When all three levels work in harmony, we create conditions to make intergenerational wellbeing as inevitable as intergenerational trauma.
Tools for transformation
These aren't abstract concepts reserved for therapy sessions. They're actionable approaches that can transform how we run companies, design curricula, shape policies and relate to each other.
The framework and its navigation tools reveal the fact that trauma's rupture isn't just individual — it shows up in our neglect of people and the planet. It manifests as addiction, polarization and dysfunction at every level. It acts like tenured professors and presidents who feel untouchable because everyone around them is in survival mode. When we can see these cycles clearly, we can begin to interrupt them.
The framework helps that process. It reveals that people on different sides of disagreements and conflicts are often suffering from the same systemic failures playing out at different times in different forms. This doesn't excuse violence or absolve responsibility, but it offers a path toward understanding that makes healing possible for everyone involved. The suffering we don’t want our kids’ kids to experience? There is a way out of it.
Living the framework
I know this works because I've lived it. When I began applying the framework’s lenses to my own healing experience, I could finally explain how I reconnected to my sense of self after the Jan. 6 trauma revived past trauma. My healing process, which included accountability and resistance to the forces that injured me, has enabled me to make decisions that allow for genuine connection while maintaining healthy boundaries. I want this for everyone.
Imagine if more families, communities, schools, workplaces and governments infused intergenerational wellbeing plans into their cultures. Imagine if philanthropic organizations made these outcomes a condition of giving and investors measured success partly by a reduction in harm. Imagine how much time and money we’d save by not repeating the same mistakes over and over and over.
Imagining is how we begin building something different. I’m proof of this. I now create media that examines the connections between mental health, democracy and wellbeing without dysregulating myself or the public I serve. (At least I hope so. Please let me know.) I'm a trained neuroscience-based resilience specialist, weaving this expertise into my work while individually empowering people to avoid the burnout cycles that nearly destroyed me. I’m developing workshops to bring this framework to communities, organizations and newsrooms. Hell, let’s bring it to Congress! I'm working with Georgetown's Psychology Department to evaluate these approaches. And I'm learning to let people know that I'm doing most of this without sustainable funding and I need angels, partners and evangelists to make this mission possible.
An invitation to begin
The work ahead isn't easy, but it's necessary. And it's already begun. Right now, leaders in newsrooms, boardrooms and communities worldwide are asking the same question: How do we build something better than what we inherited?
I ended my anxious attachment to daily journalism to help answer that question. If you're ready to interrupt the patterns that no longer serve us — in your organization, your community or your own life — I’d love to hear from you. The change we've been waiting for won't happen to us. We create it, together, one conscious choice at a time.
The framework is ready. The need is urgent. The only question is: Who's in?
I hear from a lot of folks who are worried about democracy and the mental health crisis but they don’t know what to do. If these ideas resonate with you, please email me at kate@katewoodsome.com to explore how we might bring them to your work and world. The more of us who understand how to interrupt cycles of harm and cultivate cycles of healing, the closer we get to feeling better together.
— Kate