More than just a public health catastrophe, the COVID-19 pandemic generated a psychological crisis that was both personal and collective. With luck, the worst is behind us now, but one thing is already clear: the emotional stress of those years left its mark.

Alongside (and since) the pandemic, we’ve experienced something else: prolonged cultural distress. In the United States, we’ve been living through some of the most divisive political tensions that our nation has experienced in decades. Many of us scroll daily through news of political and military actions at home and abroad, climate catastrophes, social fractures, and economic uncertainty. Even if the events do not happen directly to us, they register in our bodies.

We don’t simply observe distress—we absorb it.

And while our individual experiences differ widely, what we share is the psychological weight of these cumulative stressors. Identifying this shared trauma is important. When we don’t name collective emotional disruption, we tend to blame ourselves as being lost, less focused, and wondering why we are “not ourselves.”

Consider the role of complex trauma in our collective experience—and in your own life, too.

Complex trauma refers to distress that is chronic, unpredictable, and inescapable. Traditionally, psychologists use the term to describe children growing up with abuse or chaos in the home—situations where the nervous system can never fully rest, and from which children cannot escape.

On a collective level, that framework has touched us over the last several........

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