Process history
Giving people the opportunity to process their history in a community-based, safe, and facilitated setting.
The Healing History Project
Healing history, opening possibility.
We help communities process the histories they carry — so old fear does not decide the future.
What is Healing History
History repeats itself because of all the unprocessed historical trauma that cycles. Healing History breaks that cycle by helping people, groups, and countries process their historical trauma and learn positive coping skills, effective systemic change, and how to live trauma-free — and help create a world with less trauma.
Healing History is a series of seminars that can be attended one by one, or as a whole training and certificate program made up of many different seminars and other requirements. Seminars are held in many countries — online in some, in person in others — and taught by a team of teachers. Depending on the country, classes are sometimes online, sometimes in person, or both.
Background
The concept of this training is based on our experience of increasing fear and insecurity, in the growing right-wing extremism and racism in Europe and worldwide, as well as an escalating sense of ‘us versus them’ and a deep yearning to find new patterns in a more and more complex world. We want to bring together people of different backgrounds, faiths, and political interests in order to create an atmosphere of mutual trust and understanding across national boundaries. We want to reduce prejudice against other ethnic groups and beliefs, ease “xenophobia,” and facilitate conflicts. Healing History is active in many parts of the world, including Eastern and Western Europe, parts of Africa, Asia, the United States, and Canada.
Previous achievements
Healing History has played an active role in more than 14 countries. We started with our work in Israel and Palestine, expanded to Eastern and Western Europe and the United States and Canada, and are now also active in several countries in Asia, Africa, and many other places.
A meeting on the streets of Tel Aviv.
“Can you please listen to me. I need to tell someone what happened to me and my family during World War II, and how I escaped just at the last possible moment to Israel.”
One day my wife and I were walking down the streets of Tel Aviv when an older man came up to us and spoke those words. We listened to his whole story, and I knew that meeting was the beginning of a new direction for our work — and led me to become director of the Healing History Project.
Whether or not Jewish people were directly threatened in the Holocaust, are second-generation survivors, or come from families that were not directly impacted, all carry part of this history. Many are not aware of how it shapes their daily life and their perspective on the world. Jewish people need the opportunity to explore this history with supportive facilitation.
Histories carried on our shoulders.
The next light that went off for me was watching a German woman work on her family history during a seminar in Israel. Her family had been involved in the SS, and she spoke of the trauma, the depression, the cloud of unprocessed history that hung over her family. A Jewish woman whose parents were in the concentration camps told her the atmosphere in her own family was much the same.
The third motivator came while I was working in Austria and saw election posters everywhere for a candidate from a right-wing Nazi party. I saw again the rise of anti-Semitism and other Nazi positions coming forward — and knew something must be done to address it.
Traveling workshops across Europe.
Our organization decided to start a series of traveling presentations and workshops throughout Europe — to help people process the history of their own country, and to process alongside others from related countries.
The first workshop was in Warsaw in 2013. People from Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and other backgrounds attended this dynamic journey into healing. The second, in 2014, was in Bonn, Germany, working with many pieces of unprocessed history and how it affected our minds, bodies, and the relationships between groups.
The next workshops were in Brussels and Budapest, and requests for more have already come in from Croatia, Greece, Ukraine, and other countries.
Process Work and Worldwork.
The methods involve Process Oriented Psychology and its approach to conflict called Worldwork, which integrates personal psychology, social change, small and large group work, inner work, and trauma and family work into a unified framework. It has been used on history and conflict in Ukraine, Russia, Kenya, South Africa, the United States, Canada, Japan, Thailand, Northern Ireland, Israel, Palestine, Colombia, Brazil, Australia, and many other countries.
A few perspectives are especially relevant: that much of what we suffer individually is not only personal but carries a collective piece of unprocessed history; the fostering of deep democracy, where all perspectives, feelings, and positions are brought in and worked with; and that history not delved into tends to repeat itself. To prevent the repeat of what happened in Europe and World War II, we must face these difficult pieces of history.
“Don’t forget that I love you.”
We were crowded into a room together — many Palestinians and Israelis, with our team facilitating. Two men spent much of the time passionately telling their traumatic stories, expressing anger, hurt, and grief. The heat between them rose with every interaction.
As the seminar ended and we were all in a close circle, the Israeli man walked right toward the Palestinian man, and I grew nervous that violence might erupt. He told the Palestinian man not to forget that he loves him. The Palestinian man told the Israeli man not to forget that he loves him too — and they embraced. These moments of healing are a regular part of the work we do in this fire of conflict.
Group process, from 4 to 1,000.
This was the beginning of 20 straight years of working with Palestinians and Israelis — in Israel at the Tantur Center in Jerusalem, and in Palestine at the Everest Center in Beit Jalla. Our workshops are usually four days, combining help for the sides to process the ongoing conflict with training for those who want to facilitate it in their own communities.
We are best known for a form of group process that can work with any group from 4 to 1,000 people, allowing stuck positions to become fluid so that genuine relationship can replace fear and distrust. We have also worked within Israel in Faradis, Nazareth, Sakhnin, and other cities, with Arab-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli conflict.
An alternative to violence.
This method is based on the idea that issues must be worked on every level. Peace cannot be made by solving problems alone when there is so much hurt, distrust, and history between people. By allowing hopelessness, hurt, anger, grief, trauma, and fear to be worked with in a safe, facilitated way, peace can be made in matters of the mind and heart. Many who began with great hostility have become friends and allies; one official credited our work with avoiding a riot in his city.
Now the children of some participants are joining. A young Palestinian girl who was so depressed she almost couldn’t function started to dance with joy at our seminars. A young man who had wanted to become a suicide bomber decided instead to serve his people by going back to school. Our long-term goal is to provide an alternative to violence — and to train ground teams, at least twenty, who can intervene before violence erupts.
Healing History has three main activities.
Train facilitators
Training people in these methods to take back to their families, communities, and countries — to help break the cycle of repeating history and war.
Certify trainers
Creating a training program that will certify trainers in each region to carry this work forward.
To accomplish this work we need funding — to allow our trainers to travel, facilitate, and teach, and to support participants who need help to attend. Many come from countries with diverse economic levels. If this work speaks to you, we would love your help in carrying it forward.
Support this work