Sophy Banks: Grief tending and collective pathways to healing justice (ep425)
“We didn’t evolve to know about this much pain. There have been huge collective traumas. How do we keep each other sustained during this ongoing polycrisis?”
In this episode, Sophy Banks shares her rich wealth of knowledge, teachings, and experiences about what it means to truly support ourselves and others through both collective and personal traumas.
Cultures of individualism often lead us to navigate trauma on our own— without rituals of shared and collective space holding. For some, particularly those who have been victims of oppression, colonialism, and dispossession, the rivers and oceans of grief held within are often too vast and too deep to be carried alone.
Join us in this episode as Sophy offers medicine for our souls, asking vital questions about collective grief tending. How do we notice trauma? How do we disrupt ways of managing grief that possibly reinforce systems and cultures of destruction? And what does it mean to truly care for and hold one another through times of darkness and despair?
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About our guest:
Sophy Banks has led an eclectic life shaped by a fundamental question: what fosters healthy, joyful, life-affirming ways of being, and why do we often fall short, despite our best intentions? Her quest for answers has taken her through the worlds of engineering, grassroots football, psychotherapy, wisdom traditions, social movements for change, and beyond. Each field has enriched her understanding and ability to shape systems.
In 2006, Sophy became one of the architects of the Transition movement, catalyzing community-scale responses to multiple crises. She championed integrating inner perspectives and addressing internal dynamics like widespread burnout. Co-founding the Heart and Soul group in Totnes and Transition Training, she led workshops across four continents, inspiring a new generation of leaders.
Today, Sophy's focus is on two critical areas for our times: revitalizing practices of shared grief tending and exploring Healthy Human Culture - an evolution of her life's journey thus far.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Notawe (Father) by Adrian Sutherland
Episode-inspired artwork by Eleanor Young
Dive deeper:
Learn more from Sophy via Healthy Human Culture
Learn more about Grief Tending
Check out the works of Sophy's inspirations: Resmaa Menakem, Sobonfu Somé, Malidoma Patrice Somé, Joanna Macy, Francis Weller, Maeve Gavin, and Martín Prechtel
The Art of Mentoring, an invitation with Jon Young
The Polyvagal Theory, a book by Stephen Porges and Deb Donner
Expand your lenses:
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Sophy Banks: So part of my journey was always moving between the outer if we can even separate outer and inner? I think we do it a lot in European culture. Such as how the church and the scientists made a deal in a way to keep spirituality and science in two separate institutions that wouldn't interfere with each other.
For a lot of people throughout time, the idea of separating the material world and the spiritual would be inconceivable. Seeing how much people are impacted by how they behave, and how they respond is to do with the systems that they're part of. So both systems of family, if they have one, of culture and schooling and education, but also the ancestral lineage, the lands, the landscape that they're part of.
I think I've always been interested in seeing patterns. People were talking about the transition movement that I was part of for some time, but they were just talking about outer. They were just talking about peak oil, climate change, resource use, or things that were in the physical world. And they weren't talking so much about process or worldview or why we've made technologies the way we have.
I was always trying to put these things back together because I think whichever bit you leave out is the bit that's going to end up creating the result that you don't want. It's going to be out of awareness and the things that are out of awareness, we can't shape or have a way of being in relationship with. And if it's out of awareness and it's got a destructive element to it, it will be destructive and you won't be able to see it. That was always my sort of impulse to ask what's missing, what's not being seen, what's not being included.
And the second part of your question was about trauma. And I think it's good to ask what we mean by trauma because it's a word that is used by different people in many different ways. And a lot of people are talking about trauma or are writing about it. So I guess how I use the word trauma, is to talk about an experience of feeling overwhelmed, powerless, terrified, and isolated from which there is no return path.
For me, it's this possibility of speaking about an event that might be shocking or violent, or it might be a chronic erosion of one's well-being or self-worth from which there isn't a repair, there isn't a healing.
And it's that second part that we can have shocking or violent events or things that are wearing over time, but then a repair happens. So there's an intervention from outside. There's some support from outside. A space is held in which this body or these bodies that have experienced something can metabolize that experience, can make meaning of it together, and can restore a sense of trust both in ‘myself’ and ‘ourselves’.
In the holding field in the wider community or the family or the healers or the society that I'm a part of that says we care, we see that something's wrong, we see what happened to you and we want to help you, we're here, we're going to hold you in love until you're back to a state of wellbeing–a state of the basic state of trust.
I think when we have those systems of repair that's when we're growing in resilience, not just individually, but together. What we learn is that together we can cope with extreme situations and still recover and go forward in life well. And what happens when we don't have those repairs or those healing processes or ceremonies, we're left not only with the shock of the original event but also with a rupture to our trust in the holding of life. So a sense that I couldn't cope, but that those around me didn't care enough.
I'm really curious if that's where the kind of narcissistic wound, the sense of worthlessness comes from. It's the failure of return paths, the failure to repair. And I think there's a fundamental rupture in the trust in life or spirit that something bigger holds me, cares about me, and is there for me when I need it.
I'm interested in speaking about trauma or thinking about trauma as a rupture in relationships rather than just the original shocking event, which is often how it's framed.
Often we frame trauma as, ‘something bad happened and then I was traumatized’. But when you put in that second stage ‘something bad happened and then there was no repair and then I was traumatized’. Then it's much easier to see why it's a collective issue because usually, that repair needs to come from outside.
So one part is the question was: why did the event happen? Why was there sexual abuse? Why was there a violent attack? Why was there racism and microaggressions through somebody’s experiences as a person of colour? And so much of the violence and shock comes from societal or wider systems of racism, colonialism patriarchal inequality, poverty, disability, or oppression.
Some things just happen that are outside of our control, such as an accident or a natural disaster, but often people are still left without a repair. And that's always for me a collective issue. What are our technologies? How do we notice? How do we put in place systems? And what does it mean that it is so normal that the repair doesn't happen?
I don't always get the quote exactly right, but Resmaa Menakem puts it beautifully. He says trauma decontextualized in a society, in the wider society looks like culture. So this sense that it's culturally normal not to repair, not to offer deep counselling and support to veterans returning from war, not to have a response when a child is sexually abused. In the Catholic Church, it was normalised that nothing would be done. And when we reflect on that, when I reflect on that, that's the thing that is most shocking about it, is that it's become normal that these injuries are not attended to.
For me, that's the most helpful definition of trauma: injuries are happening that are not tended to.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing this. To deepen these connections, you explore the parallels between nervous system states for individuals and collective behaviour patterns.
What do you feel called to share about this? And I wonder if this might speak to any systemic vicious cycles going on — meaning, societal and systemic contexts that are more likely to spark certain nervous system states for individuals, and how that might be more likely to then feed into collective behaviour patterns that are considered less healthy.
There seem to be ongoing vicious cycles of injustice socially, economically, ecologically and beyond in many ways, and I wonder if the states of our nervous systems and what that means for our collectivity play into these trends as well.
Sophy Banks: When I did therapy training 25 years ago, I didn't learn so much about nervous systems or trauma. And I think it's much more understood in kind of Western or Global North culture now - the role of the body in healing from trauma.
I got interested in archetypes. So I kept coming across these pairs of archetypes that were kind of definitional about what is health in different systems of thought or different cultural traditions. And I got really curious. In my psychotherapy training, they talked about will and love. Then I read a book by Martin Luther King that talked about strength and love as being the two necessary things to hold together in activism and ineffective struggles for liberation.
I also talked to a Chinese medicine expert who spoke about yin and yang. In Sobonfu Somé, one of my teachers from the Dagara people of Burkina Faso spoke about fire and water as the two key elements to hold in balance to create health. So these are archetypes that I was finding in very different cultural paradigms. I got curious at one point whether they related to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. They sense that our body is doing is being organized by the autonomous nervous system.
The nervous system is out of awareness, it's autonomous, it's running itself, and it's not in my control even though I can to some extent be aware of what it's doing. And that's not only organising what my body is doing and what my heart rate is, or whether there's lots of energy going to my muscles, or whether I'm relaxing and calming or sleeping, but it's also organising what I can perceive.
So a lot of this vagus nerve, that's a large part of the autonomous nervous system, is about what I'm receiving, what information is coming in. And out of the mass of information, what my brain is going to notice and perceive. So what I can perceive is also being organized by the state of my autonomous nervous system. That felt helpful when I started reading Polyvagal Theory by Stephen Porges and Deb Donner, who helped to translate that and make it more accessible.
And to see that there's a kind of ground state and I'd met it in nature connection work that I had learned from Jon Young and Art of Mentoring, that there is a kind of natural ground state that's low energy, low stress, a basic state of trust where we move easily from action to rest in cycles. So from the more sympathetic, outward, moving, mobilised state to parasympathetic, relaxed, soothing, resting, recovering, digesting. And that can be with others or on my own.
There’s a sense that that's a state of regulation and that we, when shocks come in or stress comes in or conflict, we start to go into fight-flight and we may go into fawn and freeze and there are other stress states that have evolved to allow us to deal with stressful situations. Many of them have to do with our evolution as social beings. So long as we can come back to this ground state, which requires a basic sense of ease and trust and relaxation, relaxed action and relaxed digestion and resting.
So that's what I started to understand as being the kind of patterning of healthy cultures, is that we have processes, technologies, rhythms, rituals and habits that support us to move between these different states. Whether that is the ritual of getting up in the morning or how we greet each other, how we move from solitude to connection, how we prepare ourselves to go out in the day, how we gather at the end and digest experience, how we hold healing ceremonies if somebody's experienced something out of the ordinary or stressful.
The group processing of group experience. All of these things are part of what makes a culture. So a culture that can keep its people co-regulated, supporting each other to come back to this state of basic trust, basic relaxation, competence, and confidence. For me is the essence of a healthy culture. Cultures start to go out of health when there are dysregulated nervous systems.
So there's fight, flight or freeze. Freeze is the most extreme response to shock or violent situations, and there's no return path, then we get left with these residual states of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or other possible ones (they're the ones that I've understood the most).
And now we have bodies walking around with unmetabolized stress states and feelings of terror, powerlessness, isolation, broken trust, of possible worthlessness, and the structures that emerge in our psyche to try to manage that.
One of the recent things that I've been learning about is internal family systems and the idea that there are the exiled parts and the protector parts. These structures emerge to try to manage life when we can't get back to a basic sense of our goodness or the goodness that is around us.
And I just want to say, for me, there's always spectrums, it's not like we either have that or we don't. Probably every society has got some bit needing to manage life, we don't always get life to meet us exactly as we want. But the more unprocessed stress, the more unprocessed pain there is in the bodies, in the society, the more that pain will come out and be acted out in unhelpful ways.
One way I could manage my stress is by putting it into your body. So if a group has more physical power, more financial power, more military power, you know, a group of bodies could put it into another group of bodies. And I think it's an interesting way to look at colonialism, for instance.
Colonialism isn't just about extracting resources, it's also about exporting feelings of shame, powerlessness, poverty and helplessness.
Is that true? You know, I'd like to start coming a bit later, but I'd like to keep asking that question: is it true? I think it's an interesting thing to ask.
And sometimes we turn the pain in on ourselves, you know, in modern culture, there's a lot of self-harm. There's a lot of substance abuse, or there's a lot of addictions: to manage my unmanageable pain, I'm going to overwork, I'm going to keep running away from it. So we can see the patterns of flight, or fight: I'm going to try to control everything, I'm going to get enough strength that I never feel powerless again. I'm going to appease people. I feel powerless, so I'm going to just try to give away my authentic needs, my sense of self and empowerment.
These can be really good strategies. And they’ve probably kept me safe and in a system where there is a lot of power, unevenly distributed and often being held not in caring or clean ways, we need these survival strategies. And I think it's a sign of a culture that has gone a long way from what I would recognise as health and I think what a lot of cultures throughout time would recognise as health.
Kamea Chayne: There is so much grief and pain in the world right now in what feels to many like an era of mass death and destruction. What have you noticed as some notable trends of how many people in dominant cultures process their pain and grief? And how does this relate to our tendencies and capacities to either reinforce and continually create, or otherwise disrupt cultures of destruction?
Sophy Banks: I feel incredibly blessed and privileged to have come across grief tending work, you know, through Sobonfu Somé Malidoma Somé from the Dagara people, but also from Joanna Macy - who came through a kind of activist culture, the need to feel our pain for the world, to be moved to stand for it and take action for life on earth to feel ourselves as connected. And then other teachers that I've learnt from, Francis Weller, Maeve Gavin, Martin Pretele.
For me, grief tending is one form of a return path when we're carrying pain, when there's an unmetabolised experience in our bodies. But what I see when we hold shared grief spaces, I sometimes think we've privatised grief in the modern world. So if you're privileged enough, you might be able to take it to a therapist or have some support, but it's often in one-to-one spaces. There's something about sitting in a circle or holding a ceremony with others where we move from being the one who's supporting and holding to the one who's falling in grief.
And then we come back and then we support the next person. I think it is a strengthening experience. And for many people, it can be quite radical because we're either the professional therapist or we're the broken client or the patient or the whatever and actually to say we're all both and we can just move from one to the other and that's good to be able to do that.
I think it strengthens each one of us. Yes, I'm the holder and I'm the broken one.
But also there's something about when we hold pain collectively in some way that we can hold things that are too overwhelming to hold on our own.
And like you say, you know the amount of pain the amount of suffering that so many people are experiencing, it is too much and it's part of the reason why lots of people are numbing out or distracting themselves or doing some of the fight-flight switching off.
It's not because they don't care, it's actually because they care too much. This is what Joanna Macy used to say: it's not about apathy, it's about overwhelm. So then we need to have a space where there's enough support, enough time, enough resources to go towards the big issues, the collective pain, the deep wounding that is just in us, that are being experienced.
Part of what I see is that when we do that, it's an incredibly beautiful, nourishing experience to be with other human beings, hearing the depth of their truth, even if it's painful. I regularly come out of grief-tending circles, short ones, and long ones, feeling something of my faith in humanity is restored.
Feeling a deep sense of love and connection for the other people that I've been with, even if I've only met them for four hours online. So there's something about the practice of hearing each other's pain that I think weaves us back into trusting, loving human beings. And I just see it happen again and again with people who have never tended to grief, people who have never sat in a circle, people who have done years of it, it just seems to work.
And again, I think it's part of why I believe it's natural in us. Our ancestors learned to do it and they somehow managed to pass it on. Because it's even on like, how do we do grief tending on Zoom? I think we can do it because it's such a part of who we are and we're longing for it. Not everybody, nothing's for everybody.
But the people who've come, people that are drawn to it, it's like, ‘Oh, I've got to the water and I can drink.’ And I think there's such a shortage of spaces where we can be truly authentic with each other and speak about how I'm broken and how I had a breakdown and how guilty and ashamed I feel of parts of myself or how much hatred.
I have outrage or disgust. Where do we get to share that with people in a way where it's accepted and we've all got it and it's fine? As well as: I love, I care deeply, I'm beautiful, you're wonderful. We are all holding each other because we just care, we care. That's so natural.
Kamea Chayne: As you’ve written: “I’ve spoken about trauma as not just the overwhelming event, not just the shock, but the failure of that return path, what I’ve called the return path of pulling back.”
With so much having scaled, with the internet enabling global communication, and with systems that tie the global economy together, these days, instead of people only having to process pain and grieve things at a more community and human scale level, a lot of us are having to sit with and deal with grief at levels that I don’t know if we’ve ever had to deal with in the course of deeper human history.
With this, I wonder if you’ve thought about our nervous systems’ capacities to process the pains of learning about mass destruction at a global scale. And what could more affirming ways of tending grief and sharing grief look like for people wanting to alchemize that in different ways?
Sophy Banks: The main thing that I want to say is about this balance between how resourced I am, how connected, how much loving support I have, how much beauty there is, whatever it is that nourishes and holds me in life. I love this word, you know, holding, to be held in life. What does that mean?
You know, this sense that I'm connected. There are relationships where I can show up, but also where there's caring that comes towards me or beauty or something nourishing comes towards me and that I can offer my nourishment and beauty and love and care out to others.
I can feel it's like my body's moving, but this sort of web of tendrils that go out hold me in life, and when we come together in a circle and we call in support and we name all the things that nourish and help us and hold us and you know the not just in the present but teachers and practices and all the different dimensions of our being then we go towards what is painful.
And we can dive into the water, of grief or flow in the river of grief and metabolize it through our bodies and acknowledge it and care for it, and with this and often with a wider holding inviting ancestors or elements or the land or the water that is with us and this sense of being part of these much greater bodies through time.
And then there's a process at the end of when we have shared grief in whatever way we've managed to do it, that we come back, that we soothe, that we take time to integrate, that we possibly make meaning of what's been shared so that we go forward changed by the experience, reconnected, but also understanding a deeper sense of what it is to be human, what it is to be human in these times.
There's something about this balance of what holds me and what I can tend to, what holds us, how we resource ourselves, what we can face into and metabolize, and how we come back out again. There's courage in keeping on facing into like you say, the overwhelm of information, of distressing information. And there's something about moderating or managing how much of that we take in. Because I think that's so true, isn't it?
We didn't evolve to know about this much pain. And of course, throughout time, there have been cultures that have been destroyed, mass slavery, there have been huge, huge collective traumas that the individuals that are being enslaved or destroyed have had to deal with—could anything be more overwhelming than that?
And here we are, if we're modern people with enough privilege to be able to watch the news and take it in, then it's so easy to get overwhelmed.
For me, one of the key questions of our time is: how do I keep myself sustained? How do we keep each other sustained? Because this polycrisis that we're in is going to go on and on and on.
And I don't think there's any right answer, but burnout and exhaustion and overwhelm are such pressing issues, you know, for those people that have the capacity, that have the choice to care and give their lives towards tending it in some way. So how we come together and remember to celebrate and be in gratitude and honouring and thanks and touch beauty and love each other, and to say thank you.
Kamea Chayne: We are coming to a close today, and we will have more references from this episode at greendreamer.com. But for now, Sophy, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Sophy Banks: My wish and prayer is for people to be well and connected and supported and please don't burn out. And to take burnout seriously and to keep pulling each other into care and supporting and sustaining each other and finding the ways that we can do that in these times.
