Israel and Unintegrated Trauma: a Case Study On How Unhealed Pain Fuels Collective Collapse
- Elizabeth Halligan
- Sep 28, 2025
- 9 min read
What happens when a nation, or any collective system, is built on the unhealed legacy of generational trauma?
The result is a political entity that mirrors the exact dynamics of the terror it swore to never repeat. This isn’t mere coincidence or failure of morality. It is a predictable outcome when a collective nervous system fails to metabolize and integrate its deepest wounds.
This analysis is not about blame, nor is it absolution. It is a necessary act of systemic diagnosis: to understand the architecture of pain so we can rewire it. To dismantle the mechanisms driving humanity into collapse, we must first see that the foundation of that architecture is unintegrated pain. Like a fractal pattern, trauma left unhealed doesn’t just repeat. It replicates itself at every scale: the individual, the family, the nation. Without integration, it becomes the whole operating system.
The Unintegrated Wound: From Survival to Policy
For Jewish communities, the Holocaust scarred the collective psyche with a magnitude few can fathom. Survival became identity, and hypervigilance became policy. The sacred oath of “never again” became an ideology. But without corresponding collective healing, it has metastasized into a cancer of preemptive violence.
Epigenetics explains how this legacy endures. Epigenetics studies how life experience — especially trauma — changes gene expression through chemical tags like DNA methylation, often affecting stress hormones, fear pathways, and immune responses. These changes are heritable, meaning trauma’s biological echoes can be passed to children and grandchildren, not just in story, but in biology.
For example:
Maternal and paternal trauma both produce epigenetically marked stress responses in offspring — even those born long after the trauma.
In both animal models and humans (Holocaust survivors, war refugees), distinctive signatures of trauma-induced methylation persist over generations.
Healing is possible: trauma-informed therapy and social acknowledgment can change methylation patterns in later generations.
The result of trauma that is not fully processed, grieved, and integrated in a lineage is that trauma becomes a lens through which everything appears as threat, and you don’t even see the lens. You don’t see how it’s distorting your vision. You don’t see how the amygdala is allowed to become a despotic dictator when this is the dominant lens through which you see the world, constantly overriding the higher reasoning of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Higher brain functions (adaptation-as-strategy, compassion, planning) become subordinated to ancient survival circuitry. This is amygdala hijack. Then the amygdala is guiding institutional policy toward domination and control as false safety.
When pain is not integrated, not fully grieved, it does not dissolve. It replicates through echo and reenactment. The starving and traumatized child, denied safety and dignity then unconsciously projects the wound forward, recreates cycles of control and domination, and then targets others.
This is where Carl Jung’s famous principle rings ever-so-true:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
In other words, until the amygdala is fully integrated into the prefrontal cortex, until pre-verbal limbic fears are fully voiced into language (PFC activity) and made conscious, those limbic wounds and fears live in the brain and nervous system as a survival algorithm. And what you do not bring into conscious awareness will unconsciously run you until it causes you — and the world — enough pain that you see it clearly enough to regulate its influence.
In other words, this neurological hijack doesn’t just remain in the mind. It becomes identity. And from identity, it becomes ideology and governance.
The Neurological Mechanism: Narcissistic Defense Structures
The defense mechanism powering this cycle is textbook trauma psychology, externalized into national leadership.
Unintegrated trauma results in a fragile ego operating on amygdala domination. The amygdala — the brain’s ancient threat detector — is still screaming. Because the original threat was existential, the individual and the state become obsessed with power as a substitute for safety. When a child never felt safe, power feels like safety. When a people were made small and powerless, domination feels like agency. And when their suffering was ignored by the world, they begin ignoring the suffering of others as a necessary psychological defense.
The behavior of Israel’s current leadership is not a unique evil. It is the inevitable result of a system that rewards amygdala-driven paranoid survivalism, punishes dissent, and equates empathy with weakness. This is also amygdala-dominated rationale. It is the nation’s trauma logic incarnate — the predictable political consequence of a collective nervous system that has not moved beyond the initial wound.
Policy as Pathology: Reenacting the Nightmare
When trauma becomes policy, the resulting actions are not about true security; they are a compulsive reenactment of the original, unintegrated wound. This makes the irony of the situation brutal and undeniable.
Look at the policies:
Collective punishment, blockades on food and water, the targeting of journalists, medics, and children. How is that about long-term, rational security? It isn’t. This is the limbic brain operating the control panel — it is the child, once powerless, now in control, terrified to lose it. The result is that the descendants of genocide victims now justify actions that align with the pattern of genocide. Not because they are born monsters, but because they never fully healed.
Their trauma became policy.
Their fear became ideology.
Their pain became power.
The world says, “never again.” But that promise is broken every time a system externalizes its unintegrated trauma and calls the resulting violence “justice”.
And this isn’t just about Israel.
It’s about every system, every nation, and every culture that refuses to sit with its shadow, with its amygdala-driven algorithm. The United States has the same problem. Its legacy of genocide, slavery, and denial is simply more insidious. Some of the British escaped tyranny by fleeing to America, only to institute a uniquely brutal system of chattel slavery on top of the genocide of at least 10 million Native Americans. The trauma of oppression — and then later, revolutionary war — was never metabolized. So it got projected. This is the current human condition. If you don’t face the wound, you become the wound. You recreate the oppressor in your own image, because you believe power is the only form of safety. When we refuse to integrate what we inherited, we unconsciously inherit the perpetrator’s script.
Pain becomes power.
We see this pattern echoed in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. On the surface, his work reads as political philosophy — a roadmap for liberation through education and critical consciousness. But at its core, it’s a psychological treatise on trauma. Freire understood that the oppressed internalize the logic of their oppressors, and without deep reflection, they risk recreating the very hierarchies they suffered under. This is why revolution alone does not liberate. It simply reorders the roles in the trauma algorithm. Communism, as Marx envisioned it, failed to account for this psychological recursion: the pain of the proletariat, left unintegrated, seeks justice through reversal — not through transformation and liberation. And so the cycle repeats. A new group gains power, wields the same instruments of force, and declares their violence righteous. “Never again” becomes “never again for us” — and the threshold for true integration, for true healing, is raised even higher. Until trauma is processed, not just redistributed, no ideology can bring liberation.
Frantz Fanon and bell hooks each mapped different facets of this same trauma loop. Freire warned that when the oppressed seize power without transforming consciousness, they unconsciously replicate the oppressor’s script. Fanon, writing as both psychiatrist and revolutionary, showed how colonialism lives on as a psychic wound in the colonized, producing post‑independence regimes that mirror the violence they fought to escape. bell hooks extends this analysis into classrooms and intimate life, arguing that education and love must be practices of healing, not domination, if we are to break the cycle. Together, they reveal the truth that attempts at liberation without trauma integration are always going to result in replication. Revolutions that ignore the trauma algorithm do not free people — they reboot the same system under a new name, with an even higher threshold for individual and collective healing.
And if this pattern holds true for nations like the U.S. and Israel — both born from trauma — then it holds a mirror of darkness up to us all. There are countless examples of this throughout history. The mirror reflects back to us the truth of the human condition.
Weaponization of the Term Antisemitism and the Trauma Reflex
The mirror is not the enemy. Collective healing cannot occur without reflection. And yet, every attempt to hold up the mirror — to name the consequences of this unintegrated trauma — is often met with accusations of betrayal, antisemitism, or disloyalty. This reaction is not evidence of moral clarity. It is a symptom of unresolved trauma defending itself from exposure. When a system has not metabolized its grief, it perceives every invitation to self-reflect as an existential threat. This is not to say antisemitism isn’t real — it is, and must be confronted. But when the term becomes a reflexive shield against all critique, even from within the community, it loses its diagnostic power and becomes a weapon of denial. This refusal to look becomes the very mechanism that perpetuates harm. In trauma psychology, this is known as defensive dissociation.
Here is what this trauma loop looks like through the lens of defensive dissociation:
1. The Unintegrated Wound
Background: Collective trauma (e.g., the Holocaust) creates a deep, persistent vulnerability in a group’s identity.
Defense: To avoid re-exposure to the original wound, the system armors itself — psychically and institutionally — with protective narratives like “never again.”
2. The External Mirror
Feedback: Individuals or groups, both inside and outside the collective, call for reflection, pointing to state violence, policy decisions, or human rights concerns.
Interpretation: Because the core wound is unhealed, critique is experienced not as feedback about behavior, but as a threat to survival itself.
3. Diagnosis Is Interpreted as Attack
Reflex: The trauma-based system cannot differentiate between critique and attack.
Response: Terms like antisemitism are deployed broadly and rapidly, not to clarify harm, but to shut down reflection — a panic response that collapses all nuance.
4. Defensive Dissociation
In trauma therapy, dissociation is when the mind splits from unbearable pain:
“That’s not me. I can’t hold that truth.”
Societies do this too. The accusation becomes a way to eject unbearable insight back onto the world, rejecting it before it can be metabolized.
5. Result: Locked Out of Integration
As the system repeatedly refuses reflection, it becomes less coherent and more reactive.
The unprocessed shadow increasingly gets projected outward.
Self-correction becomes impossible. Feedback becomes unbearable. And those closest — even allies — are pushed away by indiscriminate accusations.
6. DARVO at Scale
Deny: “That’s not happening.”
Attack: “You’re antisemitic.”
Reverse Victim and Offender: “We’re the (only) victims being persecuted just for surviving.”
This trauma loop comes at enormous cost, both individually and collectively.
As alluded to above, declaring “antisemitism” as a reaction to every critique is not (always) deployed purposely. It is a reflex, a way for a traumatized system to defend against pain that feels too great to confront. But this reflex, unchecked, traps both the traumatized and those who care for them in cycles of further trauma, isolation, and collapse. And so the trauma grows, festers, and hardens into ideology. True healing requires the courage to look. To see. To integrate. Without it, the wound becomes identity, and the mirror becomes the enemy. Again, this is happening also in the U.S. with its continual failure to integrate the lessons of its own history. Social cohesion continually erodes, and this leads to collective and systemic collapse.
The Universal Truth of Unintegrated Trauma
This cycle of collapse will continue until we recognize that the revolution required is not political or military; it is neurological and spiritual. Healing is not weakness. It is the arduous, grievous, and necessary process of integrating trauma through the body, which then allows the prefrontal cortex to finally regulate the amygdala. Collective trauma does not justify collective violence. Israel doesn’t need more weapons; it needs mirrors. It needs to see what its trauma has created. And the same is true for all nations, especially the U.S. Its true reflection is a far cry from its self-image of a protector and guarantor of freedom. That self-image was a projection, and the reflection is the reality it has long refused to see.
We can only break the cycle of self-destruction by choosing a path of self-reflection and integration over replication. We must stop treating pain as a permanent policy guide and start treating it as data — a signal that the system is incoherent and requires an evolutionary update. We talk about this not to wallow or assign inherited guilt, but to show how pain, when unprocessed, becomes the core vulnerability of the system. Our goal is to make that vulnerability visible.
So I’m going to keep writing about trauma, because this is not just about Israel. It is the root of every single one of humanity’s collective problems. Everything else is a symptom.
Failure to integrate trauma is failure to become fully conscious. It means living as a drone, hijacked by an amygdala-driven survival algorithm, rather than a fully conscious, fully aware being capable of regulating inherited and systemic influence.
This is why we teeter on the edge of collapse.
And that means one thing:
The only way off the path of extinction is to wake up. We cannot evolve until we can see ourselves clearly — and survive the seeing.
For Further Reading:
The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna Wiest: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-mountain-is-you-brianna-wiest/1141829837
It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn: https://markwolynn.com/it-didnt-start-with-you/
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk: https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score
all about love: new visions by bell hooks: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/all-about-love-new-visions-bell-hooks-love-trilogy_bell-hooks/248913/#isbn=0060959479
“Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in humans.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z
“Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6127768/
“How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-parents-rsquo-trauma-leaves-biological-traces-in-children/
“How trauma's effects can pass from generation to generation.” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01433-y
“Transgenerational Epigenetics of Traumatic Stress.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S187711731830053X
“Can the legacy of trauma be passed down the generations?” https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics
“Parents' emotional trauma may change their children's biology…” https://www.science.org/content/article/parents-emotional-trauma-may-change-their-children-s-biology-studies-mice-show-how
“Epigenetic Modifications in Stress Response Genes Associated With Intergenerational Trauma.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6857662/
Comments