So far, we've been learning about trauma to individuals, especially children. But there are things that cause trauma to groups of people on a mass scale - and that's what we'll learn about in this lesson. However, we really can't separate individual and collective trauma, because collective trauma compounds individual trauma. In other words, if you've experienced adverse childhood traumatic events, and you then experience trauma of racism, trauma of climate change, trauma of pandemics (COVID-19), trauma from natural disasters - you're laying the collective trauma experience by groups of people on top of your individual trauma. And this can exacerbate trauma responses.

Even if your ACE score is zero, you're living into collective trauma right now - at the very least climate change and the global pandemic have traumatized everyone on the planet, whether they know it or not.

I'm going to ask you to take a while in this unit and read as much as you can from the Lesson 6 Google folder. It is important that you know how racism causes trauma, and how intergenerational trauma plays out in indigenous and other populations. Don't skip these readings. Then as always, take the short quiz at the end of the lesson.