What is “the tribal wound?“

The Tribal Wound is another name for the wound caused by not having access to our human tribe. Our bodies, our genetics as a species, are still wired for the lifestyle we led for 1.8 million years during the Pleistocene era. Yet today, every aspect of our daily lives is drastically different from what our genome is set up to experience. Our lifestyles over the last 250 years are drastically different than the 1.8 million years that came before… and that isn’t nearly enough time for genetic expression to change to sustain this massive lifestyle shift!

Humans are primates. Primates live communally and experience a ton of physical touch from fellow primates all day and all night long. They groom by touching each other, they sleep huddled together, they spend their days lazying about together watching the young ones wrestle and play.

As the human species, our own physiology requires a similar level of physical connection and group experiences. Our entire nervous systems and attachment pathways are predicated on living within a group, or tribal, setting.

Living a lifestyle that does not meet these basic physiological needs for our species is damaging. But instead of addressing the essence of our lifestyles failing to meet our needs, our species continues to plunge forward living a disconnected reality, and then seeks to pathologize each individual’s responses to living so far outside of our bodies’ abilities.

We are expected to perform and thrive under conditions we are not wired for.

The experience of living these human lives is full of the potential to experience wonderful things: bliss, joy, euphoria, all simply for being alive.

But most of us are barely squeaking by day-to-day.

Our neurobiology is wired to experience joy. Why would that be if it’s so hard to achieve? Our lives are supposed to feel good to live. Our bodies are supposed to feel good to exist within. Our relationships are supposed to feel good and satisfying to experience.

A person’s experience of The Tribal Wound in their own lives requires examining other structures such as colonialism, capitalism, industrialism, and patriarchy. In our own country of the United States, the Indigenous peoples, who were thriving here before European settlers came to colonize an already inhabited landmass, were living tribal and connected lifestyles. But the European conquerors brutally destroyed a way of life for an entire continent’s worth of humans using violent and ferocious means. What constituted a “successful life” was rewritten by the invading conquerors.

Living in harmony with the Earth and with one’s fellow tribe was obliterated and replaced with the accruing and hoarding of material wealth, and a host of other changes succeeding in separating the Indigenous people from their own way of life and their own meaningful values and culture. It was no longer enough to live a peaceful life connected to your family and the earth.

Now people had to be slotted into a system whose goal isn’t to serve the individual, but rather only a few elite who all benefit from the sacrifices of everyone sacrificed to the system. From my acculturation and indoctrination as a white American, I have been raised and fed under these destructive systems and therefore am still unpacking and examining this wound. We have work to do together to reclaim what was taken from us all, so long ago.

How does the Tribal Wound affect us?

It’s almost easier to answer how it doesn’t affect us. The wounds of having a lifestyle ripped away from us that was designed to help us thrive goes so deeply that is impacts every aspect of our existence.

And it’s an insidious wound.

It has permeated every aspect of our being so completely that most people don’t even know it’s there. But once you start viewing the world through the lens of the Tribal Wound, it’s suddenly apparent all around you everywhere you look.

All “pathology” comes down to nervous system distress. It’s a simplified understanding, but one that holds true. No matter what form of illness you’re looking at, be it physical or mental, the illness creates stress within the nervous system. Many providers and teachers today are busting apart the paradigm and showing how often it’s the nervous system distress that comes first and creates the dis-ease.

Regardless of if the stress comes first or the illness, the fact remains that living in a system which creates greater and greater stress to our nervous systems isn’t helping anyone to heal.  

Imagine the common struggles that modern humanity grapples with every day that didn’t exist when we lived tribally connected lives. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. There are still pockets of people living this way on our planet today. Tribes that remain untouched and uninfluenced by the demands of modern culture. Everyone has shelter, enough food, plenty of social contact and connection. Children get all of their needs met because there are ample hands around at all times to attend to them. If someone is sick or injured, the entire family system doesn’t come crashing down because that person couldn’t go to work and earn enough money to buy the food necessary to survive. Instead the hands of the rest of the community take care of the sick person until they are better, and continue to all work together to keep providing the basics for survival.

The societal structures that modern western society has set up and under which we have been raised creates a far different outcome.

In our world today, things are set up to make harming each other far too simple. And far too common. It seems to be accepted as part of the human condition. I argue that it’s not supposed to be this way. That the violence our brethren can be capable of committing against each other isn’t supposed to be the norm; it’s supposed to be the exception.

What is therapy through the lens of the Tribal Wound?

The standard approach to psychotherapy was developed in the 19th century, and at that time involved only a look at an individual and their own isolated level of functioning compared to the expected level of functioning placed by the society around them.

For instance, before labor laws were put into place, many people were expected at that time to work under truly brutal conditions, for long hours, without set days off, and certainly without paid vacation time to look forward to. The toll that that placed upon the very fabric of human life was not examined in a broader sense (outside of the valiant work made by people seeking and achieving labor laws), but instead the humans living within that system were examined through the metaphorical lens of a microscope, assigning them with labels such as “hysterical” and “neurotic”.

People were figuratively pulled apart from the systems that helped create these responses of the human condition and were instead assigned pathologizing labels and effectively told that they were falling short in life.

What a therapeutic approach from the standpoint of the Tribal Wound does differently is to see how the individual seeking therapy has been affected by how the human ecosystem has departed from the essence of what it needs to survive and thrive.

This approach takes the blame of pathology and places is where it belongs: on the systems that separate and isolate us.

In a therapy session with a focus on the Tribal Wound, an individual will get to see themselves as a whole and complete human whose innate instinct was born to thrive and experience joy, understand the structures and systems that have limited that joyful experience of being alive, process stuck and trapped emotions that have resulted from traumas and negative events, create tangible changes in their life to heal the fractures caused by separation, and to work towards a more sustainable approach to living which yields more tranquility, peace, joy, connection, and resilience.

This therapeutic approach involves the use of talk therapy for the individual to start seeing themselves in their truer essence. We frequently use tools such as ART and hypnotherapy to clear out root traumas that are blocking and keeping an individual from feeling and responding to stressors with greater ease. An exploration of interests and desires is given importance to start creating lifestyle changes to become more connected and less isolated.

All this transformation occurs in a space that is held for you by a therapist who crafts a safe environment to create connective change in your life.