Collective Dysregulation: How to Practice Trauma Therapy in Chaotic Times

Written By: The TTI Team

Read Time: 8 minutes

_{Disclaimer: This blog may include discussion of systemic racism and racial injustice, including recent incidents that may be triggering or upsetting. At TTI, we strive to speak truthfully about what is happening while remaining mindful and respectful of our readers’ emotional safety.}

You know that moment when you're sitting across from a client, and you realize you're both scrolling the same doom feed? When their nervous system is firing on all cylinders because of what's happening in the world, and yours is doing the exact same thing? Welcome to practicing trauma therapy in 2026, where the personal is political, the clinical is collective, and your EMDR training didn't exactly prepare you for the fact that you and your clients are living through the same crisis in real time.

This isn't your standard "challenging clinical case." This is what happens when entire communities experience sustained threat together. When racial violence isn't a historical trauma but today's headline. When climate disasters aren't theoretical but literal. When political upheaval isn't background noise but the thing making everyone's nervous system scream.

Let me be clear: if you're feeling like trauma work is harder right now, you're not imagining it. You're experiencing collective dysregulation, and it's changing everything about how we need to think about trauma-informed therapy training.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Collective Dysregulation

Collective dysregulation is what it sounds like: nervous systems under sustained threat across entire communities. Not just one person's trauma response, but whole populations cycling through hypervigilance, collapse, rage, and numbness together. Think pandemic lockdowns. Think watching another video of police violence against BIPOC people. Think scrolling climate disaster footage while your state is on fire. Think of political terror that keeps you up at night.

Research on shared trauma confirms what therapists already know from their offices: when therapists and clients are experiencing the same threatening events, traditional clinical boundaries get complicated fast. You're not a neutral observer helping someone process their past. You're both living through an ongoing crisis, often from similarly marginalized positions.

The thing about collective dysregulation is that it layers onto everything else. Your client with complex trauma? They're not just working through childhood abuse anymore. They're also navigating a world that feels increasingly unsafe in new and intersecting ways. Studies show that collective stressors activate existing trauma patterns while creating entirely new ones.

And here's what makes this particularly brutal for therapists: you can't exactly take a professional stance of "objective observer" when you're also wondering if your rights will exist tomorrow.

How This Shows Up in Your Clients (And Probably You)

Your clients are coming in with what looks like classic trauma responses, but the usual interventions aren't landing the same way. You're seeing heightened hypervigilance that isn't "irrational" because the threat is actually ongoing. You're seeing collapse and numbness that makes perfect sense when hope feels dangerous. You're seeing chronic anxiety that's less "disorder" and more "entirely reasonable response to current circumstances."

Recent research on nervous system dysregulation describes what you're witnessing: fight-flight-freeze responses that won't turn off because the perceived danger keeps being confirmed by reality. Doomscrolling that serves as both a hypervigilance behavior and a dissociative one. Sleep disruption, digestive issues, immune system crashes. Bodies keeping the score of collective trauma in real time.

For many clients, especially those from marginalized communities, this isn't even new. Scholars examining nervous system regulation through a materialist ecofeminist lens point out that some bodies have never had the privilege of baseline safety. BIPOC clients have been navigating collective threats for generations. LGBTQIA+ folks have been practicing survival under political assault for years. What's "new" for some therapists has been the relentless daily reality for many clients.

The clinical question becomes: how do you treat complex trauma when the complex trauma is actively ongoing and socially shared?

When Your Nervous System Is Also in the Room

Here's what is often not discussed in EMDR training programs: you're going to have sessions where you're as dysregulated as your client. You're going to read the same headlines, experience the same political threats, and sometimes share the same marginalized identities. Research on shared trauma in therapy documents what happens when therapists and clients are impacted by the same traumatic events.

Signs you're experiencing therapist dysregulation: you're numb in sessions but rage-crying in your car. You're "going through the motions" with your EMDR protocol while your own window of tolerance is about three millimeters wide. You're exhausted in a bone-deep way that no amount of self-care Sunday bubble baths will touch. You're irritable with clients who "should know better" or with yourself for not being able to hold more.

Studies on therapist wellbeing during collective crisis show increased rates of secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, and burnout among trauma therapists. But here's the thing: calling it "secondary" trauma feels like gaslighting when you're also directly experiencing the crisis. When you're a Black therapist treating Black clients after another police murder, that's not secondary. When you're a queer therapist navigating anti-trans legislation with your trans clients, that's not vicarious.

This is shared trauma, and it requires us to fundamentally rethink therapist self-care and professional boundaries.

Clinical Considerations When the World Is on Fire

So how do you actually practice trauma-informed therapy training principles when the world is actively threatening? Start by adjusting your expectations. Research on treating clients during ongoing adversity suggests that trauma processing hits differently when the trauma is current rather than historical.

You can't expect someone to build a coherent trauma narrative when new traumatic events keep interrupting the story. You can't expect regulation tools to "work" the same way when the nervous system is accurately detecting ongoing danger. You can't expect progress on a linear timeline when survival is taking up most of the bandwidth.

The clinical balancing act becomes: how do you validate that the danger is real without collapsing into helplessness? How do you resource your clients without bypassing the legitimate terror they're experiencing?

Trauma-informed dialogue approaches emphasize naming systemic and collective factors explicitly. This isn't "making therapy political." Politics are already in the room. The question is whether you're going to acknowledge the elephant or keep pretending your client's panic attacks exist in a vacuum.

Your EMDR for complex trauma skills are still relevant, but they need adaptation. The preparation phase becomes more critical. Resourcing needs to account for the fact that "safe place" imagery might feel fraudulent right now. Titration matters more than ever because your client's window of tolerance is probably even smaller than usual.

Resourcing That Doesn't Feel Like Gaslighting

Here's what doesn't work: telling your clients to "focus on what they can control" when their rights are being stripped away. Suggesting they "limit news exposure" when they need to stay informed for safety. Offering generic mindfulness when their hypervigilance is keeping them alive.

What does work: regulation tools that acknowledge the context. Grounding techniques that say "yes, the threat is real, and your body needs a break from the activation." Bilateral stimulation that doesn't require pretending everything is fine. Containment strategies that honor the overwhelm rather than shame it.

For therapists, the resourcing needs to be collective too. Research on therapist self-care during shared trauma emphasizes peer consultation, supervision that acknowledges the shared reality, and community care over individual resilience narratives. You can't self-care your way out of collective trauma. You need other therapists who get it, who are also doing this impossible work, who can witness your exhaustion without minimizing it.

This is where continuing education for trauma therapists becomes essential, but not the sanitized CEU kind. You need spaces that talk about what it's like to do EMDR training while also wondering if your clients' worst fears will come true. You need advanced trauma therapist training that includes how to practice when you're also living through it.

Liberation and Racial Repair as Clinical Anchors

Here's where we need to get real about race, power, and whose nervous systems have always been under threat. Collective dysregulation isn't new for BIPOC communities. It's not new for Indigenous peoples. It's not new for anyone whose bodies have been targeted by state violence, whose existence has been politicized, whose safety has always been conditional.

What's happening now is that more people are experiencing what marginalized communities have been trying to tell us for generations: the world isn't safe. The systems aren't neutral. Your nervous system's threat detection is probably accurate.

Liberation-focused trauma therapy approaches this differently. Instead of pathologizing hypervigilance, it asks what the hypervigilance is protecting against. Instead of focusing solely on individual regulation, it examines how collective liberation might actually create the safety conditions that make regulation possible.

Anti-oppression frameworks in EMDR training offer therapists a way to organize treatment planning that doesn't ignore power. That doesn't pretend therapy happens outside of social context. That centers racial repair, healing justice, and community care alongside clinical interventions.

This isn't about abandoning evidence-based practice. It's about recognizing that evidence was often gathered in contexts that centered privileged populations. It's about expanding what we consider "clinical" to include the social determinants of nervous system regulation: safety, dignity, power, connection, and hope.

Recent scholarship on collective nervous systems points to what many trauma therapists already know intuitively: we co-regulate in communities. Individual nervous system regulation is always happening within collective contexts. And some of those contexts are designed to keep certain bodies dysregulated.

Practicing with Integrity in Impossible Times

So what does it actually look like to practice trauma therapy when the world is on fire? It looks like naming what's happening. It looks like adjusting your clinical expectations without abandoning your clients. It looks like resourcing yourself and your clients in ways that don't bypass the legitimate terror.

It looks like seeking out trauma-informed practice in times of crisis training that doesn't pretend to be apolitical. It looks like finding online EMDR training for therapists that addresses how to use bilateral stimulation when shared trauma is in the room. 

It looks like building community with other therapists who are also trying to hold this impossible tension. Leadership through collective dysregulation requires acknowledging that we're all navigating this together, that there's no neutral ground, that survival and care can coexist.

Most importantly, it looks like recognizing that trauma work was always political. We're just being more honest about it now. The nervous systems in your office have always been shaped by social forces. The safety your clients need has always required more than individual healing. The work has always been about liberation as much as regulation.

If you're a therapist trying to navigate this, you're not failing. You're doing incredibly hard work in incredibly hard times. Your dysregulation doesn't make you a bad therapist. Your exhaustion doesn't mean you're not cut out for this. Your rage and grief and fear are data, not pathology.

And if you're looking for training that actually addresses these realities, that doesn't make you practice trauma therapy like it's still 2019, that centers anti-oppression and liberation as clinical frameworks, Lisa Hayes' Anti-Oppression and Liberation in Trauma Therapy course might be exactly what you need. Because practicing trauma therapy when the world is on fire requires more than clinical skills. It requires a political analysis, a commitment to justice, and a community of therapists willing to do this work together.

The world is dysregulated. Your clients are dysregulated. You're probably dysregulated. And somehow, we're still here, still showing up, still believing that healing is possible even when safety feels impossible. That's not naive. That's the work.

References

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_{Figley, C. (2012). Encyclopedia of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary Guide. Encyclopedia of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary Guide. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452218595}

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