Journaling Prompts for Processing Collective Trauma
Some experiences wound people collectively—pandemics, disasters, prolonged uncertainty, social rupture—in ways that individual therapy frameworks don't quite capture. When everyone is struggling, there's pressure to minimize your own experience because 'other people have it worse.' But your experience is still your experience, and it still deserves space. Collective trauma can leave a residue: a changed relationship with other people, a different relationship with the future, a grief for normalcy that feels hard to name. Writing gives you a place to put that unnamed grief.
Journaling Prompts
What changed during this period of collective difficulty that you don't think will fully go back? In your life, in your relationships, in your sense of how the world works?
What did you lose during this time that hasn't been acknowledged—by yourself or anyone else? Name it specifically, without minimizing it because others had it worse.
How did this experience change what you want from other people? From community? From the future? Have you let those changed needs reshape how you're actually living?
What did you discover you could endure that you didn't know you could? Not to celebrate the difficulty—just to honestly account for what you found out about yourself.
What would it look like to genuinely grieve this period—to mark it, honor it, close it—rather than just moving past it as if it didn't leave a mark?