Thank you Benjamin for stepping in because I’m terrible at reading my comments! (I’m trying to get better at that, but balancing it with a mental health thing, reading comments ain’t always good for our brains). Ok so, everything Benjamin said, plus I’d recommend some of the following books/topics: interpersonal neurobiology (see The Developing Mind by Dan Siegel), collective trauma (see Trauma: A Social Theory by Jeffrey Alexander and Healing Collective Trauma by Thomas Hübl), and even some more individual perspectives on trauma that illuminate the individual self as a series of relationships like Internal Family Systems (see No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz). It’s difficult to conceptualize, so nothing wrong on your end if you have difficulty with that understanding, but the TL;DR is that the individual psyche and body are not that individual. Our minds, like our bodies, require input from the external environment (and other people in particular) in order to develop and grow. Trauma in the external environment, like collective trauma, impacts the development and expression of individuals. Trauma in the individual impacts all of that individual’s relationships and, as such, impacts the collective environment. Our mental health is not separable from what’s happening around us (The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté gets at this) and how we interact with our external environment depends a lot on our internal state of being (The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram gets at this in its chapter on phenomenology and philosophy). That porousness of the self is one of those annoying things that is simple to experience but complicated to explain in words and thoughts. I’m sorry if that attempt to explain further only complicates it more!