Frequently Asked Questions

About the Author and his Work:

  • Civic engagement means having an impact on the world around you. Healthy civic engagement makes your actions are likely to have a positive impact on your community.

    Not being engaged means you will have little if any wider impact. And unhealthy civic engagement means your actions are likely to have a negative impact. How each of us definite “positive” and “negative” is of course the essential question.

  • There is a dangerous crosswalk in your community. Kids are at risk at that location and every parents knows it. If you call up other parents and together petition your city council to put in street lights and traffic lights at that intersection, that is civic engagement in action.

    Similarly, if your town has three high schools and one consistently gets better teachers, equipment and funding, you know that is inequality. If you do something about changing that, you are civically engaged.

  • All you have to do is focus on fixing a problem and include your neighbors regardless of their political affiliation. That is transpartisan problem-solving. It’s more likely to be effective and to endure when it’s not partisan because everyone can be involved.

  • One reason is we don’t feel the need to do so. When things are going well, we often don’t feel it’s a priority. Our work and family responsibilities can easily fill our lives. So we think: why should I waste time at community meetings for no reason? But a second reason is, when things are not going well, we feel powerless to change them. That is why we need to reach out to others— so that our voice is magnified.

  • In his poem A Servant to Servants, Robert Frost wrote: “The best way out is always through.” The best way to build trust is to go through the differences, not try to deny or minimize or sidestep them. That means constructing a process where all the people who are affected (called “stakeholders”) can be heard. With the right people and a constructive process, trust can be rebuilt. Please see my book Leading Through Conflict for more details.

  • Personal storytelling is at the heart and soul of building trust in communities. Each of us is an authority on our lives and feelings. Beyond that, we will each have different opinions and perspectives. But the ground each of us can stand on is our own experience. Sharing that experience is the first step toward resolution and collaboration.

  • Decide what they care enough about that they want to make a difference. Notice who is making a difference in a way that they respect and admire. Join them. Just remember: if you feel alone, step one is finding out who shares your feelings. Then learn to act together. That is called “collaboration” or, at a larger scale, “movement-building.”

  • It’s the only thing. Everything else is cosmetic.


  • The easiest way to define it is to borrow from Hafez, the 15th century Sufi poet who wrote:

    The small man builds cages for everyone he knows, while the sage keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.

    Outer work is wanting to free prisoners from the despotic ruler. Inner work is realizing the ruler is our own shadow and the prisoners are our true selves yearning to be free.

  • If you are driving and someone hits your car and almost fatally injures you, that is an individual trauma. If a bridge collapses when hundreds of cars are crossing over and ships passing under it, that is a collective trauma. Similarly, if one person becomes addicted to a substance, that is an individual trauma. But if addiction becomes the #1 cause of death in a specific population, that is a collective trauma. Collective traumas could also be called cultural traumas. To varying degrees, they impact everyone who lives in that culture.

  • If it just happened to you, it’s personal. If it’s happening to hundreds, thousands or even millions of others, it’s collective. If, for example,  you are the only 14-year-old girl who is getting depressed after spending hours on social media, then that’s your personal problem and you should get help. However, if you are one of millions of 14-year-girls having that experience, then that’s a collective, cultural trauma and the entire society needs to be involved in fixing the problem.

  • The author of The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, said in an interview that a political leader who is abusive and manipulative and instills fear can trigger earlier childhood experiences of fear, manipulation and abuse. Think about it: just as an abusive father can activate personal trauma, an abusive politician or dictators can reactive that trauma. It is happening all the time.

  • When fires ripped through Spokane, Washington and devastated the community, the citizens were dealing with the trauma of death and destruction and loss. When they learned that one of the majors had been an arsonist, their trauma was magnified. As one resident said, when it was act of God, people were in grief. But when it was an act of man, there was also anger. Unless collective trauma is faced and expressed, it can lead to repeated cycles of trauma.

  • To answer your question would require a long and detailed answer. But the essence is that unresolved trauma breeds more trauma. It leads to traumatized people taking actions that re-traumatize themselves and others. In this way, it becomes intergenerational and is built into the way society operates. This leads a culture that is itself traumatizing.

  • Just as our kidneys are our bodies’ natural cleaning system, so can our minds and hearts “clean” the information to which we are constantly exposed. Just as we carefully avoid being exposed too often to strong toxins, so do we need to make sure that we avoid being overdosed or overexposed to traumatizing news. There needs to be a balance between the stimuli that impact us and our capacity to deal with it. Case in point: learning about and being aware of violence around us is important. However, watching it endlessly and repeatedly on screens — with no corresponding release or action— is not.

  • In American PTSD, there are six chapters about trauma, followed by six corresponding chapters on healing. That structure is intentional. It feels irresponsible to write about our collective traumas without offering readers healing practices for dealing with them. This is the difference between exploiting and exploring trauma: the former offers no way through towards healing; the latter does.

Personal & Collective Trauma:

Politics & Democracy:

  • In your question let’s focus on the concept of identity, which is shaped by fear and belonging. The philosopher Ken Wilber wrote that the “boundaries of our souls” determine the “battles of our lives.” If you are citizen of the United States whose primary identity is being a liberal or a conservative, that is a boundary that will lead to a battle. Conversely, if your primary identity is being an “American,” that’s a very different boundary that will lead to very different battles. Ideally, we will learn to have a wider sense of multiple identities that enable us to be more flexible and creative. For example, even if we disagree politically, we may share identities such as father or mother, Christian or Jew, lawyer or teacher. These shared identities may be just as important, or more important, than our divergent ones. We can choose whether to defend our different identities and to build on our shared identities to find common ground.

  • When the city of Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui burnt to the ground, everyone asked how it could have happened and who could have prevented it. The same aftermath occurs in many crises, ranging from the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center to the impact of the Katrina hurricane on New Orleans to the January 6th attacks on the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The sheer diversity of these collective traumas underscores how omnipresent these kinds of experiences are. This is why it is so important that we nurture a culture that is trauma-aware and trauma-healing, not trauma-denying and trauma-making.

  • The key is to be clear what the purpose of your discussion is. If someone’s foot is in your neck, the purpose of the discussion is to get it off — now. Conversely, if you and your father-in-law are having a “boy’s-night-our” dinner to get better acquainted, the purpose of the discussion is to bond because of your shared love for his daughter. Those are very different settings, and therefore have very different ground rules. So before you open your mouth, ask yourself: What is the purpose of this political discussion? How can you speak in a way that is likely to fulfill — not undermine — that purpose?

  • Just as you think about the food you eat if you want to be healthy, so you need to think about the information you consume. What is your information diet? It is important to avoid unhealthy extremes. If you endlessly watch are cute cat videos on Instagram, you are likely to be undernourished. Similarly, if you are addicted to watching crime and disaster news, you are likely to be traumatized. In both cases, you need to have a healthier news diet. If you are at a buffet, you have to choose carefully what to eat. Similarly, in our information saturated culture, you have to choose carefully to what you pay attention.

Civic Engagement:

  • Mark writes about where our lives — our life history— meets history itself. In other words, he writes about the way in which psychology and our own individual minds are affected by what’s happening around us in the world: politics, culture, the economy, et cetera.

  • The world is full of people talking about “self-help” and psychology and how people can feel better. It’s also filled with people who are talking about politics and the news of the day. Where Mark likes to focus is where those two worlds meet. How the personal and the political intersect.

  • Everything Mark writes about is personal. But it is also political. For example, his family was affected by war, so he writes about war and peace. He was deeply affected by his parents’ divorce, so he has studied deeply about love and marriage. His family was affected by gender and the roles of masculine and feminine, so he writes about that too.

  • You will find a full listing of all that he has written on the Bookshelf Page of this site. Several of the books are about the political dimension of life, like The Reunited States of America. Others, like Listening to Midlife, our focused more on the personal dimension. But all of them focus on where the two dimensions intersect which is where “real life” unfolds.

  • You can find his latest book American PTSD on Amazon.com or barnesanoble.com or you can follow him on Substack.

  • Yes, you can find full information about his availability. On his website or you can write to him directly at mark@mediatorsfoundation.org.

  • Educators will find that his books are relevant in several areas. His book Leading Through Conflict, published by Harvard Business School Press. It’s very relevant to any courses dealing with differences and handling both interpersonal and organizational conflict. His book Global Citizens is used widely in high schools and colleges around the world. The Reunited States of America is a small and accessible volume for exploring the positive possibilities in American political life. And his most recent book, American PTSD is extremely useful in courses ranging from psychology to social relationships to civic affairs.