Beyond individual therapy, communal ritual — shared song, prayer, collective movement — has a documented capacity to help groups of people regulate overwhelming shared trauma in real time, functioning as a kind of nervous-system-level support that individual verbal processing alone doesn't provide. This isn't a replacement for individual treatment or for justice processes, but a genuinely distinct tool: something that operates on the body and the group simultaneously, allowing people to stay present with unbearable testimony rather than becoming overwhelmed and dissociating or shutting down.
The implication extends past any single historical event: collective trauma — whether from war, disaster, or systemic violence — may specifically require collective, embodied responses alongside individual treatment, since some of what overwhelms a person in these situations is fundamentally social and communal, not just personal.
Van der Kolk personally witnessed 1996 hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where a group of rape survivors testified publicly about apartheid-era atrocities. When witnesses became visibly overwhelmed partway through their testimony, Archbishop Desmond Tutu would interrupt and lead the entire room in collective song, prayer, and dance — not to avoid the difficult testimony, but to help everyone present, including the witness, regulate their nervous systems enough to be able to continue bearing witness rather than collapsing or being driven toward retaliation.