By Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake
Journalist Kate Woodsome has been laser-focused on a key challenge facing democracy in the United States and, frankly, within liberal democracies more generally: the growing inability of social and political tribes to talk with one another. In fact, the impacts of the pandemic on younger generations have generated difficulties for individuals to be part of a broader healthy – literally physically and mentally – democratic society. But the political sectarianism and mental health and addiction issues plaguing America existed even before covid-19 hit, and their corrosive challenge to social cohesion affect young and old alike.
Woodsome has been a journalist throughout her professional life, working for the Voice of America, Al Jazeera English, and The Washington Post in societies with complex information environments and fading or failed democracies. These include Cuba, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and the United States. Everywhere she’s lived and worked in, starting in her home state of Maine, Kate says she’s witnessed a common human experience: People are in pain, and they want to feel better. While so much political reporting focuses on tit-for-tat, he-said-she-said point-scoring, Kate delves deeper to examine the underlying forces of our division and alienation.
The root of much pain, Kate has found, is trauma, a biopsychosocial wound caused by an experience or condition so distressing that it overwhelms or short-circuits a person’s normal stress response systems. Even when a person returns to “safety,” their body and mind can carry the impacts of adversity, whether it is from a challenging childhood or fighting in war. A person’s nervous, endocrine, immune, cardiovascular, and cognitive systems can all be affected by the toxic stress, creating a complex web of long-term and even intergenerational consequences. Without care, resources and support, Kate told us, people can become shutdown or hypervigilant, scanning for threats or danger, or dissociating from even the highest levels of stress. She told us that trauma can rupture connections within ourselves and with others, and that social disorder, political polarization, and violence are all manifestations of collective trauma.
Kate had this experience in her home growing up. She witnessed it reporting in post-genocide Cambodia in the early 2000s. And she covered and lived it reporting on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 as part of The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team.
Now an independent journalist and emerging entrepreneur, Kate is focused on bringing together her experience in the journalistic world with her research on trauma to take a new approach to the challenge of fragmentation. As she told us, “We have to heal our nervous systems to heal our social and political systems.”
Kate took a buyout from The Post in Dec. 2023, and began a multimedia newsletter on Substack called Invisible Threads, where she uncovers the ties between mental health and democracy. Her writing and conversations are compassionate and authentic, weaving personal experiences with larger systemic happenings to make complex challenges more relatable and, therefore, less overwhelming to address.
A year later, with thousands of subscribers, it has grown into something bigger: a living laboratory for media, education and resources to nourish what she calls “an economy of well-being.”
Now a visiting scholar with Georgetown University’s Psychology Department and a senior fellow with the school’s Red House research and design unit, Kate is pioneering a nervous-system-informed approach to journalism, education, and public engagement. She’s building The Invisible Threads Lab to empower people with “tools to stay regulated, relational, and responsive in a world of constant input.”
We had a chance to talk with Kate recently about her mission and how she’s approaching the work.
The key question we posed during the discussion was raised by Ed Timperlake: “Using an engineering term in times of stress, pressure builds, and we need for folks to have a constructive pressure relief valve in order to take the pressure down and allow the society or the system to function so it doesn’t blow up into a set of angry confrontations. Is your vision to pull people together by shaping a common ground?”
One might add that one of the objectives of democratic discourse is in fact to shape common grounds rather than simply to shape isolated social tribes fighting with one another, and unable to find, or even to see the necessity of, finding common ground.
Kate Woodsome provided a thoughtful response that gets at the heart of her work:
The goal is to have media and resources for an economy of well-being. An economy fo well-being is what would result if our social and political and economic systems — and our relationships — were built with human dignity and respect and care in mind.
Right now, the media information ecosystem that I am a product of, that I spent 23 years in newsrooms participating in, and that I consume, is built on adrenaline. It’s built on speed. It is built on generating clicks to bolster ad revenue, to rev you up, to make you scared to you keep checking the news. It keeps us all scanning for danger, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing except when it becomes overwhelming and unhealthy, which I’d argue a lot of people are feeling right now. The information ecosystem reflects the larger fear-driven, hyper-capitalist system that has people ordering stuff they don’t need from Amazon to temporarily make them feel better. People either want quick fixes to complex problems, something to make us feel better now, or they want to know that their angst is valid, and they seek out information that confirms their fears.
And so essentially, what is happening when people are engaging in the information ecosystem, be it mainstream media or social media, or even conversations across the dinner table that are a product of the hyper partisan media, the result is to keep people in a state of fight, flight or freeze.
When you talk about the nervous system and responses to a traumatic incident, you can get ready to fight, you can get ready to run away, or you can freeze and shut down. Another response is appeasement. For a lot of people, reading the news or even visiting family or old friends over the holidays can raise their stress levels so much that they don’t want to engage anymore. Or they’ll say something that fractures the relationship, or they’ll bite their tongue to make the problem go away, which often generates more resentment or grief. This is the tip of the iceberg of the deeper dysregulation of our society.
What I’m trying to do with Invisible Threads is help people understand the underlying, interrelated factors of our mental health and political crises — what I call our crisis of misunderstanding — and develop the skills to start looking at these overwhelming things through different lenses. If we examine complex problems by asking different questions, we can identify different tools and pathways to solve them.
In the writing, interviews and field reporting I publish with the Invisible Threads newsletter, I’m integrating references to the human nervous system and how trauma affects the world around us so that we are better equipped to notice how social, political, and economic systems affect our well-being, and how our well-being affects the communities and systems we build. The goal is to ground people in a shared sense of humanity, so even if you disagree on political points, at least you’re more aware that maybe someone is experiencing spikes of cortisol or adrenaline that might be affecting how they — or we — are listening, communicating, relating, for better or worse.
The current information ecosystems promote polarization. And political polarization is a manifestation of collective trauma. Trauma ruptures relationships and makes you look at someone as the enemy — “us versus them.” That is polarization.
If we have a baseline understanding of how our nervous systems are working, and how trauma and resilience affect society, people can come to Invisible Threads and engage with these conversations and these ideas in a more complex, almost slower way, to begin to reassess how we exist in the world, so that we can see how the systems were built around us.
That’s the media arm of Invisible Threads. This coming year, I’ll be releasing more videos with high-profile trauma experts including Bessel Van Der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score, as well as a younger generation of resilience teachers such as Nkem Ndefo. I’m also teeing up conversations with people affected by the massive shifts in government, those who support it and those who don’t. We need to model dialogue across differences but, more than that, we need the tools to navigate this on an embodied level.
This is where The Invisible Threads Lab comes in. I’m building a non-profit where nervous system literacy meets media literacy, social intelligence, and collective care. People need opportunities to develop deeper skills and practice what they’re learning, so I’m building curriculum and workshops to empower people to notice, navigate, and transform the systems inside and around them. Social media, misinformation, and fearmongering are not going away. We need different skills to stay healthy and grounded in this environment.
This builds on work I’ve been doing for the past year with my partners at Georgetown’s Red House, including its director, Dr. Randall Bass, and Dr. Mays Imad, a neuroscience professor at my alma mater, Connecticut College, as well as with Dr. Jennifer Woolard, a Georgetown vice dean and psychology and law professor who heads the Community Research Group, It’s exciting to blend journalism, psychology, and systems change with an eye on healing rather than fear and division.
You can subscribe to the Invisible Threads newsletter here: https://katewoodsome.substack.com. To help build The Invisible Threads Lab or to learn more about talks, workshops and tools, email ka**@**********me.com.
Editor’s Note: We called our defense website Second Line of Defense and I have had defense types ask why this title?
Our idea from the beginning is that the defense mission of the nation is too narrowly focused on forward deployed forces and neglecting the entire domestic base which makes defense of the nation possible, including infrastructure, industry, a healthy information society and the willingness of the civilian population to defend their ideals and the nation. What Kate is focused on fits right in with our core concept.