Alone Together in the Empire: The Psychology of Community Collapse and Collective Rage
Welcome to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about what it means to be emotionally abandoned by the very systems that are supposed to protect us and how that abandonment is shaping our response to war, injustice, and each other. Over the weekend, in The United States, president Trump launched an unprovoked attack on Iran. No approval from congress, no legal justification, just a unilateral act of violence from a president who's pulling political strings on behalf of ego and outside interests and testing the boundaries of law and power.
Leslie Poston:There was a gut punch to many of us here in The United States, and yet as we try to make sense of what we're feeling, anger, fear, confusion, exhaustion, it's clear that something deeper is at play. We're not just reacting to a war we didn't ask for. We're reacting to years of living in a country that sold off our collective safety net and told us we're on our own, a country where every form of protection, from health care to housing to education and food, is mediated by wealth, leaving us all scrambling to survive, let alone process national grief. In this episode, we'll explore the psychology of community collapse, the emotional weight of living in a fractured society, and what it means to rebuild the village when the system has burned it down. Whether or not you follow politics closely, there's a visceral emotional reaction when your government bypasses the rules.
Leslie Poston:It's a breach of trust. It undermines the sense of shared reality and fairness that helps people feel psychologically safe. That sense of safety is not a luxury. It's foundational to emotional regulation. When it's pulled out from under you, the response is often a mix of numbness, rage, anxiety, and dissociation.
Leslie Poston:And this isn't just about Trump. He's just one man acting within a system currently weighted down with multiple power hungry people and systems. It's about the pattern. We've seen misguided and unprovoked military interventions before from The United States. What makes this moment feel more psychologically destabilizing is the context around it.
Leslie Poston:We're already carrying the weight of years of political disillusionment, a pandemic that shattered our collective norms, and a social fabric that's barely holding together. When something like this happens, when a leader acts like a dictator and no one stops him, it taps into an unresolved trauma of powerlessness, that collective feeling of what can I even do? Research in political psychology has a term for this: civic trauma. It happens when a society's foundational institutions fail to act in the interest of the public good. It doesn't just breed cynicism.
Leslie Poston:It breaks people down, making them less likely to engage, less likely to trust, and more likely to retreat into survival mode, exactly the opposite of what needs to happen in this moment. When people feel powerless in the face of war or injustice, the next question is often, where do I turn? Who helps me process this? And here's the thing. In The United States, we don't really have an answer anymore.
Leslie Poston:The emotional response to events like this is compounded by the fact that most Americans no longer have a village, a community. We live in a country that systematically dismantled community structures and replaced them with market transactions. Need therapy? Pay for it. Need food?
Leslie Poston:Hope you can afford groceries. Need elder care, child care, housing, education, health care, or just someone to talk to? That'll cost you. What was once handled by interdependent community has been carved up and sold back to us in pieces, and not everyone can afford the price. This shift didn't just break down support networks, it changed how we view each other.
Leslie Poston:Other people stopped being part of our emotional ecosystem and started becoming competitors. Others we were taught to view through a lens of suspicion, envy, or transactional utility. Capitalism trains us to internalize systemic failure as personal failure. If you're struggling to cope with war, injustice, burnout, the narrative says, Get more therapy. Meditate.
Leslie Poston:Drink water. Hustle harder. It doesn't tell you to look around and ask, Where is my community? Where is the shared response? Because that would reveal the rot in the system.
Leslie Poston:The result is emotional outsourcing. Instead of grief circles, we have mindfulness apps. Instead of community action, we have self care influencers. We're told to regulate ourselves while the world burns. Let's talk more directly about how this shift plays out on a psychological level.
Leslie Poston:When community breaks down, people lose not just practical support but mirroring, the psychological reflection that comes from others validating your emotions. When someone dies and no one shows up to mourn with you, your grief becomes distorted. When injustice happens and no one affirms your anger, you start to question your own sense of right and wrong. This is emotional gaslighting on a societal scale. Studies on collective trauma, especially post disaster mental health research, show us that people fare better mentally when recovery efforts are rooted in communal activity, shared rituals, and mutual aid.
Leslie Poston:But our current system isolates even that. We grieve in private. We recover in private. Even the way we consume our news is often solitary, processed algorithmically rather than communally. That fracture is not just understanding but identity.
Leslie Poston:You stop feeling like a citizen and start feeling like a consumer of tragedy. This is especially hard on people who are already marginalized. Black and indigenous communities, disabled folks, queer people, poor people, because those are the groups who rely most heavily on community to survive the systems that routinely target them. When the community is forced to fragment under economic pressure, the most vulnerable are the ones left most exposed. One reason people struggle so much with grief and anger in The United States is because they've been sold the myth of the self reliant citizen.
Leslie Poston:Our media loves to tell us stories about bootstraps and lone heroes, but this story is a lie. No one builds a life alone. No one processes national trauma alone. The entire psychology of the human brain is relational. We are literally wired for connection, pattern recognition, and shared meaning making.
Leslie Poston:In fact, developmental psychology tells us that even our earliest sense of self forms in the context of others. Even as early as the fifties, psychologist Erickson argued that identity isn't something discovered in isolation but constructed through relationships and cultural systems. Neuroscience backs this up. Research on mirror neurons, social baseline theory, and attachment theory all show that our brains expect connection emotionally, cognitively, physiologically. When we're deprived of that connection, especially in moments of crisis, the body registers it as a threat.
Leslie Poston:It's not just unpleasant. It's dysregulating. The problem is individualism has been so thoroughly baked into American culture that people often mistake communal needs for personal weakness. They feel shame about needing help, shame about struggling, shame about not having the answers. This shame isn't natural.
Leslie Poston:It's taught, and it's used to keep people from building solidarity. When something like an unauthorized act of war happens, the individualist narrative tells you just stay informed, vote, keep calm, be reasonable, and be nonviolent. But what it doesn't tell you is how to metabolize that into something you can carry, something that won't break you apart. And that's what community used to do. It held the container, helping us process collective fear, anger, and uncertainty so they didn't spiral.
Leslie Poston:Without that community as container, every emotion spills out sideways into rage, apathy, or despair. That's not a personal failure. It's a nervous system doing its job in the absence of shared meaning. Let's talk about the pandemic or more accurately pandemics. COVID nineteen didn't just devastate families and take lives.
Leslie Poston:It also revealed in brutal detail just how much we're all our own. The federal and state governments gave up on meaningful protections years ago before this continuing threat was over. People were forced back to work too soon. Kids were sent back to school without any mitigations for clean air. Those who were vulnerable have been simply left behind.
Leslie Poston:Even now, we're in the early stages of a bird flu outbreak that public health officials are worried about. Measles cases are rising. Tuberculosis is back in cities where it had once been controlled. But there's no meaningful infrastructure established in The United States to protect us, not because we don't have the resources, but because prioritizing public health cuts into profit. From a psychological standpoint, this creates a collective exposure to what trauma theorists call slow crisis or chronic societal trauma, the kind of trauma that doesn't have a clear endpoint or resolution.
Leslie Poston:It lingers, accumulates, and quietly erodes our emotional resources over time. Unlike acute trauma, which is often dramatic and visible, chronic sociopolitical trauma works in the background, creating a baseline of unease, vigilance, and exhaustion. And here's what's most haunting to me as a psychologist. We never really grieved what we lost, not collectively. There was no national day of mourning, no public acknowledgment of how many families are still shattered, no reckoning with the trauma of living through a mass disabling event that's still ongoing.
Leslie Poston:Grief was rushed, privatized, and hidden. We were told to move on for the economy. This disenfranchised grief is a grief that isn't acknowledged or validated by society. When grief is invisible or shamed, people suppress it. But suppressed grief doesn't disappear.
Leslie Poston:It manifests as irritability, numbness, emotional disconnection, or even physical illness. Left unprocessed, it becomes a psychological burden that quietly warps how we see ourselves, each other, and the world. And that's The US template now. Tragedy happens, people suffer, and the system denies it ever mattered. This continual emotional erasure has a cost.
Leslie Poston:When something new, like an illegal war, comes along, it reactivates all that unresolved grief and betrayal, and once again, we're left to carry it alone. This is known as emotional reactivation or associative trauma response. Your body and mind remember past harms even if you're not consciously aware of the connection. New crises tap into old wounds, and without a collective framework for healing, people are left reliving pain without meaning or resolution. There's something especially cruel about how the end of pandemic protections was framed.
Leslie Poston:Instead of a slow, thoughtful transition out of emergency mode, we got slogans like get back to normal, even though normal never worked for everyone. We got platitudes about resilience even as thousands were still dying. People who wore masks were mocked. Those who asked for accommodations were shamed. Collective care became political, and public health was framed as a personal choice.
Leslie Poston:This shift mirrors what psychologists call moral injury, the emotional damage that results from being forced to witness or participate in actions that violate one's sense of what is right. People who took the pandemic seriously were not only dismissed, they were made to feel wrong for holding on to care. This undermines people's trust in themselves and others, and it corrodes empathy at scale. We talked about empathy in a previous episode. That shift, framing public safety as individual responsibility, didn't just hurt people medically.
Leslie Poston:It's rewired how we relate to each other. You stopped being your neighbor's keeper. You became a potential threat, a moral failing or a burden. And once again, the emotional cost of surviving was treated like a personal defect. This kind of structural gaslighting where the dominant narrative denies the lived reality of suffering leads to widespread self doubt and alienation.
Leslie Poston:People begin to second guess their instincts, minimize their needs, and feel shame for asking questions. In the long run, this undermines not only mental health, but also the capacity for collective action and solidarity. There was no place to say, I'm still scared or I lost someone or I've changed and the world hasn't caught up. And without that space, those feelings calcify. They turn into bitterness, alienation, and disconnection, exactly the opposite of what we need to build solidarity in the face of ongoing harm.
Leslie Poston:Let's talk a little bit more about grief, but this time, let's focus on it power. We don't usually think of grief as political, but it is. Not just because we grieve the outcomes of political decisions, but because how grief is permitted, framed, and policed tells us who is allowed to be fully human and public. Grief is disruptive. It slows down productivity.
Leslie Poston:It demands care. It interrupts the flow of what capitalism calls normal. That's why public grief over systemic violence, whether it's war, pandemic death, police shootings, or climate collapse, is often silenced or redirected. You're told to keep it private, move on, and get back to work. But grief doesn't move on.
Leslie Poston:It transforms. And the way it transforms depends on whether it's shared or isolated. When grief is held in community, it can turn into care, into solidarity, into acts of mutual protection. When it's acknowledged, it reconnects us to others and helps us remember that we're not alone in feeling like something has gone terribly wrong. When grief is made visible and ritualized, even in small ways, it becomes a quiet form of resistance against the systems that would rather we stay numb.
Leslie Poston:But when grief is denied or hidden, it calcifies and hardens into numbness, festers into quiet rage. Psychologically, that's what happens when there's no outlet for mourning. The loss gets internalized as alienation, shame, and sometimes moral fatigue. If that happens at scale, it becomes easier for institutions to maintain control. And that's the real danger.
Leslie Poston:When we lose access to shared emotional language, we become easier to fragment and manipulate. We stop saying things like this is wrong and we all feel it. We stop seeing each other's pain as connected to our own. If we want to rebuild our village, we have to reclaim grief not just as a feeling but as a public practice. That means creating spaces, physical, cultural, and emotional, where people can name their losses out loud, not just the loss of life, but the loss of trust, safety, and the futures they once imagined.
Leslie Poston:So talk about what you've lost. Invite others to do the same. Make space where collective mourning isn't seen as weakness but as an act of truth telling. When grief is witnessed, it reminds us what we value and what we're still willing to fight for. There's another layer to this, the way power structures manufacture hopelessness.
Leslie Poston:Media coverage of war, like this latest strike, often works like a slow sedative. You'll see pundits arguing over tactics. You'll see maps, acronyms, and military terms, but you won't see sustained outrage. You won't see organizing, and you likely won't see protest if you're not on social media. The framing flattens your emotional response until it becomes confusion or resignation.
Leslie Poston:Just another headline. Just another day. This is by design. There's a psychological term for what we experience in moments like this, learned helplessness. It happens when people are repeatedly exposed to uncontrollable events and come to believe that nothing they do will change the outcome.
Leslie Poston:Over time, they disengage, not because they don't care, but because the emotional cost of caring becomes unbearable. This kind of emotional shutdown is a survival response, a form of psychic triage. The brain starts rationing your ability to feel because feeling too much without agency becomes a kind of slow emotional death. And so we become spectators to our own unraveling, not because we want to be, but because we've been conditioned to believe that participation is futile. Pair that with moral injury, the psychological damage that occurs when your values are violated by actions you're forced to witness, and you have a country full of people emotionally paralyzed by contradiction.
Leslie Poston:We believe in democracy, but we see it violated. We believe in peace but see only endless war. We believe in community but feel completely alone. What we're seeing is not apathy. It's grief with nowhere to go, and often that grief tries to speak through our anger.
Leslie Poston:But when we try to express it, we're told to calm down, be polite. That rage is pathologized, seen as excessive, irrational, or unproductive. But the truth is anger is often a sign of care, conscience, and connection. It's not something to be suppressed. It's something to be honored.
Leslie Poston:Anger is what rises when grief refuses to be silenced. It's not the problem. It's a signal that the problem still matters. So where do we go from here? The first thing is to stop pretending that we can regulate our way through this alone.
Leslie Poston:You can't self care your way out of a war. You can't meditate or goat yoga away the collapse of public health. You can't journal your way through systemic violence. We need each other desperately. There's power in community, real community, not group chats, friend groups, or shared aesthetics.
Leslie Poston:In fact, a community that only includes people you like and enjoy isn't really community, is it? It's a click. People are rebuilding that community power now through mutual aid networks, solidarity collectives, neighborhood councils, and intentional communities. These aren't just practical responses. They're psychological medicine.
Leslie Poston:Being seen, held, and helped by others restores the parts of the self that capitalism tries to strip away. When we connect, we co regulate. That's not a soft skill. That's a survival mechanism. It helps us process grief in ways that are sustainable.
Leslie Poston:It helps us metabolize rage into action instead of implosion. It helps us remember that we're not, quote, crazy. We're just reacting to a world that wants us to feel isolated and powerless. There are steps you can take right now. If you're overwhelmed by what's happening, start small.
Leslie Poston:Find an existing mutual aid group in your area. Offer help. Ask for help. Share food with your neighbors in your communities. Pool your resources.
Leslie Poston:Create a grief space where people can talk about what they've lost, whether that's from war, pandemics, or just the everyday violence of economic survival. Build a resiliency garden with your neighbors. Get to know each other. Don't stay silent and isolated. Most of all, allow yourself to feel.
Leslie Poston:Your anger is not a failure, and your sadness is not a weakness. Your confusion right now, it's not a flaw. These are signals that your conscience is intact and your humanity hasn't been eroded by the system no matter how hard it tries. In a society built to isolate us, connection is a radical act. In a world that wants us numb, feeling is rebellion.
Leslie Poston:And in a time when it feels like everything is unraveling, showing up for each other is how we hold the thread. Thanks for listening to this special episode of PsyberSpace. We felt that this was imperative to release today in light of the news events that happened this weekend. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. I hope this episode has helped you.
Leslie Poston:Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss any of the weekly drops.
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