Hi Anthony,

Appreciate you taking the time to respond, but that is exactly what you’re saying. There is no distinction between saying that healing comes only and fundamentally through the individual, and blaming individuals who are not able to heal.
Yours is actually a fundamentally ethnocentric mistake.
Nonwestern cultures, for example, often offer a collective method to heal trauma that involves storytelling and collective accountability. One example is the effort that Black South Africans made to publicize narratives of their violations at the hands of the apartheid system.
Another example is indigenous Native American cultures who created complex healing rituals they called “soul retrieval.”
So no. Healing trauma does not need to begin with the individual. The choice is not necessarily rooted in the individual. This is a culturally specific perspective.
It is a perspective which ignores the impact of enforced cultural barriers—a child raised in a culture of forced marriage who knows no other way of life will never protest that culture successfully because they will know nothing else. We are all interdependent on others, especially for our healing.