Wetiko, The Trance & The Virus of Unhealed Trauma

What Is Wetiko Really?

“A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Wetiko is a psychosis in the true sense of the word, “a sickness of the spirit.” Wetiko covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen.” - Paul Levy

In my podcast interview with Paul Levy, we discussed the similarities between what he explores in the concept of Wetiko and what I call the Trance of Unworthiness.

My Guest Paul Levy

“Many of us think that if we were in the middle of a collective psychosis, it would mean that people would be doing all sorts of “crazy” things such as running around naked and screaming, for instance”.

Paul describes Wetiko as a dissociative and cannibalizing force driven by insatiable greed, a voracious appetite for acquisition and consumption to the point of cannibalization, and war for its own sake against other peoples, tribes, species, and nature herself.

I don’t see these traits in my work with women, but I see similarities in how Paul describes a disassociation from the body, nature, and nature itself. I see it potentially taking a different form for women as a more inward arc toward self-oppression, self-doubt, and self-destruction rather than wetiko directed at others.

While Wetiko may play out differently for men and women, it's similar to the adage of “cutting off your nose to spite your face" because both play against our humanity, keeping us stuck in trauma patterns that perpetuate more of the same.

Paul goes on to describe Wetiko as a disease of the soul, a form of soul-loss that comes from unhealed generational trauma that moves and shifts undetected in our unconscious, thereby allowing it to possess us and use us as an instrument and, in the case of patriarchal culture to dominate, control, consume and annihilate ourselves or another before we would ever pause to consider another way of being.

Trauma and soul loss are at the heart of the trance of unworthiness—generational trauma of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal culture paired with micro-dosed messages projected upon women from birth have a cumulative impact, anesthetizing women to their sovereignty and agency.

Wetiko is its pathology, feeding off polarization and fear of “the other.” The trance is also a pathology- the disease of living in an emotionally uninhabitable world.

In the case of the trance, I observe a draining of vital and erotic energy- hopelessness and eventually dispair- a perpetual approval seeking in a culture that suppresses the organic nature of the feminine that deeply conflicts with her natural rhythms and intuitive guidance.

If we humans are the great creators - Wetiko subversively turns our genius for reality-creation against us. Instead of dreaming up our world in a way that serves us, we project the nightmare of our unresolved trauma into others.

Instead of being authentic to who we are, we wear masks playing a role of who we are.

The ego drives us with its insatiable need to prove while disconnecting from the soul’s essence and voice within our human experience, as this, too, is what I describe as part of the feminine energy principle.

In this state, women say "yes" when we want to say "no". We say "no" when we want to say "yes."

Our conditioning drives the bus rather than our fully awake selves, not under the spell of a conformist culture that has taught us to stay “pretty, pleasing, and polite” at the very cost of ourselves.

Disconnected from our intrinsic agency, outside forces allow us to be used, manipulated, and exploited. I have called these external forces “Patriarchy.”

“The main channel of Wetiko’s transmission is relational. It exists through our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world at large. Like a vampire that can’t stand the light of day, the Wetiko virus can’t stand to be illumined. However, in seeing how it covertly operates through our consciousness, we take away its seeming independence, autonomy, and power over us while at the same time empowering ourselves. The way the vampiric wetiko covertly operates within the human psyche is mirrored by the way it works in the outside world. Jung never tired of warning us that the greatest danger threatening humanity today is the possibility that millions—even billions— of us can fall into our unconscious together in a collective psychosis, reinforcing each other’s madness in such a way that we become unwittingly complicit in creating our own destruction. When this occurs, humanity finds itself in a situation where we are confronted with—and battered by—the primal, primordial, and elemental forces of our own psyche.” - Paul Levy

I enjoyed my interview with Paul Levy and have been tracking his work for years. Once you have listened to our episode, I’m curious if you will find parallels between Wetiko and the trance of unworthiness. Do you think it’s the same disease, occurring differently for the masculine and feminine?