What to Expect in 2025

If 2024 was bizarre, what's next?

A weather front passing over Brighton’s West Pier © Ros Barber

2024 has done its thing, and for many of us, that thing was Profound Change.

For some, that change was welcome. Take my youngest son, who has been living with us for a few years. In January, he wasn’t even dating. By August, he was betrothed to his childhood sweetheart. By September, they’d been gifted their dream place — a home with land in Portugal — rent-free. I’ll be telling that magical story in a few weeks.

For others, that change felt a little like being chewed up and spat out. Bang in the middle, my year turned so hard I’m surprised it didn’t leave skid marks. Sometimes, life has to pull the rug out from under you, so you’ll learn how to levitate. At the moment, I’m still getting a few bruises.

I was by no means the only person I know who lost their job as the shape of society, stable for decades, progressed further into meltdown. Globally, big shifts are in process. Where I live, climate change is blending seasons together into an eternal wet autumn. Legacy media, poisoned by a loss of revenue and authority, teeters on the brink of collapse. Young people are having less sex and fewer babies. A large number of things that seemed solid are in flux.

When everything is in flux, the remedy is to become your own still point. The difficulty in doing so isn’t just the distractions of the modern age. We rely on those distractions to escape anxiety; anxiety caused both by what we're observing and the legacy of crap we’ve been dragging around with us for years. By which I mean, of course, our unresolved traumas.

I read with interest this post by Tom Keugler dismissing ‘trauma’ as a ‘first world problem’. He suggests that healing our old wounds is pointless naval gazing; what really matters is that the fast fashion industry is dumping its excess on the developing world. Meanwhile, he says, Philipino people living in tin shacks and poverty seem happy.

Data from the World Happiness Report doesn’t back up Tom’s personal observations.¹ But I would, in any case, disagree with him about the importance of recognising that we are all carrying trauma (whether large T, small t, or complex) and that taking steps to heal it will improve our lives — and the lives of those around us — immeasurably. Healing it could even improve the lives of people living in tin shacks in the Philippines.² Let me drop in some stats for a talk I gave in London in November for an event called Changemakers, entitled:

Mass unresolved trauma has made society dysfunctional.

Nearly half of the UK population are affected by addiction or dependency.³

Close to 9 out of 10 prisoners have experienced trauma prior to incarceration.⁴

1 in 4 women suffer domestic abuse in their lifetime.⁵

How are these things connected? Unresolved trauma is the major underlying cause of addiction and violence. It fills prisons and hospitals. It creates spiralling costs for the Government and, hence, the taxpayer. So even if you are quite sure that you haven’t suffered trauma, you have certainly suffered from someone else’s.

Traumatised people make dysfunctional societies. The military-industrial complex has made people in developed countries wealthy but generationally damaged. There were centuries of conflicts even before the 20th century came knocking. Then two World Wars, and many “smaller” ones (Korea, Vietnam, Falklands, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine), have created layer upon layer of generational trauma while destroying, for many of us, meaningful spiritual experiences, supportive communities, and any sense of human goodness.

If you’re a sensitive person and have any connection at all to the “real world”, you have a source of ongoing trauma trying to reach you every day: the news. I stopped actively tuning into news programmes two decades ago, aware of how it affected me. However, you can’t be anywhere near the internet without it reaching you anyway.

Recently, I dropped my phone in the toilet and had to replace it. A meaningful glitch ensured it wouldn’t transfer over my previous set-up; both the phone and connected smartwatch had to be set up from scratch. The bare-bones setup is minimal, but it contains a News app and a News widget as standard. Two news reports that leapt out at me during the set-up process were beyond horrific. I won’t seed the horror here in case you have made yourself a lovely news-free bubble, but they are truly the kind of actions that make you wonder what the hell is happening to people.

Well, I’ll tell you what is happening. The results of accumulated trauma. No one commits atrocities who hasn’t first been traumatised into a state that disconnects them from their humanity.⁶ Damage to others occurs on a sliding scale, eye-for-an-eye style. Those who have been utterly brutalised are the ones capable of brutalities (e.g Gaza). Injury and dysfunctional response to it tend to match. Note how at the Dominique Pelicot trial, the defence of almost every rapist included the fact they were sexually abused as children (yes, some news stories suck me in once I get wind of them. I, too, am human).

Certainly, not all brutalised people brutalise. Not all abused people abuse. And a damaged past is not an excuse for appalling actions, but it can drive them.

Consider this. Every murderer and rapist was once a newborn baby, innocent, delightful, and incapable of evil. So what happened to them? Somewhere along the way, they were traumatised. Freda Briggs found that 93% of paedophiles were sexually abused as children.⁷ Only 4% of victims of childhood sexual abuse have a confirmed history of sexual abuse as adults, but that doesn’t alter the fact that new victims are constantly being created by those who were themselves victimised.⁸ Trauma is an infection, and if we don’t heal it, we will tend to keep passing it on.

Say your trauma is “small t” but complex: thirty years of relentless criticism from a mother for whom you are never enough. (Where did she get it? Odds on, her own parent). Unless you heal it, you are likely to repeat these patterns with people you love (just as she did). You will end up with a trail of broken or dysfunctional relationships. Or, to numb the pain of the gaping hole where unconditional love should have been, you may end up with a drug or alcohol habit, a gambling problem, or a shopping addiction. Or hell, maybe you end up upsetting people on social media because, for just a few seconds, you feel better from doing so, like you’re dishing out portions of what was dished out to you. Misery replicates itself every bit as efficiently as a meme. But your stock levels remain untouched.

Predictions for 2025

Shit’s going to get worse before it gets better (and I’m thinking the ‘gets better’, globally and temporally speaking, is quite a long way off). Human suffering is building to something of a peak (or a low, if you measure our progress in terms of good feeling). Atrocities, small and large, are going to keep happening this year, and that’s going to affect our outlook when we have sources of trauma shouting at us every day from our pockets.

Humanity’s Dark Night of the Soul is in progress. Personal breakdowns lead to breakthroughs, and humanity is now going through this process on a global scale. We need not be afraid of it if we see it as an evolutionary driver.

We can do almost nothing about The State of the World (including tin shacks and the debris of the Fast Fashion industry in the Philippines), but we can do everything about healing our own traumas, large and small, so that we stop contributing to society’s dysfunction.

More than that, too. When you heal significant amounts of your own trauma, amazing things happen. As you heal your own wounds, gaining insights into yourself and others, you increase your levels of compassion. You are more capable of being a stable and peaceful centre point for others.

And more profound than even this: each trauma removed leaves a little pocket of personal peace. And as those pockets expand and join up, you find yourself able to function on interesting new levels. It is operating from these new levels of compassion and connectedness — operating as Humans 2.0 — that will enable us as a species to end our endless cycles of generational trauma. Finally, we can see how dissolving our trauma makes it possible to stop hurting each other and the planet we live on.

So, if you want a better world, do this one thing. Commit to healing all the small and large damage that has been done to you ever since you were born. Okay, it’s several thousand things. Fear not. Ingenious humans have developed great processes now, and you can tackle some of those thousands of things in big bundles. The better you feel, the easier it becomes.

A Name Change

2024 was a powerful year of change, and it’s time for another. In this first year on Substack, my list has grown from 750 to 2,600 subscribers, and I have discovered, through the process of weekly posts, what touches and delights you. I have begun to understand what I am uniquely able to offer; exactly how my life experiences and skills have put me in the position of being of service to others who could use them.

Writing A Better World is an audible aim, and was linked to a protopian novel in progress. However, it sounds a bit fuzzy, and I mean to be clear. You may have noticed a change of header, logo, and now, the name. For 2025, and for as long as it seems fitting, this Substack will go forward as How to Evolve.

Getting Involved/Evolved

I’m going to keep writing those things you like every Friday, and if that’s all you’re after, I am completely happy with that. I appreciate the time you give my words, and I love all the likes and comments that make it feel worthwhile. I know how much you love those humorous reframes of growth-fuelling experiences!

But as I’ve flagged up in a couple of recent posts, I’m also building a community of people who want to go deeper. Starting in mid-January, I’ll be launching the first of three Writing Challenges for those interested in gaining insights on their life, uncovering patterns and meaningful motifs, through the discovery process of writing. I’ll also be providing tools to make the healing of small and large T traumas faster and more effective than most people are used to. Writing Home begins on January 14th.

There are nearly sixty of us already and I’d like to keep it manageable at around 80, so that’s 23 places left. Because we’ll be digging into personal stuff, we’ll keep the community private under the paywall. If you fancy joining us for this Writing Challenge and the others in 2025, to make some serious progress on raising your Personal Peace quotient, become a paid subscriber. If you’d like to take out an annual pass and do all three challenges, there is a 20% discount available for another 72 hours.

Empower Yourself for 2025

However you choose to go about it — and there are so many different routes to healing — I consider healing your own trauma to be the essential gift to yourself, from which spring all others. Unhealed trauma disempowers us, whether we recognise it or not. Keeping mental lids on all the past stuff that still troubles us takes a lot of energy. When we’re exhausted by our personal dramas or even that quiet damage from dramas of the past, it’s hard to turn outward and do some good in the world.

Trauma makes us ineffective, and right now, as we face the start of 2025, we urgently need to be aligned with the powerful core of ourselves. Once we clear the static caused by unhealed trauma, we can more easily reach, for some part of every day, an extraordinary state of love and connection.

I say extraordinary, because look at the world. Or don’t.

Let’s make it ordinary, that state of love and connection. Let’s start with us.

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Answer me these questions three :-)

1. Did you experience a big change in 2024?

2. What do you hope for in 2025?

3. Have you ever dropped your phone in a toilet? Was the timing in some way meaningful?

If you want more, the results are in: my Five Most Popular Posts of 2024

1. Memoir at number one: domestic abuse. That this resonated with so many is a sad reflection on heterosexual relationships.

No one Knew I Was in an Abusive Marriage. Including Me.

2. Memoir at number two: never mix your genitals with meat products.

The Penis in the Pâté

3. Memoir at number three: what price misery?

   The Half a Million Pounds Wife

4. Author woes at number four: I do the maths, and nobody’s happy about it except Jeff Bezos.

   Authors and the Truth About Money

5. More author woes at number five, with some observational comedy and useful tips on your legal rights.

   What to Do When Your Novel is Adapted into a Pile of Dogshit

That’s all for 2024. See you next year! (P.S. This post was late because I was ill. Yes, definitely still 100% human.)

1. Evidence, at least through the measures of the World Happiness Report 2024, does not support this. The Phillipines ranks as the 2nd happiest country in Asia, 53rd out of 143 countries, but the USA is 23rd, UK 20th, France 27th… you get the picture. That Philipinos are happy despite major challenges like poverty and corruption is explained by close family ties, a love of music, dance, and celebrations, and Christianity, according to this article: https://kealakai.byuh.edu/the-joy-of-filipinos-unveiled

2. Indirectly and eventually by the ripple effect. But more directly through the fact that unhealed trauma drives consumerism. Buying the fast fashion that ends up dumped in the Phillipines is one of many non-solutions that people with unhealed trauma use to numb their pain temporarily.

3. Forward Trust: IPSOS survey 2023, https://www.actiononaddiction.org.uk/news-release-almost-half-of-brits-impacted-by-addiction-yet-stigma-continues-to-silence-the-nation

4. Morrison M, Pettus-Davis C, Renn T, Veeh C, Weatherly C. What Trauma Looks Like for Incarcerated Men: A Study of Men's Lifetime Trauma Exposure in Two State Prisons. J Trauma Stress Disord Treat. 2019 Mar;8(1):192. Epub 2018 Dec 21. PMID: 32704504; PMCID: PMC7377264. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7377264/

5. National Centre for Domestic Violence https://www.ncdv.org.uk/domestic-abuse-statistics-uk/

6. You might say “psychopaths, Ros,” but I will argue that psychopaths are made, not born. I have never met a psychopathic baby, and I see no evidence for their existence. I have, however, met a future-psychopath child who bludgeoned one of my baby goslings to death at my son’s birthday party. He was not, I contend, “born that way”.

7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014521349500145X

8. Logically, this is surely in line with ‘all cats are mammals, but not all mammals are cats’. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0145213415003828