Transform Trauma 2026: Exploring the Meaning Crisis

Panel discussion, moderated by Anthea Bell
Transform Trauma Oxford 2026, 14–17 September

We are living through something quieter than a crisis of symptoms. It is a crisis of meaning.

Beneath so much of what shows up as anxiety, addiction, dysregulation and despair sits a more fundamental rupture: our disconnection from self, from body, from community, from nature, from a shared sense of why any of this matters.

This panel brings together voices from neuroscience, trauma studies, addiction research, spirituality and embodied practice to sit inside that rupture honestly. We will explore how contemporary culture, its pace, its technologies, its isolating structures, pulls us away from the very things that once held us steady. And we will look at what the body and brain are telling us when they fall out of coherence: the neurobiology beneath the ache.

But this conversation does not end in diagnosis. It turns, deliberately, toward the way back.

Altered states. Creativity. Community. Spirituality. A return to nature and to each other. These are not indulgences at the edge of healing, they are its foundation. Together we will explore how coherence, belonging and purpose can be restored, not only in the individual nervous system, but across the collective we are all part of.

Anthea will moderate this conversation with the depth, warmth and directness her audience knows her for, holding space for both the rigour of the research and the reality of what it feels like to live this.

Join us in Oxford.