Being With/In Trauma: Entangling Agential Realism and Marriage and Family Therapy to Treat Traumatic Stress

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article serves as an introduction to Karen Barad’s agential realism, a feminist new materialist theory, employing her theoretical tenets to explore how this framework matters for marriage and family therapists, particularly regarding the treatment of trauma and traumatic stress. Entangling Barad’s agential realism with systems theory, this article considers how marriage and family therapists intra-act with traumatized clients to produce different becomings. In particular, this article explores how power and oppression are performed and reinforced to perpetuate traumatic stress, and puts forth recommendations for how this theoretical orientation can aid marriage and family therapists in embodying a feminist and just therapeutic approach for understanding, diagnosing, and treating traumatic stress. Employing a case example of the incarceration of Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor, traumatic stress is conceptualized as a material-discursive phenomenon, opening possibilities for thinking trauma and healing differently. Clinical intra-ventions are put forth in contrast to therapeutic interventions, underscoring re-membering as a re-turn to the material in the work of systemic, feminist-informed trauma treatments.