Trauma and resistance: ‘hang time’ and other innovative responses to oppression, violence and suffering

Abstract

This article presents alternative ways to respond to events understood as ‘traumatic’ in most psychological contexts. It questions the medicalisation and individualisation of persons’ resistance against harms, especially violence and structural oppressions, as criteria of mental illness and trauma. I present activist‐informed approaches to suffering and oppression that are centred on witnessing acts of resistance. This work comes from my ethical stance for justice‐doing and responding to colonisation with accountability as a white settler practitioner. Witnessing requires that we situate personal suffering in its sociopolitical context and resist the individualisation and medicalisation of suffering. Activist practices of witnessing include the duty of the witness to work to change the social contexts of oppression, addressing power both personally and structurally, and working towards co‐creating a just society.Practitioner points Resistance to suffering and oppression is always present as persons always act to guard their dignity and move towards safety Justice‐doing and a decolonising stance for the work is required to resist psychology’s neutrality and objectivity that obscure contexts of structural oppression A witnessing stance from direct action activism is useful in making space for resistance The practitioner’s responsibility is to move beyond witnessing to create social change and address contexts of injustice and limited life choices that are the frame for suffering