We draw on several traditions, and we name them because the work doesn’t come from one school or one method. Each of them changes how we listen and how we want to put a programme together.
They also argue with each other. Phenomenology trusts experience as people describe it. Liberation psychology is more suspicious, because Martín-Baró saw how people are taught fatalism until oppression feels like the way things are. Psychoanalysis makes claims about all minds everywhere – which is exactly what uncolonial practice wants us to questions. Theopoetics stays with the language people reach for when nothing else fits, while Peter Rollins, reading Christianity through Lacan, hears much of that language as a way of covering over a lack. Autoethnography and narrative work assume a story can be rewritten, and Catherine Malabou warns that what comes after damage may not be recovery at all…
So – we haven’t settled these arguments. A framework that never runs into another one has usually stopped being much use, at least that is what we think
Before a diagnosis or an explanation, there is how someone actually lives their situation. Phenomenology starts there, and so do we. What does a language feel like in the mouth after twenty years of not speaking it? What happens to time in exile? We try to describe before we interpret, and we check our descriptions with the person they’re about.
Ours is critical phenomenology, which assumes that perception and the body carry history. Fanon comes first for us, with his account in Black Skin, White Masks of being fixed in place by a white child’s “Look, a Negro!” We read Merleau-Ponty on the body. We read Sara Ahmed, whose work on orientation explains why some people feel at home in a room while others are made to feel they’ve walked into the wrong one. Mariana Ortega writes about a self that lives across several worlds at once, and Alia Al-Saji about how racism settles into a habit of seeing.
In a group this might mean noticing that someone switches language when the conversation turns to home, or goes still at a particular word, and asking about it without deciding in advance what it means.
Ignacio Martín-Baró was a Jesuit priest and social psychologist in El Salvador, killed by the army in 1989. His argument was that you can’t understand someone’s suffering apart from the politics that produce it. If you treat trauma from state violence as a private problem, you end up repeating the harm.
He gave psychology some practical tasks, and we use them: recovering historical memory, and taking apart the ideology built into everyday experience, especially the fatalism that tells people nothing will change. From Paulo Freire we take conscientisation and popular education, and they shape how our groups actually run.
Underneath all of it is one question. Who benefits when suffering is treated as an individual matter? We ask it of every programme we design.
We listen psychoanalytically without working as analysts. That means paying attention to repetition and transference, and to what happens in a room when a subject gets close and everyone suddenly finds something else to talk about.
Winnicott, Bion, Kristeva and Fanon are the writers we go back to most, along with work on migration and on the politics of memory. Bion matters for group work in particular, because the unconscious doesn’t belong only to individuals. Organisations have one, and so do classrooms and newsrooms where people have learned that dissent costs something. Patterns that show up between two people show up there too, usually louder.
This thread also runs into our theology, through Rollins and Kristeva.
Most trauma models were built around a single event with a clear before and after. That isn’t what most of the people we work with are living. The surveillance continues, and family members are still in the country they left.
Judith Herman’s work on complex trauma showed what long, repeated harm does to identity, trust, relationships and a person’s sense of what anything means. Complex PTSD still assumes the danger is over, though. In apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, clinicians working with victims of political violence needed a different idea, and called it continuous traumatic stress. When the danger is real and still going on, vigilance is often simply accurate, and we start from there.
Catherine Malabou adds something harder. She argues that damage can produce a new person, someone who is neither the old self restored nor recovered. We don’t design programmes around getting people back to who they were before.
Arnold van Gennep named liminality in 1909, and Victor Turner took it further in the 1960s. It describes the middle of a transition, when the old rules have stopped applying and the new ones haven’t arrived. It’s an uncomfortable place, and a lot of real change happens there.
Many of the people we work with live in that middle, through migration, adoption, exile, a change of faith, or a job that sits between institutions that don’t understand each other. Gloria Anzaldúa called it nepantla. Homi Bhabha’s third space, which the practice is named after, is a cultural version of the same in-between.
We don’t push anyone towards a neat resolution. Some people cross a threshold in a few months. Others live on it for years.
We don’t call our work decolonial. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that decolonisation means the repatriation of Indigenous land and life, and that it shouldn’t be used as a metaphor for improving therapy or education. We take that seriously.
What we call uncolonial is more modest. It means noticing colonial categories in how we listen and how we design programmes, decentring whiteness, and being suspicious of any Western framework that claims to apply everywhere. It also means steering clear of guilt rituals and purity politics, which often stand in for actually doing anything. From Édouard Glissant we take the right to opacity: people don’t owe us full transparency. We learn from Indigenous knowledge where we’ve been invited to.
We’ve also let go of the idea of an original, authentic self waiting under the displacement, because that idea has colonial roots of its own. Most people we meet are several things at once: hybrid, diasporic, adopted, translated.
We heal in the circle, not in the corner.
