So you want to decolonise trauma?
Arriving to this space
Hello! I’m really glad that you found your way to my chapter. I am grateful for your presence, curiosity, and engagement. In this chapter, I will share reflections, musings, and wonderings on what decolonising trauma-informed and trauma-responsive practices could look like. That being said, I want to be as transparent as possible on what engaging with this chapter might feel like. Some of the topics include:
- colonial violence,
- intergenerational trauma,
- carceral systems,
- intersectional oppression,
- interpersonal and relational harm,
- exploitation.
As we move through this chapter together, you may experience a range of emotions, feelings, and responses. I encourage you to lean into practices of embodiment, moving at a pace that feels right for you. You may find it helpful to reflect on ways to self-soothe and regulate your bodymind, especially in moments of activation and heightened awareness. I trust that you will honour your own agency in choosing how (not) to engage with this chapter.
If you haven’t been introduced to it yet, the concept of “bodymind” integrates the perceived split between the mind and body by understanding them as interconnected and interdependent. Dr. Sami Schalk, in her book Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, stretches our conceptualization of bodyminds by imagining possibilities that break free from the social constructions of identity and oppression. I offer this as an invitation for you to tap into the rich and abundant knowledge your bodymind carries and explore it as a site of resistance, joy, and liberation.
Grounding ourselves in the present moment
At the time of writing this, I am situated on the unceded, ancestral lands of the Anishinaabe people from the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa nations. These lands carry the memory of enslavement, occupation, and the ongoing genocide against Native and Black communities. They also embody ancestral wisdom passed down through generations of healers, land defenders, water protectors, and freedom fighters. In the present moment, we are actively witnessing multiple genocides across borders and the continued expansion of colonial empires. The wounds inflicted through colonial and imperial violence extend beyond linear timescapes and are felt across generations. As we seek to decolonise trauma, it is our individual and collective responsibility to actively confront the systems that create and perpetuate those traumas in the first place.
My histories, herstories, and relationships with (de)colonisation
I come from a lineage of ancestors, known and yet to be known, who tended to their native lands and waters as a primary form of sustenance and survival. Due to colonial violence and forced displacement, these relationships have been severed over multiple generations and cycles of loss. Unravelling the work of colonisation has led me through a process of reconciliation and remembrance – (re)learning ancestral ways of being and preserving new practices for future kin. As a first-generation immigrant-settler on Turtle Island, I commit to centering Indigenous sovereignty and the right to self-determination and resistance against occupation, settler violence, and colonisation.
Decolonisation is an everyday practice that requires us to actively confront the ways in which colonial legacies seep into our lives, relationships, social structures, and institutions. Decolonisation work cannot exist without a steadfast commitment to defend and protect Indigenous presence and futures. We must resist the metaphorisation of decolonisation, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang highlight in their seminal paper,“Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonial struggles must be rooted in a politic of Indigenous resurgence and revitalization.
My journey with decolonisation continues to emerge and remains imperfect. Every single day, I continue unravelling the ways in which colonial norms and legacies are ingrained in my daily practices of living. This process requires me to reckon with my own histories of colonisation and how I, too, participate in maintaining the dominance of colonial structures that exist and linger today. Before we move further, I invite you to take a moment and reflect on what practising decolonisation means to you.
What brings me to this work
Care work has always been an integral part of my life: to stay alive, to transform harm, to build peer support networks, and to keep each other safe(r) from institutional forms of violence. Navigating a world that is inherently violent to racialised, queer, femme, and disabled bodies has taught me the importance of reclaiming our bodily autonomy and creating pockets of joy and resistance. Often, we face harm and violence at the hands of the very institutions meant to provide care. In the face of such injustices, care work is a necessary and life-preserving strategy for survival.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, in their book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, highlights how:
“people’s fear of accessing care didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of generations and centuries where needed care meant being locked up, losing your human and civil rights, and being subject to abuse.”
As someone who has firsthand experience surviving the medical and psychiatric industrial complexes, I believe that access to dignifying care should be a fundamental human right. When institutionalised care strips people of their autonomy and criminalises them, the struggle to cultivate care beyond carceral institutions is shared and ongoing.
Contextualising trauma
Trauma is often understood and defined from the perspective of an individual responding to distress, harm, injury, or violence. The dominant socio-cultural construction of trauma is based on what is considered a “normal” response to a situation or context that is activating, distressing, or violent. Often, there is a hyper-emphasis on defining and controlling the ways in which people respond, without addressing the root causes of what creates and exacerbates trauma. Dr. Samah Jabr, Head of the Mental Health Unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, prompts us to reflect on:
“what is sick, the context or the person? In Palestine, we see many people whose symptoms—unusual emotional reaction or a behaviour—are a normal reaction to a pathogenic context.”
Trauma as a collective experience
In order to contextualise trauma, we need to create space for multiple ways of viewing and understanding trauma itself. Trauma is often thought of in the context of one person with their individual symptoms, not a group of people with a collective experience. For example, colonial violence is rooted in the logic of separation. This attempts to sever our relationships with each other and our more-than-human relatives. I use the term “more-than-human relatives” to honour the sacred and infinite life forms that exist within the ecosystems we are part of. For many Indigenous communities, their livelihoods are deeply intertwined with the lands and waters they tend to and steward. The trauma of separation and displacement is profound and passed down from generation to generation.
As a response to colonial violence, in order to comply with and survive the colonial order, we are often forced into ways of assimilation and erasure. Over time, this becomes encoded into our bodyminds as a lasting impression that permeates our ancestral ways of being and knowing. This is how intergenerational trauma manifests itself, continuing to change and evolve, and in some contexts becomes embedded into cultural norms. Dr. Resmaa Menakem highlights how:
“trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma decontextualized in people looks like culture.”
This is extremely important to understand how cycles of trauma are reinforced and continue to persist over time, especially when the underlying conditions remain unaddressed.
Trauma beyond the confines of human supremacy
Many discussions around trauma are rooted in human supremacy and neglect to account for the ways in which harm and violence are inflicted upon lands, waters, and ecosystems. These narratives reinforce colonial norms, which privilege human domination and exacerbate hierarchies of control. The impact of colonial violence and plunder on the land is often ignored. In many cultures and communities, the land holds great significance as it sustains and nourishes us. The interconnectedness between all sentient beings is profound and necessary for our collective survival. Land-Based Ecologies is an interdisciplinary network seeking to understand the lived experiences of land trauma among marginalised communities. They articulate how “the land and the body are sites of simultaneous land-based violence and we feel the land-body trauma in our bodies, because we are the land, land is us.” Understanding the impact of land-body trauma is necessary to contextualise the experiences of many individuals and communities whose livelihoods are deeply intertwined with the lands and waters they belong to.
It is important to highlight the trauma carried by the land and our more-than-human kin. As a result of land-based and colonial violence, they hold the memory of all they have witnessed and been subjected to. Similarly, we need to understand that the way this trauma manifests may shift and evolve over time. Our understanding of linear timescales is often rooted in a human-centric perspective shaped by coloniality. Inspired by Anna Tsing’s work in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, I invite you to reflect on the different kinds of world-making projects happening around us, by different species on multiple timescales. By viewing trauma as an evolutionary phenomenon, we can map out how trauma influences and shapes sociocultural change.
Exploring the root causes of trauma
It is important that our understanding of collective trauma addresses the root causes of harm and violence. Systems of oppression are built on the foundations of dehumanisation, erasure, and othering. These principles are based on separation from our shared humanity and interdependence.
An aspect often diminished is the need for co-regulation and mapping out how disruption and dysregulation can have a ripple effect beyond individual experiences. Co-regulation allows us to embrace a holistic approach to collectively tend to our nervous systems and care for our bodyminds. Dr. Jennifer Mullan, author of Decolonizing Therapy, traces the roots of pain and trauma to “separation from our land, our ancestry, our community, and our innate joy.” This separation is intentional and by design, allowing systems of oppression to stay alive and thrive. In order to effectively respond to trauma, we need to shift toward relational practices that integrate the need for individual and collective care.
Resisting pathologisation
One of the unfortunate realities I have witnessed is how sometimes seemingly “trauma-informed” practices reduce people’s lived experiences to the traumas they carry without directly acknowledging systemic and institutional contexts. When we fail to address the root causes of harm and violence, trauma can be pathologised in detrimental ways that strip individuals of their agency and dignity. This form of isolation is often weaponised as a means of control: to label and categorise whether someone’s trauma responses seem irrational or disordered. In many situations, pathologisation directly feeds into criminalisation, as is the case with the medical industrial complex. Stella Akua Mensah explains how:
“the mental ‘health’ system is fundamentally carceral, meaning that it is one of the many kindred systems that function to contain and surveil people, take away their locus of control, isolate them from their communities, and limit their freedom.”
It is also important to acknowledge that de-pathologisation does not necessarily mean getting rid of a clinical approach to addressing symptoms arising as a result of trauma responses. In some contexts, people can find a sense of belonging or community through having a fully-realised psychiatric identity, and it may open up pathways to access institutional care. We need to hold space for multiple truths to co-exist. Wrongful de-pathologisation of the ways in which trauma manifests can lead to trivialisation or create barriers for accessing needed care and support. At the same time, we can reckon with the ways in which medical and psychiatric institutions uphold carceral practices and further cause harm, disproportionately to minoritised communities. To be clear, we are not attempting to question the validity or legitimacy of what an individual is experiencing or how that shows up in their bodymind; rather, we are seeking to deconstruct the notion of what is considered “normal.”
Decolonising trauma requires us to shatter the social construction of normality and with it our dependence on carceral systems and institutions that continue to control and oppress us. The medicalisation of trauma often focuses on “fixing” the individual and getting them back to “normal”. The underlying notion here is again that of control and domination. In their article “Visions for a Liberated Anti-Carceral Crisis Response,” Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu shares how “medicalisation has limited our capacity to show up as curious humans, to find value or meaning in someone’s state or in their words – regardless of if they ‘make sense’ to you or not.” This is often a result of the ways in which internalised carcerality is projected onto others, contributing to systems of policing and oppression. Internalised carcerality can be understood as the “cop that exists in our heads and our hearts,” reinforcing ideas of surveillance, punishment, and dehumanisation.
Before we move further, I invite you to pause and reflect on the ways in which internalised carcerality shows up for you, as well as experiments and practices to dismantle these carceral logics. As a reminder, engaging in this process may feel unsettling or dysregulating. I encourage you to move slowly and gently while tending to your own needs and honouring your capacity.
Reclaiming trauma work
As we seek to decolonise trauma, it is imperative to highlight how much of trauma work continues to be a mode of survival and resistance against institutional forms of oppression. While there is an emerging discipline around trauma-informed and trauma-responsive practices, many of these approaches have existed for time immemorial across borders, communities, and cultures.
Let’s take a closer look at the Liberatory Harm Reduction movement in the United States, driven by the community advocacy of sex workers, substance users, transgender activists, and disability justice organisers attempting to survive realities where they are outcast and criminalised. In the absence of institutional support, peer and community support becomes essential to survive. Liberatory Harm Reduction, as defined by Shira Hassan, focuses on transforming the root causes of oppression. It is rooted in true self-determination and total body autonomy. A central aspect of this approach is to promote community-based empowerment and survival strategies that prioritise safety from institutional violence and reject any coercion, judgement, or stigma.
Shira Hassan highlights how:
“we have become targets of a system that cannot make sense of us and seeks only to control us. Sometimes I think these systems have little help to offer, and other times I think these systems hoard resources from our communities intentionally and force us to fight each other for what little access we have.”
This perspective is significant because it highlights the need to cultivate ecologies of care that prioritise the material and safety needs of the communities who are impacted by institutional harm and violence. Learning from the many examples of peer support and alternatives to carceral care, we must realise the need to invest in grassroots initiatives that are directly led by community members and reduce the overall dependence on carceral systems. A popular perspective that has gained momentum in abolitionist spaces is that “we keep us safe,” which highlights how safety needs to be reimagined as something that grows from cultivating reciprocal relationships rooted in accountability, care, and transformative justice.
Reframing resilience
I often come across narratives of resilience that romanticise struggle in the face of adversity and trauma, rather than recognising how resilience is a necessary mode of resistance and survival against oppressive systems. This phenomenon is exacerbated for folks who experience intersectional forms of harm and violence. The glorification of resilience is incredibly harmful and can lead to further dehumanisation of individuals and communities, as violence inflicted upon them becomes more normalised. Dr. Sahar D. Sattarzadeh expresses how:
“resilience is often understood from a lens that centres the oppressive forces that many peoples and communities face. It rarely, if ever, centres the human beings that experience and endure suffering”
The fetishisation of resilience can also mask the deep-rooted realities of institutional and systemic violence, making it seem like enduring trauma is a routine, and even admirable, outcome. This narrative shifts focus away from those perpetuating violence and oppression, absolving them of their complicity and responsibility to take action. The burden inevitably falls on those who are disproportionately harmed, along with the demand for resilience becoming an expectation.
We must ensure that the endurance of immeasurable violence and brutality is not lost on us. In some ways, resistance and resilience, too, are intertwined. Ancestral wisdom is a form of resilience that has been cultivated through generations as a means of cultural preservation and continued presence. Reframing resilience means shifting away from narratives that overemphasise struggle and instead focusing on celebrating rest, joy, and collective care.
(Re)Centering joy and pleasure
Trauma-informed practices often exclusively focus on the absence or prevention of harm, but rarely the presence of joy and pleasure. Systems of oppression are inherently violent and designed to suck the life and soul out of us. We are often denied the right to experience joy and pleasure, especially those who are forced to live in a state of continuous and perpetual trauma. Thus, joy and pleasure become necessary antidotes to keep us alive and sustain our bodyminds and spirits. A brilliant example is how Sins Invalid, a disability justice-based performance project led by Disabled people of colour, challenges conventional paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” by centering body liberation. Through various forms of artistry and storytelling, their collective efforts resist the medicalisation of bodies and celebrate the diversity of beauty that exists.
Creating space for joy and pleasure allows us to embrace the richness and abundance of our experiences. This is important because it deconstructs the narrative that portrays minoritised communities as perpetual victims that need to be saved. Our experiences should not solely be defined in relation to the harm and violence we experience at the hands of oppressive systems. Reconnecting with and remembering our cultural practices, connections with lands and waters, ancestral wisdoms, and innate capacity to practise joy is revolutionary and necessary resistance. Decolonising trauma requires us to lean into our imagination and break free from the shackles placed on us. How can we imagine, practice, and build outside the confines of the colonial imaginary?
Shifting the scales: what does this mean for designers?
Decolonising trauma requires us to critically examine the ways in which hierarchies of control and domination are (re)produced in design and research. Power is a dynamic, multifaceted concept that shows up in a myriad of ways.
One of the ways I like to think about power is when it is coupled with possibility. Where there is room for power dynamics to be exacerbated and reinforce systems of oppression, there is also space to imagine what possibilities may open up when power is leveraged to share access, privilege, and resources. As designers seeking to decolonise trauma-centred practices, it is our responsibility to shift power imbalances and actively work toward dismantling systems of oppression.
Rejecting the commodification of trauma
The commodification of trauma is something that shows up significantly in design, especially when working with communities who face intersectional forms of oppression and violence. When trauma is commodified, it loses its depth and complexity, turning people’s pain and suffering into a spectacle for the sake of engagement or profit. This is made possible through objectification and stripping individuals and communities of their agency.
There is an underlying phenomenon of how the practice and institution of design has persistently extracted from minoritised communities, while community members involved rarely reap the benefits of the work. As designers, we must treat people’s stories as living and breathing. It is truly a sacred gift to have someone entrust their lived and experiential knowledge to you. As such, we must act with a duty of care and relational responsibility, reminding ourselves who we are accountable to and how we can ensure reciprocal exchange to respect and value their contributions. I invite you to further explore ethical storytelling in Chapter 11.
Deconstructing colonial hegemony
As designers, we hold a fair amount of power afforded to us by our positionality within social ecosystems and institutions. This means that we often have control over what and whose stories are highlighted, how they are portrayed, what issues get prioritised or not, and so on. This form of control dictates the ways in which we may engage with the communities we partner with.
In order to understand someone’s experiences, we must ensure that we are not enforcing a dominant lens or perspective. We are conditioned to view certain forms of knowledge as more credible, dismissing alternative ways of knowing and being. We need to remind ourselves that often what is considered “new knowledge” already exists within communities, and accessing that insight and wisdom should be done with utmost care, dignity, and respect.
Centering agency, dignity, and the right to self-determination
In our work, we must ensure that the identities and experiences of the people we are designing with are captured in dignifying ways that align with how they want to be represented.
An example comes to mind from a project where I was collaborating with a group of predominantly Black and Brown women who had recently been released from prison. One moment that came up during our work together was to create a shared language on how to represent their experiences with the carceral system. Through feedback and mutual consensus, we agreed upon the term “system-impacted.” I remember reflecting on this moment and the impact it had on the women I was working with, particularly as they were used to being labelled as “inmate” or “prisoner”. While this shift in language may feel small or insignificant, I do feel it had a profound impact by allowing someone to exercise their own agency in defining their experiences. From this interaction, I learned the importance of the right to self-determination and how changing the narrative is a crucial step for designing new possibilities.
Another example is related to a research project where an online survey was shared with a group of college students to better understand their experiences navigating mental health support. In this context, we asked each of the students to define what mental health means to them through the use of a creative metaphor. Coupled with open-ended questions to self-describe their backgrounds and identities, this approach created space for students to share their experiences on their own terms.
We must recognise and affirm that every individual is the expert of their own lived experiences. As designers, our role is to hold space for them to share if and whatever they feel comfortable with, as well as take charge of their own realities.
Embracing plurality and emergence
When working with individuals or communities that have experienced considerable harm and violence, it is important to ensure that we can honour and reflect the fullness of their experiences. Particularly in relation to narratives of trauma, we should intentionally create space for multiple perspectives and truths to co-exist. We must resist any attempts that default to monolithic ways of thinking and portray an entire group, community, or culture in a specific way that reduces complexity and nuance.
Similarly, the way we choose to portray individual or communal experiences should not reinforce tactics of control and dehumanisation. For example, if we solely choose to represent someone’s experiences in relation to the harm or violence they have endured, we are unable to reflect the ways in which they may experience joy, resistance, and pleasure. It is also important to recognise that people’s consciousness and understanding of who they are and who they become is constantly changing. Thus, it is our responsibility to create space for folks to exercise their agency in shifting how they want to be represented.
Practising accountability and consensual repair
I have come to realise how harm is inevitable in our work as designers, or even as a result of it. This is not meant to excuse or justify causing harm, rather to recognise that we should be equipped to respond to harm if and when it does show up. This doesn’t mean we need to have all the answers figured out, but it is essential to build capacity for engaging in reparative practice and create the conditions for accountability and care.
Responding to harm can be unsettling as it requires us to lean into discomfort and also acknowledge the impact of our engagement. What I have found helpful, based on my own experiences, is to practise transparency and vulnerability throughout any relational engagement where possible. By actively prioritising the need to cultivate trust, we are able to build deeper connections that allow for the possibility of repair. Any attempts at repair need to centre the experiences of those who have been harmed and prioritise their autonomy and safety.
In some contexts, I have witnessed how our desire to make amends can come from a place of fragility, guilt, or saviourism. We need to understand that repair may not always be possible – or even if it is, it may not lead to the outcomes we were hoping for or expecting. Repair needs to be a consensual practice and rooted in principles of liberatory harm reduction. I find it humbling to periodically remind myself of whom I am accountable to and what our shared understanding of accountability is.
Closing thoughts
There is so much left to be said, and there will always be more to say. For now, wherever this finds you in your journey toward unravelling the coloniality of trauma and decolonising your practices, I hope you feel compelled to continue moving forward. As you have probably realised by now, this chapter is meant to be a springboard to help you think and feel differently about trauma in relation to colonial systems of oppression. I hope you will build upon the ideas and provocations shared within and feed back into cultivating networks of radical care and support. I want to thank you for joining me on this journey. I sincerely welcome the gift of your feedback and would love to hear from you.
Honouring the lineages of whom we learn from
Learning is a collaborative and relational process; much of the labour, insight, and expertise that has been shared in this chapter has been realised through nurturing relationships and being present with community. I want to honour the many teachers, human and more-than-human, who have helped shape my understanding of and praxis around trauma, coloniality, and oppression. Some of these folks include Dr. Shirin Vossoughi, Dr. Megan Bang, Dr. Moya Bailey, Incia Rashid-Dawdy, Lauren Lin, Ritika Ramesh, and many more.
I also want to extend heartfelt gratitude to my partner-in-alchemy, Sabrina Meherally, who has been an amazing collaborator over the past year and a pivotal force in pushing the boundaries of what research and design rooted in care and relationality could look like. Sabrina and I have had the pleasure of working together at Pause and Effect, a decolonial design and research think-tank and consultancy based on the ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. A substantial portion of the work shared here has been co-created through our collaborative visions for decolonising trauma-informed practices.
At several moments throughout this chapter, I have included quotations and references from a multitude of authors, cultural workers, community organisers, healers, and trauma practitioners. I encourage you to support and amplify their work in whatever ways you feel called to. In a similar spirit, I ask that you respect the labour that has gone into compiling this work, and hold it gently and lovingly with integrity and tenderness. I hope this is an opportunity to recognise how our work is always in flux, building upon the rich and abundant lineages of knowledge present within and around us.