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What is Liberation Traumatology?
At the center of trauma is not what happened to you, but your response to it—and the response of every system you encountered in its aftermath. Liberation Traumatology recognizes the inherent worth and dignity of survivorship, and centers autonomy, agency, self-determination, and consent as non-negotiable foundations of ethical care.
The Liberation Traumatology framework builds upon the foundational work of Judith Herman, whose 1992 book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror introduced a three-stage model for understanding the healing process. Herman described these stages as nonlinear, providing a structured but fluid framework designed to foster healing without imposing a rigid sequence upon the survivor.
Stage 1: Safety and Stabilization. The focus is establishing both physical and emotional safety. This means stabilization techniques to manage symptoms, building a secure foundation from which a survivor can operate. For someone living through domestic violence, this might mean housing, clothing, access to the basic elements of survival before anything else can begin. This is essential work — and it is where the vast majority of clinical approaches stop.
Stage 2: Remembrance and Mourning. This is the processing of the traumatic story — putting words to the experience, bringing it into the conscious mind in the companionship of an empathic other. Your story is important. Your story matters. This stage involves deconstructing shame and guilt, or more precisely, placing shame and guilt where they rightfully belong: in the hands of the person who caused the harm. It involves transforming the traumatic memory from an active threat into a narrative that can be situated in the past.
Liberation Traumatology acknowledges the contributions of Francine Shapiro's Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, which was developed as the theoretical foundation for EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and describes how the brain encodes traumatic memories differently from normative memory—storing them "out of time," disconnected from the past, retaining their original distressing form when not fully processed due to high arousal states or trauma responses. This is one explanation for experiences like flashbacks, nightmares, and intrusion symptoms. However, Liberation Traumatology holds that the AIP model, while foundational, is not sufficient. It does not fully account for complex trauma, where there is not always a singular recurrent threat in the way that combat or acute violence produces one. The model needs to continue to develop and evolve beyond a rudimentary understanding of mis-filed memories and toward something more holistic and integrative.
Stage 3: Reconnection and Integration. This involves rebuilding a sense of self, forming trust-based relationships, and finding meaning. It may include integrating the trauma into one's life story, or focusing on future growth and empowerment. But this cannot be externally imposed. Liberation Traumatology does not believe in the imposition of any stage upon a person before they are ready. Much like the commonly understood five stages of grief, these stages do not have to occur in order, do not all have to occur for healing to take place, and completing a stage does not mean it is finished forever. People revisit these stages. That is not regression. That is the nature of healing.
Stage 4: Justice (Truth and Repair). It was not until 2024 that Herman published Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, adding a fourth stage to the model. This stage addresses the societal and relational dimensions of trauma—ensuring that the survivor is not blamed for what happened, acknowledging wrongdoing by those who caused harm, and holding perpetrators accountable through societal recognition of the injustice. In this book, Herman interviewed survivors who had interactions with the justice system, not all of whom saw or met their justice. The statistics on how seldom justice is actually experienced are staggering. But the inclusion of this stage is critical: it names what Liberation Traumatology has always insisted—that healing without accountability is incomplete.
For the purposes of Liberation Traumatology, the stages are: safety, processing, integration, and social affirmation. Again, similar to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's grief stages, the stages of trauma healing are not sequential. They are not linear. A person may be in multiple stages simultaneously, may return to earlier stages, and may experience them in any order. The heart of any healing approach requires the centering of autonomy, agency, self-determination, and consent.
Several additional principles are essential to how Liberation Traumatology engages with this model. First, there is a high recognition of the specific dynamics of interpersonal trauma—sexual assault, domestic violence, childhood abuse, and other—as forms of harm that are ongoing rather than singular acute events, and that involve differentials of power between the person harmed and the person who harmed them. Second, there is the power of witness. Herman refers to those who witness as bystanders, and names that recovery often depends on acknowledgment and validation from others.
The Liberation Traumatology philosophy acknowledges that both judgment and silence are significant barriers to healing. Neither are mutually exclusive. And neither is more or less harmful. Just as judgment causes direct harm to someone in a healing process, so does silence. This is one of the reasons Liberation Traumatology refuses clinical neutrality. Clinicians, therapists, and counselors who interact with trauma cannot remain neutral. They must take a stance. Beyond merely mirroring what the client has concluded, they must contribute as a form of deep witness and companioning to the trauma story.
A Sociology of Trauma
The word "sociology" comes from the Latin socius, meaning "society," and the Greek logia, meaning "the study of." At its most fundamental, sociology is the study of how societies are structured—and how those structures shape the lives of the people within them. For those more familiar with psychology, the distinction is essential: where psychology looks inward at the individual, sociology looks outward at the systems, institutions, organizations, and dynamics of power that surround the individual and over which they often have no control.
This matters because modern Western cultures like America are deeply intertwined with an ideology of competitive individualism—the belief that success and failure alike are products of personal effort, that if something is wrong, it must be wrong with you. This ideology has become pervasive throughout postmodern societies, and it has seeped into the very foundations of how we understand and treat trauma. When someone is harmed, the question becomes "What is wrong with this person?" rather than "What allowed for this to happen?"
Sociology refuses that framing. Social problems require social solutions.
At the heart of sociological thought is the concept of othering—the processes by which individuals are socially, politically, and psychologically defined, labeled, or treated as inferior. Through marginalization based on race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, size, ability, and more, societies create divides between in-groups and out-groups that reinforce inequality and center dehumanization, reducing empathy at every level. Both sociology and psychology engage with othering—but they do so in fundamentally different directions. Psychology, rooted in diagnosis and pathology, others the powerless—labeling, categorizing, and locating deficiency within the person who has been harmed. Sociology, rooted in conflict theory and the critique of power, others the powerful—naming the systems that produce harm and insisting that the structures themselves must be held accountable.
Drawing upon the Marxian tradition of conflict theory, sociology stands on the side of those who are powerless and asks: Who benefits? Whose power is protected when we tell a trauma survivor that the problem lives inside them? We know that even when trauma is deeply interpersonal, as it so often is, the process of healing puts people in direct contact with institutions—insurance systems, diagnostic frameworks, licensing bodies, legal structures—whose impersonal approach directly conflicts with the needs of trauma survivorship. Many of these systems reproduce the very power dynamics that caused the harm. At the heart of this tradition is distinguishing between false consciousness and class consciousness. False consciousness means that people internalize the idologies of the very systems which oppress them and sometimes even mistake such systems as their own beliefs. They blame themselves for their poverty, their illness, their trauma. They believe that unfair systems are fair and that outcomes are earned.
A false consciousness approach to trauma is one that locates the problem in the person who was harmed. If they are traumatized, the system believes they somehow deserves it—a deficits-based lens that suggests that if only they would try harder, breathe more deeply, meditate more thoroughly, sleep more soundly, they too could will their way to a better life. This is the lens that dominates much of the American mental health establishment. The American Psychiatric Association and the writers of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have built a system that individualizes suffering and pathologizes the strategies people developed to survive it. The APA's refusal to recognize Complex PTSD (CPTSD) in the DSM-V-TR—a diagnosis that the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) adopted in its most recent update—is only one example of how a narrow but highly-medicalized framework resists the sociological reality that trauma is not merely an individual event but a structural condition.
In Marxian thought, by contrast, class consciousness is when people understand their true position within the power structure—they see the system clearly, they recognize that their suffering is not personal failure but a product of how society is organized, and they understand that collective action is necessary to change it. It's the moment of seeing the trap as a trap. Applied to trauma this means that a person who lives in society today is often encouraged to adopt false consciousness. The impacts of this are striking, with deeply-embedded beliefs that their PTSD symptoms are their own failure to cope, that they should be further along, that if they just did the DBT worksheet or practiced the breathing exercise, they'd be better by now. A person in class consciousness recognizes that the system was never built to acknowledge trauma, that pathology serves a purpose of creating distance between the clinician and the client, that the diagnostic labels they carry were designed to categorize them for billing purposes, and that a person's inability to heal within that system is not evidence of their brokenness. It is evidence of a broken system.
Liberation Traumatology is essentially the project of moving people from false consciousness to class consciousness about their own trauma—seeing clearly, and refusing to carry the blame for what structures produced. Liberation Traumatology centers people's expertise in their own lives. It understands the systems of oppression under which they live as existing through no fault of their own. It refuses a deficits-based approach that seeks to blame, shame, or cognitively and behaviorally modify people into healing. Instead, it uses the strengths they already possess, centering autonomy, agency, self-determination, and consent to uplift the knowledges they carry and to do the deeper work of healing—work that goes beyond mere resourcing, beyond mindfulness practices, beyond the stabilization that the field has mistaken for the whole of recovery.
We see the replication of societal power structures in the therapy room itself, where the therapist is positioned as the possessor of all knowledge, wisdom, and training necessary to intervene, and the person who has been traumatized is treated as a helpless, empty vessel. The reality is that trauma does not work that way. And the field's insistence on this model is not a failure of individual clinicians alone—it is a structural problem, reproduced by training programs, licensing bodies, insurance models, and diagnostic systems that reward stabilization and have built almost nothing for what comes after.
Sociology others the powerful. Psychology others the powerless.
Liberation Traumatology believes in people over pathologies.
The Roots of Liberation
At the heart of Liberation Traumatology are two theoretical bases: liberation theology and liberation psychology. Grounded in the liberation tradition, it stands in a lineage of thinkers who insisted—sometimes at the cost of their lives—that systems designed to help can also be systems designed to control, and that true liberation begins when we name this clearly.
Paulo Freire and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed
The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, writing in the 1960s and 70s, offered one of the most powerful critiques of how systems of care can replicate the very oppression they claim to address. Born in 1921 in Recife, a port city in the impoverished northeast of Brazil, Freire was the youngest of four children. His father, Joaquim, was a military police officer; his mother, Edeltrudis, was a devout Catholic who taught him to read by writing letters and drawing pictures in the dirt under a mango tree. The family was middle-class until the Great Depression destroyed their financial stability. His father died in 1934. Freire knew hunger as a child. He later wrote: "I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't lack of interest. My social condition didn't allow me to have an education." He fell four grades behind. His mother secured him a scholarship to a private school he could not otherwise have attended. He went on to study law but never practiced—he turned instead to education, working with illiterate sugarcane workers in northeastern Brazil. In one experiment, 300 workers learned to read and write in 45 days. The Brazilian military jailed him for it. He was imprisoned for 70 days, then exiled for 15 years. He wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed in exile. He was considered so dangerous that a military dictatorship decided it could not allow him to teach people to read.
In his landmark work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire described what he called the "banking model of education." This is a model in which the teacher is positioned as the one who knows, and the student is positioned as an empty vessel to be filled. The teacher deposits knowledge. Similar to someone depositing money at a bank, the student is a passive recipient of wisdom. However, in this model, there is no dialogue, no co-creation, no recognition that the student carries knowledge of their own.
Freire argued that this model is not politically neutral, but instead, that it teaches people to accept their position rather than question it. This replicates Marx's concept of false consciousness, by encouraging people to internalize the structures of their own oppression rather than to question them, centering the dominance of powerful groups and dominant ideologies rather than the ground-up knowledges that are so intrinsically important to the richness of our lived experience. And this banking model replicates itself everywhere—not only in classrooms but in any system where one person is positioned as the expert and the other as the passive recipient of that expertise.
The parallel to the therapy room is immediate. A clinician who deposits coping skills into a client, who assigns worksheets and breathing exercises without engaging with the person's own understanding of what happened to them and why, is operating within the banking model. Freire's alternative was praxis—a concept so central to Liberation Traumatology that it warrants its own section below. But in the ground is the seed that Freire planted, believing that people who are oppressed are not empty. They are full of knowledge, of experience, of insight into the systems that harmed them. Education, and by extension healing, must begin from that fullness rather than from an assumption of deficit.
Gustavo Gutiérrez and Liberation Theology
For those unfamiliar with the theological tradition, liberation theology can be understood as the insistence that faith must begin from the perspective of those who suffer, and that any theology must actively work toward the dismantling of the structures that cause suffering. It is not enough to pray for the poor. The question is why they are poor in the first place, and whose power is maintained by keeping them that way.
The Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez is widely credited as the founder of the Liberation Theology movement. Writing in the early 1970s, Gutiérrez articulated what became known as the preferential option for the poor—the conviction that the concern of the divine is not neutral across the social hierarchy, but is specifically oriented toward those who are marginalized, exploited, and oppressed. Gutiérrez argued that poverty is not an accident or a personal failing. Rather, it is produced by economic and political systems that benefit from its existence. And he argued that the role of the church is not to comfort people within unjust systems, but to challenge the systems themselves.
Applied to trauma, the implications are direct. If we take seriously the preferential option for the poor—for the powerless, for the marginalized, for those who have been harmed—then trauma care cannot be neutral. It cannot sit comfortably within systems that benefit from diagnosing, billing, stabilizing, and silencing without ever asking who caused the harm and whether anyone will be held accountable. Liberation theology gives Liberation Traumatology its moral foundation: the conviction that the structures must change, not the people who survive them.
Ignacio Martín-Baró and Liberation Psychology
If Freire gave us the critique of education and Gutiérrez gave us the critique of theology, the Jesuit social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró gave us the critique of psychology itself.
Working in El Salvador during the civil war of the 1980s, Martín-Baró argued that psychology as a discipline was complicit in oppression. Not because individual psychologists intended harm, but because the field's fundamental orientation—its insistence on locating problems within the individual, its importation of Western clinical frameworks onto communities whose suffering was produced by political violence and structural injustice—served to obscure the systems that were actually causing the damage. When you tell a population traumatized by state violence that the problem is their individual failure to cope, you are doing the work of the state.
Martín-Baró called for a psychology of liberation—one that would begin from the lived experience of oppressed communities rather than importing frameworks designed in the Global North and applying them as though context did not matter. He argued that you cannot heal individuals without naming and changing the systems that wounded them. That the task of psychology is not to adjust people to unjust conditions but to help them see those conditions clearly and act to transform them.
On November 16, 1989, Ignacio Martín-Baró was assassinated by the Salvadoran military, along with five fellow Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter. He was killed for this work. He was killed because he named what the powerful did not want named.
Liberation Traumatology carries his work forward. It insists that the field of trauma care must examine its own complicity—not only in the failures of individual clinicians, but in the structural architecture of a discipline that was built to categorize, diagnose, stabilize, and bill, and that has mistaken this machinery for healing. Martín-Baró understood that liberation is not a technique. It is a stance. And it requires courage, because the systems that benefit from the current arrangement do not welcome scrutiny.
Why praxis?
Liberation Traumatology is based on a praxis model.
In order to understand the term praxis, we must first distinguish it from practice. "Practice" refers to the application of standardized skills or protocols. It is the worksheet, the breathing exercise, the manualized treatment plan applied to every person who walks through the door, with assumed universality. This describes the mindfulness focus that has come to dominant Western medicine as borrowed from Eastern philosophy, and also can be found in the numerous breathing exercises, relaxation techniques, or worksheets so beloved by those whose core philosophy centers on cognitive and behavioral modification, particularly after CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) became popular in the 1980s and 1990s in counseling as an evidence based-modality. A core component of precisely why these modalities are evidence-based is because their very construction lends them to being studied.
Practice is not inherently harmful—but it is inherently limited. Like the false consciousness cautioned by Marx or the banking model critiqued by Freire, practice assumes that the clinician possesses the knowledge and the client receives it. It does not require the clinician to interrogate their own assumptions, their theoretical foundations, or the ethical implications of their methods. It does not ask who benefits from the way care is structured. It does not ask whether the structure itself might be part of the problem. At its worst, it can assume that clients who are not getting better are at fault, and blame the very person seeking care for their failure to recover from the harm committed against them.
There must be a better way.
Praxis is something different entirely. Praxis is an active, reflective, and co-creational process—one that requires practitioners to interrogate their own assumptions, theological foundations, and the ethical implications of their methods while invoking harm reduction as a core philosophy. It is not a technique. It is a posture. It is continuous. Like Judith Herman's model described in Trauma and Recovery, it is non-linear, does not involve a set series of steps that must be done in a particular order, and is both organic and holistic in that it can be revisited, revised, adapted, and transformed to facilitate healing. And it places the person being companioned at the center of the process, not as a passive recipient of expertise but as an expert in their own experience.
Freire called this conscientização—critical consciousness—the process by which people come to understand their own position within systems of power, not through being told but through dialogue. For Freire, dialogue was not simply conversation. It was the foundational act of liberation. Anti-dialogue, or the imposition of one person's knowledge onto another, the refusal to listen, the assumption that the teacher or clinician already knows what the student or client needs, is an act of domination, regardless of how well-intentioned it may be. An unfortunately, modern care settings can replicate the very silencing that survivorship requires interrogate itself in order to be overcome.
Applied to trauma care, the implications are direct. A praxis model does not impose stages of healing onto a person before they are ready. It does not assume that the clinician's training is more authoritative than the survivor's lived experience. It does not assign homework as though healing were a classroom exercise. It recognizes that trauma survivors carry knowledge—about their own bodies, their own histories, their own nervous systems, their own patterns of harm and survival—that no clinician can replicate through observation alone. And it does not pathologize.
At the center of this model is the recognition that healing must center autonomy, agency, self-determination, and consent. These are not aspirational values. They are non-negotiable foundations. A praxis model asks, at every stage: Is this person choosing this? Have they been given the information they need to choose? Is their voice present in this process, or have we substituted our own?
Practice asks: What intervention should I apply?
Praxis asks: What does this person need, and have I created the conditions for them to tell me?
Practice centers pathology. Praxis centers personhood.
The Promise
Liberation Traumatology is for anyone who has experienced trauma. It is for anyone who wants to help those who have trauma histories to heal. It is for the person who experiences symptoms but wishes to treat the underlying cause, and for the clinician who is dedicated to the craft of companioning those though healing.
Liberation Traumatology is for the survivor who has been told they are too much, too difficult, too complex—who has been handed a worksheet when what they needed was a witness. It is for the person who has done everything they were told to do and still does not feel better, not because they failed the treatment but because the treatment was never built to heal.
It is for the clinician who senses that something is missing—who has been trained in protocols and manualized treatments and still leaves sessions feeling that the work is not reaching the wound. It is for the student who is being taught to diagnose and intervene but has not yet been taught to listen. It is for the faith leader who sits with suffering every week and has never been given a framework for understanding what they are holding.
It is for the field itself, for training programs, licensing bodies, and institutions that have built their structures around stabilization and called it the whole of care.
It is a voice for the voiceless—not because they could not speak, but because their voices were stifled. It is the whisper of survivorship of those forced to scream themselves hoarse at systems that refused to listen.
C. Wright Mills wrote that the promise of the sociological imagination is the capacity to see the relationship between our selves and the social structures in which we live. Liberation Traumatology makes the same promise: that your suffering is not yours alone. That what happened to you happened within systems, and that healing requires us to name them.
People are not pathologies. The system is not broken by the people it fails. And healing is among the most meaningful work we will ever be called to do.
For general inquiries, please contact:
LiberationTraumatology@gmail.com
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