The practice draws on several intellectual traditions. We list them because the work doesn’t run on a single school of thought or method, and each one contributes something specific to how we listen and design what we do.
They also don’t agree with each other. Existential thought treats a person as radically free to choose; liberation psychology holds that the conditions largely choose for them. Psychoanalysis makes universal claims about how minds work, which uncolonial practice exists to question. Autoethnographic re-authoring assumes an account can be remade, while the work on plasticity refuses any guarantee that what comes after damage is recovery.
We haven’t resolved these, and we’re not trying to. Every framework here reaches a point where it stops explaining, and a tradition that never contradicts anything is usually one that has stopped being useful…
Existential thinking takes seriously the fact that people have to make decisions about meaning, responsibility, and direction without external certainty about what’s right. We work with this rather than around it. The question isn’t how to remove ambiguity from a person’s situation. It’s how to support someone to act inside it.
The thinkers we draw on include Paul Tillich, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and Rollo May, alongside writers and practitioners whose existential thinking emerged from their own conditions of displacement, oppression, and survival. We use existential philosophy as a working orientation, not as an academic frame applied to a person’s experience from outside it.
In practice this means accompanying people through rupture, exile, identity change, and moral exhaustion without trying to resolve those experiences into a single coherent narrative. The work tolerates not-knowing without collapsing into it.
Liberation psychology, developed by Ignacio Martín-Baró in El Salvador in the 1980s, insists that the psyche cannot be understood independently of the political conditions that shape it. Trauma produced by structural violence cannot be treated as if it were a private matter, and clinical models that pretend otherwise tend to reproduce the harm they claim to address.
Our work foregrounds the historical, economic, racial, and gendered conditions that produce distress. We attend to internalised oppression, collective memory, and the question of what repair means when the harm is structural. We draw on conscientisation, community memory, and popular education as practical methods, not as concepts.
The core question liberation psychology asks is: who benefits when suffering is individualised? It’s a question we carry into every kind of work the practice does.
Psychoanalytic thinking, used as a way of listening rather than as a clinical framework, gives us tools for working with transference, repetition, and the patterns that shape relationships under the surface of what people are saying. We’re attentive to language, affect, embodiment, and the moments when something in the room shifts without anyone naming why.
The thinkers we return to include Winnicott, Fanon, Kristeva, and Bion, alongside writers working on migration, family systems, and the politics of memory. We treat the unconscious as something that operates in groups, institutions, and political life, not only in individual minds. The patterns that show up in a one-to-one conversation also show up in organisations under pressure, in classrooms, in the silences that accumulate in environments that punish dissent.
This is why psychoanalytic attention matters to facilitation and group work, not just to clinical practice. The relational field of any encounter carries more information than its surface content.
Most trauma frameworks were built around event-based incidents — a discrete thing that happened, with a defined before and after. Much of what frontline workers live with doesn’t fit that shape. Sustained exposure, ongoing surveillance, repeated harm, contexts that don’t stabilise: these produce psychological responses that the original trauma literature wasn’t designed to describe.
Judith Herman’s work on complex trauma opened that ground clinically. The picture is different from event-based PTSD. Identity, trust, capacity to relate, and the experience of time itself can shift under sustained strain, and the response doesn’t resolve through brief intervention because the conditions producing it don’t resolve.
Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity opens the philosophical question of what change after such experience can mean. She argues that the brain, and by extension the person, is plastic in two directions: shaped by experience and, sometimes, reshaped by it in ways that don’t restore an earlier self. Programmes here are designed for people whose exposure is ongoing, and they don’t treat strain as a problem to be cleared so the person can return to a previous version of themselves.
Liminality, named by Arnold van Gennep in 1909 and developed by Victor Turner in the 1960s, describes the in-between phases of a transition. The rules of the old position no longer apply and the rules of the new one haven’t yet been established. These periods are unsettling and they’re also where genuine reformation tends to happen.
We work with this concept because so many of the people the practice serves are living through it. Gloria Anzaldúa called the borderland between identities nepantla — at once painful and generative. Homi Bhabha’s third space describes the cultural in-between that the practice takes its name from. These are not abstract ideas for us. They map onto the actual conditions of migration, adoption, exile, faith change, and the fractured affiliations of working across institutions that don’t speak the same language.
In practice, we resist rushing people toward coherence. We let unresolved things stay unresolved when that’s the more honest position. Some thresholds are crossed quickly. Others are lived in for years.
We don’t claim to decolonise. As Tuck and Yang argue, decolonisation is not a metaphor — it is material, Indigenous-led, and tied to land and sovereignty. To speak loosely of “decolonising” therapy, education, or organisations risks treating real political work as a register of self-improvement.
Our orientation is uncolonial. That means loosening the grip of colonial categories in how we listen, teach, and design work. It means decentring whiteness and questioning the Western frameworks that present themselves as universal, while refusing the purity narratives or guilt-management postures that often substitute for actual practice. We draw on practices of opacity, relation, and imagination, and we learn from Indigenous knowledge where invited.
Uncolonial practice also refuses the fantasy of a recoverable original self. The idea that there is one authentic country, one true identity, or one real self waiting underneath the layers of displacement is itself a colonial inheritance. The practice attends instead to the multiplicity of how people actually live: fractured, hybrid, diasporic, adopted, translated. It doesn’t ask any of that to resolve into a single story.
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
