Journal of Family Therapy, 2020, 42(3): 347-364

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. (Author's abstract). Record #6753