Where There Is Violence, There Is Resistance: Rethinking Trauma Through Response-Based Practice

A young adult in shadows captures a moment of introspection and contemplation

One of the most difficult realities in therapeutic work is witnessing how deeply people blame themselves for violence, oppression or adversity they endured. Again and again, clients come to therapy believing they failed: I should have fought harder. I should have left sooner. I should not be so affected by this. Because the violence continued despite their efforts, they often cannot recognise the countless ways they resisted, and are still resisting, in order to preserve safety, dignity, sanity, relationships or life itself. Too often, therapists unintentionally reinforce this self-blame. When we rely only on the language of symptoms, pathology, coping deficits, attachment wounds or emotional dysregulation, we risk obscuring the violence itself and the intelligent responses people developed under coercive conditions.

Response-Based Practice offers another way of seeing. Rather than asking only What did the violence do to you?, it asks: What exactly did the perpetrator do, and how did you respond? This shift is not simply a compassionate reframe; it is an attempt to describe violence and responses to violence more accurately. Once violence is understood relationally and contextually, resistance becomes visible. And once resistance becomes visible, we can begin to honour, with our clients, the many ways they have struggled to protect themselves, others and their dignity all along.

I asked you to stop
I tried to negotiate
I screamed for help
I turned my face away from yours
I crossed my legs

I stuck out my stomach
I clutched a tree
Then I went limp to avoid the pain
And went to a safe place in my head

Do you really question my resistance?
The judge decided I consented.

Nobody asked to be raped.
Stand with us for dignity and non-violence.

Source: Public Service Announcements, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada

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When Survival Looks Like Failure

“I’m such a coward,” she says, dropping into the chair in front of me, tired and exhausted. “I freeze when he floods my phone with messages about our child. I can’t keep up. I either respond for hours and end up exhausted, or I stop replying, but I know he will use that against me in our next mediation session and I’ll be called uncooperative.”

Since the separation, her ex-partner has turned every exchange into a crisis: endless “concerns” about school lunches, pick-up times, doctor appointments, bedtime routines, holiday planning. Nothing ever gets resolved. Every message pulls her into circular arguments, accusations and self-doubt. Professionals urge her to communicate better, stay calm, engage more collaboratively, without recognising how coercive control hides behind the language of co-parenting. Sometimes things go quiet for a while. She starts to breathe again. Until he finds a new way to pull her back in.

Often when she comes to therapy, she is full of blame for herself: for shutting down, for people-pleasing, for feeling emotionally flooded all the time, for not being able to set a boundary, for being exhausted. But what if these are not signs of weakness or dysfunction? What if the very responses we call symptoms are actually intelligent, life-preserving acts of resistance? Response-Based Practice invites us to see violence differently: not only in terms of harm, but in terms of the countless ways people resist, protect their dignity and survive. Understanding how coercion feels, and honouring the resistance to it, is where her healing begins. Some readers may recognise this pattern from what is sometimes called unnamed trauma, where a response makes complete sense in context but is never named as a response to something real.

The Language That Traps Us

“I’m such a coward. I froze when he yelled at me. I should’ve fought back.”

“I’m so broken. I smiled when they humiliated me. I should’ve said no.”

“It’s my fault. I agreed to have children with him. I should’ve already left.”

Countless variations of this kind of self-blame appear in the room. Many clients have been victims of physical or sexualised violence, assault, severe neglect, coercive control, stalking, workplace harassment and other forms of systemic or colonial oppression. They have internalised the belief that they are the problem, and that if they were not so broken these things would not happen to them or affect them the way they do. When trauma is understood mainly through its neurobiological effects, the focus easily shifts toward what violence did to the victim rather than how the person responded to survive it. It also conceals that the deliberate choice to use violence or control against someone includes breaking their very resistance. Many clients are then left blaming themselves for not being able to simply “get over it.”

Linda Coates and Allan Wade distinguish four discursive operations that make this misrepresentation possible in the context of interpersonal, systemic or colonial violence. Language is used to:

  1. conceal violence
  2. mitigate perpetrator responsibility
  3. conceal resistance
  4. blame victims

In the example above, this language becomes painfully visible in the way it erases agency and responsibility. It leads institutions and professional practices to participate in coercive control, even unintentionally, precisely because they fail to recognise it. Practices framed as neutral, such as mediation, co-parenting communication requirements or expectations of “collaboration”, can become extensions of abuse when power, fear and coercion are ignored.

1. Concealing the violence. The abuse is framed as a “high-conflict co-parenting dispute” rather than coercive control. His relentless messaging is described as “concerns about the children”, “communication difficulties” or “poor boundaries”, which disguises the pattern of surveillance, intimidation and domination underneath. Because the violence is psychological and administrative rather than physical, it becomes normalised as ordinary post-separation conflict. The cumulative impact on the victim, hypervigilance, exhaustion, inability to think clearly, is rendered invisible and later pathologised.

2. Mitigating perpetrator responsibility. His behaviour is interpreted in charitable terms: he is “trying to stay involved”, “anxious about the children”, or “struggling with the separation”. Professionals may encourage both parties to improve communication equally, implying mutual responsibility. The coercive pattern disappears into neutral language about “miscommunication” or “relationship breakdown”. Even the endless barrage of messages can be reframed as evidence that he is an “engaged father”, rather than someone feeling entitled to, and strategically consuming, her time, attention and emotional energy. This same reframing pattern shows up in other contexts too, including narcissistic dynamics in relationships, where a partner’s controlling behaviour is repeatedly explained away rather than named.

3. Concealing resistance. Her responses are often seen only as symptoms or deficits. Freezing, delayed replies, emotional shutdown, carefully worded messages or limiting contact may be interpreted as avoidance, instability or poor co-parenting. Yet from a Response-Based perspective, these are acts of resistance and self-protection. She may spend hours crafting neutral responses to avoid escalation, document interactions meticulously, silence notifications to preserve sleep, or strategically disengage from circular arguments. These are skilled, deliberate actions taken under conditions of coercion, but they are rarely recognised as resistance because they do not resemble dramatic confrontation.

4. Blaming the victim. Once resistance is concealed, responsibility shifts onto her. If she replies emotionally, she is “reactive”. If she does not respond quickly enough, she is “uncooperative”. If she becomes exhausted or dysregulated, her distress itself is treated as evidence that she is the problem. Mediation processes can intensify this dynamic by assuming equal power and mutual capacity for negotiation. The focus moves from his coercive conduct to her communication style. She begins internalising these judgements, asking herself: Why can’t I just handle this better? In this way, institutional discourse can reproduce the abuser’s narrative while appearing neutral and professional.

Response-Based Practice: Violence, Resistance and Dignity

Response-Based Practice challenges these discursive operations by asking different questions. It moves from What’s wrong with you that this happens to you? to What exactly did he do? How did you respond? What values and dignity were present in those responses? How did, and do, you survive what is happening to you? The shift is subtle but profound. Instead of viewing her as passive, pathological or failing, we begin to see a person actively responding to ongoing coercion while trying to protect herself and her child in a context that repeatedly undermines those efforts.

RBP operates through three assumptions:

  • Violence is unilateral, social, non-consensual and deliberate. Violence is not a mutual “dynamic” or a loss of control, but an action imposed by one person against another’s will and wellbeing. Perpetrators anticipate resistance and often take deliberate steps to overcome, conceal, minimise or punish it. Even so-called “explosive” or “out of control” acts of violence involve choices, strategies and social awareness.
  • Whenever people are subjected to violence, oppression and adversity, they resist in some form. Individuals respond to and resist violence and other forms of injustice. Resistance can be open and direct or subtle and disguised depending on the situation. Open defiance is the least common form of resistance.
  • Social responses are crucial. Victims and offenders are constantly mindful of actual and possible social network and institutional responses. The quality of social responses in cases of violence is closely tied to victim responses, offender strategies and outcomes in the short and long term.

He rapes me at home
I try to come home as late as I can

I try to never be alone at home
I try to always bring a friend
I work as many night shifts as I can
Hoping that he’ll be asleep when I come home
When all that fails, I get drunk, hoping I’ll pass out.

That is how I attempt to stop it.

Do you really question my resistance?
The judge decided I consented.

Nobody asked to be raped.
Stand with us for dignity and non-violence.

Source: Public Service Announcements, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada

Where There Is Violence, There Is Resistance

Perpetrators, and society, erase resistance to maintain control. Our role as therapists is to witness, name and honour the resistance clients don’t see in themselves. By describing, moment to moment, the victim’s response to the act of violence, their resistance is made visible. This matters regardless of whether their resistance stopped the violence or not. This process also includes carefully describing the broader context and the social responses surrounding the violence. Experiences of adversity are often misrepresented by negative social responses from others, including family and social networks, as well as professionals, authorities and institutions. Only when resistance becomes visible can victims begin to see themselves not as broken or complicit, but as people who have been actively and creatively struggling to preserve their dignity all along.

“Resistance is ubiquitous: Whenever individuals are subjected to violence, they resist. Alongside each history of violence, there runs a parallel history of resistance. Victims of violence face the threat of further violence, from mild censure to extreme brutality, for any act of open defiance. Consequently, open defiance is the least common form of resistance.” (Coates & Wade, 2007)

Response-Based Practice understands resistance as “any mental or behavioural act through which a person attempts to expose, withstand, repel, stop, prevent, abstain from, strive against, impede, refuse to comply with, or oppose any form of violence or oppression, including any type of disrespect, or the conditions that make such acts possible.” (Wade, 1997)

If we fail to ask the right questions, both the violence and the victim’s responses to it disappear from view. Consider an account of sexualised assault where the victim appears passive:

He followed her down the sidewalk. He sped up to catch her. He grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her to the ground. He dragged her toward the bushes. He overpowered her and dragged her into the bushes. He held a rock over her head and threatened to kill her if she screamed. He called her degrading names. He forced his mouth onto her face. He tried to undo her belt. He grabbed her trouser legs to pull them off. He overpowered her and raped her.

Now consider what kind of questions would need to be asked to arrive at the following account of the same assault, where the victim’s resistance is made visible and named:

He followed her down the sidewalk. She sped up. He sped up to catch her. She moved to the side. He grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her to the ground. She rolled on the ground to get away. He dragged her toward the bushes. She grabbed the roots of a tree so he couldn’t drag her into the bushes. He overpowered her and dragged her into the bushes. She started to scream. He held a rock over her head and threatened to kill her if she screamed. She stopped screaming. He called her degrading names. She said: “You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to hurt me.” He forced his mouth onto her face. She averted her face. He tried to undo her belt. She stuck out her stomach so that he could not undo her belt. He grabbed her trouser legs to pull them off. She crossed her ankles so that he could not pull off her trousers. He overpowered her and raped her. She went limp to avoid injury and went elsewhere in her mind.

Too often, we measure resistance by its effectiveness in stopping violence. Did she leave? Did she say no? Did she report it? Did she fight back? This framework subtly shifts responsibility onto victims while exonerating perpetrators. It also casts doubt on victims’ resistance itself, leading them to question whether they were somehow complicit in the violence against them.

What if we asked instead: What did you notice just before you froze? What were you afraid would happen? Did you monitor the other person’s mood, movements or tone? Did you try to avoid escalation? Did you leave later, seek help, tell someone, or change your behaviour afterward? Often we help clients discover that “I did nothing” was not literally true. They were perceiving, calculating, protecting, enduring or minimising harm. The point is not to force a positive identity. The point is to recover actions that disappeared from the original narrative.

And it does not always take two to tango. The only person who can stop violence is the person who chooses to commit it. At the same time, institutions, social systems and communities bear responsibility for creating conditions that make the choice of violence more or less possible, tolerated or concealed. Resistance should not be measured by whether it successfully ended the abuse, but by the countless ways victims preserve dignity, values, relationships, safety and sense of self under conditions of violence and oppression.

Pathologising victims’ responses may sometimes protect therapists, and society, from having to confront the unbearable reality that human beings can be rendered powerless by violence, coercion, discrimination or structural injustice. It asks us to sit with our helplessness while holding our clients in theirs. Honouring resistance is not saying that people are always powerful or that everyone always resists effectively. Rather, RBP asks: even under conditions of severe powerlessness, what did you try to do? And the question for therapists is: is helplessness allowed to exist in our practice? Can we tolerate witnessing experiences that cannot be redeemed, that cannot be transformed into growth, reframed as resilience, or explained as dysregulation, but that simply remain unjust, horrifying, humiliating, tragic? And can we remain alongside our clients there?

Dignity is the moral compass of Response-Based Practice and stands as the opposite of violence. Violence, whether interpersonal, structural, colonial or discursive, is not merely harmful behaviour; it is an attack on dignity. It seeks not only to control people, but to define them.

In RBP, dignity is not something victims passively possess or lose; it is enacted and preserved through resistance. This understanding fundamentally changes how we interpret human responses to violence. These responses are not random symptoms appearing inside individuals; they develop relationally as people attempt to preserve safety, connection, dignity or bodily integrity under conditions they did not choose. Resistance does not require intention or awareness; it is defined by its function in relation to coercion. As therapists, working from a trauma-informed framework means understanding that:

  • Freezing is a response to threat, not proof of trauma.
  • Hypervigilance is a response to danger, not proof of pathology.
  • Compliance is often a response to coercion, not proof of agreement, not even unconscious agreement.
  • Dissociation emerges in relation to overwhelming conditions, not proof of dysfunction or disorder.

Response-Based Practice is not about romanticising suffering or redefining every response as strength. Nor is it simply a more compassionate interpretation of trauma. It is an attempt to describe violence more accurately. Once violence is understood relationally, who did what to whom, under what conditions, and how the victim responded, resistance becomes visible. What previously appeared as passivity, pathology or dysfunction often reveals itself as intelligent, ethical and strategic action under constraint.

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Honouring Resistance in Everyday Life

Violence-concealing language is everywhere. So is resistance.

Part of our role as therapists, educators, friends, parents and community members is learning to notice the small acts through which people preserve dignity every day, even when those acts do not look heroic, strong or socially acceptable.

Sometimes “avoidance” is a person carefully monitoring danger before entering a room. “People-pleasing” may reflect years of learning that disagreement leads to punishment or humiliation. A nervous system described as “emotionally dysregulated” may be responding exactly as it learned to under chronic threat. What appears as “non-compliance” may be someone protecting themselves from another degrading institutional experience. And what is often described as “resistance to therapy” may, at times, be a wise resistance to being misunderstood once again.

Recognising victim blaming means refusing explanations that individualise suffering while ignoring violence, oppression and social context.

At its heart, Response-Based Practice is not only about analysing violence differently, it is about seeing people differently. When we learn to notice resistance, we begin to recognise the intelligence, ethics, creativity and dignity present even in the midst of oppression. Clients are no longer understood primarily through pathology, deficits or damage, but through the countless ways they have struggled to preserve themselves and others under difficult conditions. This is, at its core, also a question of self-confidence and how people come to see their own responses.

Honouring resistance changes therapeutic conversations. It changes institutional responses. And often, it changes how people see themselves. What once appeared as weakness, compliance, dysfunction or failure can begin to be understood as courage, skill, care and survival.

Journal Prompt: Recognising Resistance

Think of a time you judged yourself for how you handled a difficult, abusive or oppressive situation. Maybe you froze, stayed quiet, complied, shut down, dissociated, people-pleased, avoided conflict, or did whatever you needed to get through it.

Now ask yourself: how might these responses have been forms of resistance?

Choose one specific incident. This could involve abuse directed toward you, someone else, or a situation of coercion, intimidation, humiliation, harassment or injustice that you witnessed or experienced.

Write slowly and in detail:

  • What exactly happened?
  • What did the other person do?
  • What did you do in response, moment by moment?
  • What were you trying to protect?
  • What thoughts went through your mind?
  • What emotions did you feel?
  • What did your facial expression, body posture, silence, compliance or actions communicate?
  • What did the other person do next?
  • How did you respond again?

As you reflect, notice:

  • What is it like to think about your responses as resistance rather than weakness or failure?
  • Have your responses ever been labelled as “dysfunctional”, “dramatic”, “avoidant”, “too sensitive”, “non-compliant” or “pathological”?
  • How did those labels affect how you saw yourself?
  • What becomes visible when you instead understand your responses in the context of what was happening to you?

Where there is violence, coercion or oppression, there is often resistance, even when it is quiet, constrained or unseen.

If you are recognising yourself in this piece and would like support processing violence, coercive control or trauma, you can explore therapists on It’s Complicated or use the matching service to be paired with someone suited to your situation.

Sources and Resources

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Anne Pascale Stein is a licensed body psychotherapist (Heilpraktikerin für Psychotherapie) based in Berlin, working in German, English and French. Her approach is body-oriented, emotion-focused and attachment-based, drawing on AEDP, the Grinberg Method, TRE and EMDR to support clients with trauma, anxiety, grief and depression. Find Anne on It’s Complicated.

Anne Pascale Stein is a German, English and French speaking licensed mental health practitioner in Berlin and online with over a decade of experience in private practice. Her approach combines body-oriented, emotion-focused, and attachment-based methods to help with anxiety, exhaustion, depression, grief and trauma.