Response-Based Therapy

Response-based therapy is the application of response-based practice in the area of therapy. The approach conceptualizes people as active agents responding to and within richly complex social contexts, informed by social justice and human rights, and leaves behind the intra-psychic focus on the individual in isolation common in psychology and psychotherapy. Developed in the 1990s by Allan Wade with contributions from Nick Todd and Linda Coates, it has proven especially useful in working with victims and perpetrators of violence: Wade, an expert in social interaction, analyzed what victims and perpetrators actually do rather than accepting widespread myths, and Coates and Wade distinguished mutual from unilateral acts, arguing that violent acts are frequently misrepresented as mutual and that victims, though often falsely understood as passive recipients of violence, in fact actively resist it, mentally, spiritually, physically and psychologically, even when that resistance is covert because victims correctly anticipate that open resistance will be met with escalated violence. Rather than asking a victim how an event made them feel, a response-based therapist instead asks how the victim responded and what they did.