The therapeutic counterspace as an ethical encounter : a dignified response to gendered sexual violence and women’s narratives of pain : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This project emerged from reflection on the shadow stories of women and clinicians’ journeys through systems of gendered sexual violence response, and a desire to apprehend and resist the interrelations between western institutional systems where women’s pain is produced as suffering, and responses that listen to women’s narratives through the restrictions of pathologising practice to configure a hysterical, shameful subject that needs to be ‘fixed’. In this project, I take up the position of ethical activist through affirmative ethics in order to move from a listening of pain as symptoms to be extinguished, towards a transformation of therapeutic counterspaces that can hear affective intensities as a process of becoming response-able. In the bringing together of seven professionals that work in the gendered sexual violence sector through a collaborative reflective workshop, we-together opened spaces to share our shadow stories of hearing affective intensities through imperceptible processes and embedded and embodied resistances, to legitimate the untellable practices of creativity and curiosity as a relational assemblage of becoming response-able, developing a collective voice to apprehend ethical activist counterspaces as a ‘moving we’. And in doing so, we evoke our expert knowledges of relational affective intensities to move the institutions we work within to become part of the collective relational assemblage, advocating for the creation and protection of spaces where collaborative reflective practices are mobilised as the response-ability for dignified responses to women’s pain, and as pathways to freedom, hope and joy for women who have experienced gendered sexual violence, and for the clinicians that walk along side them, together.