Liberatory alignment: Integrating agency and self-authorship to foster healing from racial trauma.

OBJECTIVE

Racial trauma poses significant and underaddressed challenges within existing health care systems, where current frameworks often fail to account for the political dimensions of healing or the ways that dominant models can reproduce the dynamics of power they seek to address. This article introduces the liberatory alignment framework, which integrates sociocultural understandings of agency with self-authorship theory to support healing from racial trauma.

METHOD: The liberatory alignment framework integrates sociocultural understandings of agency with self-authorship theory, drawing on developmental and liberation psychology to construct a model that centers clients' internal authority and self-defined identities as mechanisms of resilience and transformation.

RESULTS

Through clinical examples, the framework illustrates how therapists can partner with clients to resist systemic harm, reclaim power, and sustain healing while also engaging in parallel processes of reflection and restoration.

CONCLUSION

Liberatory alignment reorients therapeutic practice toward healing that is both relational and emancipatory, with implications for clinical training, supervisory relationships, and the theoretical foundations of culturally responsive care. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).