Reframing trauma recovery for public health: introducing the recovery assemblage framework

Psychological trauma represents a major global health challenge, with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) contributing to long-term difficulties in mental and physical health, relationships, and wellbeing. Despite this, dominant models of trauma recovery are largely grounded in biomedical and individualized paradigms, and prioritize linear pathways focused on symptom reduction and therapeutic outcomes. Such approaches risk locating responsibility for recovery within the individual, overlooking the broader social, relational, and structural conditions that shape how recovery is understood and practiced. In this paper, we introduce the Recovery Assemblage Framework for Trauma (RAF-T), a conceptual framework empirically informed by a feminist participatory action research study with adult survivors of childhood trauma conducted within UK community-based trauma recovery contexts. Drawing on feminist new materialism, posthuman ethics, and affective pedagogy, RAF-T reconceptualises recovery as dynamic, relational and contextually embedded, shaped through relations among bodies, lived experience, relationships, material conditions, environments, institutions, time, and wider social conditions. Rather than conceptualizing recovery through discrete domains, stages, principles, or resources, RAF-T facilitates reflection on how multiple influences become entangled and how their changing configurations may enable, constrain, or reshape possibilities for recovery within particular contexts. RAF-T therefore positions trauma recovery not solely as an individual or clinical endeavor, but as a population health concern shaped through communities, services, systems, and everyday environments. While grounded in this empirical context, RAF-T has potential relevance across wider trauma contexts; however, further research is needed to examine its applicability across different populations, cultural settings, and health systems. We discuss implications of RAF-T for public mental health, research and practice to facilitate a more relational, material, contextual, and systems-orientated understanding of trauma recovery. RAF-T offers a novel conceptual resource for exploring trauma recovery as a population health concern while remaining open to further empirical refinement and examination across different contexts.