Disengagement and reintegration as psychosocial capacity-building after violent extremism

When people leave violent extremist movements, the hardest part is often not the decision to walk away but everything that comes afterward. A new study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry argues that the psychological work of leaving has been chronically misunderstood, with mental health treated as a background vulnerability rather than as an active process determining whether reintegration can be sustained over time. Drawing on longitudinal narrative interviews with six former extremists who took part in trauma-informed therapeutic work, the research traces how emotional regulation, identity, trust in others, and moral reasoning change over time, and why those changes matter for whether disengagement from extremism actually sticks.

The participants, all of whom had already disengaged for a minimum of two years from far-right or Islamist extremist or extremist-adjacent environments, or from the incel milieu, subsequently took part in individual, remotely delivered trauma-informed therapy over approximately nine to twelve months. The study is careful about what it does and does not claim. Because all six participants had already left extremism before starting therapy, the research is not an evaluation of a specific therapy’s effectiveness in supporting disengagement. Instead, it offers a conceptual, theory-generating account of the psychosocial mechanisms through which change unfolds once disengagement has already occurred, tracing how therapeutic engagement supports the consolidation of disengagement and the conditions for sustainable reintegration.

At the heart of the analysis is a critique of how post-exit support is typically designed. Many contemporary intervention frameworks prioritise practical, problem-solving approaches such as housing, employment, education, or social support, or position ideological change as the primary lever of disengagement. Yet individuals leaving extremist environments often continue to operate in survival-based modes of functioning, characterised by heightened threat sensitivity, emotional reactivity or numbing, and defensive self-reliance shaped by chronic adversity. These modes prioritise short-term safety over reflection, trust, or integration, and they frequently persist even after ideological identities have begun to loosen. The implication is not that practical assistance is unnecessary, but that its effectiveness depends on whether individuals have developed sufficient emotional regulation, epistemic trust, and narrative coherence to make use of such support as meaningful rather than overwhelming or misaligned.

The study defines four interrelated psychosocial capacities that it argues shape reintegration stability. Emotional regulation refers to the capacity to modulate the intensity and duration of affective states without recourse to avoidance, suppression, dissociation, or unhelpful coping behaviours. Narrative coherence refers to the capacity to organise past, present, and anticipated future experiences into a self-narrative that is continuous, liveable, and able to accommodate responsibility without collapse or defensive fragmentation. Epistemic trust refers to the capacity to experience another person as accurately understanding one’s own mind, feelings, and perspective, and, on that basis, to experience the information, guidance, and support they offer as relevant, benign, and worth taking in rather than as threatening or manipulative. Moral agency concerns the ability to hold responsibility and complexity without collapsing into shame or projection. Together, these capacities constitute what the author calls psychosocial capacity, an integrative heuristic rather than a validated psychometric construct, and one that is distinct from resilience or psychological flexibility because it concerns whether specific developmental capacities are built over time rather than whether a person can withstand or adapt to adversity in the moment.

Participants’ accounts suggest a provisional sequence of development within therapeutic engagement. First, emotional safeness and regulation emerged cumulatively through structured therapeutic containment and the presence of a reliable relational other. One participant described an earlier period of acute internal conflict in which a rational understanding of his situation was repeatedly overridden by an intense involuntary emotional state, and later used the metaphor of a cloudy sky gradually becoming visible, the clouds lifting and the thunderstorm calming down. As affect became more tolerable, participants described becoming more able to revisit and integrate previously dissociated or shame-laden material into a more continuous self-account. One participant described taking his old self and his present self and combining them into one whole, while another reworked his identity from a single label into a map of multiple traits, acknowledging that he was capable of both good and bad like everybody else.

As narrative coherence increased, and as the relational context demonstrated consistent, non-judgemental responsiveness over time, participants described becoming more able to experience guidance and support as credible rather than threatening. Finally, as epistemic trust and narrative coherence developed, participants described becoming better able to hold responsibility and complexity without collapsing into shame or projection, supporting more flexible moral reasoning and relational conduct. This sequence, regulation, then narrative integration, then epistemic trust, then moral agency, is proposed as a working order of development broadly consistent with participants’ accounts and with Herman’s triphasic model of stabilisation, processing, and reintegration, but the qualitative, non-experimental design cannot establish it causally, and its elements plausibly overlapped and recurred rather than proceeding in a single direction for every participant.

One of the most striking findings concerns depolarisation. Participants did not describe moral transformation as the adoption of new ideological frameworks or externally imposed values. Instead, moral agency re-emerged as participants became better able to tolerate emotional complexity and integrate responsibility within more coherent self-narratives. One participant explained that after therapy he eventually stopped seeing the world as us and them, describing how he now stops and speaks to people whose opinions differ from his own, recognising them as people with different views rather than hated enemies. Depolarisation appeared less as a cognitive shift than as an affective and relational one: as internal threat diminished and shame became more manageable, the need to organise social perception around hostility or projection weakened. From this perspective, polarisation is sustained not only by belief systems but by emotional and relational dynamics shaped by dysregulation and threat sensitivity, and efforts to counter polarisation through debate or persuasion alone may overlook the psychosocial conditions under which moral complexity and rehumanisation become psychologically viable.

However, the durability of these psychosocial gains depended on external conditions such as stability, social recognition, and access to meaningful roles. Where internal capacity aligned with opportunity, participants described enacting new identities through routine, responsibility, and social participation, including employment, education, and supportive relationships. Where such alignment was absent, material precarity, institutional unreliability, and limited guidance disrupted emerging stability despite psychological gains. One participant described a related tension in which financial precarity created a pull back toward extremist-adjacent work specifically because it had once been a viable source of income and a sense of purpose, noting that it was much easier to get involved on the right than on the left because those networks were much more willing to immediately embrace him. Peer mentoring networks, particularly Life After Hate, often functioned as relational bridges, supporting disclosure, continuity, and practical negotiation of next steps in contexts where formal support was limited or mistrusted.

The study also raises ethical questions specific to therapeutic work conducted in securitised contexts, where support for former extremists sits close to surveillance, risk management, and public protection imperatives. If epistemic trust depends on experiencing another person’s guidance and responses as benign rather than threatening, this becomes considerably harder to sustain where that same person, or the service they represent, also contributes to decisions about an individual’s risk classification, licence conditions, or continued liberty. In such settings, disclosures that would support therapeutic work, admitting doubt, describing an unresolved sympathy, acknowledging a lapse, may carry real consequences for the individual’s management, creating a structural incentive toward exactly the kind of guarded, selectively self-protective account that undermines the conditions required for sustained change. The voluntariness that this study depended on, with participation structurally separate from statutory obligation, cannot be assumed to generalise to therapeutic provision delivered within statutory disengagement programmes.

The findings carry practical implications for frontline organisations involved in extremism prevention and post-exit support. Behaviour that might be read by practitioners or institutions as resistant, guarded, or non-compliant may sometimes reflect underlying epistemic mistrust or perceived threat rather than a lack of motivation to change, and responding to such behaviour as a compliance problem risks reinforcing precisely the mistrust that produced it. Establishing psychological safety and epistemic trust may need to precede, or run alongside, the introduction of specific content-based interventions, whether ideological, practical, or therapeutic, though the relationship between internal psychosocial capacity and external stability is plausibly reciprocal rather than linear. Crucially, the findings do not suggest that trauma-focused therapy is necessary for everyone disengaging from extremism, nor that its absence precludes successful reintegration. The value of the psychosocial capacities examined here may lie less in prescribing therapy as a universal requirement and more in informing individualised assessment and formulation, identifying which capacities appear underdeveloped for a given individual and using that understanding to inform how support, of whatever kind, is introduced and sequenced. Reintegration, the study concludes, is best understood not as an individual task but as a shared ethical and civic process requiring reciprocity from institutions and communities, in which change emerges through the ongoing negotiation between internal capacity and external possibility within relational contexts capable of holding both vulnerability and responsibility.

Subject of Research: Disengagement and reintegration as psychosocial capacity-building after violent extremism

Article Title: Disengagement and reintegration as psychosocial capacity-building after violent extremism

Article References: Ramaswamy, D. (2026). Disengagement and reintegration as psychosocial capacity-building after violent extremism. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17, Article 1814567. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1814567

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1814567

Keywords: Disengagement, reintegration, psychosocial, capacity-building, violent, extremism, scientific research