Disengagement and reintegration as psychosocial capacity-building after violent extremism

Efforts to address violent extremism increasingly acknowledge the relevance of mental health, yet psychological factors are still often treated as background vulnerabilities rather than as active processes shaping whether reintegration can be sustained over time. This paper offers a conceptual, theory-generating account of how therapeutic engagement supports the consolidation of disengagement and the conditions for sustainable reintegration. All participants had already disengaged before starting therapy, so the paper is not an evaluation of a specific therapy's effectiveness in supporting disengagement; instead, it traces the psychosocial mechanisms through which change unfolds over time. Drawing on longitudinal narrative interviews with six individuals, the analysis traces changes in emotional regulation, identity, trust in others, and moral reasoning over time. All six had disengaged, for a minimum of two years, from far-right or Islamist extremist or extremist-adjacent environments, or from the incel milieu. They subsequently took part in trauma-informed therapeutic work delivered individually and remotely over approximately nine to twelve months. Participants described therapeutic engagement as supporting emotional safeness and regulation, and their accounts point to an accompanying capacity to revisit past involvement without collapse, integrate responsibility into more coherent self-narratives, and move away from rigid, polarised ways of relating to others. These psychosocial shifts shaped participants' capacity to engage with everyday social, practical, and civic domains. However, the durability of these changes depended on external conditions, such as stability, social recognition, and access to meaningful roles. Where those conditions were absent, exclusion or precarity could undermine even real psychosocial gains. The study reframes post-exit reintegration as a relational and developmental process of psychosocial capacity-building, in which therapeutic engagement is one enabling condition among others.