16/03/2026
There is a pattern we rarely name on LinkedIn: trauma brokerage.
It is when institutions, funders, researchers, consultants, and decision-makers say they value lived experience, but only after people have explained their pain in a way the system recognises.
Not before.
Not on their own terms.
Only once it has been translated, surveyed, quoted, coded, packaged, and presented back to power.
That should trouble us more than it does.
Because what are we really saying when someone has to validate their pain before it becomes valued?
What does that do to a person’s dignity?
What does that do to a community’s trust?
What does that say about the moral compass of a system that needs public evidence of suffering before it will act?
I think about this a lot, including in my own life.
Because my struggle, my story, my migration, my grief, my navigation of systems, all of that can give people insight. It can help people understand the conditions around me. It can help name a real problem.
But at what cost?
Does sharing my lived experience bring you closer to me, my culture, and my humanity?
Or does it simply give you enough information to build a solution about me from an external lens?
That is the part people skip.
Because once my pain becomes data, who owns it?
Once my story becomes evidence, who interprets it?
Once my experience becomes strategy, who gets paid?
Once my reality becomes a framework, who gets called the expert?
And if the solution is built by people outside the experience, how much of it is actually shaped by us, not just extracted from us?
This is why I think we need to be more honest about how lived experience is used.
Too often, communities provide the pain.
Institutions provide the language.
Professionals provide the interpretation.
Decision-makers provide the approval.
And then the people most affected are thanked for their vulnerability and left out of ownership.
That is not participation.
That is extraction with better manners.
Lived experience is not just a story.
It is knowledge.
It is labour.
It is risk.
It is memory.
It is cultural context.
It is survival intelligence.
So here is the question I do not see asked enough:
Why does a person’s pain need an institutional witness before it counts as truth?
And maybe the next one is even harder:
If I have to reopen the wound for the system to believe me, is the system trying to solve the problem or simply study the damage?
Until we answer that honestly, a lot of what gets called lived experience work is still power borrowing community pain without giving up control.
Some systems do not lack lived experience. They lack the ethics to hold it without extracting from it.- Third Space Narrative
