Dr. Linda Coates is a professor in the department of Psychology at Okanagan College. She is one of the founders of Response-based Practice, and has published and presented on topics related to violence, social interaction, and language. Linda is particularly interested in social responses to violence and has investigated responses by helping professionals (such as therapists and psychologists), legal professionals (like police, prosecutors, defence council, and judges), and the media.
Linda has conducted numerous studies demonstrating how language can be used to conceal violence, mitigate perpetrators’ responsibility, blame victims, and conceal victim resistance. She pioneered the use of the term “unilateral” to describe violent interactions, and “mutualizing” to describe how those unilateral violent actions are misrepresented as mutual.
Dr. Allan Wade began his work as a family therapist in 1983. Prior to entering private practice, Allan worked in federal corrections, youth work, addictions services, child protection, and as a special education teacher.
In 1999, Allan completed his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Victoria. In the course of his Ph.D. training, Allan focused on the micro-analysis of face-to-face communication, and on the connection between violence and language. His dissertation is entitled, “Resistance to Interpersonal Violence: Implications for the Practice of Therapy”.
Allan continued to work as a family therapist while completing graduate studies. With colleagues Linda Coates and Nick Todd, Allan developed “Response-based Practice”, which is both a method of working with victims and perpetrators of violence and their families, and a framework to guide professional interventions, research on social responses to interpersonal violence, and research on the connection between violence and language. Allan teaches locally and internationally. He provides supervision and conducts workshops with criminal justice and mental health professionals from across the range of agencies involved in cases of interpersonal violence.