Communicating Through and Around Trauma: Understanding the Limitations to Narrative and Resilience

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this autoethnographic account of my experiences as a parent who discovers and attempts to respond to the abuse of her child, I highlight the ways trauma can remove access to storytelling as a sensemaking and healing tool in a crisis. I narrate how I experienced secondary trauma as a meaning-making black hole that blocked language’s healing capacities, blinded me to important sensemaking turning points, and hampered my and my child’s ability to ask for help. These experiences caused me to question many foundational assumptions I made as a health communication scholar and to see an interdisciplinary bias toward narrative resiliency. Narrating the inhibiting effects trauma has on emplotment, help-seeking, and meaning-making points to the uniquely communicative nature of trauma which enables narrative theory and health communication research to make strong theoretical contributions to better understand trauma and support appropriate trauma-informed practices.