The Narrating Self and the Experiencing Self in the Narratives of Women Who Have Experienced Trauma

Abstract

This study examines how the appearance of post-traumatic growth as a result of a traumatic event is affected by the extent to which the experiencing self dominates the narrating self (concepts introduced by Franz Stanzel). The experiencing self describes its feelings, needs, and desires, and reveals its own attitudes toward the situation and its circumstances. The narrating self aims to give a detailed account of the event, circumstances and its own actions, without saying much about its emotional state. Seventy-eight Polish women were asked to recount their traumatic experiences and answer questions about how the experience had affected their thinking about themselves and their world-view. The participants narratives were analyzed in terms of the dominance of either the experiencing self or the narrating self, or their possible balance. The participants also filled out questionnaires to measure post-traumatic growth and sense of purpose in life. The qualitative analysis suggested that greater post-traumatic growth was reported by women for whom the experiencing self either dominated in the narratives over the narrating self, or was balanced with the equally developed story of the narrating self. However, the quantitative analysis distinguished only between the experiencing self and narrating self positions, with the former demonstrating greater post-traumatic growth, whereas narratives that balanced both voices were intermediate in the comparison and were not distinguished from the other more pure positions. Taken as a whole, results support the inference that narration from an emotion-focused internal perspective facilitates personal growth in the face of very difficult life events.