Trauma Narratives Research Articles

Personal Narratives in Trauma-Related Disorders: Contributions from a Metacognitive Approach and Treatment Considerations

Traumatic experiences are significant life events that are thought to impact one’s personal life narrative and narrative identity. Individuals who have experienced trauma may display fragmented memories and decreased narrative cohesion, resulting in trauma narratives that are disjointed and poorly integrated into the larger picture of their lives. Metacognition, defined as the ability to form increasingly complex and integrated ideas about the self, others, and the wider world, offers a framework to better understand life narratives and has been proposed as a construct that allows personal narratives to evolve in response to new experiences. In this paper, we will review the alterations commonly observed in trauma narratives. We will utilize the integrated model of metacognition as a framework to understand these deviations with an eye toward clinical implications. Although treatments that focus on trauma narratives exist, we argue that the study of metacognition provides unique insights into the process of integration of traumatic experience into an evolving personal narrative and may allow for more complete treatment of trauma-related disorders.

Niger Delta Poetry and Traumatic Inscriptions: A Reading of Sophia Obi’s Tears in a Basket

Environmental degradation, beyond being a global phenomenon, is fast becoming a major cause of concern in Africa with severe impacts on humans and non-humans. This mindless exploitation of natural resources, particularly in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, does not only adversely affect aquatic and terrestrial habitats, making them endangered species, but also leaves scathing impacts on humans, which range from physical to psychological. Previous studies have largely focused on analysing the destructive consequences of environmental degradation on non-humans and the effects on the material well-being of humans in Sophia Obi’s Tears in a Basket. However, this study argues that the destruction of the environment in the Niger Delta region directly affects the psychological and mental health of the inhabitants in the affected communities, causing trauma. Therefore, this study is a critical reading of Sophia Obi’s Tears in a Basket as a narrative of trauma. The study adopts ecocriticism (the study of nature in literature), Stef Craps’ model of trauma theory, which redefines trauma to include unending, quotidian kinds of brutality that befall persons in lower factions, and engages Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”, which focuses on the accretive, cumulative impact of environmental degradation on marginalised communities. The text is subjected to literary and critical textual analysis to examine its preoccupation with the subject of trauma, through the prisms of individual and collective suffering among the Niger Delta people. The study establishes that environmental degradation possesses the potential to generate trauma.

#BlackLivesMatter:

Through a variety of narrative discourses and forms, Afrofuturism has frequently dissected concrete and figurative traverses that intersect and engage in interaction with one another across the Black Atlantic and beyond. It has redefined, extended, and dislocated white supremacist narratives about time, culture, history, violence, and racism, taking an interesting stance on the social media hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, after the movement Black Lives Matter was born following George Zimmerman's acquittal in Trayvon Martin's shooting murder in 2012. On the same note, Afropessimism is an outlook that focuses on the infinite consequences that the black body confronts as a nonexistent slave, a space and often as a defenseless being prone to ceaseless violence. An exact antithesis of humanity, Afropessimism proclaims that the white dominant society simultaneously forgets and exploits the black and the anti-dictatorial apparatus and discourses. Being the case, even psychological procedures cannot alleviate the sufferings of those nonbeings who exist beyond the boundaries. This article undertakes an Afrofuturist and Afro-pessimistic reading of an American experimental hip-hop band clipping.’s (stylized as clipping.) song “The Deep” (2017) and Rivers Solomon’s novella The Deep (2019) to examine how the narratives of trauma and collective memory work to create a futuristic nexus of emancipation, liberation, and technology. Based on the mythology of Detroit electronic band Drexciya, clipping.’s song "The Deep", a multilayered and evocative sci-fi tale, deals with the underwater descendants of pregnant African women who were cast off slave ships. Based on the song, Solomon has tweaked the outline and turned it into a literary work of the same name, The Deep, which will be examined as a text to further inspect the power relationship. The aim of the article is two-fold. Firstly, underpinning Afrofuturism and Afropessimism lenses, it seeks to explore the texts to portray embedded collective trauma and memory to redefine, re-explain, and reimagine the archived history/ies. Secondly, the article will connect the text to study how every black lives matter.

Overlapping Traumas: Revisiting Trauma in Post-apocalyptic World of Anna Kavan’s Ice

This article offers a critical exploration of Anna Kavan’s Ice which includes a literary representation of trauma and its correlation with the concept of post-apocalypse. Establishing a preliminary dialogue between post-apocalyptic and trauma narratives, it investigates the individual and post-apocalyptic trauma both separately and holistically through a single text. The abandonment trauma and the traumatic glacial apocalypse create an interrelated discourse of post-apocalyptic trauma that encompasses changes on the protagonist of the novel and collectivities. Following Hobbesian discussion of social contract together with Golding’s Lord of the Flies, apocalyptic trauma and its symptoms are traced as disturbing demonstration of humanity’s primitive urges in the absence of social, religious, political, and moral orders. The analysis of the protagonist’s unrelenting quest and obsessive psychology through Lacanian concept objet a allows the discussion to diversify to address the individual trauma. Instead of casting Kavan’s novel as purely trauma narrative or post-apocalyptic account, this article reads her novel in a focused attentiveness to analyse different types of trauma and their merge with each other.

Clinical and Legal Considerations When Optimizing Trauma Narratives in Immigration Law Evaluations.

Asylum seekers in the United States face complex legal processes that require the construction of coherent and credible narratives to establish eligibility for legal status or immigration relief. In this article, we review clinical and legal considerations involved in optimizing trauma narratives in forensic psychiatric evaluations for immigration courts. We highlight significant challenges faced by asylum seekers, including the emotional impact of trauma and cultural factors affecting their ability to disclose their experiences, including the roles of symptoms and cultural and situational elements in disclosure and narrative development. We emphasize the importance of creating a therapeutic and empathetic environment to facilitate disclosure and partnering with interpreters across multiple culturally sensitive evaluations. We address the roles of common traumatic stressors in narrative development, including cultural challenges related to histories of torture, abduction, sexual violence, and human trafficking prevalent among asylum seekers, providing insights and guidance on each. Further, we address specific potential challenges to the forensic psychiatric evaluator during the narrative development process, such as transference, countertransference, malingering, and vicarious traumatization. We aim to provide guidance on the development of trauma narratives of asylees developed for both therapeutic and medico-legal effectiveness.

Reading, Reflection, and Resilience in the Study of Australian Literature

ABSTRACT This article explores supportive learning practices and related complexities in a first-year Australian literature course anecdotally reported to be challenging in content because it requires the study of several traumatic narratives as well as texts that directly contradict accepted discourses of Australian history and culture. The article analyses the role of critical reflection in developing students’ skills in reading resilience, with a focus on responding to trauma and the complex entanglements of language, power, and identity. In doing so, we offer an understanding of how critical reflection can constitute a useful response to reading triggering texts, particularly when affective response is bound up with pre-existing ideas about collective identity in a post/neo-colonial context. Thematic analysis revealed the presence of three core themes patterned across the data: confrontation and discomfort, relatability and familiarity, and perseverance versus abandonment. Our work expands literary studies pedagogy by contributing valuable insights into students’ affective responses to reading challenging texts, the relationship between discomfort, relatability, and engagement in the literary studies classroom, and the independent development of strategies for reading stamina.

Decoding threat neurocircuitry representations during traumatic memory recall in PTSD.

The neurocircuitry mechanisms underlying recall of traumatic memories remain unclear. This study investigated whether traumatic memory recall engages neurocircuitry representations that mirror activity patterns engaged during generalized threat stimulus processing in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Multivariate pattern analysis was used to train 3 decoders. A "trauma" decoder was trained on fMRI patterns during idiographic trauma versus neutral narratives in a sample of 73 adult women with PTSD. A separate cohort of 125 adult participants completed a reward and threat learning task, from which "shock" and "reward loss" decoders were trained on neural patterns during threat or reward outcome delivery, respectively. These decoders were then cross-tested on the alternative datasets, allowing analyses of the degree to which traumatic memory recall engaged neurocircuitry representations that overlap with more general aversive stimuli. Decoders were trained and tested in four networks related to salience processing as well bilateral amygdala and hippocampal masks. The shock decoder trained in a midcingulate / posterior insula network demonstrated elevated predictions for shock during traumatic versus neutral memory recall. Similarly, the trauma decoder made elevated predictions about trauma recall during shock versus no shock delivery across multiple networks related to salience processing. There was no overlap between reward loss decoder predictions and trauma memory recall or vice versa. PTSD participants with elevated re-experiencing symptoms demonstrated the highest engagement of shock activity patterns during trauma memory recall. These results suggest that trauma memory recall engages neurocircuitry representations that overlap with threat, specifically painful, stimulus delivery.

A home without secrets or lies on family & writing poems of childhood sexual assault

ABSTRACT In this short memoir, the author uses personal narrative, research, and popular literature to analyze her first book of poetry on childhood sexual assault and the social consequences of choosing to write a trauma narrative. As the author shows, writing her first book was an intuitive experiment of poetic therapy as well as an intellectual engagement with an artistic medium that becomes, through its production and publication, an example of the psychological benefits of writing these narratives while also inspiring negative familial responses. Drawing from the voices of other writers, this memoir argues that survivors of assault should write their experiences despite negative social responses, contending that the emotional and psychological benefits of doing so well outweigh social invalidation. Shame is examined as an inevitable consequence of assault that can be confronted through the act of writing, and memory as an unreliable resource the writer must choose to trust.

Development of a codebook for the narrative analysis of in-hospital trauma interviews of patients following stroke.

Given their sudden onset and life-threatening consequences, strokes and transient ischemic attacks (TIAs) can trigger posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). To gain a deeper understanding of the potential influence of factors in patients' descriptions of these medical events on PTSD, we conducted a standardized trauma interview with a convenience sample of patients hospitalized for suspected stroke/TIA (N = 98) to assess the details and emotional experience of the stroke/TIA event. Three researchers reviewed the interviews and the research literature on risk and protective factors for PTSD. From this analysis, a codebook with descriptions, examples, and scoring protocols for eight Likert scale, two categorical, and four binary codes was developed. Upon demonstrating sufficient interrater reliability, the research team scored all narratives. Three superordinate themes were identified in the analysis: distress (e.g., fear, helplessness), potential protective factors (e.g., positive expectancies, concern for loved ones), and level of detail (e.g., somatic detail, emotional detail). Differences in perceptions, themes, and expectations emerged in the narratives, indicating a wide range of responses following stroke/TIA. Additionally, patient age was negatively correlated with scores for the fear, r = -.34, p <.001, and negative consequences, r = -.24, p =.018, codes and positively associated with the likelihood of having positive expectancies, OR = 1.05, 95% CI [1.00, 1.10], p =.039. These findings provide a more comprehensive understanding of how patients reflect on their experiences post-stroke/TIA and can inform future research on the contributions of trauma narrative characteristics and emotional responses to PTSD risk.

Trauma Narratives: Collective Memories as Literature by Indochinese Refugees in the United States

Indochinese refugees in the United States are part of Asian Americans, whose narratives portray their life in their home countries, journeys to the new world and life in the United States, their new world. This study investigates three primary texts by American authors of Indochinese descent, including Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, Sichan Siv’s Golden Bones and Sucheng Chan’s Hmong Means Free. These three texts are highly historicised, portraying traumatic experiences of Indochinese refugees who suffer from war and communist persecution in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, respectively. These texts are considered trauma narratives serving as collective memories of those people, which help them to remember their pasts and constitute their group identity. The narratives in the three primary texts also explain how Indochinese subjects come to be Asian Americans and reveal that in fact the United States is considered an important cause of their diaspora and trauma. The authors of those narratives are unable to eradicate the traumatic memories from their psyche, so they yearn for voices to vent out those memories as a form of healing. Their trauma narratives have become part of American culture which is partially constituted by trauma suffered by different groups of people in this country.

A Reading of 2 Kings 18:17–19:9a, 36–37 as a Trauma Narrative

The narrative of 2 Kings 18:17–19:9a, 36–37 (“Source B1”) recounts pre-exilic religious collective trauma surrounding Sennacherib’s military advance against Judah in 710 BCE and its aftermath. In this narrative, the Rabshakeh uses the keywords “בטח” and “נצל” to assert that Yhwh has turned against Judah. However, his claims were subverted by the withdrawal of the Assyrian army and the later death of Sennacherib, facilitated by the divine intervention of Yhwh following Hezekiah’s supplication. Despite its significance, only a few studies have examined this narrative as that of trauma. Drawing on Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of the social process of cultural or collective trauma, this study argues that the function of this narrative is that of religious trauma narrative. It reconstructs the collective trauma of Sennacherib’s campaign to theologically defend the Davidic kingship and Yhwh and ultimately suggests a revised identity for the Judaean community to foster solidarity, even under the ongoing influence of Assyria following the military campaign.

Queering the Vietnam Trauma Narrative in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Veteran memoirs, imbued with white, masculinist bias, dominate US perceptions of the Vietnam War. Drawing from an intersectional approach to trauma studies, this article examines Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019) as a rewriting of the paradigmatic Vietnam trauma narrative. Vuong challenges normative understandings of traumatic events by shedding light on the effects of the war upon female civilians and their descendants, as well as on the traumatogenic aftermath of all-American masculinist violence for its queer, Asian American protagonist. Vuong also calls for an alternative model to working through trauma based on empathy and relationality.

Medellín: Narratives of trauma and exclusion in the works of Colombian journalists

Medellín: Narratives of trauma and exclusion in the works of Colombian journalists

Jewellery Making, Boundary Objects and Creativity in Social Work

The use of the arts in social work is creating space to reimagine effective communication, meaningful relationships and social change. Peripheral to this growing body of knowledge is jewellery design and making, a lacuna that this paper addresses within the context of recovery journeys. The paper presents art as an activity which can lead to tangible outputs, understood as ‘boundary objects’ and as an embodied aesthetic and sensory experience, for building dialogical relationships. Using the concept of ‘boundary objects’ is a new, yet achievable ambition for social work. Insights are presented from a small qualitative study on the use of jewellery making for assisting women, who have experienced trauma, to develop a positive self-identity and confidence. Jewellery making is introduced as a method for reframing trauma narratives into tangible objects. Part of the women’s embodied experiences are situated in the jewellery, an object of adornment external to them, rather than remaining trapped inside their body. For social workers, identifying objects (a piece of jewellery, a photograph, or any range of items) that symbolises or contains meaning for service users, can unlock a conversation that can lead to a deeper understanding of the person, their past, present and future ambitions.

The teaching of traumatic narratives: out-of-the-classroom engagement with non-canonical ‘chosen traumas’

The teaching of traumatic narratives: out-of-the-classroom engagement with non-canonical ‘chosen traumas’

Leveraging Victim Voices: Unveiling True Needs Through Natural Language Processing in Trauma Narratives

This article explores the intersection of technology, particularly artificial intelligence and anti-human trafficking and child sexual exploitation (CSE) initiatives. Despite the promises of technology, the overall effectiveness in addressing these crimes is limited. The authors argue that a key factor contributing to this limitation is the insufficient understanding of the crimes, rooted in the absence of meaningful engagement with victims. To address these challenges, the authors propose two strategies. First, they advocate for data-sharing partnerships to access extensive textual data held by organizations. Second, they highlight the use of natural language processing (NLP) to systematically analyse victim narratives without causing further interview fatigue. Embracing NLP is seen as a way to expedite research, enhance scalability and provide a fresh perspective on combating human trafficking and CSE. The article is structured to define key terminology, make a case for a victim-led response, demonstrate the application of NLP and conclude with insights from in-house research. The authors urge stakeholders to consider this new approach in their efforts to combat human trafficking and CSE.

Kinship in Darkness: On the Humanities’ Intrinsic Potential to Foster Post-Traumatic Healing

ABSTRACT In this article, I describe my personal healing process after my husband’s death in the Virginia Tech shootings. Focusing on the ways in which my scholarship aided in this recovery, I examine my responses to Gordon Quinn’s Prisoner of Her Past (2010) through Dominick LaCapra’s lens of working through trauma. I came to understand that exposing myself to the suffering of others through cultural representations is a form of controlled repetition. Although witnessing others’ pain offers a sensory gateway to my own trauma, it also necessitates reflexive distance to avoid appropriation. One step removed from my own trauma, critical analysis (nourished but not hijacked by emotions) is easier to achieve, also when working through my traumatic memories and post-traumatic reactions triggered by these cultural representations. Speaking in LaCapra’s terms, I am able to put affect and cognition into a better equilibrium. Ultimately, I argue that by providing both emotive experience and intellectual analysis, scholarship in the humanities offers tools to work on post-traumatic symptoms and to move the trauma narrative towards self-understanding and healing.

Secondary traumatization in refugee care—EMDR intervention for interpreters (STEIN): a study protocol for a quasi-randomized controlled trial

BackgroundBy the end of 2022, more than 100 million people worldwide fled their homes. Before, during and after their flight, refugees have high risk of experiencing traumatic events. Accordingly, around every third refugee is affected by posttraumatic stress disorder. For adequate mental health care, the service of interpreters is often urgently needed to overcome existing language barriers. However, repeated exposure with details of traumatic narratives, as experienced by interpreters, can be burdensome and can lead to trauma sequela symptoms in terms of secondary traumatic stress. Only few studies have examined the treatment of secondary traumatic stress to date. Based on the recommendations for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder with confrontational methods, this study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of an eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) intervention in a sample of interpreters working in refugee care suffering from secondary traumatic stress symptoms.MethodsTo evaluate the effectiveness of an EMDR intervention for the treatment of secondary traumatic stress symptoms, a quasi-randomized controlled trial using a waiting group design will be performed. Participants will be treated with a maximum of 6 sessions based on EMDR standard protocol. Primary outcome is the symptom load of secondary traumatic stress, assessed with the Questionnaire for Secondary Traumatization, while secondary outcomes comprise further symptom complexes such as PTSD due to self-experienced traumatic events, depression, anxiety, and somatization as well as quality of life, quality of professional life, and psychological wellbeing that will be assessed with the PDS, PHQ-9, GAD-7, SSD-12, SF-12, PROQOL-5, and WHO-5, respectively.DiscussionOur primary interest is to determine the efficacy of an EMDR intervention in interpreters affected by secondary traumatic stress, especially how many sessions are needed for significant symptom reduction. Change of associated symptom complexes and quality of life will be investigated. Reprocessing one’s own stressful experiences may also contribute to this, which is not the focus of the treatment but relevant to the EMDR protocol. This study aims to assess if EMDR could be an acceptable, effective, and time-efficient method for reducing work-related secondary traumatization.Trial registrationGerman Clinical Trials Register, DRKS00032092, registered 16 June 2023.

Beyond Empathy: Analyzing Compassion Fatigue Among Counselor

Compassion fatigue is an emotional response characterized by a diminished capacity or interest in empathizing with others. This phenomenon often results from continuous exposure to traumatic narratives recounted by clients, leading to negative behavioral and emotional outcomes in counselors. Compassion fatigue can impair the ability to support others and hinder overall productivity. Counselors are particularly vulnerable to experiencing compassion fatigue. Given the increasing number of counselors, it is imperative to investigate the prevalence and characteristics of compassion fatigue. This study aims to delineate the features of compassion fatigue among 45 counselors at East &amp; Central Java. The research employs a quantitative descriptive methodology. The Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL) was adapted for this study, encompassing three subscales that assess compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and burnout. This instrument represents an advanced iteration of the original compassion fatigue scale.

Racialized Hostipitality and Narrative Resistance in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People

Sharon Bala’s The Boat People (2018) is at once a trauma narrative bearing witness to the ravages of Sri Lanka’s civil war, as well as a powerful portrayal of the racialized interpellation of refugee-immigrants from the Global South. A fictionalized account of the Sri Lankan refugees who arrived in Canada on board the ships Ocean Lady in 2009 and MV Sun Sea in 2010, the novel challenges the facile and depersonalized portrayals of asylum seekers that are proliferated uncritically in media. Bala presents a humane and humanizing counter narrative that challenges the arbitrary naming, shaming, and dehumanizing discourse that labels asylum seekers as “terrorists,” “illegals,” “thugs,” and “foreign criminals,” all labels used by Canadian anti-immigrant factions to brand the Sri Lanka asylum seekers in The Boat People. In this paper, drawing on the Derridian neologism “hostipitality,” I introduce the concept of “racialized hostipitality” to understand how Bala sheds light on the racialized and bifurcated nature of Canadian immigration law. By demonstrating how immigration law embeds both hospitality and hostility, and how hospitality is conditionally offered only to the “good immigrants,” I argue that Bala’s novel unveils the racialized hostipitality that conditions Canadian immigration law as portrayed in the novel.