‘I Was Close to Them’: Re-experiencing War through Trauma-based Interviews

ABSTRACT

Previous scholarly work on vicarious trauma provides an overview of how researchers have been personally coping with the hazards of their work. In order to understand the deep meanings of war and genocide, researchers end up being caught between representations of reality and their personal reflexions on it. In this paper I will elaborate on vicarious tortures for already traumatized researchers; hence, my attempt is to enlighten the position of researcher – war survivor who conducts the research on war trauma. Using an example of my own research, I will analyze the process of dealing with the trauma in a situation in which both the researcher and the respondents experienced the same war. Becoming aware of emotional and bodily reactions to the events I explored together with my participants I started finding personal traumatic experiences that existed parallel to the experiences reported by participants. In this paper, I attempt to define the context, development and purpose of ‘finding a parallel narrative and emotion’ and the importance of active listening and empathy throughout that process. Also, how my traumatic experiences influenced my participants’ narratives of the traumatic past and vice versa will be explored as one of the enlightening processes emerging from fieldwork.

KEYWORDS:

• Vicarious trauma
• researcher
• active listening
• empathy
• war

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alma Jeftić

Alma Jeftić is a PhD (ABD) candidate in Psychology at the University of Belgrade and a Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute, International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of Social Aspects of Memory. Stories of Victims and Perpetrators from Bosnia-Herzegovina (Routledge, 2019), and a Governing Board member of the Research Network on Transnational Memory and Identity in Europe (Council for European Studies at Columbia University).