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

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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Because I know that even in telling our own stories we share other people’s, I received permission from my child to write and publish this essay. I do not believe I am entitled to represent their experience and acknowledge that the portrayal of these events is limited by my own bounded perspective (Shuman, 2005). Thankfully, my child and I both agreed that enough time has passed, and work has been accomplished, for us to begin to talk about this experience. We hope to encourage research that will help us all understand and respond to trauma better. Please be aware that this narrative has the potential to activate a trauma-response in your body. Also, if you want to correspond about this article, please remember I am not able to discuss these events in casual conversation.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.