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

Area of Science:

• Health Communication
• Trauma Studies
• Autoethnography

Background:

• Trauma can disrupt an individual's capacity for sense-making and healing.
• Storytelling is often viewed as a crucial tool for processing crisis and trauma.
• Existing research may overlook the communicative barriers imposed by trauma.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the impact of secondary trauma on a parent's ability to utilize storytelling for sense-making and healing.
• To explore how trauma inhibits narrative construction and help-seeking behaviors.
• To challenge assumptions about narrative resiliency in the context of severe trauma.

Main Methods:

• Autoethnography: A qualitative research method where the researcher uses their own experiences to understand a phenomenon.
• Personal narrative: Detailed account of the researcher's experiences as a parent responding to child abuse.
• Reflexivity: Critical self-examination of the researcher's assumptions and biases as a health communication scholar.

Main Results:

• Secondary trauma acted as a "meaning-making black hole," obstructing language's healing potential.
• Trauma impaired the ability to identify crucial sense-making turning points.
• The experience hindered both the parent's and child's capacity to seek help.

Conclusions:

• Trauma significantly inhibits narrative processes, including emplotment, help-seeking, and meaning-making.
• Trauma possesses a unique communicative nature that requires further investigation.
• Health communication and narrative theory can offer valuable insights into understanding trauma and informing trauma-informed practices.