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Skin care Face Body. What happens when I have an item in my cart but it is less than the eligibility threshold? From this view, posttrauma is a legitimate response to trauma and violence. Qualitative methods are invaluable to feminist research as they position women's stories at the center of the inquiry, allowing for rich examination of these stories within their larger gendered social context Reinharz, ; Stoppard, Stoppard argues that such approaches permit us to see the "discursive conditions shaping women's experiences within specific socio-cultural contexts" p.
From this perspective, I emphasize how stories of experience are socially organized Smith, The individual, semi-structured interviews allowed women to raise issues that they may not have been comfortable discussing in a group. In-depth, semi-structured interviews allowed for a life story approach, which provided a narrative structure across time. Participants were asked about the time sequence or history of events related to their understanding of their experiences of alcohol use and trauma and what these events had meant to them over time see White, A focus group generated additional information beyond the individual interviews.
The group interview structure provided an interactive approach, yielding rich data and discussion stimulated by varying positions and opinions as well as shared experience Morgan, Research findings will highlight the themes of self-blame, minimization of trauma experiences, and uncertainty about trauma which is then followed by a discussion which situates these themes within a social context in which violence against women is blamed on women and minimized.
It is argued that it makes sense that women will frame their stories within the language available to them, and the uncertainty itself may be seen as a way in which women are not able to easily place their account into dominant discourse. All 60 women screened revealed a dual problem with depression and alcohol use. Following this screening, 20 women agreed to participate in semi-structured, in-depth interviews, and, subsequently 6 of these agreed to participate in a follow-up focus group.
The interviews and focus group were audiotaped and transcribed. This paper analyzes the stories of trauma emerging from community-based narrative research on these women in treatment for alcohol-use problems. Among these 20 women, 18 described experiences of some form of childhood or adulthood abuse. In this research, data analysis begins with thematic analysis of the content of women's narratives, and moves to discourse analysis, which allows for the exploration of the meaning of narratives contextualized within the broader social discourse on gender, trauma, and coping McMullen, ; Wells, ; White, By moving to a discursive analysis Brown, a, b; McMullen, ; Wells, , experience was viewed as the beginning of social inquiry.
This research explored what these narratives said, what they meant to women, how they were organized, what cultural practices and discourse were evident, why the story was constructed, and what it accomplished. Taken together, these strategies allowed me to unpack, contextualize, and interpret the narratives produced in this study. By exploring the construction of trauma narratives, the extent to which dominant discourse was challenged or reinforced was investigated.
All of the women involved with sex-work had a history of trauma. The average age of participants was Most women were economically marginalized with Most women were Caucasian Women seemed socially isolated, without strong family or friendship supports. Yet many were sole parents while struggling with alcohol use, depression, and histories of trauma and abuse: Significant uncertainty, minimization, and self-blame were evident, especially in reporting sexual abuse.
Women in this study reported long-term histories of severe violence and abuse from childhood into adulthood.
Trauma Narratives and Herstory
Uncertainty refers to the struggles women have in interpreting and talking about their trauma experiences, specifically the caution, self-doubt, and lack of authority that prevail. Other research has also shown that people often have difficulty remembering early childhood abuse, particularly in the form of fully formulated stories Herman, Instead, they often remember snapshot images, feelings, and physical sensations, including embodied sensations of panic, smells, taste, and pain.
She seems to be very concerned about gaps in her memory. She is clear, though, that her OCD and drinking helped to numb these difficult feelings. Her adult experience seems to include anxiety and sadness, which she self-medicates:. When childhood events occur and children are not yet capable of forming an organized account or memory shaped by culturally available discourse, they may only be able to refer to the feelings or sense of trauma. Martha, like Maria, has no complete narrative of trauma, but has feelings. Martha begins by saying she does not think there was childhood violence and ends by saying she has feelings like she has been abused:.
In another instance, Trina is uncertain about a history of sexual abuse. Like with Trina, as the interview with Maria unfolds, there is a sense of her struggling with uncertainty:. If the interviewer did not proceed to inquire whether there was child sexual abuse Maria may have held to the account she remembers: With this shift away from arguments and sadness, abuse can now be explored further. It is clear in these instances how the telling of stories is fluid. The researcher, like the therapist, is cued to pay greater attention when disjunctures, gaps, and contradictions are presented.
By highlighting her fragmented memory, Nancy draws our attention to it in this excerpt. In doing so, she also establishes the position that there is not much point in exploring her home life. This itself may serve to protect her from talking about it. The lack of memory creates a barrier to exploring the possibility of abuse. Further, this statement shuts down exploring an alternative account. It sounds like this is a dominant story for her and maybe her family. I, too, want to know about her fear of the dark. Like Nancy, I am curious whether someone put her in the closet, and why. It is possible it was safer for her to make this a question, rather than a statement.
This may be a partial telling of a story that could have been explored further. The research interviewer was treading a careful line to not push too hard, but it is clear that there is a lot more to this story. This woman lived in an economically privileged home that appeared to the outside world as quite ideal. Her story, however, seems to suggest that she was living in a home that was quite the opposite. She reports she was physically and emotionally abused and was suicidal at one point.
Instead of talking about it or having the abuse addressed, she was institutionalized. She was the problem. This not only minimizes rape; it results in the disqualification or suppression of experience. Further, as McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance argue, women try to find a way to make sense of their experiences within dominant social narratives, which provide inadequate accounts of their experiences and tend to reify oppressive dominant discourse, including the blaming of women for rape.
As women rely on the dominant discourses available to them, they often tell unhelpful stories about their lives Brown, a, c. In addition to the constraints of discourse, one way of coping with violence and abuse is to minimize its harmful impact. Children, youth, and adult women dealing with violence and abuse often see themselves as causing or contributing to the abuse. In the case of children, it is often self-protective to see themselves as the cause of abuse, as it allows them to preserve a sense of positive attachment to their caretakers; it is they who are the problem Herman, Self-blame also allows the person being abused to believe she has some control over the situation, or agency, while feeling frighteningly out of control.
Butler reminds us that choice and agency are always shaped and constrained by culture.
If she is going to stay in this relationship and not get beaten, she concludes, she cannot express herself. Women struggle with rejecting blame and also being empowered and active agents in their own lives. This tends to obscure and minimize other experiences of rape. This little four-year-old girl had been put up for adoption by her parents, who did not want her. Then she was bounced around from foster home to foster home, where to her it appeared as if no one else wanted her either.
While she was no doubt scared, feeling unloved, grieving, and angry, she says she must have done something wrong: Rather than allowing compassion for her four-year-old self, a mere baby, who is struggling with an undoubtedly scary, painful, and traumatic situation, Jo reframes her foster care experience through self-blame. Significant uncertainty was expressed, especially with regard to childhood trauma where memory was less clear.
Minimization and self-blame were evident in childhood and adult stories of trauma. Processes of minimization and self-blame allow women to maintain a sense of control over the situation. Trauma is hard for women to talk about and they often do not trust that they will be believed. This clearly has an impact on narrative research conversations on trauma with women. The shape that disclosure takes will reflect the interaction between the person telling the story and those listening.
Dominant Discourse, Self-Surveillance, and Trauma Narratives
It is clear that researchers can shut down or invite women to tell their trauma stories. This script often calls for a withholding, a toning down, a tucking in of expression: This can be seen in the cultural speech practice, especially among young women, of turning statements into questions. Uncertainty functions as a constraint against and regulation of speaking about violence which suggests that speaking challenges ongoing cultural supports for violence against women.
While uncertainty may imply flexibility or a lack of orthodoxy, allowing for alternative interpretations and possibilities, it may also operate as a mechanism of power Foucault, As such, uncertainty may reflect a troubled intersection of conformity and resistance to the dominant discourse available to women in telling their trauma stories and the problematic normalizing truths which they support.
According to Foucault ,. Silence is evident in uncertainty, yet uncertainty immediately reveals both speaking and declining to speak. The posture of discretion about speaking is not innocent, but shaped by how cultural discourses and meanings determine particular ramifications associated with telling stories of trauma. Uncertainty can offer a powerful entry point to explore and re-story self-blame and minimization while acknowledging how they are often, in themselves, an effort at resistance. These stories are likely to live outside the dominant stories a person is telling.
The disqualified or subjugated stories are rich with alternative information and interpretation which have largely remained silent. It can enable movement, agency, resistance as well as an abundance of caution and self-protection. Although uncertainty may be self-protective, in this study co-existing themes of self-blame and the minimization of violence may also lock women into harmful identity conclusions that interfere with how they live their lives.
Exploring uncertainty suggests that there are dangers or high levels of anxiety associated with talking. This danger may shape the self-stories women tell themselves, as well as the researcher. Caution and self-surveillance may render invisible, or disqualify, other aspects of the story while also serving to self-protect. Listening beyond the words allows us to listen to the dominant story as well as other interpretations and experiences which live outside the dominant story. When explored, uncertainty may fade or slip away, allowing a more determined, entitled, and confident voice to emerge.
If both the women telling trauma stories and those listening to trauma stories are uncertain and afraid, that which is silenced or disqualified in uncertainty is reinforced. It is important to be aware of the negative effects of leaving uncertainty intact, especially as it offers valuable possibilities if explored. In this research cautious fledgling accounts were evident in uncertainty. These alternative or disqualified stories needed gentle encouragement.
It was easy to see how quickly these disqualified stories could quickly retreat again to safety and invisibility. Similarly, McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance argue that helpful counter-stories reside within the disqualified story. If researchers only emphasize resistance, they risk silencing suffering and pain. If researchers emphasize only the suffering and pain and ignore the resistance, they strip women of their power and agency.
- Trauma Narratives and Herstory?
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Emphasizing multiple possibilities is less constricting and allows for a more complex telling and hearing of trauma stories. Restorying allows for both agency and pain, strength and vulnerability counter-narratives. Interviewing women about violence and trauma requires some awareness of the dangers for women associated with speaking of violence as well as the need to create space for women to be able to talk about trauma.
When women say they are not sure if they were raped, or that the abuse was not very bad, these are entry points for asking further questions. There is more story there. When one hears uncertainty—sensing a woman is both speaking and hiding —it is important that the researcher explore the uncertainty by continuing to ask rather than shut down questions. Those same uncertain responses should be qualified by actual interview content. Uncertainty may come from not working through experience; it may sometimes be a partial disclosure —partial talk or hinting—a way of telling without telling.
It may also reflect at least a partial desire to explore trauma and talk about it. Research-based conversations are not therapy, but like therapy, they explore socially constructed stories.
Narrative Interviews: Responses to Trauma and Violence
Practitioners of both narrative practices need to be aware of retraumatizing or revictimizing through narrative conversation. As I have argued, neither the telling nor the listening to stories in research is neutral. Questions can simply reproduce dominant discourse or adopt a counterviewing strategy to explore more broadly.
The scaffolding of counterviewing questions may facilitate multiple and non-binary understandings of stories. There are arguably ethical questions around what it means to leave uncertainty, minimization, and self-blame intact in research and therapy. Further, stories of uncertainty or ambivalence need to be seen as integral and meaningful aspects of the stories told. This paper has argued that: This research emphasizes an ethical obligation to ensure that uncertainty is not recorded as an absence of trauma. Trauma histories are vastly underreported in research results with significant unacknowledged implications for research findings and outcomes.
Moreover, there is an ethical responsibility not to reify self-blame in the interview process. A complex approach to stories of trauma experience should expect the contradiction and gaps, as seen here. Recognizing uncertainty allows for the messiness of trauma stories. Overall, this research suggests that it must be ensured that emancipatory research strategies for data collection and analysis have not colluded with dominant cultural approaches to trauma that make speaking dangerous and that reify oppressive dominant stories.
Re storying Uncertainty, Minimization and Self-Blame 1. Catrina Brown Dalhousie University. Dominant Discourse, Self-Surveillance, and Trauma Narratives 6 Dominant discourse on violence against women often blames women and minimizes its traumatizing effects. This is critical, as conversations involve injurious speech acts that reproduce horrible, paralyzing, and long-lasting negative effects on how individuals view themselves Butler, In listening beyond the words, researchers can challenge the dominant discourse and work toward the development of alternative and more helpful narratives.
According to Madigan , The other gives us meaning and a comprehension of ourselves so that we might possibly function in the social world. We are not passive; rather, we respond to these interactions and the discourses intent for power. What gets to be said about who we are and with what authority is in constant debate and carried throughout language traditions.
Writing in the Social: Research Methods 19 Qualitative research methods are emphasized as they are consistent with the postmodern epistemological lens through which this study will be conducted. Responses to Trauma and Violence 27 Although the women reported multiple, severe, and chronic abuse in their lives, they were often ambivalent in telling their stories of abuse. Struggles with Fragmented Memory 29 In this research women often demonstrated a fragmented memory in which they questioned their memories and their significance.
Her adult experience seems to include anxiety and sadness, which she self-medicates: So I think what really happens is when I start feeling things that reminds me of that…that is either the time that I do my other behavior [OCD] to get myself out of it or start drinking or whatever. So it is almost like I am there in body, but I am just gone somewhere else.
Martha begins by saying she does not think there was childhood violence and ends by saying she has feelings like she has been abused: Ah, I am not really sure. I have the feelings like I have been sexually abused, but there is no mental picture to go with it. I am very curious about that [sexual abuse] because at the time when my parents…had company over…my stepsisters came with their husbands.
One of them brought a friend over and he played hide and seek in the house. Do you want me to be a little more specific- childhood physical abuse? I can remember a couple of things, like maybe an argument in the house, or something. Or sadness, some types of sadness but only a few things. Emotional abuse in childhood? I am not sure now if it was all just in my head. But I know it must be there because when my husband tries to touch me I freeze. But when I was drinking I was alright. I only remember from 13 and up. I have no memory from 13 down.
And the memories I do have!
Trauma Narratives and Herstory : Sonya Andermahr :
From 13 and up at home is a lot of yelling and screaming. So that is why everything scares me. But I guess verbal. Okay so in childhood verbal abuse? I mean there was a couple of things that I remember about that.
