Transforming Trauma: Space for Growth and Meaning-Making after Adversity (original) (raw)
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Voicing Trauma and Truth: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation (Edited book - Introduction)
Voicing Trauma and Truth: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation, 2013
This volume brings together a worldwide array of phenomena and research programmes associated with working with trauma. Wide-ranging in content, it truly represents the interdisciplinary nature of current research, providing dynamic and valuable crossovers between differing research practices. presented to provide different perspectives of the experience of trauma: the personal; the subjective/objective; and the collective.
Trauma and Meaning Making: Introduction
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Trauma and Meaning Making highlights multiple practices of meaning making after traumatic events in the lives of individuals and communities. Meaning making consists both in a personal journey towards a new way to exist and live in a world shattered by trauma and in public politics locating and defining what has happened. In both perspectives, the collection evaluates the impact achieved by naming the victim/s and thus the right of the victim/s to suffer from its aftermath or by refusing to recognise the traumatic event and thus the right of the victim/s to respond to it. A range of paradigms and techniques invite readers to consider anew the specificities of context and relationship while negotiating post-traumatic survival. By delineating how one makes sense of traumatic events, this volume will enable readers to draw links between practices grounded in diverse disciplines encompassing creative arts, textual analysis, public and collective communication, psychology and psychotherapy, memory and memorial.
Trauma, and the need for transformation
| | 'Trauma, and the need for transformation' Tomas Baum 2 / 7 "You deserve to die." "The recognition of my suffering is a pre-conditionfor any form of communication." "We need to separate from each other first in order to work better together later: this wall of separation is necessary. It's actually not a wall; it's a fence." Dear representatives, Ladies and gentlemen,
Nordic Psychology, 2013
The aim of this study was to explore how female survivors of childhood trauma who have sought treatment experience ways to positive change. Little knowledge exists regarding the first-person perspective of the recovery process following childhood trauma, and getting access to this perspective might contribute to better understanding of these processes, hence offering opportunities for health promotion. All clients (31, including 3 who dropped out) from six stabilization groups for women exposed to human-inflicted traumas were invited to participate in the study. Experiences of the recovery process were not restricted to the period of receiving treatment, and all clients who volunteered were included in the study. Qualitative, in-depth interviews with 13 consenting clients were carried out shortly after completion of the group treatment. All interviews were transcribed verbatim, and a hermeneutical -phenomenological approach to analysis was applied. The analysis resulted in five interrelated, but distinct main themes: finding new ways to understand one's emotions and actions, moving from numbness toward vital contact, becoming an advocate of one's own needs, experiencing increased sense of agency, and staying with difficult feelings and choices. The themes support, yet supplement trauma theory, by underlining the relationship between emotional contact and meaningmaking, while downplaying the necessity of symptom elimination in the experience of recovery. The findings also underline that the active role trauma survivors play in their processes of recovery.
2015
This thesis analyses the ways in which notions of transformation and viability (Butler 2004a) can be articulated within therapy after traumatic life events or circumstances. It draws together discursive threads from psychology, therapy, neuroscience and spirituality, to examine what makes for the viability of a life after overwhelming life events. In penetrating the dialogue between what is presently understood as "the scientific truth" about traumatic experience and the embodied experience of trauma, this thesis also argues that it is not enough to simply view psychology or biology as "complicated effects of discursive processes" (Blackman, 2001, p. 230). It examines subjectivity in the interface between biological and psychological processes. Therapeutic work with survivors of trauma is based on the act of "perfect listening". It attempts to move traumatic events into language and into autobiographical memory to make for a viable life. The notion that listening is enough suggests that what is unbearable is within the person, who, with such help, can overcome any obstacle. A traumatised person"s transformation relies on neurobiological concepts to account for the positive change. However trauma work is not that simple. It is mostly challenging, exhausting, long-term and often "messy", when interventions that "should" work, don"t, or the unexpected arises. Explanations and life-enhancing changes that fit at one stage of a person"s life or during a course of therapy do not appear to be easily sustained over time in the lives of many trauma sufferers. However therapy may be one domain, when understood as a "relational cure", where subjects can be recognised and called into being. Understood systemically, therapyand researchis also domains in which to explore how it is that subjects may continue to be recognised and interpolated as viable subjects, by themselves and others.
Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma
2007
In the 1990's, South Africa surprised the world with a peaceful, negotiated transition from armed conflict to an inclusive democracy. This was followed by the ground-breaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to confront and work through a troubled past. The search for truth and reconciliation in South Africa, however, is far from completed; the country is in many ways still burdened by unresolved individual and collective traumas. In this book, two academics from the University of Cape Town, one a psychologist and the other a literary scholar, explore the importance of narrative as a way of working through trauma. Although written from within a South African context, the work has a much wider relevance. It offers illuminating perspectives on the process of "narrating our healing": the sharing of personal narratives, the appropriation of literary narratives, and above all, the re-creating of life narratives shattered by trauma. It is a book about the sea...