Women’s Narratives of Trauma: (Re)storying Uncertainty, Minimization and Self-Blame

Abstract

Women's stories of trauma often reveal uncertainty, minimization, and selfblame. This paper explores community-based research findings on women's narratives illustrating powerful, yet uncertain, stories of chronic, multiple, and severe trauma. This paper argues that 1) research needs to recognize that posttraumatic responses often involve uncertainty and ambivalence about telling stories of trauma; 2) uncertainty is not just a product of trauma but also reflects the influence of the dominant discourse on women and trauma that creates fragmented memory of the events and supports blaming women for the violence and minimizing the serious of the violence; 3) uncertainty reveals the dangers of speaking and often a struggle with speaking and hiding simultaneously; and 4) research questions can be designed to counterview dominant discourse which will bring forward the prevalence and nature of the violence. Despite powerful stories of chronic, multiple, and severe trauma, women's narratives of trauma reveal uncertainty, minimization, and selfblame in this community-based research. This paper explores how uncertainty is reflected in women's struggle with interpreting and talking about their trauma experiences. Uncertainty functions as a constraint against and regulation of speaking about violence, suggesting that speaking challenges ongoing cultural supports for violence against 1 This research was supported through a generous grant from the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation to Dr. Catrina Brown (principal investigator) and Dr. Sherry Stewart. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of service providers and the program directors for their contribution to their project, including their assistance in providing access to the women in their treatment services and their assistance in participant recruitment. I would also like to thank Kathy Petite, Sarah Norris, Sherry Stewart, and Peter Horvath for their research assistance and to Tod Augusta-Scott for his thoughtful reading of this text and his helpful comments. And of course, I extend thanks to the women receiving services at these programs for their participating in the study.

The personal motif in naturalistic case study research: developing “innerstandings” in woman’s compulsive behaviour

“…This process led to a "re-storying" of the case (Brown, 2013). This "re-storying" is in line with the narrative theory that stories are the outcome of a hermeneutic and dialogical process, and part of an ongoing negotiation (Walker, 1989).…”

“…It appears as an ignored but crucial life event. Ellen considered herself responsible for it and took the blame, a well-known pattern (Brown, 2013), often grounded in a "good girl script", which may give a sense of control over the situation. The "good girl script" (Ahmed, 2017;Butler, 1990) calls among other things for a withholding, a toning down, a tucking in of expression, or even complete silencing (Jack & Ali, 2010).…”

“…• Focus on cognition at the expense of spirituality and sacredness (Hartman McGilley, 2009), love and embodied intuition (see also Bleakley, 2013); • Self-silencing in the form of initially not seeing the gender perspective (Brown, 2013); blind spots and taken-for-granted patterns because we are in the middle of it as researchers; • A focus on the individual, autonomous self as a major tenet of Western norms, as expressed in self-reliance and independence.…”

“…The case study shifts the focus from the particularities of the illness to the particularities of the person with an illness. This opens up new perspectives and patterns: instead of illness patterns, the case study reveals underlying dominant discourses of being in the world-as a girl and a victim-in-control (Brown, 2013;Verdonk et al, 2008), as a patient (Dykshoorn, 2014), as a medical student (Bleakley, 2013;Verdonk et al, 2014).…”

Traumatized Voices in Contemporary Arab-British Women Fiction: A Critical Stylistics Approach

“…In other words, trauma is an injury to the psyche that language often fails to adequately represent or express. Concerned as it is with the complexities of representing experiences that defy conventional modes of knowledge and expression, Caruth's approach has been widely used to delineate the recurrent themes of recollected memories of home and the pain of exile that pervade many diasporic feminist narratives (Brown, 2013;Gunne & Thompson, 2012;Moglen, 2001;Woodiwiss, Smith, & Lockwood, 2017) Yet, despite this conceptual awareness of the importance of language in trauma narratives, very little has been done in relation to the study of the linguistic patterns of traumatized characters' speech. As a result, this article explores the linguistic configurations in feminist trauma narratives with a particular focus on the trauma of exile in Arab-British women literature.…”