Advocates, lawyers, and organizations working with survivors need to both understand trauma and how storytelling can help their clients heal. It also helpful for those who have suffered trauma to understand the benefits of storytelling.
The Impact of Trauma
People who have experienced injustice and abuse—whether physical, psychological, or emotional—are often left traumatized. We see this in children who were neglected by their parents, placed in foster care, and then shipped off to residential facilities—the most un-family-like of all foster care settings. And in women whose partners berated them behind closed doors, made them question their own reality, and monitored their communications and daily activities. And we see this in individuals who were trafficked and kept as another’s property and source of income.
Traumatic experiences like these can cause traumatic stress. According to Deborah Serani, Psy.D., “[t]raumatic stress leaves an indelible mark on your mind, body and soul….In traumatic stress, the acute danger of the situation causes your mind to dissociate, fragment or shift into denial; your body to go into emergency mode, like numbness or limpness, just to name a few. Trauma is so overwhelming that the fight or flight response freezes. What ends up thereafter is you become fixed in a reactive response style, characterized by hyperarousal of the sympathetic nervous system. This leaves you in a state of permanent alert.”
Storytelling and Healing
But there is hope—and it comes in the form of storytelling. Dr. Serani says, “[r]esearch has long shown that the key to healing from traumatic stress is the telling of your own story.” This means that advocates can help their clients heal by helping them to tell their stories.
Stories help us understand past events and bring meaning, and perhaps eventually acceptance, to traumatic experiences. Richard Kearney, in Narrating Pain: The Power of Catharsis, writes, “stories have always been ways in which people explain themselves to themselves and to others.” He suggests that when people are unable to deal with the shock of a traumatic event in the moment, they need to be able to later revisit that event via storytelling to understand what occurred. Indeed, Kearney cites Lisa Schnell, who wrote Learning How to Tell: Narratives of Child Loss and observed, “the closest we get to answering the saddest questions life asks us, is to respond in the most beautiful language we can muster.”
Moreover, as the author of a story, the survivor (rather than the abuser) takes control of the narrative. This is a powerful turning point. Through storytelling, a survivor can begin to realize her role as the main character her life story, as someone who is a leader with unique lived experiences. She can take a step back and view the hardships she has experienced as well as her strengths and resilience.
In telling her story, a survivor also has a captive audience—that could be an audience of one or one hundred—who can witness the story and see all that she overcame. Storytelling unites the narrator and the audience, and hopefully fosters a deeper sense of compassion and respect for those who have experienced trauma.
As Richard F. Mollica wrote in Healing Invisible Wounds:
“When violence leads to physical and mental injury, it also engenders a healing response. One aspect of this is the trauma story, whose function is not only to heal the survivor, but also to teach and guide the listener—and by extension, society—in healing and survival.”