trauma essay

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Writing Can Help Us Heal from Trauma

• Deborah Siegel-Acevedo

Three prompts to get started.

Why does a writing intervention work? While it may seem counterintuitive that writing about negative experiences has a positive effect, some have posited that narrating the story of a past negative event or an ongoing anxiety “frees up” cognitive resources. Research suggests that trauma damages brain tissue, but that when people translate their emotional experience into words, they may be changing the way it is organized in the brain. This matters, both personally and professionally. In a moment still permeated with epic stress and loss, we need to call in all possible supports. So, what does this look like in practice, and how can you put this powerful tool into effect? The author offers three practices, with prompts, to get you started.

Even as we inoculate our bodies and seemingly move out of the pandemic, psychologically we are still moving through it. We owe it to ourselves — and our coworkers — to make space for processing this individual and collective trauma. A recent op-ed in the New York Times Sunday Review affirms what I, as a writer and professor of writing, have witnessed repeatedly, up close: expressive writing can heal us.

• Deborah Siegel-Acevedo is an author , TEDx speaker, and founder of Bold Voice Collaborative , an organization fostering growth, resilience, and community through storytelling for individuals and organizations. An adjunct faculty member at DePaul University’s College of Communication, her writing has appeared in venues including The Washington Post, The Guardian, and CNN.com.

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13 Reasons Why It’s OK to Write About Trauma in your College Applications — And How to Do So (a joint post by AdmissionsMom and McNeilAdmissions)

Hi everyone. This post is written by me, AdmissionsMom and McNeilAdmissions , TOGETHER. It’s a subject we both care about. We (your dynamic college-co nsultant duo) took up pens together to write what we believe is the first collaborative advice post in the sub’s history. Yay!  Enjoy and thanks for reading. 

Content warning: discussion of traumatic subjects: suicide, sexual abuse, trauma, self-harm

There is always a debate about what topics should be avoided at all cost on college essays. The short-list always boils down to a familiar crew of traumatic or “difficult” subjects. These include, but are not limited to, essays discussing severe depression, self-harm, eating disorders, experiences with sexual violence, family abuse, and experiences with the loss of a close relative or loved one.

First and foremost, you do NOT have to write about anything that makes you uncomfortable or that you don’t want to share. This isn’t the Overcoming Obstacles Olympics. Don’t feel pressure to tell any story that you don’t want to share. It is your story and if you don’t want to write about it, don’t. Period.

BUT, in our view, ruling out all essays that deal with trauma is wrong for two big reasons.

The first is that there is no actual, empirical evidence that essays that deal with trauma are less successful than those that don’t.  The view that essays dealing with trauma correlate with lower admissions rates is based on counselor speculation and anecdotal evidence from students who applied, weren’t admitted, then tried to find a justification and decided it was their essays.

Both of us reflected on this. Here’s what we had to say.

• AdmissionsMom : I work with lots of students who have suffered from anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and addiction. They nearly always have to address their issues because of school disruption, and I have to say that their acceptances have remained right in range with the rest of my students.
• McNeilAdmissions : I counted, and I can provide more than 17 accounts about students of mine who have written about trauma and been admitted to T10 schools. I also asked a colleague of mine who is known as the “queen of Stanford admissions” and she said there was no trend among her students.

The other big reason is that traumas, while complex, can be sources of deep meaning, and therefore are potentially the exact sort of thing you want to consider . Traumatic experiences are often life-shaping, for better or for worse. So are the ways that we respond to and adapt in the face of trauma. The struggle to adapt and move forward after a traumatic experience may be one of the most important and meaningful things you’ve ever done. So a blanket prohibition on traumatic topics is equivalent, for many, to a blanket prohibition on writing an essay that feels personally meaningful and rewarding.

Categorically ruling out trauma stories also conflicts directly with  the core lesson  that most college consultants and counselors (including ours truly) are trying to advocate. That is, write a story that matters to you. This is a piece of corny but non-bullshit advice. As it turns out, it’s a rare moment (in a process that can be somewhat cynical) where meaning and strategy overlap. AOs want to read good essays. Good essays are good when they’re written about things that matter. You can attempt to hack together a good essay on a topic you don’t care about, but good luck.

So there are a few big intersecting threads about why you MIGHT want to write about your experience with trauma. First, there is no empirical evidence to recommend against it. Second, traumatic experiences are huge sources of personal meaning and significance, and it would be sad if you couldn’t use your writing as a tool for processing your experience. Third, meaningful essays = good essays = stronger applications.

So for anyone out there who wants to talk about their experience but who is struggling with how to do it, here are some things we want to say:

• You ARE allowed to talk about trauma in college apps.
• Your story is valid even if you haven’t turned your experience into a non-profit focused on preventing sexual assault, combating abuse, or eating disorders or done anything whatsoever to address the larger systemic issue.  Your  story and experience —  your  personal growth and lessons learned — are intrinsically valuable.

Now, here are some things to keep in mind if you decide to write an essay about a challenging or traumatic subject.

13 Reasons Why It’s OK to Write About Trauma in your College Applications —  And  How to Do So

• Colleges are not looking for perfect people . They are looking for real humans. Real Humans are flawed and have had flawed experiences. Some of our most compelling stories are the ones that open with showing our lives and experiences in less than favorable light. Throw in your lessons learned or what you have done to repair yourself and grow, and you have the makings of a compelling overcoming — or even redemption — story.
• Write with pride : This is your real life. Sometimes you need to be able to explain the circumstances in your life — and colleges want to know about any hardships you’ve had. They want to understand the context of your application, so don’t worry about thinking you’re asking the colleges to feel sorry for you (we hear kids say that all the time). We recognize you for your immense strength and courage, and we encourage you to speak your truth if you want to share your story. Colleges can’t know about your challenges and obstacles unless you tell them. Be proud of yourself for making it through your challenges and moving on to pursue college — that’s an accomplishment on its own!
• Consider the position of the admissions officer :  “We’ve all had painful experiences. Many of these experiences are difficult to talk about, let alone write about. However, sometimes, if there is time, distance, and healing between you and the experience, you can not only revisit the experience but also articulate it as an example of how even the most painful of experiences can be reclaimed, transformed, and accepted for what they are, the building blocks of our unique identities.

If you can do this, go for it. When done well, these types of narratives are the most impactful.  Do remember you are seeking admission into a community for which the admissions officer is the gatekeeper. They need to know that, if admitted, not only will you be okay but your fellow students will be okay as wel l.”  from Chad-Henry Galler-Sojourner ( www.bearingwitnessadmissions.com )

• Remember what’s really important : Sometimes the processing of your trauma can be more important than the college acceptances — and that’s ok. If a college doesn’t accept you because you mention mental health issues, sexual assault, or traumatic life experiences, in my opinion, they don’t deserve to have anyone on their campus, much less survivors. Take your hard-earned lived experiences elsewhere. The stigma of being assaulted, abused, or having mental health issues, is a blight on our society. That said, be aware of any potential legal issues as admissions readers are mandated reporters in some states.
• Consider using the Additional Info Section : If you do decide you want to share your story — or you need to because of needing to explain grades, missed school, or another aspect of your application or transcript, don’t feel compelled to write about your trauma, disability, mental health, or addiction in the main personal essay. Instead, we encourage you to use the Additional Info Essay if you want to share (or if you need to share to explain the context of your application). Your main common app essay should be about something that is important to you and should reveal some aspect of who you are. To us (and many applicants), your trauma, disability, mental issues, or addiction doesn’t define you. It isn’t who you are and it isn’t a part you want to lead with.

Putting some other aspect of who you are first in your main essay and putting trauma, addiction, mental health issues, or disability in the Add’l Info Essay is a way to reinforce that those negative experiences in your life don’t define you, and that your recovery or your learning to accommodate for it has relegated that aspect of their experience to a secondary part of who you are.

• You CAN use your Common App essay if you want:  IF you feel like recovery from the trauma or learning to handle your circumstances  does  define you, then there is no reason you can’t put that aspect of who you are forward in the main personal essay. If the growth that stemmed from the crisis is central to your narrative, then it can be a recovery, or an “overcoming” story. It’s a positive look at your strengths and how you achieved them. If you want to place your recovery story front and center in the primary essay, that’s an appropriate choice.
• Write from a place of healing : Some colleges fear liabilities. So, wherever you decide to put your essay in your application, make sure you are presenting your situation in a way that centers how you have dealt with it and moved forward. That doesn’t mean it’s over and everything is all better for you, but you need to write from a place of healing; in essence, “write from scars, not wounds.” (we can’t take credit for that metaphor, but we love it)
• M ake sure your first draft is a free draft.  With any topic, it can be hard to stare at a blank page and not feel pressure to write perfectly. This can be doubly true when addressing a tough topic. For your first draft, approach it as a free write. No pressure. No perfection. Just thoughts and feelings. Even if you don’t end up using your essay as a personal statement or in the additional info section, it can be useful to sit and write it out.
• Establish an anchor. Anything that makes you feel safe while you’re writing and exploring your thoughts and experiences. Have that nearby. It can be a candle, an image, a pet, a stuffed animal.
• Check-in with how you are feeling.
• Pay attention to your body and what it’s telling you.
• Take breaks
• Go for walk
• Talk to someone who makes you feel safe
• Remember this kind of essay is NOT a reflection of you. It is only  part  of your story. (Ashley Lipscomb & Ethan Sawyer, “Addressing Trauma in the College Essay,” NACAC 2021)
• Who supported you in the aftermath of the experience? What did you appreciate about their support and what did you learn about how you would support others?
• Did your self-perception change after the experience? How has your self-perception evolved or grown since?
• How did you cultivate the strength to move through your experience?
• What about how you dealt with the experience makes you most proud?
• Remember that all writing is a two-way street and should serve you and the reader : All writing leaves an emotional impression or residue with the reader. This is especially true with personal essays. Good writers are able to look at their writing and understand how it can serve themselves (that sweet, sweet catharsis) while still meeting the reader halfway. This can be particularly challenging on the college essay, where your goal is to be both personally honest and to help an AO see why you would be a wonderful addition to their school’s student community. When you’re writing, be cognizant of your reader – tell your story
• Shield your writing itself from excessive negativity : When writing about difficult experiences, it can be easy for the writing itself (your phrasing, your diction) to become saturated with a tone of hardship and sorrow. This kind of writing can be hard to read and can get in the way of the underlying story about growth, maturity, or self-awareness. Push yourself to weed out any excessive “negativity” in your writing – look for more neutral ways of stating the facts of your situation. If you’re comfortable, ask a trusted reader to read your essay and point out the places where language seems too negative. Think of ways to rephrase or rewrite.
•  Think of your application — and therefore your essay — kind of like a job application. Sure, it’s more personal than a job occupation, but it’s not necessary to share every detail. Focus on the relevant information that validates the power of your journey and overcoming your challenges. Focus on the overcoming.

A framework for writing well about trauma and difficulty: “More Phoenix, Fewer Ashes”

Here’s a framework that we think you could apply to any essay topic about a traumatic experience or challenge. This is not a one-size-fits-all framework, but it should help you avoid the biggest pitfalls in writing about challenging topics.

The framework is called “More Phoenix, Fewer Ashes.” The metaphor actually comes from one of our parents who used to be active on A2C back when her kid was applying to college; she took it down in her notes at a Wellesley info session. In short, however, the idea is to pare down the “ashes” (the really hard details about the situation, past or present) to focus on who you’ve become as a result.

• Address your issue or circumstance BRIEFLY and be straightforward. Don’t dwell on it.
• Next, focus on what you did to take care of yourself and how you handled the situation. Describe how you’ve moved forward and what you learned from the experience.
• Then, write about how you will apply those lessons to your future college career and how you plan to help others with your self-knowledge as you continue to help yourself as you learn more and grow.
• Show them that, while you can’t control what happened in the past, you’ve taken steps to gain control over your life and you’re prepared to be the college student you can be.
• Remember to keep the focus on the positives and what you learned from your experiences.
• Make sure your essay is at least 80% phoenix, 20% ashes. Or another way to put this is, tell the gain, not the pain.
• The ending, overall impression should leave a positive feeling.
• Consider adding a “content warning or trigger warning” at the beginning of your essay, especially if it deals with sexual violence or suicide. You can simply say at the top: Content Warning: this essay discusses sexual violence (or discussion of suicide). This way the reader will know if they need to pass your essay along to someone else to read.

Use that checklist/framework to read back through your essay. In particular, do a spot check with the 80/20 phoenix/ashes rule. Make sure to focus on growth!

Good luck and happy writing,

AdmissionsMom and McNeilAdmissions ( www.McNeilAdmissions.com )

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!

I agree with both of You! When we experience a traumatic event, it can be difficult to share our experiences with others. We may feel like we are the only ones who can understand what we went through. We may feel like we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. But sharing our experiences with others can help us heal and can help prevent further trauma. Although, for me, it’s ok to share. If you can’t, then there’s nothing bad about that. After all, it’s difficult to get back to your dark past.

I love your perspective. Thank you for sharing your thoughts here!

Do you think if you write about a parent who was abusive, they can somehow contact the parent or something? I don’t wanna get in any trouble.

They might have to because of their state laws. I’d research that and talk to your school counselor.

As someone who works closely with high school students, I will definitely be sharing your article with them. It’s a valuable resource that can help them navigate this important aspect of the college application process with confidence and integrity.

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The rise of the "trauma essay" in college applications

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The Case Against the Trauma Plot

By Parul Sehgal

It was on a train journey, from Richmond to Waterloo, that Virginia Woolf encountered the weeping woman. A pinched little thing, with her silent tears, she had no way of knowing that she was about to be enlisted into an argument about the fate of fiction. Woolf summoned her in the 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” writing that “all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite”—a character who awakens the imagination. Unless the English novel recalled that fact, Woolf thought, the form would be finished. Plot and originality count for crumbs if a writer cannot bring the unhappy lady to life. And here Woolf, almost helplessly, began to spin a story herself—the cottage that the old lady kept, decorated with sea urchins, her way of picking her meals off a saucer—alighting on details of odd, dark density to convey something of this woman’s essence.

Those details: the sea urchins, that saucer, that slant of personality. To conjure them, Woolf said, a writer draws from her temperament, her time, her country. An English novelist would portray the woman as an eccentric, warty and beribboned. A Russian would turn her into an untethered soul wandering the street, “asking of life some tremendous question.”

How might today’s novelists depict Woolf’s Mrs. Brown? Who is our representative character? We’d meet her, I imagine, in profile or bare outline. Self-entranced, withholding, giving off a fragrance of unspecified damage. Stalled, confusing to others, prone to sudden silences and jumpy responsiveness. Something gnaws at her, keeps her solitary and opaque, until there’s a sudden rip in her composure and her history comes spilling out, in confession or in flashback.

Dress this story up or down: on the page and on the screen, one plot—the trauma plot—has arrived to rule them all. Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future ( Will they or won’t they ?) but back into the past ( What happened to her ?). “For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge,” Sylvia Plath wrote in “Lady Lazarus.” “A very large charge.” Now such exposure comes cheap. Frame it within a bad romance between two characters and their discordant baggage. Nest it in an epic of diaspora; reënvision the Western, or the novel of passing. Fill it with ghosts. Tell it in a modernist sensory rush with the punctuation falling away. Set it among nine perfect strangers. In fiction, our protagonist will often go unnamed; on television, the character may be known as Ted Lasso, Wanda Maximoff, Claire Underwood, Fleabag. Classics are retrofitted according to the model. Two modern adaptations of Henry James ’s “The Turn of the Screw” add a rape to the governess’s past. In “Anne with an E,” the Netflix reboot of “Anne of Green Gables,” the title character is given a history of violent abuse, which she relives in jittery flashbacks. In Hogarth Press’s novelized updates of Shakespeare’s plays, Jo Nesbø, Howard Jacobson, Jeanette Winterson, and others accessorize Macbeth and company with the requisite devastating backstories.

The prevalence of the trauma plot cannot come as a surprise at a time when the notion of trauma has proved all-engulfing. Its customary clinical incarnation, P.T.S.D., is the fourth most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder in America, and one with a vast remit. Defined by the DSM-III, in 1980, as an event “outside the range of usual human experience,” trauma now encompasses “anything the body perceives as too much, too fast, or too soon,” the psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem tells us in “ My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies ” (2017). The expanded definition has allowed many more people to receive care but has also stretched the concept so far that some 636,120 possible symptom combinations can be attributed to P.T.S.D., meaning that 636,120 people could conceivably have a unique set of symptoms and the same diagnosis. The ambiguity is moral as well as medical: a soldier who commits war crimes can share the diagnosis with his victims, Ruth Leys notes in “ Trauma: A Genealogy ” (2000). Today, with the term having grown even more elastic, this same diagnosis can apply to a journalist who reported on that atrocity, to descendants of the victims, and even to a historian studying the event a century later, who may be a casualty of “vicarious trauma.”

How to account for trauma’s creep? Take your corners. Modern life is inherently traumatic. No, we’re just better at spotting it, having become more attentive to human suffering in all its gradations. Unless we’re worse at it—more prone to perceive everything as injury. In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status—our red badge of courage? The question itself might offend: perhaps it’s grotesque to argue about the symbolic value attributed to suffering when so little restitution or remedy is available. So many laborious debates, all set aside when it’s time to be entertained. We settle in for more episodes of Marvel superheroes brooding brawnily over daddy issues, more sagas of enigmatic, obscurely injured literary heroines.

It was not war or sexual violence that brought the idea of traumatic memory to light but the English railways, some six decades before Woolf chugged along from Richmond to Waterloo. In the eighteen-sixties, the physician John Eric Erichsen identified a group of symptoms in some victims of railway accidents—though apparently uninjured, they later reported confusion, hearing voices, and paralysis. He termed it “railway spine.” Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet went on to argue that the mind itself could be wounded. In the trenches of the Great War, railway spine was reborn as shell shock, incarnated in the figure of the suicidal veteran Septimus Smith, in Woolf’s “ Mrs. Dalloway .” What remained unaltered was the scorn that accompanied diagnosis; shell-shocked soldiers were sometimes labelled “moral invalids” and court-martialled. In the decades that followed, the study of trauma slipped into “periods of oblivion,” as the psychiatrist Judith Herman has written. It wasn’t until the Vietnam War that the aftershocks of combat trauma were “rediscovered.” P.T.S.D. was identified, and, with the political organizing of women’s groups, the diagnosis was extended to victims of rape and sexual abuse. In the nineteen-nineties, trauma theory as a cultural field of inquiry—pioneered by the literary critic Cathy Caruth—described an experience that overwhelms the mind, fragments the memory, and elicits repetitive behaviors and hallucinations. In the popular realm, such ideas were given a scientific imprimatur by Bessel van der Kolk’s “ The Body Keeps the Score ” (2014), which argues that traumatic memories are physiologically distinctive and inscribe themselves on an older, more primal part of the brain.

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“If Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet,” Elie Wiesel wrote, “our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.” The enshrinement of testimony in all its guises—in memoirs, confessional poetry, survivor narratives, talk shows—elevated trauma from a sign of moral defect to a source of moral authority, even a kind of expertise. In the past couple of decades, a fresh wave of writing about the subject has emerged, with best-selling novels and memoirs of every disposition: the caustic ( Edward St. Aubyn ’s Patrick Melrose novels), the sentimental (Jonathan Safran Foer’s “ Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close ”), the enraptured (Leslie Jamison’s essay collection “ The Empathy Exams ”), the breathtakingly candid (the anonymously written memoir “ Incest Diary ”), or all of the above ( Karl Ove Knausgaard ’s six-volume “My Struggle”). Internet writing mills offered a hundred and fifty dollars a confession. “It was 2015, and everyone was a pop-culture critic, writing from the seat of experience,” Larissa Pham recalls in a recent essay collection, “ Pop Song .” “The dominant mode by which a young, hungry writer could enter the conversation was by deciding which of her traumas she could monetize . . . be it anorexia, depression, casual racism, or perhaps a sadness like mine, which blended all three.” “The Body Keeps the Score” has remained planted on the Times best-seller list for nearly three years.

Trauma came to be accepted as a totalizing identity. Its status has been little affected by the robust debates within trauma theory or, for that matter, by critics who argue that the evidence of van der Kolk’s theory of traumatic memory remains weak, and his claims uncorroborated by empirical studies (even his own). Lines from a Terrance Hayes sonnet come to mind: “I thought we might sing, / Of the wire wound round the wound of feeling.” That wire around the wound might be trauma’s cultural script, a concept that bites into the flesh so deeply it is difficult to see its historical contingency. The claim that trauma’s imprint is a timeless feature of our species, that it etches itself on the human brain in a distinct way, ignores how trauma has been evolving since the days of railway spine; traumatic flashbacks were reported only after the invention of film. Are the words that come to our lips when we speak of our suffering ever purely our own?

Trauma theory finds its exemplary novelistic incarnation in Hanya Yanagihara’s “ A Little Life ” (2015), which centers on one of the most accursed characters to ever darken a page. Jude, evidently named for the patron saint of lost causes, was abandoned as an infant. He endures—among other horrors—rape by priests; forced prostitution as a boy; torture and attempted murder by a man who kidnaps him; battery and attempted murder by a lover; the amputation of both legs. He is a man of ambiguous race, without desires, near-mute where his history is concerned—“post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past,” a friend teases him. “The post-man, Jude the Postman.” The reader completes the list: Jude the Post-Traumatic .

Trauma trumps all other identities, evacuates personality, remakes it in its own image. The story is built on the care and service that Jude elicits from a circle of supporters who fight to protect him from his self-destructive ways; truly, there are newborns envious of the devotion he inspires. The loyalty can be mystifying for the reader, who is conscripted to join in, as a witness to Jude’s unending mortifications. Can we so easily invest in this walking chalk outline, this vivified DSM entry? With the trauma plot, the logic goes: Evoke the wound and we will believe that a body, a person, has borne it.

Such belief can be difficult to sustain. The invocation of trauma promises access to some well-guarded bloody chamber; increasingly, though, we feel as if we have entered a rather generic motel room, with all the signs of heavy turnover. The second-season revelation of Ted Lasso’s childhood trauma only reduces him; his peculiar, almost sinister buoyancy is revealed to be merely a coping mechanism. He opens up about his past to his therapist just as another character does to her mother—their scenes are intercut—and it happens that both of their traumatic incidents occurred on the same day. The braided revelations make familiar points about fathers (fallible), secrecy (bad), and banked resentments (also bad), but mostly expose the creakiness of a plot mechanism. As audiences grow inured, one trauma may not suffice. We must rival Job, rival Jude. In “ WandaVision ,” our protagonist weathers the murder of her parents, the murder of her twin, and the death, by her own hands, of her beloved, who is then resurrected and killed again. All that, and a subplot with a ticking time bomb.

Trauma has become synonymous with backstory, but the tyranny of backstory is itself a relatively recent phenomenon—one that, like any successful convention, has a way of skirting our notice. Personality was not always rendered as the pencil-rubbing of personal history. Jane Austen’s characters are not pierced by sudden memories; they do not work to fill in the gaps of partial, haunting recollections. A curtain hangs over childhood, Nicholas Dames writes in “ Amnesiac Selves ” (2001), describing a tradition of “pleasurable forgetting,” in which characters import only those details from the past which can serve them (and, implicitly, the narrative) in the present. The same holds for Dorothea Brooke, for Isabel Archer, for Mrs. Ramsay. Certainly the filmmakers of classical Hollywood cinema were quite able to bring characters to life without portentous flashbacks to formative torments. In contrast, characters are now created in order to be dispatched into the past, to truffle for trauma.

Jason Mott’s “ Hell of a Book ,” which received the 2021 National Book Award for fiction, begins with a slow pan across the figure of a woman sitting on a porch in an old, faded dress: “The threads around the hem lost their grip on things. They broke apart and reached their dangling necks in every direction that might take them away. And now, after seven years of hard work, the dress looked as though it would not be able to hold its fraying fabric together much longer.” It is tempting to read this as a description of the trauma plot itself, threadbare and barely hanging on, never more so than in Mott’s novel. The narrator, a wildly successful novelist on book tour, finds himself followed by an apparition, who represents both a young Black boy killed by police and a child who witnesses police shoot and kill his own father. But the rangy, sorrowing themes that Mott wants to explore are subsumed by an array of cheap effects, coy hints of buried trauma in the narrator’s own past: amnesiac episodes, hammy Freudian slips, a therapist’s sage but unappreciated insights. Once brought to light, this trauma feels oddly disengaged from the story at hand, as tangentially connected as those two entwined strands in “ Ted Lasso ,” signalling to the same vague homilies (grief haunts, trauma catches up with you) and unnecessary to Mott’s more powerful points about police violence as a form of terrorism and the painful perpetual mourning it inspires. Mott uses all the possible cranks and levers of the trauma plot, as if imagining a wire of suspense drawing us in. But the machinery is nothing so fine; it chews up his story instead.

I hear grumbling. Isn’t it unfair to blame trauma narratives for portraying what trauma does: annihilate the self, freeze the imagination, force stasis and repetition? It’s true that our experiences and our cultural scripts can’t be neatly divided; we will interpret one through the other. And yet survivor narratives and research suggest greater diversity than our script allows. Even as the definition of what constitutes P.T.S.D. has grown more jumbled—“the junk drawer of disconnected symptoms,” David J. Morris calls it in “ The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ” (2015)—the notion of what it entails, the sentence it imposes, appears to have grown narrower and more unyielding. The afterword to a recent manual, “ Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor’s Guide to Writing About Trauma ,” advises, “Don’t bother trying to rid yourself of trauma altogether. Forget about happy endings. You will lose. Escaping trauma isn’t unlike trying to swim out of a riptide.”

To question the role of trauma, we are warned, is to oppress: it is “often nothing but a resistance to movements for social justice,” Melissa Febos writes in her forthcoming book, “ Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative .” Those who look askance at trauma memoirs, she says, are replicating the “classic role of perpetrator: to deny, discredit and dismiss victims in order to avoid being implicated or losing power.” Trauma survivors and researchers who have testified about experiences or presented evidence that clashes with the preferred narrative often find their own stories denied and dismissed. In the nineties, the psychologist Susan A. Clancy conducted a study of adults who had been sexually abused as children. They described the grievous long-term suffering and harm of P.T.S.D., but, to her surprise, many said that the actual incidents of abuse were not themselves traumatic, characterized by force or fear—if only because so many subjects were too young to fully understand what was happening and because the abuse was disguised as affection, as a game. The anguish came later, with the realization of what had occurred. Merely for presenting these findings, Clancy was labelled an ally of pedophilia, a trauma denialist. During treatment for P.T.S.D. after serving as a war correspondent in Iraq, David Morris was discouraged from asking if his experience might yield any form of wisdom. Clinicians admonished him, he says, “for straying from the strictures of the therapeutic regime.” He was left wondering how the medicalization of trauma prevents veterans from expressing their moral outrage at war, siphoning it, instead, into a set of symptoms to be managed.

And never mind pesky findings that the vast majority of people recover well from traumatic events and that post-traumatic growth is far more common than post-traumatic stress. In a recent Harper’s essay , the novelist Will Self suggests that the biggest beneficiaries of the trauma model are trauma theorists themselves, who are granted a kind of tenure, entrusted with a lifetime’s work of “witnessing” and interpreting. George A. Bonanno, the director of Columbia’s Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab and the author of “ The End of Trauma ,” has a blunter assessment: “People don’t seem to want to let go of the idea that everybody’s traumatized.”

When Virginia Woolf wrote about her own experience of sexual abuse as a child, she settled on a wary description of herself as “the person to whom things happen.” The mask of trauma does not always neatly fit the face. In “ Maus ,” Art Spiegelman strives to understand his overbearing father, a Holocaust survivor. “I used to think the war made him that way,” he says. His stepmother, Mala, replies, “ Fah! I went through the camp. All our friends went through the camps. Nobody is like him!” Mala won’t cede her knowledge of her husband or of life to the coercive tidiness of the trauma plot. There are other doubting Malas. I start seeing them everywhere, even lurking inside the conventional trauma story with designs of their own, unravelling it from within.

Stories rebel against the constriction of the trauma plot with skepticism, comedy, critique, fantasy, and a prickly awareness of the genre and audience expectations. In the Netflix series “Feel Good,” the protagonist, Mae, a comedian dealing with an addiction and disorienting flashbacks, struggles to fit their muddled feelings about their past into any straightforward diagnosis or treatment plan. (“People are obsessed with trauma these days,” Mae says ruefully. “It’s like a buzzword.”) The protagonist of Michaela Coel’s “ I May Destroy You ,” learning that she has been drugged and sexually assaulted, also finds the ready-made therapeutic scripts wanting; some of the show’s most interesting strands follow the ways that focussing on painful histories can make us myopic to the suffering of others. Conversations about trauma in Anthony Veasna So ’s “ Afterparties ” are seasoned with exasperation, teasing, fatigue. “You gotta stop using the genocide to win arguments,” Cambodian American children tell their refugee parents.

The appetite for stories about Black trauma is skewered in Uwem Akpan’s “ New York, My Village ” and Raven Leilani’s “ Luster .” Scanning the season’s “diversity giveaway” books, Leilani’s Edie, one of the only Black employees at a publishing house, sees “a slave narrative about a mixed-race house girl fighting for a piece of her father’s estate; a slave narrative about a runaway’s friendship with the white schoolteacher who selflessly teaches her how to read; a slave narrative about a tragic mulatto who raises the dead with her magic chitlin pies; a domestic drama about a Black maid who, like Schrödinger’s cat, is both alive and dead.”

The FX series “Reservation Dogs,” set in Oklahoma’s Indian country, draws attention to, and shirks, the expectation that Indigenous stories be tethered to trauma. A sixteen-year-old named Bear and his friends are accosted by members of a rival gang, who pull up in a car and start firing. Bear’s body shudders with the impact, flails, and falls, with agonizing slowness. He is brought down—in a hail of paintballs. It’s a fine parody of “Platoon,” of the killing of Willem Dafoe’s Sergeant Elias. If it isn’t enough to play on one classic narrative of trauma, Bear then has a vision of a Native warrior on horseback, ambling through the mist. “I was at the Battle of Little Bighorn,” the warrior says, as if prepared to give Bear a speech on adversity and heroism. Then he clarifies: “I didn’t kill anybody, but I fought bravely.” He clarifies again: “Well, I actually didn’t get into the fight itself, but I came over that hill, real rugged-like.” Humor protects genuine feeling from sentimental traditions that have left the specificity of Native experience flattened and forgotten. Bear and his friends, we learn, are reeling from the suicide of a member of their group. They face all the present-day difficulties of life on the reservation, but mourning is not the only way they are known to themselves, or to us. They’re teen-agers, and announce themselves in the time-honored ways—their taste, their terrible schemes, their ferocious loyalty to one another.

My trauma , I’ve heard it said, with an odd note of caress and behind it something steely, protective. (Is it a dark little joke of Yanagihara’s that Jude is discovered reading Freud’s “On Narcissism”?) It often yields a story that can be easily diagrammed, a self that can be easily diagnosed. But in deft hands the trauma plot is taken only as a beginning—with a middle and an end to be sought elsewhere. With a wider aperture, we move out of the therapeutic register and into a generational, social, and political one. It becomes a portal into history and into a common language. “Stammering, injured, babbling—the language of pain, the pain we share with others,” Cristina Garza has written in “ Grieving ,” her book on femicide in Mexico. “Where suffering lies, so, too, does the political imperative to say, You pain me, I suffer with you.” That treatment of history feels influenced and irrigated by the novels of Toni Morrison , who envisaged her work as filling in the omissions and erasures of the archives, and by Saidiya Hartman , who espouses writing history as a form of care for the dead. Think of the historian-protagonists in Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s “ The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois ” and in Yaa Gyasi’s “ Homegoing .” In these novels, my trauma becomes but one rung of a ladder. Climb it; what else will you see? In “Homegoing,” Marcus, a graduate student, is writing about his great-grandfather’s time as a leased convict in post-Reconstruction Alabama. To explain it, he realizes, he must bring in Jim Crow, but how can he discuss Jim Crow without bringing in the stories of his family fleeing it, in the Great Migration, and their experiences in the cities of the North, and the “war on drugs”—and then? I recall an image from Faulkner’s “ Absalom, Absalom! ”: of two pools, connected by a “narrow umbilical water-cord,” one fed by another. A pebble is dropped into one. Ripples stir the surface, and then the other pool—the pool that never felt the pebble—starts moving to its rhythm.

And what water-cord connects us to Woolf’s weeping lady, on whom once hung the fate of the English novel—the woman surrounded by her sea urchins, perched on the edges of her chair, still wearing her coat, scraping her dinner off a saucer? Why are those sea urchins so pleasing to think about, so mysterious yet telling? I wouldn’t trade a single one for a passel of awful secrets from the lady’s past. It’s the sort of detail that stokes the curiosity so crucial to reading—not narrative hunger but the sort of drifting, almost unconscious nourishment we get from looking at strangers, from piecing something together, from knowing and not knowing.

The experience of uncertainty and partial knowledge is one of the great, unheralded pleasures of fiction. Why does Hedda Gabler haunt us? Who does Jean Brodie think she is? What does Sula Peace want? Sula’s early life is thick with incidents, any one of which could plausibly provide the wound around which personality, as understood by the trauma plot, might scab—witnessing a small boy drown, witnessing her mother burn to death. But she is not their sum; from her first proper appearance in the novel, with an act of sudden, spectacular violence of her own, she has an open destiny. Where the trauma plot presents us with locks and keys, Morrison does not even bother to tell us what happens to Sula in the decade she disappears from town, and from the novel. Sula doesn’t exist for our approval or judgment, and, in her self-possession, is instead rewarded with something better: our rapt fascination with her style, her silences and refusals. Stephen Greenblatt has used the term “strategic opacity” to describe Shakespeare’s excision of causal explanation to create a more complex character. Shakespeare’s source texts for “King Lear” and “Hamlet” include neatly legible motivations; lopping them off from the story releases an energy obstructed by the conventional explanation.

That energy isn’t just released by the play. It is the audience’s own, the force of our imagination rushing to fill the gap. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf describes the impulse to imagine the private lives of others as the art of the young—a matter of survival—and of the novelist, who never tires of this work, who sees an old woman crying in a railway car and begins to imagine her inner life. But it is the province of the reader as well. Looking again at the description I gave of the old woman, I realize that the coat is my addition. Envisioning the scene, I have somehow placed on her shoulders a coat that I used to own, deeply unprepossessing, much missed—old armor. I am confused and stirred to find it here. Stories are full of our fingerprints and our old coats; we co-create them. Hence, perhaps, that feeling of deflation at the heavily determined backstory, that feeling of our own redundancy, the squandering of our intuition.

The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority. The solace of its simplicity comes at no little cost. It disregards what we know and asks that we forget it, too—forget about the pleasures of not knowing, about the unscripted dimensions of suffering, about the odd angularities of personality, and, above all, about the allure and necessity of a well-placed sea urchin. ♦

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College Essays and the Trauma Sweetspot

Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. Discuss a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. If all else fails, explore a background, identity, interest, or talent so profound that not doing so would leave our idea of you fundamentally incomplete.

Exactly the sort of small talk you want to make with strangers.

American college essays — frequently structured around prompts like the above — ask us to interrogate who we are, who we want to be, and what the most formative experiences of our then-short lives are. To tell a story, to reveal ourselves and our identity in its entirety to the curious gaze of admissions officers — all in a succinct 650 words.

Last Thursday, The Crimson published “ Rewriting Our Admissions Essays, ” an intimate reflection by six Crimson editors on the personal statements that got them into Harvard. Our takeaway from this exercise is that our current essay-generating ethos — the topics we choose or are made to choose, the style and emphasis we apply — is imperfect at best, when not actively harmful.

The American admissions process rightly grants students broad latitude to write about whatever they choose, with prompts that emphasize personal experience, adversity, discovery, and identity — features often distort student narratives and pressure students to present themselves in light of their most difficult experiences.

When it comes to writing, freedom is good — great even! The personal statement can be a powerful vehicle to convey an aspect of one’s identity, and students who feel inclined to do so should take advantage of the opportunity to write deeply and candidly about their lives; the variety of prompts, including the possibility to craft your own, facilitate that. We have no doubt that some of our peers had already pondered, or even lived in the shadow of, the difficult questions posed by the most recurrent essay prompts; and we know the essay to be a fundamental part of the holistic, inclusive admissions system we so fervently cherish . Writing one’s college essay, while stressful, can ultimately prove cathartic to some and revealing to others, a helpful exercise in introspection amid a much too busy reality.

Yet we would be blind not to notice the deep, dark nooks where the system that demands such introspection tends to lead us.

Both the college essay format — short but riveting, revealing but uplifting, insightful but not so self-centered that it will upset any potential admissions counselor — and the prompts that guide it push students towards an ethic of maximum emotional impact. With falling acceptance rates and a desperate need to stand out from tens of thousands of applicants, students frequently feel the need to supply the sort of attention-grabbing drama that might just push them through.

But joyful, restful days don’t make for great stories; there are few, if any, plot points in a stable, warm relationship with a living, healthy relative. Trauma, on the other hand — homophobic or racist encounters that leave one shaken, alcoholic parents, death, loss and scarring pain — makes for a good story. A Harvard-worthy story, even.

For students who have experienced genuine adversity, this pressure to package adversity into a palatable narrative can be toxic. The essay risks commodifying hardship, rendering genuinely soul-molding experiences like suffering recurrent homelessness or having orphaned grandparents into shiny narrative baubles to melt down into a Harvard degree. It can make applicants, accepted or not, feel like their admissions outcomes are tied to their most vulnerable experiences. The worst thing that ever happened to you was simply not enough, or alternatively, it was more than enough, and now you get to struggle with traumatized-imposter syndrome.

Moreover, students often feel compelled to end their essays about deep trauma with a statement of victory — a proclamation that they have overcome their problems and are “fit for admission.” Very few have figured life out by age 18. Trauma often sticks with people far longer, and this implicit obligation may make students feel like they “failed” if the pain of their trauma resurfaces during college. Not every bruise heals and not all damage can be undone — but no one wants to read a sob story without a redemption arc.

A similar dynamic is at play in terms of the intensity of the chosen experience: Students feeling for ridges of scars to tear up into prose must be careful to avoid cuts too deep or too shallow. Their trauma mustn’t appear too severe: No college, certainly not Harvard, wants to admit people who could trigger legal liabilities after a bad mental health episode . That is the essay’s twisted pain paradox — students’ trauma must be compelling but not too serious, shocking but not off-putting. Colleges seek the chic not-like-other-students sort of hurt; they want the fun, quirky pain that leaves the main character with a new refreshing perspective at the end of a lackluster indie film. Genuine wounds — the sort that don’t heal overnight or ever, the kind that don’t lead to an uplifting conclusion that ties in beautifully with your interest in Anthropology — are but lawsuits in the waiting .

For students who have not experienced such trauma, the personal essay can trap accuracy in a tug of war with appealing falsities. The desire to appear as a heroic problem-solver can incentivize students to exaggerate or misrepresent details to compete with the compelling stories of others.

We emphatically reject these unspoken premises. Students from marginalized communities don’t owe college admissions offices an inspirational story of nicely packaged drama. They should not bear a disproportionate burden in proving their worthiness.

Why, then, do these pressures exist? How can we account for the multitude of challenging experiences people have without reductionist commodification? How do you value the sharing of deeply personal struggles without incentivizing every acceptance-hungry applicant to offer an adjective-ridden, six-paragraph attempt at psychoanalyzing their terrible childhood?

We don’t have a quick fix, but we must seek a system that preserves openness and mitigates perverse pressures. Other admissions systems around the world, such as the United Kingdom’s UCAS personal statement, tend to emphasize intellectual interest in tandem with personal experience. The Rhodes Scholarship, citing an excessive focus on the “heroic self” in the essays it receives, recently overhauled its prompts to focus more broadly on the themes “self/others/world.” We should pay attention to the nature of the essays that these prompts inspire and see, in time, if their models are worth replicating.

In the meantime, students should understand that neither their hurt nor their college essay defines them — and there are many ways to stand out to admissions officers. If it feels right to write about deeply difficult experiences, do so with the knowledge that they have far more to contribute to a college campus than adversity and hardship.

The issue is not what people can or should write about in their personal statements. Rather, it’s how what admissions officers expect of their applicants distorts the essays they receive, and how the structure of American college admissions can push toward garment-rending oversharing. We must strive for an admissions culture in which students feel truly free to express their identity — to tell a story they want to share, not one their admissions officers want them to. A system where students can feel comfortable that any specific essay topic — devastating or cheerful — will not place them slightly ahead or behind in the mad, mad race toward that cherished acceptance letter.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field: A Joint BI/CRQ Discussion BI and the Conflict Resolution Quarterly invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

Follow BI and the Hyper-Polarization Discussion on BI's New Substack Newsletter .

Hyper-Polarization, COVID, Racism, and the Constructive Conflict Initiative Read about (and contribute to) the  Constructive Conflict Initiative  and its associated Blog —our effort to assemble what we collectively know about how to move beyond our hyperpolarized politics and start solving society's problems. 

By Eric Brahm

January 2004  

Those who have experienced hardship and suffering often experience lasting trauma from the experience. Traumatic events can fundamentally change not only victims' way of life, but also their psychological outlook. This is equally true for natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods as it is for man-made catastrophes of terrorism and war . Man-made trauma, however, is often more difficult to deal with, because frequently the perpetrators still live in close proximity to victims -- thereby providing constant reminders of the past, as well as the threat of further incidents . Even if the immediate source of the trauma is removed, time does not necessarily heal all wounds. The survivor may, in fact, continue to suffer, to appear "frozen in time." With conflict remaining an unfortunately common reality for many, techniques have emerged to help trauma victims interpret and heal from their experience.

What is Trauma?

Individuals can suffer trauma in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Trauma sufferers may themselves have seen their homes or communities destroyed or be victims of physical abuse such as rape, torture, or other violence. Trauma can also be induced by serious threat or harm to loved ones.[1] Individuals are often unable to cope with these extreme events, consequently inhibiting both their ability to carry on with life and to function in society. [2]

Trauma can have a range of different cognitive, emotional, physical, and behavioral effects on individuals.

Cognitive responses include memory difficulties, lack of concentration, poor judgment, inability to discriminate, and inability to make choices.

Emotional responses include depression, withdrawal, excitability, flashbacks, intense fear, feelings of helplessness, loss of control, loss of connection and meaning, generalized anxiety, and specific fears.

Physical responses include stomach pains, tightness of the chest, headaches, perspiration, and psychosomatic complaints.

Behavioral responses include irritability, startling easily, hyper-alertness, insomnia, communication difficulties, and drug, cigarette, or alcohol abuse.[3]

All told, victims of violence often feel humiliated , vulnerable, helpless, and that their lives are out of control.[4]

According to Herman, post-traumatic stress commonly manifests itself in three ways.[5]

• First, hyper-arousal arises from continual vigilance in hopes that the experience will not occur again.
• Second, the traumatic memory is omnipresent in the mind of the traumatized. The memory repeatedly occurs as a flashback, which can occur at any time, and the victim is unable to distinguish the memory from actually experiencing the event again.
• Third, traumatized individuals appear to be indifferent in order to mask the feelings of vulnerability and helplessness.

Through its effects on individuals, trauma also has a dramatic influence on communities. For example, when trauma becomes prevalent, society can lose the sense of trust . Trauma also has a way of spiraling out of control. Human rights violations create massive trauma, which can, in turn, fuel additional human rights violations and so on. Feelings of trauma can generate feelings of frustration and revenge that can produce a cycle of violence and also perpetuate feelings of victimhood on all sides of the conflict. Shared trauma generates a "we-feeling," but also creates an "us vs. them" mentality.[6]

Unresolved trauma can also be transmitted across generations.[7] Trauma-induced social divisions can form the basis of historical myths that can come to be a central part of group identity . These myths can be activated consciously or unconsciously and ignite conflict in the future. In Yugoslavia, for example, President Slobodan Milosevic reactivated a historical trauma by disinterring the body of Prince Lazar, who was killed in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, and ceremonially reburying the body in one Serbian village after another. This served to revive the mourning process as if Prince Lazar's death had occurred yesterday. This helped mobilize the population producing renewed conflict and inflicting new trauma.[8]

Healing can prevent future violence and facilitate reconciliation . Staub and Pearlman go so far as to argue that reconciliation is necessary if groups are to live together peacefully. By reconciliation, they mean "coming to accept one another and developing mutual trust . This requires forgiving . Reconciliation requires that victims and perpetrators come to accept the past and not see it as defining the future as simply a continuation of the past, that they come to see the humanity of one another, accept each other and see the possibility of a constructive relationship."[9]

Providing Healing

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable . Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. ... Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.[10]

Many argue that trauma will not go away unless it is actively confronted. This is, in turn, contingent on a full airing of the details of the crimes. "Psychological restoration and healing can only occur through providing the space for survivors to feel heard and for every detail of the traumatic event to be re-experienced in a safe environment."[11] At the same time, it should be made clear that the trauma cannot be erased. The goal of trauma healing "is to acknowledge the experience and integrate it into a sort of personal or collective rebirth."[12] As such, trauma healing can contribute to a program of social reconstruction.

Healing requires a focus on the victim. Prosecution is often not feasible in post-conflict situations due to a corrupt judicial system or one that is unable to handle the volume of cases it would be faced with. For the purposes of healing, trials are also poor because they center on the rights of the accused.

Many often assume that truth commissions can provide trauma healing, but this is a potentially dangerous assumption.[13] Truth can provide acknowledgment and validation to be sure. For some, going to commissions and witnessing that they are not alone in their suffering is comforting. However, trauma healing often requires long-term support, and truth commissions on their own cannot provide this. Typically, victims are given a small amount of time to tell their story. What is more, resources are often in short supply, limiting the degree to which follow-up services are available.

Testimonies, memorials, and group ceremonies may be helpful for healing, but there is also risk that these acts could reinforce oppositional identities.[14] Finding common goals to work toward facilitates engagement. Local initiatives seem better able to promote healing. There has been a significant expansion in programs designed to do just this.

Approaches to Trauma Healing

The goal of trauma healing is to give victims a feeling that they have control over their lives again. Herman identifies three stages that trauma victims move through as part of the healing process: safety, acknowledgement, and reconnection.[15] These processes have guided the creation of many trauma healing programs.

The first step for most programs is to provide a safe space . A feeling of safety will encourage victims to open up and reveal details of their ordeal. Retelling the details of one's story can be therapeutic and allows those memories to be incorporated into the victim's life story. When the story is told in the presence of the other, it can lead to acknowledgement, apology, forgiveness, and reconnection. Julia Chaitin describes several such processes in detail in her essay in this knowledge base on Narratives and Story Telling .

Gutlove and Thompson discuss another such project: the Health Bridges for Peace Project[16] That process begins by involving trauma sufferers in "constructive communication," in which they tell their stories and the rest of the group listens attentively, respectfully, and compassionately. Many programs also emphasize the therapeutic value of drawing or writing about their trauma.[17] Then, participants discuss the difference between debate and dialogue with the goal of realizing the latter. Finally, participants are trained in active listening , which both allows the listener to understand and empathize with others and to better articulate one's own thoughts and feelings. This process helps facilitate reconnection with one's social environment and allows the victim to restore their place in society.

The ethnic conflict that erupted in the 1990s unfortunately provided ample opportunity to develop and refine techniques for trauma healing. A brief survey of some of these efforts follows.

In The Former Yugoslavia

Amongst others, the Medical Network has utilized a variety of tools to facilitate healing in the former Yugoslavia.[18] Community Integration aims to empower marginalized groups and help them adapt to the new social context. Volunteer Action on the part of trauma victims is also important because being active and helping others can help restore the feeling of worth in trauma sufferers.

The horrific genocide in Rwanda has been extremely difficult for survivors to overcome. A new word entered the Rwandan vocabulary in 1994, ihahamuka , which refers to a variety of psychological manifestations thought to originate from the genocide. The word comes from bringing together two words: hana (lungs, respiration) and muka (without).[19] Victims suffered not only from posttraumatic stress disorder, but also from chronic traumatic grief. The latter was widespread a year after the genocide. Because 91 percent?of survivors did not have a chance to bury their relatives or perform mourning ceremonies, and nearly as many had not yet seen the remains of loved ones, the bereavement process has not been allowed to take its natural course.[20]

The importance of tailoring healing techniques to local conditions is exemplified by work done in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide. Programs utilized writing or drawing about one's experiences, but because Rwanda is an oral society, reflection and discussion in small groups about their writing and drawing proved useful. Lectures were also conducted to help victims understand why the genocide occurred, what effects these types of experiences can have on individuals and communities, and how healing can be achieved.[21] A series of radio programs was also produced and broadcast around the country to help people understand and deal with their feelings.[22]

The best evidence supports the continued use of these types of programs. Surveys conducted two months after the end of treatment indicated trauma scores significantly lower for a group treated through integrated community programs, relative to a control group.[23] The treatment group also exhibited "conditional forgiveness ," in other words, a willingness to forgive perpetrators, provided they acknowledge what they have done.

Those With Unique Trauma Healing Needs

Women and children.

Women are often in particular need of trauma healing. They may themselves be victims of traumatic experiences such as rape or incest. However, they are also more likely to be left behind after husbands and children are killed in conflict. Women are often humiliated , feeling that they could do nothing to stop the violence. What is more, the loss of a husband or children can make it difficult for women to provide for their families, thereby adding further humiliation.

Children also face particularly difficult trauma. They lack the emotional development and life experience to make sense of the trauma, even more so than adults. Jarman observes in Chechnya that traumatic events often produce rage in teenagers due to the fact that their lives have been turned upside-down; they've essentially been robbed of their youth.[24] Children are also susceptible to picking up attitudes from adults in their lives, thereby providing the opportunity for trauma to be transmitted across generations. For this reason, it is particularly important to focus on children in the healing process.

Practitioners

It should be noted that trauma healing can have adverse effects on listeners, those helping victims recover. This is because the terrible stories can have a psychological effect, particularly as story after story piles up in the listener's memory. In truth commissions , for example, commissioners and staff have reported suffering secondary trauma at having heard the harrowing stories of victims.[25] What is more, in trauma healing programs in Yugoslavia, those who worked to aid trauma victims developed feelings of trauma not only through exposure to stories, but also by being present in the environment that gave rise to the original victims' trauma.[26]

[1] Hugo van der Merwe and Tracy Vienings, "Coping with Trauma," in Peacebuilding: A Field Guide, Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 343.

[2] Gutlove, Paula and Gordon Thompson, eds. Psychosocial Healing: A Guide for Practitioners. (Cambridge, MA: Institute for Resource and Security Studies, May 2003). http://www.irss-usa.org/pages/documents/PSGuide.pdf

[3] Gutlove and Thompson 2003.

[4] van der Merwe and Vienings 2001, 345.

[5] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 35.

[6] United States Institute of Peace. 2001. Training to Help Traumatized Populations, Special Report 79. http://www.usip.org/files/resources/sr79.pdf

[7] Ervin Staub and Laurie Anne Pearlman 2002 CREATING PATHS TO HEALING http://www.heal-reconcile-rwanda.org/lec-path.htm (No longer available as of March 5th 2013 - See Pearlman, L. Gubin, A. Gimana, A "Healing, Reconciliation, Forgiving and The Prevention of Violence After Genocide or Mass Killing: An Intervention and its Experimental Evaluation in Rwanda" (2005) for related information)

[8] United States Institute of Peace. 2001. Training to Help Traumatized Populations, Special Report 79. http://www.usip.org/files/resources/sr79.pdf

[9] Ervin Staub and Laurie Anne Pearlman 2000. Healing, Reconciliation and Forgiving after Genocide and Other Collective Violence http://www.restorativejustice.org/articlesdb/articles/1273

[10] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 1. Emphasis in original.

[11] Brandon Hamber, "Do Sleeping Dogs Lie? The Psychological Implications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa," seminar presented at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg, July 26, 1995, 4-5.

[12] Gutlove and Thompson 2003.

[13] Hayner, Priscilla B. Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity. Routledge, 2001 .

[14] Ervin Staub and Laurie Anne Pearlman 2000. Healing, Reconciliation and Forgiving after Genocide and Other Collective Violence http://www.restorativejustice.org/articlesdb/articles/1273

[15] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

[16] Gutlove and Thompson 2003.

[17] Ervin Staub and Laurie Anne Pearlman 2000. Healing, Reconciliation and Forgiving after Genocide and Other Collective Violence http://www.restorativejustice.org/articlesdb/articles/1273

[18] Gutlove and Thompson 2003, 16-23.

[19] Athanase Hagengimana. 2001. After Genocide in Rwanda: Social and Psychological Consequences. http://www.isg-iags.org/newsletters/25/athanse.html

[20] Athanase Hagengimana. 2001. After Genocide in Rwanda: Social and Psychological Consequences. http://www.isg-iags.org/newsletters/25/athanse.html

[21] Ervin Staub and Laurie Anne Pearlman 2000. Healing, Reconciliation and Forgiving after Genocide and Other Collective Violence http://www.restorativejustice.org/articlesdb/articles/1273

[22] The radio programs http://www.labenevolencija.org/

[23] Jill D. Kester. 2001. From eyewitness testimony to health care to post-genocide healing Successes and Surprises in the Application of Psychological Science . APS Observer Online . (July/August) 14:6. http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/0701/pressymp.html

[24] Roswitha Jarman . Healing as part of conflict transformation. CCTS Newsletter 12 . http://www.c-r.org/sites/c-r.org/files/newsletter12.pdf

[25] Hayner, Priscilla B. Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity. Routledge, 2001 .

[26] Gutlove and Thompson 2003.

Use the following to cite this article: Brahm, Eric. "Trauma Healing." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: January 2004 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/trauma-healing >.

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How Trauma Affects the Body

Learn how trauma affects the body and treatments to help you recover..

Posted March 3, 2021 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

• What Is Trauma?
• Find a therapist to heal from trauma

Trauma is a serious issue that requires trauma therapy .

• An estimated 90 percent of adults in the United States have experienced a traumatic event at least once in their lives.
• Eight million people have post-traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD ) at any given time.
• Approximately 7-8 percent of all adults —1 in 13 people in this country—will develop PTSD during their lifetime.
• About 10 percent of women develop PTSD sometime in their lives compared to 4 percent of men.

When it comes to trauma, no two situations are ever the same, but trauma therapy can help.

Trauma can result from major life events like being in a combat zone, sexual assault , or a natural disaster, or more pervasive experiences like an abuse-filled childhood .

Initial Reactions to Trauma

These can include exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety , agitation, numbness, dissociation, and physiological arousal. You might experience a few or all of these symptoms. Increased exhaustion is often the result as the more worried and stressed people are, the more tense and constricted muscles are. Over time the muscles become exhausted and ineffectual. After a traumatic event or repeated trauma, people respond differently, experiencing a wide range of physical and emotional reactions. There is no right or wrong way to think, feel, or respond to trauma. It’s traumatic! Everyone will react differently, so don’t judge your reactions or those of other people.

The Physiological Effects of Trauma

Trauma sensitizes the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is the body’s central stress response system. You can think of this as the juncture of our central nervous system and endocrine system, which makes us more reactive to stress and more likely to increase the stress hormone cortisol. In certain situations, hormones like cortisol are crucial. (Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, increases sugars in the bloodstream, enhances your brain’s use of glucose, and increases the availability of substances that repair tissues.)

Unfortunately, Cortisol can be toxic when it is chronically high—ultimately leading to increased risks of health conditions such as depression or heart disease.

Remove the stressor, and the body’s hormones should respond in kind. The problem: Someone who is exposed to trauma may continue to produce these hormones, leading to adverse effects on the body over time. But trauma therapy can help to rebalance this natural reaction to stress.

Additionally, the indirect effects of trauma on the body can be subtle yet dangerous. Often, trauma’s physical and emotional pain can make it hard to cope, leading to unhealthy tendencies like smoking or drinking. Although these can be seemingly effective strategies in the short term, they only numb the emotions and prolong the trauma’s impact on our body and mind. We never learn how to deal with the underlying emotions effectively.

Psychological Effects

Frequently, trauma’s psychological effects are noticed first and can disrupt the individual’s day-to-day life with depression, anxiety, anger , intense fear, flashbacks, and paranoia . The traumatic experience could also affect and alter perceptions. This can lead to the belief that the world around them is unsafe and other people are dangerous, or in extreme cases, create altered personalities to help them cope with the trauma. This leads us to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is often triggered by witnessing or experiencing a shocking, dangerous or terrifying event, such as in a combat zone. “However, symptoms may not appear until several months or even years later,” according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. There are several leading indicators:

• Re-experiencing the trauma through distressing memories of the event, flashbacks, and nightmares
• Emotional detachment and avoidance of places, people, and activities that are reminders of the trauma
• Increased arousal, such as difficulty sleeping and concentrating, feeling jumpy, and being easily irritated and angered
• Adverse changes in thinking and mood

What Are the Best Treatments?

Trauma therapy is the first-line treatment in dealing with PTSD and trauma. Specifically, Cognitive Processing Therapy and Prolonged Exposure Therapy are evidence-based treatments to help individuals reduce PTSD symptoms. Research has shown that both treatments can significantly reduce PTSD symptoms after approximately 12 weeks (Lipov & Ritchie, 2015; Navaie, et al, 2014).

Although not everyone who experiences trauma will develop PTSD, everyone who experiences trauma will have had their lives impacted significantly by the events. Yes, there are evidence-based treatments that can help, but sometimes more than the specific treatment, it is the relationship with a trusted provider that can make a big difference. Especially in a world where your trauma told you to think that the world and people are untrustworthy, having a stable, safe therapist can slowly shift you towards changing that schema.

Along with the specific treatments discussed above, it is essential to consider daily ways to reduce stress. One way of doing so is through mindfulness techniques. One easy way to employ mindfulness meditations into your day is by downloading an app such as Calm, Insight Timer, Headspace, or Breeth, which will guide you through mindfulness meditations. Doing these exercises every day and sometimes three times a day helps lower your overall physiological arousal and slowly shift to a calmer baseline.

To find a mental health professional, visit Psychology Today's therapy directory.

Rubin Khoddam, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist in the Los Angeles area.

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Sob stories? Trauma dumps? Black kids worry about writing college essays after affirmative action ban

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions.

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CHICAGO (AP) — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education , it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action. The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

Wondering if schools ‘expect a sob story’

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. … I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

A ruling prompts pivots on essay topics

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

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“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process. They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

Spelling out the impact of race

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black.

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University , and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

Will schools lose racial diversity?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair. She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

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8-Year-Old Survives Bus Plunge Off Bridge That Left 45 People Dead

The bus, which was carrying people from Botswana to an Easter weekend pilgrimage in South Africa, fell 165 feet into a ravine.

By John Eligon

Reporting from Johannesburg

An 8-year-old girl was the sole survivor after a bus carrying 46 people on their way to an Easter weekend pilgrimage in South Africa on Thursday plunged 165 feet from a bridge into a ravine and burst into flames, according to a local department of transportation.

The bus was traveling from Botswana to Moria, a religious pilgrimage site in South Africa’s northeast, when it careered off a bridge winding through the Mmamatlakala mountain pass after the driver “lost control,” the department said in a statement.

Forty-five people, including the driver, were killed.

The girl was receiving medical attention at a nearby hospital, the Limpopo Province department of transportation in South Africa said in a statement . The child was in serious condition, according to another government statement.

“Rescue operations continued until the late hours of Thursday evening, as some bodies were burned beyond recognition, others trapped inside the debris and others scattered on the scene,” the transportation department said.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa called his counterpart in Botswana, President Mokgweetsi Masisi, to extend his condolences, the president’s office said in a statement released late Thursday.

The crash occurred in a scenic, mountainous area of winding roads and sweeping vistas about three and a half hours north of Johannesburg. The road on a high overpass bent sharply over a ravine flanked on both sides by rocky, tree-covered slopes.

The area attracts a lot of traffic on Easter weekend for a pilgrimage to Moria, the headquarters of the Zion Christian Church, one of the largest in the country. Mr. Ramaphosa visited last year’s pilgrimage, the first one since the Covid-19 pandemic. South African border officials had said they were bracing for an influx of visitors for this year’s pilgrimage.

The nationalities of the victims have not yet been determined.

The tragedy struck as South Africans prepared for a four-day weekend, with public holidays on Friday and Monday.

Around major holidays, the South African authorities often take extra measures like police roadblocks and publicity campaigns to help prevent traffic accidents. On Wednesday, South Africa’s minister of transport, Sindisiwe Chikunga, started an Easter road-safety campaign, noting that traffic accidents often spiked during the holiday.

“Easter is a time for celebration, but it is also a time when roads can be more dangerous due to increased traffic and holiday festivities,” the ministry warned .

Africa has historically had among the highest road-fatality rates in the world, according to data from the World Bank and the World Health Organization .

South Africa had more than 12,400 road fatalities in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available. The Automobile Association of South Africa called the traffic deaths a “national crisis” in a statement released last year. The association argued that the government needed to invest more in road safety and to enforce traffic laws better.

“Unless these two issues are dealt with, our country’s abysmal road safety situation will never improve,” it said.

Russell Goldman contributed reporting from New York.

John Eligon is the Johannesburg bureau chief for The Times, covering a wide range of events and trends that influence and shape the lives of ordinary people across southern Africa. More about John Eligon