![]() ![]() Habermas, now at Goethe University Frankfurt, wanted to understand how adolescents develop a narrative identity and then sustain that sense of self over time. The developer of this two-question approach, psychologist Tilmann Habermas, wasn’t focused on people who had experienced trauma. Her mother brought home many violent men. I try to nudge her toward specifics, but her timeline disintegrates. “I’ve had to rely on my brains to keep myself and my family alive.” ![]() ![]() “I’ve always been a highly reflective person,” she says. Second, Tran, who is a lecturer on mental health recovery at Curtin University in Perth, should stitch those snapshots together to tell me how she became who she is today. First, she should narrate seven snapshots of key moments in her life. In a nod to an established research approach, I have asked Tran to tell me her story in two parts. It asks: What would it take for someone like Tran, or anyone traumatized by war, abuse, mass shootings, the ongoing pandemic and other calamities, to flip their life script, to say that they know who they are and where they go from here? People maintain a sense of self across time The therapy focuses on the future, which once rife with possibilities now appears as a void. One therapy now in testing aims to re-tether traumatized individuals to their mental timelines, or their sense of themselves as connected across past, present and future. People think: “I don’t know who I am, and I don’t know where I go from here.” Life’s crises can trigger an existential crisis, Camia says. People use these stories to make sense of their lives, says Camia, of Zayed University’s Abu Dhabi campus in the United Arab Emirates.īut a growing body of evidence from fields as wide-ranging as psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy and literary studies suggests that, as with Tran, trauma can shatter the narrative coherence of one’s life. Autobiographical accounts, like any good narrative, typically contain a curation of key past experiences, transitions linking those experiences and larger arcs about where life is headed. That disjointed style is not how people, at least people in the West, tend to talk about themselves, says psychologist Christin Camia. Today (at Graylands Hospital in Western Australia, right), she lectures on mental health recovery and provides support for people experiencing suicidal thoughts. Trish Tran (seated with her father and the rest of her family in the photo at left) was physically and emotionally abused as a child. Yet she narrates her life growing up and living in the Australian Outback as a series of disconnected events her life story lacks connective glue. Her account lacks what are generally considered classic signs of trauma: She makes no mention of flashbacks, appears to have a generally positive outlook and speaks with relative ease about distressing events. Tran, who lives in Perth, Australia, is dispassionate as she describes a difficult childhood. My neighbor was upset, and I needed to stay back with them.’ And her voice was slurring quite a lot, so I knew she had been drinking.” ![]() Hours pass and eventually I try to call her … and she says to me, ‘I’m sorry, Trish. “I’m waiting at a train station … to meet my mother who I haven’t seen in many years…. ![]()
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