Trauma In Fiction: Coping and Growing
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
We talk sometimes about reading or writing about traumatic topics as a way of coping with trauma. And while that's absolutely a thing people do, I think talking about it as "coping" does us a disservice. For those who are drawn to it and who approach it in a healthy way, dark fiction can do a lot more than help us cope. It can be more challenging, subtle, and rewarding than anything the word "coping" describes.
Sometimes the language of coping strategies almost feels like someone's making an excuse. The language of coping, when it is taken too far, presents readers and authors as helpless little broken things. Of course this isn't what a nice person would want to read, says the language of coping, but we were just so full of bad feelings that we had to vent them out on a page. It was the only thing that made us feel better. Please forgive us!
And there's nothing wrong with writing or reading a cathartic thing that helps you feel better. No need for forgiveness. But the point I'm trying to make is that feeling better - coping - is only the beginning of what fiction about trauma can do.
We get a feeling of catharsis and relief from venting our feelings onto the page. We get a feeling of control from choosing what words we will use, choosing how we will frame and talk about the story, choosing how it will end. But that, too, is only the beginning.
Because once we have that control, we can learn to use it. We can explore and ask questions about how we feel, or how we felt. We can ask how another person might have felt in a situation like ours, what other options might or might not have been available, what their consequences might have been. We can ask how the other people involved, perpetrators or bystanders or rescuers or people in more ambiguous roles, might have felt. We can ask why the trauma might have happened. We can ask how different character might feel during the trauma, after the trauma, where they might turn, how the events might affect them.
Because fiction about trauma is fictional, rather than autobiographical, we can explore multiple possible answers to these questions. We are not limited by what we assume or have been told is true about ourselves and our experiences. We can entertain ideas we would not otherwise have entertained, and we can learn things from having explored them.
Once the words are on the page, we can learn from them further. We can look at the ways we instinctively describe trauma, the things we say and believe about people who have survived trauma like ours. Some of those beliefs are true and vital and we gain the strength to embrace them when we see them written out in a way that makes sense to us. Some of them are neither true nor untrue - they are feelings we feel strongly, and by writing we can take the time to identify and honor them. Some of them are not true - some are self-blaming or limiting, for example - and once those untrue beliefs are on the page, we can see them more clearly. We can interrogate why they are there. We can ask themselves what might be there instead. We can edit and revise, not to conform to a political idea of how trauma should be spoken about, but to explore the different thought-patterns that are available to us and find the ones that feel freeing.
This process is perhaps easiest under the guidance of a therapist, but some of us don't have access to that right now - or ever - or simply don’t want to - and even when we go it alone, writing about trauma affords us these tools and these options.
Reading about trauma - if we feel drawn to it; if we consent and feel prepared - has many of these same benefits. We can see the ways other people experience and describe these things - how trauma feels, how it happens, how a character responds, what they do in the aftermath, what helps them. We can absorb a palette of many different ideas, from many different people's minds, all of which felt compelling enough and vital enough to be written down. Not all of them will help us, and some will offend, but some will open new doorways for us and provide new ways of understanding ourselves.
“Trauma re-enactment” is a process of compulsively repeating some aspect of one’s trauma, without variation or insight or growth. Fiction, approached healthily, is the precise opposite of this. Fiction, with its malleability and its distance from reality, allows us to experiment and change and transform what we feel in any manner we like.
And the drive to explore and express these things can lie so deep in the unconscious that we don't alway realize we are doing it. We might work very hard on a very dark story without any conscious understanding of why we are drawn to it, only to look back later and realize that's what we were saying, that's what we were processing, that's what we learned. We might do it before ever realizing we are traumatized at all. But we still learn when we do it, if we do it properly.
Let's stop talking like we have to make excuses for this, and instead call it what it is. It's not only coping - it's processing, and healing, and growth.