Researching trauma, the body and transformation: a situated account of creating safety in unsafe places

This paper is based on a study of how childhood trauma can be experienced in the body and the resources individuals have chosen to deal with that. Ten individuals (including myself) wrote stories showing how they had made sense of those experiences and found ways to heal. In this paper, I tell the story of that research, contextualising myself as researcher and researched, against a changing societal, research and practitioner background to show how social constructionist and poststructuralist ideas have influenced the way I undertook and re-presented my study. This paper also provides me with an opportunity to focus for the first time on aspects of the stories that demonstrate how people created safe enough environments as children and as adults in order to heal.