This study compared the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI) scores of traumatized youth with or without PTSD to the scores of a nonclinical comparison group. Diagnostic interviews identified children with PTSD (28), traumatized PTSD negatives (64), and a nonclinical comparison group (41). In the absence of major comorbid disorders, the CDI scores of children and adolescents with PTSD significantly exceeded the CDI scores of traumatized PTSD negatives and controls on the CDI Total, Negative Mood, Ineffectiveness, and Anehdonia scales. The PTSD group also had significantly higher scores than the traumatized PTSD negatives on the Negative Self Esteem scale. Furthermore, as hypothesized, the CDI scores of the traumatized PTSD negatives and controls were not significantly different on any of the six subscales measured. On the other hand, there were three unexpected nonsignificant findings. First, the PTSD group mean CDI Interpersonal Problems score did not significantly differ from the traumatized PTSD negative group. Second, the PTSD group mean CDI Interpersonal Problems score also did not significantly differ from the control group. Finally, the PTSD group mean CDI Negative Self Esteem score did not significantly differ from the control group. Overall, PTSD was associated with increased depression across the majority of the CDI scales and trauma exposure without PTSD was not. Implications for research and practice are considered.

This study compared the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales, Second Edition (FACES II) scores of traumatized youth diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the scores of trauma-exposed youth without PTSD and a non-traumatized comparison group. Child diagnostic interviews determined that all participants were free of additional major comorbid disorders. The FACES II scores of children and adolescents with PTSD were not significantly different from the FACES II scores of trauma-exposed youth without PTSD and the non-traumatized comparison group. FACES II scores were also not significantly different between the trauma-exposed youth without PTSD and the non-traumatized comparison group. Accordingly, PTSD and trauma-exposure without PTSD were not associated with variations in the perception of family functioning as measured by the FACES II. Implications for research and practice are considered.

This dissertation explores the work of specific female autobiographers or memoirists who have written about their endured emotional or physical wounds inflicted by trauma. Throughout history, women’s writings and experiences have been commonly devalued or excluded from those autobiographical texts within the traditional canon. Further, traumatized women have traditionally been regarded as pathologically divided victims who suffer holes in their psyches. Their stories about traumatized childhood and adolescence are thus treated as insignificant or dangerous and are easily silenced. As a result, life stories of traumatized women have been commonly considered as unfit texts for students to read in class (especially because of concerns about possibilities of (re)traumatizing readers), and thus are commonly omitted from the English curriculum. Considering that the literary world still is dominated by white male writers, this study examines not only traumatized women writers but also women writers who represent “difference” as well as have suffered trauma. This dissertation’s analyzed authors and texts include: Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. These women writers variously demonstrate, through their embodied trauma writings, how easily a seemingly integrated/unitary self can be shattered, how unexpectedly the status quo can be destabilized by certain events in their life-writings, and how subversively the history of the female body can be rewritten. The life-writings by these women, who are non-heterosexual, non-white, and from the lower class, and/or who have lived with disabilities/illnesses, are far from that typical autobiographical writing that emphasizes tests of manhood, or beautifies the linear development of the masculine subject. In other words, they never emphasize their triumph over trauma, do not celebrate selfsufficiency or self-reliance, and are not interested in claiming any authority of their own personal experiences. Rather, they highlight the understanding of their own incompleteness, fragmentation, and self-contradiction, which serves to uncover the fictiveness or myths of self-control or self-mastery typically found in narratives by male and often white-only writers. In their life writings, the traumatized adolescent selves are continuously reshaped and discursively constructed, not as helpless victims of terrifying events, as is frequently assumed, but as those with rebellious, transgressive, and uncanny power, who can disturb patriarchal social norms or regulations in their life writing and come to terms with trauma in their own ways: Duras’s eroticizing trauma in The Lover, Menchú politicizing trauma in I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Kaysen’s depathologizing trauma in Girl, Interrupted, Satrapi’s and Bechdel’s visualizing unrepresentable trauma in The Complete Persepolis and Fun Home. This study employs poststructural theories that “challenge the unity and coherence of the intact and fully conscious ‘self’ of Western autobiographical practices and the limits of its representations” (J. Miller, 49) to examine traumatized girlhood. In particular, based on feminist poststructural critiques of modernist, Enlightenment assumptions about autobiographical perspectives and voices, the following questions are examined in this dissertation: What words or images do this study’s examined authors utilize as a way to (re- )construct a self out of trauma? What understandings or insights do these authors achieve — or not achieve — while working to come terms with their traumas? In what ways might — or might not — these authors’ memoirs or life writings serve or disrupt a palliative/therapeutic role in what often is termed the healing process? What places, if any, might such autobiographical works focused on women’s experiences of trauma have in the English curriculum within the secondary classroom? And lastly, what and who constitutes the English literature canon, and what debates continue to characterize efforts to expand this canon to include voices of the marginalized?

We are living are living in the age of the trigger warning— educational cultures that threaten English teachers’ ability to present psychologically upsetting literature to students who may lack the necessary resilience to tolerate highly charged literary encounters with complex issues, such as rape, violence, racism, or political strife. And yet literature is filled with conflict— artistic representations of the precise traumas that certain members of our student populations may not be able to tolerate. In order to safeguard trauma survivors from potential reactivation of traumatic stress, a handful of educational institutions promote the use of trigger warnings. But are trigger warnings effective, and, if they are, what do they teach English teachers about what happens to individuals who have endured trauma and are therefore susceptible to being triggered? The purpose of this research, which consisted of interviews and an intensive focus group with seven veteran English teachers teaching at seven distinct schools throughout the world, was to offer insights and pedagogical awareness to English teachers, so that they can better anticipate, conceptualize, and decided for themselves how to respond to students who get triggered by emotionally complex literature. In addition to the qualitative research methods used with the seven English teacher participants, this study utilizes the work and thinking of trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk in an attempt to illustrate the neurological impacts of trauma through a comprehensive overview of PET scans of trauma survivors studied in van der Kolk’s lab in Brookline, Massachusetts. Each PET scan presents key features of what can happen to the brains of survivors, and may provide significant clues into what happens among our students when they get psychologically triggered in the classroom. The dissertation concludes with a one-on-one interview with Harvard psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, and offers his insights, wisdom, and conceptualizations for this highly complex and nuanced problem.

This study compared the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales, Second Edition (FACES II) scores of traumatized youth diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the scores of trauma-exposed youth without PTSD and a non-traumatized comparison group. Child diagnostic interviews determined that all participants were free of additional major comorbid disorders. The FACES II scores of children and adolescents with PTSD were not significantly different from the FACES II scores of trauma-exposed youth without PTSD and the non-traumatized comparison group. FACES II scores were also not significantly different between the trauma-exposed youth without PTSD and the non-traumatized comparison group. Accordingly, PTSD and trauma-exposure without PTSD were not associated with variations in the perception of family functioning as measured by the FACES II. Implications for research and practice are considered.

While fantasy as a genre is often dismissed as frivolous and inappropriate, it is highly relevant in representing and working through trauma. The fantasy genre presents spectators with images of the unsettled and unresolved, taking them on a journey through a world in which the familiar is rendered unfamiliar. It positions itself as an in-between, while the consequential disturbance of recognized world orders lends this genre to relating stories of trauma themselves characterized by hauntings, disputed memories, and irresolution. Through an examination of films from around the world and their depictions of individual and collective traumas through the fantastic, this thesis outlines how fantasy succeeds in representing and challenging histories of violence, silence, and irresolution. Further, it also examines how the genre itself is transformed in relating stories that are not yet resolved. While analysing the modes in which the fantasy genre mediates and intercedes trauma narratives, this research contributes to a wider recognition of an understudied and underestimated genre, as well as to discourses on how trauma is narrated and negotiated.

O presente trabalho se propõe a discutir os destinos psíquicos da experiência traumática, tanto em seus aspectos defensivos, restritivos das capacidades de realização do si-mesmo, quanto no que diz respeito a seus potenciais de simbolização e transformação. Referimo-nos aqui, porém, a uma modalidade particular de traumatismo: aquela que se define por um distanciamento afetivo dos pais em relação à criança, distanciamento esse responsável pelo confronto do sujeito a uma condição de desamparo e impotência insuportáveis. O fracasso dos esforços que, no passado, o indivíduo realizou na tentativa de socorrer os pais em seu sofrimento e de recuperar seu amor deixou como herança um terrível abismo interno e, para sobreviver a essa condição, o psiquismo irá estruturar defesas sofisticadas contra a perda do sentido de si e o colapso da estrutura psíquica de que se vê permanentemente ameaçado, as quais se definem, de nosso ponto de vista, a partir de três vértices principais. Num primeiro plano de análise, pudemos reconhecer que a situação traumática para a qual não se vislumbra nenhuma possibilidade de saída torna-se para o sujeito signo de uma realidade não dimensionável, sem começo, meio e fim, ou seja, uma condição existencial definitiva e inquestionável. Num segundo, fomos levados a tratar os efeitos do abandono afetivo, também, nos termos de um fenômeno de auto-alienação, já que, em meio a uma situação de sofrimento intolerável, uma das primeiras tendências evidenciadas pelo psiquismo é a de mergulhar em um processo de transe, semelhante a uma anestesia, cujo resultado é um estado de desorientação psíquica capaz de suspender a percepção do mal e, junto com ela, a de uma boa parcela da realidade. Consideramos ainda, num terceiro plano, o fato de que, nessa condição, o indivíduo tende a localizar em si mesmo a origem da violência que se abate sobre ele, purificando os pais e a família de todo o seu potencial enlouquecedor e o atribuindo exclusivamente a si. Tais perspectivas se apresentaram para nós como dimensões concomitantes e indissolúveis das configurações subjetivas em que podem ser reconhecidas. A partir de cada uma delas, vemo-nos diante de diferentes aspectos de organizações defensivas criadas contra a angústia de fragmentação e despersonalização gerada pela profunda insegurança a respeito da confiabilidade do objeto. Na última parte da pesquisa, buscamos apresentar possibilidades para o trabalho com pacientes traumatizados, a partir do que nos parecem ser as condições imprescindíveis à simbolização de angústias profundas produzidas pela situação traumática / The present work proposes to discuss the psychic destinies of the traumatic experience, both in their defensive aspects, restrictive of the capacities for realization of the self, and in their potential of symbolization and transformation. We make reference here, however, to a specific modality of traumatism: one which is defined by the affective distance of the parents from the children, distance responsible for the confrontation of the subject with the condition of helplessness and unbearable powerlessness. The failure of the efforts which, in the past, the individual has realized in the attempt to rescue the parents from their suffering and to recover their love left as heritage a terrible interior abyss and, to survive this condition, the psychism will structure sophisticated defences against the loss of the meaning of the self and the collapse of the psychic structure with that is seen permanently threatened, which are defined, in our point of view, from three main angles. In a first level of analysis, we could recognise that the traumatic situation for which is not glimpsed none possibility of exit turns out to be for the subject a sign of a reality which cannot be measured, without beginning, middle and end, that is, a definitive and unquestionable existential condition. In a second level, we were led to treat the effects of the affective abandonment, also, in the terms of a phenomenon of self-alienation, since, in the midst of a situation of intolerable suffering, one of the first tendencies evidenced by the psychism is to submerge in a process of trance, similar to an anesthesia, whose result is a state of psychic disorientation able to cease the perception of the evil and, with it, of a good part of the reality. We also consider, in a third level, the fact that, in this condition, the individual tends to situate in himself or herself the origin of the violence which is inflicted upon him or her, purifying the parents and the family of their whole maddening potential and laying it exclusively to himself or herself. These perspectives have been presented for us as concomitant and indissoluble dimensions of the subjective configurations in which can be recognised. From each one of them, we see us in front of different aspects of defensive organizations created against the angst of fragmentation and depersonalization engendered by the deep insecurity about the confiability of the object. In the last part of the research, we try to present possibilities for a work with traumatized patients, from that appear us to be the essential conditions for the symbolization of deep angsts produced by the traumatic situation

Youth involved in the criminal justice system exhibit elevated rates of sexual risk behavior (SRB), placing them at high risk for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and other deleterious outcomes. High levels of youth-maternal connectedness have been shown to act as a protective factor for SRB in nationally representative studies and in studies with primarily White youth samples. However, there are mixed findings in the research literature on the association of maternal connectedness and SRB among African American and Latino youth, a population who are disproportionately over-represented in the criminal justice system. Additionally, no studies to date have examined the role of maternal connectedness in SRB among justice-involved youth. This dissertation used archived data to determine if maternal connectedness can buffer against the negative effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on SRB among justice-involved youth. A secondary aim was to explore the prevalence of ACEs among youth in the sample, including several new ACE items that focus on adversity occurring outside the home. Participants (N=263) were sentenced or detained adolescent males at a large correctional facility in New York City, aged 16-18 and predominantly African American and Latino. Data were collected from the baseline interview of an intervention study conducted from 2009-2010. Youth participated in an individually administered, computer-based survey covering a range of topics, such as sexual health history, family relationships, substance use, and exposure to adverse events. Consistent with the literature, our sample of detained youth reported a high degree of SRB and a significant number of adverse experiences. Logistic regression analysis found that total ACE scores do not predict risky sexual behavior, even when controlling for maternal connectedness, substance use, age, and number of days incarcerated/detained. However, every participant endorsed exposure to at least 2 ACEs and 92% endorsed exposure to 4 or more, suggesting that the restriction in range may have obfuscated a relationship between total ACE scores and sexual risk-taking. The new ACE items, including poverty, racial discrimination, and neighborhood violence were prevalent. Additionally, several of the individual ACE items, including physical abuse, emotional abuse, and racial discrimination were independently associated with sexual risk outcomes. Maternal connectedness was negatively correlated with one type of risky sexual behavior—frequency of substance use during sex. Maternal connectedness and total ACE scores were, as predicted, negatively correlated. These findings suggest that our sample of incarcerated youth have experienced such a profound degree of adversity and trauma that perhaps ACE scores alone cannot adequately predict their engagement in risky sex. The fact that so many of the adolescents in the study endorsed the new ACE items also provides strong support for dissemination of the revised ACE inventory. This study highlights the need for greater research on risk and protective factors influencing adolescent SRB, as well as psychosocial correlates of ACEs among at-risk youth. Furthermore, given the syndemic nature of SRB and high prevalence of STIs, HIV, and ACEs in urban communities of color, future research should consider a more comprehensive and integrative approach to preventing both childhood adversity and unwanted sexual risk outcomes. Directions for future research and clinical implications are discussed.

The focus of this thesis is to investigate the use of art therapy in the treatment of an individual diagnosed with schizophrenia. In this qualitative narrative single case study, eleven art therapy sessions are described using non-directive spontaneous art making with a 37-year-old man residing in a psychosocial rehabilitation program. The research study describes this client�s delusional world, and explores the struggle of making sense of his traumatic experiences in early childhood. The themes that emerge in this exploratory study are many and grief and bereavement are the focus as the client uncovers the connections between the past and the present. The process of the art therapy sessions and the progression in the imagery from chaos to serenity is described as the client moves from darkness into light, and as we witness his exploration of space in the images of the whirlwind that reappear throughout the sessions.

Thesis (M. Th.(Practical theology))-University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-92)