trauma narratives

Trauma narratives are accounts people construct about their traumatic experiences—the stories they tell themselves and others about what happened and what it means.

In therapeutic contexts, developing a coherent trauma narrative is often part of processing and integrating difficult experiences: Building a trauma narrative helped her make sense of the accident.

The term also appears in cultural criticism, where it can describe how trauma shapes collective storytelling or, more skeptically, narratives that center victimhood as identity.