Writing about trauma

September 11, 2025

by Nancy McCabe, creative nonfiction and fiction faculty

I’m working on a craft book, Creating Some Measure of Beauty: The Healing Power of the Artful Essay, that will be part of a University of New Mexico Press series on trauma writing in different genres. During forty years of teaching, I’ve found that students are particularly drawn to write about traumatic experience—sometimes hesitantly, even apologetically.

In classes and workshops I’ve taught—from composition to creative nonfiction to fiction classes in which disguised autobiographical writing crops up—students have written about intimate partner violence, about rejection from family members when they came out as gay or transgender, about grief over the death of a loved one, about difficult childhoods or life with a hidden or visible disability.   

Recent bestseller lists reflect a widespread interest in how we deal with trauma. Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score, focusing on the ways our bodies record trauma even when we try to ignore it, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for nearly three years. Past best-selling memoirs include Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors, Jeanette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone—just to name a few works that deal with trauma arising from upbringings in dysfunctional families, poverty, neglect, loss, sexual assault, and war through the eyes of a child soldier.

Why are such works so popular? Are readers just rubberneckers attracted to sensationalism, or is something deeper going on?

And for that matter, when we’re unable to look away from, say, a car accident, is that really about the schadenfreude of joy in others’ catastrophes, as one prevalent cultural interpretation would have it, or do we react out of anxiety and concern stemming from our sense of common humanity? Are we drawn by reminders of our own vulnerability and mortality? Why is there such a strong sense in our culture that the only polite response to the tragedies of strangers is to turn away and go about our own business as if nothing has happened? No wonder we sometimes have conflicted views toward writing about our own experience with trauma, though such stories surround us.

We see these stories well represented in shorter-form work as well: essays like Jo Ann Beard’s much-anthologized “The Fourth State of Matter,” which braids together accounts of a workplace shooting as well as the loss of both a marriage and a dog; Lauren Slater’s powerful “Three Spheres,”  which juxtaposes Slater’s work as a therapist with her personal experience of mental illness; and Michele Morano’s innovative “In the Subjunctive Mood,” in which a lesson in the use of the subjunctive in Spanish serves as a container for telling the story of her attempt to distance herself from a fraught relationship.

Studies have shown that both reading about such experiences and processing our personal experience through writing can be therapeutic and confer a variety of other health benefits, especially when the work is attentive to artistry and craft. Discovering language and finding a shape for our experience and observations can be intensely pleasurable and can give us a greater sense of control as well as new visions for our lives. Reading others’ work on such topics—phrasing that nails our own unarticulated perceptions, stories that make us feel less alone—can help to validate our experience, suggest templates for our own writing, and offer wisdom that can help us to move on.

But while clearly there is great value in writing, and reading, about trauma, many writers are inhibited by fear of awkward silences and a feeling of exposure. We may face obstacles because of myths, misconceptions, and misunderstandings about the writing process, writers’ lives, the nature and role of trauma, the nature and role of art, and the relationship between craft and health.

One myth is that writing about ourselves is somehow narcissistic. But good writing isn’t about celebrating victimhood, being self-indulgent, or seeking attention. It’s about finding agency and connecting to others. Jen Cross describes the way readers can be inspired or reassured by others’ stories: “Look at how they resisted, made it through, forgave themselves, told the truth . . . maybe I could do that, too. . . . [W]hen I hear others’ stories of resilience and resistance, I get the chance to revisit my own narrative, consider the parts I’ve labelled cowardice, betrayal, isolation, lack of integrity, lack of strength, and cover those old labels with sticky notes on which I’ve scribbled: strategy, resilience, patience, courage, generosity.”

We also have to get past an odd but prevalent notion that trauma is an outlier to normal human experience. Isn’t traumatic experience simply a part of being human—losses, accidents, natural disasters, violations? Sometimes in our rush to put the emphasis on our resilience—certainly an important quality to cultivate—we feel pressured to deny that we’ve sustained damage. Sometimes we hesitate to claim that we’ve been impacted by trauma because we don’t want to feel like victims, or because we see our experience as lowercase trauma in contrast to the uppercase Traumas that we associate with profound abuse or harrowing escapes from war-torn countries. While competitions to determine who is the most or least traumatized are rarely useful, it’s reasonable to want to keep a sense of perspective and scale.  

But sometimes claiming and writing about our experience can be an avenue to all of those worthy goals—finding resilience, avoiding a permanent sense of victimhood, discovering that perspective and scale. I think it’s important to remember that if we’re human beings that things happened to, chances are pretty much 100 percent that somewhere, at some point in history, they happened to someone else, too. And most likely, those things happened to a whole lot of people not just historically but in our lifetime. Sometimes our courage to speak about it provides an opening for others.

Finally, a myth that I’ve written about elsewhere is that therapy and artistic creations involve different procedures with differing goals. In fact, paying close attention to details can ground us in ways that can counteract anxiety—and paying close attention to details can also make for good, sensory-rich writing. Focusing not on working our way toward resolution but instead finding insight can boost our mental health—and also make for richer, more resonant work.

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Nancy McCabe is the author of nine books, most recently the middle grade novel Fires Burning Underground, the academic satire The Pamela Papers, the young adult novel Vaulting through Time, and the memoir-in-essays Can This Marriage Be Saved?