Christina Christou
Thesis Title: Story writing for reframing trauma - Looking at the metaphors people use in the narrative structure of their 'story'.
Research in writing for wellbeing supports the rationale that there are benefits in writing about difficult experiences (Pennebaker and Beall, 1986). Conceptual metaphor theory suggests that how we think, and act is metaphorical (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and how thinking is organised in stories (Turner, 1996). Integrating a difficult experience into the ongoing narrative of present life, is essential for healing (Van der Kolk, 2016).
My PhD aims to explore how people use story writing to reframe their trauma narrative and the metaphors they use. Three groups of participants: PTSD clients, therapists, and wellbeing workshop participants, are asked to express their trauma through three expressive activities within a narrative structure: 1. Beginning, art as a prompt, 2. Middle, expressive writing, describing the art, 3. End, reframing the narrative using the story completion method (SC), story writing from a story stem about a hypothetical character in the 3rd person.
The research questions are, How do the different expressive activities help participants express, process and reframe the trauma narrative? What kind of metaphors do people use in each writing activity?’ The writing activities will be coded for metaphor, comparing metaphor use in expressive and story writing. The expected findings suggested from my MA, which piloted SC, and from the literature is that embodied metaphors will be clustered when expressing difficult emotions (Gibbs, 1994). Positive story stems in the SC task have the potential for reframing language. The implication for my study is for the knowledge to be used for psychological interventions.
Biography
Christina is an ESRC funded PhD postgraduate in the department of English Language and Linguistics, at the University of Birmingham. Christina has a BSc in Psychology and is a writing for wellbeing therapist. She uses counselling skills and expressive writing helping people express and process their trauma narratives. Christina is especially interested in the metaphors people use in their ‘story’.
Applied Linguistics
University of Birmingham
2021 Cohort 1+3
Supervisory Team
Prof Jeannette Littlemore
Dr Ruth Page