DEALING WITH THE PAIN OF WITNESSING VIOLENCE:

SOME NARRATIVE THERAPEUTIC WRITING QUESTIONS

Daria Kutuzova

Social networks and all kinds of online (‘virtual’) communities nowadays play an ever-

increasing role in people’s lives. For many people these communities serve as one of the main

social forums for communication, for learning new things (including global and local news),

for forming and expressing one’s position on a variety of subjects. The more dramatic are the

events which disrupt the day-to-day lives of people, the faster the avalanche of links, raw

photos, videos, interpretations, opinions, opinions on opinions etc. spreads through

Facebook, Twitter and many other social media. This avalanche of information powerfully

impacts people’s emotional well-being and health, and more often than not, this impact

creates feelings of desperation, helplessness, guilt, anger and sense of personal failure etc.,

described by Kaethe Weingarten as ‘common shock’. But the conscious and deliberate use of

the same social media and the mechanics of the ‘viral’ spreading of information can help

offset or change direction of this impact.

Common shock

The term ‘common shock’ was introduced by Kaethe Weingarten (2003) to name the

experiences of people who in their day-to-day lives become witnesses of situations of

violence, destruction and harm – both as eye-witnesses and by means of the mass media (and

now by means of the social media, too). It is a ‘common’ shock, because we receive

information of this kind daily; but it is still a ‘shock’, because it shakes the foundations of our

being in the world. The tragic events that we get to know about, usually disrupt the flow of

life we are accustomed to and cause anxiety, fear, feelings of fragility of human existence (and

sometimes – of fragility of the human civilization and the world itself). A witness of a tragic

event experiences, although to somewhat lesser extent and from a different point of view,

the same kinds of feelings that the victims of the situation experience, including grief and loss.

However, there is a widespread, albeit erroneous, opinion that the things that do not involve

us physically should not impact us so much. As a result of the operation of this opinion, we

may hear from others or even tell ourselves: ‘Why are you suffering so? Nothing bad

happened to you or your loved ones!” One can say to oneself: “this doesn’t concern me”, -

but when one experiences something similar to those who have been harmed directly, one

has to spend lots of energy on ignoring the difference between what one feels and what one

‘should’ feel.

Closing oneself off from the experiences related to witnessing violence, destruction and harm,

a person can numb his own perceptivity towards feelings – his own and other people’s. Or

she can engage in more aggressive attempts at protecting herself: getting angry, frustrated,

and expressing this anger and frustration in rather ‘rough’ forms of communication

(sometimes leading to escalation of conflict and to violence). In both cases it becomes harder

to stay close to this person; communication with a person in such states requires additional

efforts on behalf of her interlocutors.

If a person doesn’t close himself off from the experiences related to witnessing violence,

destruction and harm, his mood becomes dominated by the feelings of sadness and

mournfulness, powerlessness, shame and guilt. This feeling of guilt may be similar to

‘survivor’s guilt’: “I haven’t been harmed, but I am not a better person than those who have

perished, and in many ways I might be even a worse kind of person then them; why then am

I alive, and they have died such horrid deaths?”

One of the reasons why witnessing violence, destruction and harm traumatizes us, is because

such situations make us doubt the basic and usually not quite conscious beliefs that the world

is generally orderly and friendly and that there is a rational and predictable cause-effect

relationship between what a person does and what response she gets from the world. These

basic assumptions allow persons to act in the world. When they get destroyed or threatened,

persons lose their faith in their ability to influence their own lives – their personal agency

diminishes, and they may become ‘passive victims of circumstances’.

To prevent this from happening, it is necessary to create conditions where the person will

know that he can influence the situation and limit its negative consequences both for the

people who were harmed directly and for himself and other witnesses. This influence might

be minimal. To understand that you can do at least something – this position is radically

different from ‘there is nothing I can do’. To be able to restore her belief in her ability to do

at least something, a person has to find ways to express and make meaning of her experiences

related to the traumatic situation.

Expressing experiences and making meaning of them: impact on health and emotional well-

being

The impact of expressing experience and making meaning of them has been for the last few

decades the main area of scientific interest of Professor James W. Pennebaker from the

University of Texas, USA, and of his colleagues and students. They conducted many studies

that demonstrated that mental and somatic health of persons correlates with the ability and

opportunity to tell somebody about the traumatic experiences in their lives (and to be heard)

(Pennebaker, 1997; Lepore & Smyth, 2002). People who had experienced a traumatic event

and never told anyone about it, suffered from more frequent and more severe illnesses in

comparison to those who experienced a traumatic event and had the opportunity to tell

about this. Pennebaker suggested ‘work of inhibition’ as an explanatory concept. Inhibition

(of expression of experience) is what people, who cannot tell their stories, are engaged in,

and for them it is a source of chronic stress. Perhaps the most important condition that

prevents people from expressing their experiences is that some of these experiences are not

socially sanctioned. Either the events that cause these experiences are considered impossible

(for example, when a child that has been molested by his mother’s live-in male partner comes

to tell her about this and hears back: “You are lying, that could not have happened!”), or the

experiences that are caused by an event are considered ‘not appropriate’ or ‘not normal’

(some people, who experience acute grief because of the death of some person who was not

close to them and did not know them at all, or because of the death of an animal, a tree, or

because of heritage buildings being demolished, cannot talk about this, because such feelings

‘should’ be experienced only in case of death of a partner, parent or child).

In one of their studies, Pennebaker and his colleagues showed that the higher the level of

self-disclosure of the teller (therefore, the less work of inhibition she is engaged in), the more

work of inhibition is performed by the listeners. While the indexes of physiological stress of

the teller decrease, the same indexes of physiological stress of the listeners increase. Listening

to another person tell about their traumatic experiences is a form of witnessing violence,

destruction and harm and can cause secondary traumatisation. People understand this

intuitively and try to protect themselves, more or less overtly communicating that they do

not want to hear about tragic events and feelings caused by these. So the witnesses of

disasters, terrorist attacks and the like get stuck – if they don’t tell, it may be harmful for their

health, if they tell, it may be harmful for relationships. Some people see therapists to tell

about their experiences, to make meaning of them and to find a form of constructive action.

Many people (in Russia it would be the majority) do not see therapists for various reasons:

therapy is not culturally appropriate, people who consult therapists are stigmatised in society,

people cannot afford therapy, and so on.

However, Pennebaker’s research demonstrated that written self-disclosure is as effective, as

oral self-disclosure. In his most famous study he found that after 4 days of writing (15 minutes

a day) about something that caused strong feelings, the subjects experienced lesser levels of

physiological stress, their cellular immune system gave more active response. When the long-

term consequences of such interventions were studied, it was found that the subjects had

lesser levels of ‘slow stress’ hormones (cortisone) in their bloodstream, and the functioning

of their immune systems was better. During 5.5 months after participating in the experiment,

the subjects visited physicians approximately 45% less often in comparison to the frequency

of visits during 2.5 months prior to the experiment. Joshua Smyth et al. conducted an

experiment of the same type on two groups of people with autoimmune diseases (one group

had rheumatoid arthritis and the other had asthma) and demonstrated that the severity of

the symptoms and the amount of medicines consumed decrease significantly after four 15-

minute sessions of expressive writing.

What kind of writing is the most helpful?

Pennebaker and his colleagues also have researched the structure and content of the texts

written by the people who demonstrated the most significant improving of their health and

emotional well-being after writing. It turned out that the persons who benefitted the most

from writing:

- From the first writing session to the last, used more and more expressions pointing at

causal relationships: ‘because’, ‘therefore’, ‘so’, ‘as a result’ etc.

- From the first writing session to the last, used more and more expressions related to

reflection and meaning-making: ‘I understood’, ‘I realized’, ‘it became clear to me’, ‘I came to

the conclusion’ etc.

- Throughout all the sessions of writing used a moderate number of negative words

(‘dreadful’, ‘despair’, ‘powerless’ etc.) and a large number of positive words (‘love’, ‘hope’,

‘value’ etc.).

- In the course of the writing changed the point of view of the narration: started looking

at the situation not only through their own eyes, but also described how the situation might

have been perceived and interpreted by other people that were involved.

- Linked the described episode of their lives with different contexts in the present, in

the past and in the future, thus positioning the episode amongst others and marking its

beginning and its end.

If we look at the latter findings of Pennebaker et al. from the narrative practice point of view

(White, 2007; Denborough, 2006), we can see that expressive writing turned out to be most

helpful to those who managed to story their experiences – to create a sequence of events

unfolding through time according to a plot and a unifying theme. This story included both the

landscape of action (description of actions and events) and the landscape of identity (the

conclusions made by the protagonist/narrator, his understanding of the events, his wishes,

intentions, hopes and dreams, values, principles etc. The protagonist/narrator is not alone in

this story, there are other people present, each possessing her own unique point of view. In

such a story there is not only a description of the suffering of the protagonist, of the factors

she became a victim to. The actions and responses of the protagonist are always highlighted,

emphasized and richly described (and a thought, a fantasy and an unfulfilled intent also count

as ‘actions’). The story therefore is not one-sided, but it is a double description: it contains

not only a story of suffering, but also a story of survival. In such double-storied description a

lot is told about what is ‘absent but implicit’ in suffering, in dread, in anger etc. – about the

values that were to a certain extent destroyed, violated or threatened by the traumatic event,

and also about the skills that allow persons to keep in contact with these values, no matter

what.

On the basis of this understanding and of some suggestions by Pennebaker (2004), I

developed four sets of questions for individual written self-exploration, for the target group

of witnesses of violence, destruction and harm. These sets of questions are presented below,

after the suggestions for safety.

Instructions for practice

The written word is a tool that most of us have been wielding since a relatively early age. It is

often considered as a given. Sometimes it is not obvious how one could harm oneself with it;

practical experience suggests, however, that one can harm oneself non-intentionally with

virtually anything, and therefore it would be better to follow a few simple recommendations.

Safety suggestions

1. DO NOT attempt to try this out on your own if:

- Your thoughts run wildly in many directions at once, you hear voices that do not allow

you to think and to live as you would like to;

- You feel very depressed (to the extent of not being able to finish anything you start

doing), and you are plagued by feelings of worthlessness and failure;

- You are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – you have flashbacks (intrusive

memories of trauma that feel as intense and real as your perception of the world at the

present moment), hyper-vigilance etc.

- If you know that you have trouble switching from one activity to another, you get

‘sucked in’ by the process, you cannot hear the timer going off or you cannot stop whatever

you are doing when you hear the timer going off.

In these cases, if you are interested in answering the questions provided below, show them

to the specialist you get help from and discuss with her what could be done.

2. Before you start writing, organize some uninterrupted time and space for it.

3. Also think about a person who might ‘hold your hand’ if need be. If you get upset,

what will be better for you – to spend some time alone or to call (or send an instant message)

to a trusted person, a friend who understands what you are doing and why? If by any chance

you get such a strong bout of ‘nerves’ that some chronic diseases you have will go into acute

stage, how will you take care of yourself? Think about this in advance. Such things happen

very rarely, but it is better to overdo safety procedures than regret later.

4. Plan that the text you will be writing will be read only by you. You will not show it to

anyone – be aware of this from the very beginning. And of course do not post it in your blog.

If you will not separate your private self-exploration from your public self-presentation – you

will keep on censoring what you are writing (more or less consciously), and that would make

the process of expressive writing less helpful. If during writing you find ways to express

something that you would like to share with other people – write a separate text with the

target audience in mind. The text you write for yourself you can destroy afterwards – or keep

somewhere safe.

5. Read the questions below. There are four sets of questions aimed at exploring

different aspects of the situation and your experience of it. It is not necessary to explore all

the four sets of questions during four 15-minute sessions of writing (actually, it is impossible).

Choose one set of questions that feels most relevant for you now. The sequence of questions

follows a particular logic. You may want to answer the questions in sequence, or just read

them all carefully and then start writing for 15 minutes about something that feels most

important. Both of these ways are equally appropriate. If any questions look

incomprehensible to you or cause some discomfort or dislike, don’t answer them. If you are

not sure, which question to start from, choose a question that aims at something positive: for

example, with the question about what good outcome do you hope for as a result of this

written self-exploration, and why it is important for you.

6. The main rule for written self-exploration: DON’T force yourself to do anything you do

not like. If at some point you feel that you’ve had enough, time to stop – for example, you

feel overwhelmed or exhausted – don’t force yourself to keep writing because you ‘should’

do it to make it ‘right’. Trust yourself; your body and your mind do know how much you can

stomach at any particular moment. There is no standard to aspire to conform to. As soon as

you feel that it is enough – stop writing, put away your paper or close your text-editing

programme. If after one attempt of writing you understand that this is ‘not your cup of tea’

(now or ever) – stop without hesitation, don’t blame yourself for ‘not following through with

this’. You know better what might harm you at this moment and what might not.

7. Although the research by Pennebaker et al. has shown that writing for 15 minutes a

day during 4 consecutive days leads to significant long-term benefits for health and well-

being, it is not mandatory to follow this particular schedule. It may turn out that 15 minutes

at a time is too much for you, and writing every day for four days is too often. This is absolutely

okay. Devise your own schedule that works for you. Just don’t write more than 15 minutes at

a time and don’t try to cram all four sessions of writing into one day (nor into two days). Put

a timer on for 15 minutes and stop writing when it goes off.

8. After you finish writing, sit for a couple of minutes with your eyes closed, breathing as

calmly and evenly as possible (if you are crying, it is difficult to breathe calmly, but as soon as

you find a rhythm and depth of breathing that suits you at this moment, you’ll feel much

better). Then get up and walk around. It may happen that during the process of writing about

important issues there will be tension accumulating in your body. Get free from it in a safe

fashion that works for you – deliberately tense and relax different muscles of your body,

stretch, exercise, or get in pleasantly warm shower. It may happen that after writing you will

feel that the pre-writing tension has left you. In that case find a way of taking care of yourself

to make yourself feel comfortable – you have worked on serious issues, now give yourself a

nice gift of something.

9. After taking such a break, come back to your writing, draw a line under the previously

written text and for 5 minutes write a reflexive feedback about the process of writing:

What was your experience of writing? How did you feel when you finished? Did you feel calmer

or more highly-strung? Did your mood become better or worse? What ideas and thoughts

attracted your attention while you were writing? Did anything become clearer? Was the

process of writing helpful, not helpful, or harmful for you?

10. If you feel that four sessions of 15 minutes each were not enough for you – the

sessions were helpful and you want more, - you can proceed with writing at your own pace

and according to your needs, but it is better not to exceed 15-20 minutes at a time.

Questions for written self-exploration for those who are witnessing violence, destruction

and harm

A quick reminder:

- Read the questions

- Choose the set that feels most relevant now

- Either answer the questions in sequence, or put them aside after reading and write

about something they helped you to bring into focus

- If you don’t know which question to start with, start with something positive.

Questions set 1

What happened? (Give a name to the event X.) How does this make you feel?

Why is it important to sort out these feelings and experiences and make meaning of them?

What might be a good outcome of this?

What do these feelings and experiences try to take from you? How do they influence the state

of your health, your ability to concentrate, your productivity, your relationships with your

loved ones, friends and colleagues? How do they influence your relationships with the world

and with God, if this makes sense and matters to you?

From what is being destroyed or threatened – in the world, in yourself, in your relationships –

what would you like to protect and keep safe?

From what you feel is lacking in this situation or in your experience of it, what would you like

to create, nurture and support?

Is there anybody amongst the people you know, your close friends and more distant friends,

who shares these dreams and intentions with you? Who might support you in this? What

important people – living as well as deceased – might become an example and a source of

inspiration for you in this?

What kind of next step (small or not so small) you can envision on the way to protecting and

creating what you chose to protect and create? To whom it might be meaningful to talk about

this?

Questions set 2

How did you learn about event X? When you learnt about it, what aspects of it attracted your

attention, fed your imagination?

What kind of image, picture or metaphor came to your mind when you learnt about these

aspects of X? What did it look like for you? (It might have been the end of the world, the vision

of the Apocalypse, hell painted by Bosch, war of all against all etc. – you can put anything on

paper without being afraid of looking like an alarmist or fatalist.)

What episode from your previous experience did it remind you of? Maybe you’ve already

thought about something like this, imagined it and worried about it? What did event X bring

to the forefront for you, what did it made you think about? What do you have to acknowledge

now? Does this in any way change your attitude towards life, towards the present time and

the future, towards projects, nature, people, culture etc.?

In the light of this understanding, what position would you like to assume to be able to respect

yourself? This might be a position related to the fact that although you cannot save

everything, you can protect at least something, you can support some people who are close

to you (or far away from you). Maybe you might have to make a choice, sacrifice something

to have the opportunity to keep something else. Or maybe it is absolutely different for you.

Write how it is for you.

What kind of small (or not so small) steps you can envision that would embody this preferred

position of yours? What things you can start doing even now (maybe – slowly and steadily)?

Question set 3

When you saw how people acted in this tragic situation, being inside it or witnessing it from

the outside, what actions evoked your approval, respect, maybe even admiration?

What do you think those people (whose actions you approve of, respect or admire) give value

to in their lives? What do they stand for? What kind of skills do they have that help them to

stand for these values?

Where in your life have you met the performance of those values and skills? Maybe you

performed them yourself and it helped you and other people? Or maybe you saw some other

persons performing these skills and values? How did you learn to identify these values and

skills in persons’ actions? From whom did you learn to do it?

Which of those values and skills would you like to embody in your life? What might become

possible if you manage to do it? Maybe you could work on some project, support some

initiative or some group of people who share a certain vision? Something else?

How can you make sure that these values and skills get more fully embodied in your life? What

might be helpful to achieve this? Who may support you? Whom you might talk about this and

what would you tell them?

Questions set 4

Were there any actions or statements from people (including officials) which evoked

indignation, hurt, feeling of unfairness, anger or even rage in you? What did those people do

or say?

What do these actions or statements contradict in your value system? Why, in your opinion,

should good, real, decent people not act like this? What things that you give value to in life

get violated, when you witness such actions or statements? What do you try to do to protect

the things that you give value to?

Does it happen sometimes that the events like X and the related reactions from people lead to

misunderstandings, arguments and conflicts between you and your friends, acquaintances,

loved ones? Remember the latest of such situations. From your own actions in that situation,

what can you be proud of? What could you respect yourself for?

When a similar kind of situation arises again, what would you like to do differently? What

would you need to learn to be able to do so?

Conclusion

The practices of the written word are not a panacea; there are situations where they are not

appropriate and people for whom they are not helpful. Nevertheless, these practices are

perhaps the cheapest and most flexible way of self-help that can be adapted to the demands

of various contexts. Each person can determine the limits of their usability for themselves

only by trying. And although generally written practices bring more benefits than cause harm,

- it is important to proceed with caution when exploring them (which is true for all other ways

of influencing people’s lives, too).

It would be a manifestation of unfounded optimism to declare that the number of disasters

and terrorist attacks will decrease in the coming years. Most probably the opposite will

happen. But there is some reason to hope that they will not involve you, the reader, and your

loved ones, and you will be able to make witnessing such situations less harmful for yourself

and other people. I hope that the written practices described here help you to find the small

steps that you could take in your life to feel that you can do something to influence your own

life.

(end of Instructions for practice)

Final words

Social networks and blogs are important modern forums for authentication of identity claims.

People perform their identity their via the written word and mixed media, and get their

identity claims confirmed, contested or negotiated by means of commentaries, ‘likes’ and

links. Barbara Myerhoff wrote in Number Our Days (1978) that journaling, autobiography and

other forms of writing can be considered a special kind of definitional ceremony. It is even

more so for the ‘secondary orality’ (Ong, 1982) of the internet, where interaction can happen

in real time, and clubs of life can be restructured consciously and deliberately. In social

networks people witness each other’s performances of identity, organize for social actions

and actively participate as ‘recruits’ and ‘recruiters’ of particular discourses. In this regard,

online communities are not ‘virtual’, as in ‘not quite existing’, but very real. They can be a

field for community work as much as the more familiar, ‘offline’ communities. In post-

totalitarian countries, where the communitarian tradition was significantly weakened by

decades of enforced collectivism (as in Russia), online networks are now the main avenue for

the growth and development of the new communities.

What can be the role of a narrative practitioner in an online community, especially in times

of crisis? How do relationships of privilege, power and marginalization evolve in the medium

that essentially preserves every word you say in every context? How can one’s positioning be

effective for one’s preferred direction of life in a situation where ‘the personal is the

professional’ takes a slightly different meaning?

I suppose the years to come will invite more and more of us to consider these things. So far it

is clear that social networks possess great potential as environments for the development of

identity projects, and narrative practitioners have a set of particular knowledges and skills

that might make them very special agents of transformation within this environment, both in

times of peace and quiet and in times of tumult and strife. There are lots of avenues yet to be

explored!

If ‘being a narrative practitioner within online social networks’ is a topic that you can relate

to, I would be happy to hear from you about your experiences, reflections and projects. And

if you are using written word (journaling, autobiography, creative writing etc.) within the

framework of narrative practice, I would be happy to hear from you too!

References:

Denborough, D. (2005). Collecting testimonies of trauma. First published in the International

Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, ##3-4, pp. 34-42; republished in

D.Denborough (Ed.), (2006), Trauma: Narrative responses to traumatic experiences, Adelaide,

Australia: Dulwich Centre Publications.

Lepore, S. & Smyth, J. (Eds.) (2002) The Writing Cure: How Expressive Writing Promotes Health

and Emotional Well-Being. American Psychological Association.

Myerhoff, B.G. (1978). Number Our Days: A Triumph of Continuity and Culture Among Jewish

Old People in an Urban Ghetto. Touchstone Books.

Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing the Word. New York: Methuen.

Pennebaker J. (1997). Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. London, New

York: The Guilford Press.

Pennebaker J. (2004). Writing to heal: A guided journal for recovery from trauma and

emotional upheaval. New Harbinger Publications.

Weingarten, K. (2003). Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day – How We Are Harmed,

How We Can Heal. New York, NY: Dutton.

White, M. (2007). Maps of Narrative Practice. New York, NY: W.W.Norton.