ABSTRACT
Hydén and Brockmeier (2008b) have introduced the term ‘broken narratives’ to explain what it is people do when they engage in trauma storytelling. They define a broken narrative as “an open and fluid concept, emphasizing problematic, precarious, and damaged narratives told by people who in one way or another have trouble telling their story” (p. 10). Brockmeier (2008) further elaborates on the narrative structure of trauma storytelling, and he argues it is characterised by breaks and voids in the narrative flow. The problem, he says, is that ‘ordinary’ language cannot adequately capture traumatic experiences; this often leads to a traumatic gap between the experience, on the one hand, and the language available to describe it, on the other. When people talk about trauma, he argues, they “may attempt to talk, only to become even more aware of the traumatic gap between their talking and what the talking is about: an experience that goes beyond all common and ordinary modes of experience” (p. 29).
