Abstract

This study examines how the appearance of post-traumatic growth as a result of a traumatic event is affected by the extent to which the experiencing self dominates the narrating self (concepts introduced by Franz Stanzel). The experiencing self describes its feelings, needs, and desires, and reveals its own attitudes toward the situation and its circumstances. The narrating self aims to give a detailed account of the event, circumstances and its own actions, without saying much about its emotional state. Seventy-eight Polish women were asked to recount their traumatic experiences and answer questions about how the experience had affected their thinking about themselves and their world-view. The participants narratives were analyzed in terms of the dominance of either the experiencing self or the narrating self, or their possible balance. The participants also filled out questionnaires to measure post-traumatic growth and sense of purpose in life. The qualitative analysis suggested that greater post-traumatic growth was reported by women for whom the experiencing self either dominated in the narratives over the narrating self, or was balanced with the equally developed story of the narrating self. However, the quantitative analysis distinguished only between the experiencing self and narrating self positions, with the former demonstrating greater post-traumatic growth, whereas narratives that balanced both voices were intermediate in the comparison and were not distinguished from the other more pure positions. Taken as a whole, results support the inference that narration from an emotion-focused internal perspective facilitates personal growth in the face of very difficult life events.

摘要

本研究探讨了创伤事件导致的创伤后成长的外观如何受到体验自我支配叙述自我的程度（弗朗茨·斯坦泽尔引入的概念）的影响。体验自我描述了它的感受、需要和愿望，并揭示了它自己对情境和环境的态度。叙述自我的目的是详细描述事件、环境和自己的行为，而不会过多地谈论自己的情绪状态。七十八名波兰女性被要求讲述她们的创伤经历，并回答有关经历如何影响她们对自己和世界观的思考的问题。参与者的叙述是根据体验自我或叙述自我的主导地位或它们可能的平衡来分析的。参与者还填写了问卷，以衡量创伤后的成长和生活目标感。定性分析表明，经历过的自我在叙述中占主导地位的女性报告了更大的创伤后成长，或者与叙述自我的同样发展的故事相平衡。然而，定量分析仅区分体验自我和叙述自我的立场，前者表现出更大的创伤后成长，而平衡两种声音的叙述在比较中处于中间位置，与其他更纯粹的立场没有区别。整体来看，