Metaphor as a window on talk about trauma and post traumatic growth

• Autor(a) principal: Costa, Adriana
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Steen, Gerard
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Scripta
• Texto Completo: http://periodicos.pucminas.br/index.php/scripta/article/view/P.2358-3428.2014v18n34p283
• topic: Interviews; Metaphor; Posttraumatic growth; Recovery; Trauma.

People who have suffered traumatic experiences struggle to speak out loud about those events and the resulting pain. At the same time, talking about the trauma and its consequences is a precondition for recovery. This paper adopts Conceptual Metaphor Theory (LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 1980) to investigate how and when trauma sufferers use metaphor as a helpful means to talk and reason about their life stories. It analyzes a set of 7 interviews with traumatized people to study Posttraumatic Growth (PTG), a positive change in people who have struggled with challenging situations in life. The verbal data were analyzed with a cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor, focusing on a selection of central metaphors for emotions of trauma and life. The patterns that emerged from this analysis were used to construct a model that reveals how survivors use the same conceptual metaphors in two different ways to talk about the different moments of the trauma itself and the subsequent process of recovery.