Trauma Autoethnography: From Object of Diagnosis to Subject of Knowledge
Abstract
Autoethnography allows researchers to analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural processes, yet its use by trauma survivors who are also researchers remains undertheorized. This methodological article proposes trauma autoethnography as a critical and decolonial variant of the method, in which a survivor-researcher analyzes her own trauma exposure and healing process as situated, embodied, and political knowledge. The proposal draws on Fanon, Brown, Herman, Foucault, and Fricker, and is applied to the experience of the author, a Mexican psychologist who survived multiple and cumulative forms of violence and received several psychiatric diagnoses, none of which accurately described what she was living through. The materials comprise reflective writing, journals, therapeutic letters, a visual artifact, skills records, training notes, and academic output (2024–2026), and will be examined through reflexive thematic analysis. An exploratory reading of the materials suggested seven categories that illustrate how the method operates: diagnosis and discredit, identity after trauma, naming the unnamed, the body as a continuous story, surviving without being able to dream, repair within the relationship, and expansion. The article also describes a perceived cognitive expansion during healing, which is framed as a hypothesis consistent with evidence on the partial reversibility of cognitive deficits associated with posttraumatic stress disorder. Trauma autoethnography is proposed as a way to restore survivors’ epistemic authority.
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BibTeX
@misc{diaz2026trauma,
title = {{Trauma Autoethnography: From Object of Diagnosis to Subject of Knowledge}},
author = {Andrea Gallegos Díaz},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/vchxy_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vchxy_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Trauma Autoethnography: From Object of Diagnosis to Subject of Knowledge
AU - Andrea Gallegos Díaz
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/vchxy_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vchxy_v1/
AB - Autoethnography allows researchers to analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural processes, yet its use by trauma survivors who are also researchers remains undertheorized. This methodological article proposes trauma autoethnography as a critical and decolonial variant of the method, in which a survivor-researcher analyzes her own trauma exposure and healing process as situated, embodied, and political knowledge. The proposal draws on Fanon, Brown, Herman, Foucault, and Fricker, and is applied to the experience of the author, a Mexican psychologist who survived multiple and cumulative forms of violence and received several psychiatric diagnoses, none of which accurately described what she was living through. The materials comprise reflective writing, journals, therapeutic letters, a visual artifact, skills records, training notes, and academic output (2024–2026), and will be examined through reflexive thematic analysis. An exploratory reading of the materials suggested seven categories that illustrate how the method operates: diagnosis and discredit, identity after trauma, naming the unnamed, the body as a continuous story, surviving without being able to dream, repair within the relationship, and expansion. The article also describes a perceived cognitive expansion during healing, which is framed as a hypothesis consistent with evidence on the partial reversibility of cognitive deficits associated with posttraumatic stress disorder. Trauma autoethnography is proposed as a way to restore survivors’ epistemic authority.
ER -