Trauma, extreme humiliation, and coping strategies in migrant domestic workers’ storytelling : linguistic and psychological perspectives

Abstract

This paper focuses on the experience of trauma in Indonesian migrant domestic workers’ storytelling. It draws on a large corpus of narratives told by 131 migrant workers who share their traumatic experiences in small-group sharing sessions. The paper outlines the predominant themes that were identified across sharing sessions, and, using a discourse analytical approach that combines linguistic analysis with narrative therapy, it identifies three coping strategies that were common across narratives, and it analyzes six examples as evidence. They show that the women (1) resign to fate in the face of insurmountable difficulties, (2) normalize their abusive employers’ abusive behavior, and (3) advocate the retelling of trauma narratives to empathetic listeners in the attempt to recover. Finally, the paper discusses how we as analysts deal with other people's stories of extreme suffering and humiliation, and how language and social psychology scholars and students can contribute to a social justice agenda.