How To Write Trauma Authentically With Deep POV

Learn to write authentic, emotionally resonant trauma backstories that deepen your characters without resorting to clichés, info dumps, or flashbacks.

Good fiction isn’t borne out in the comfortable and easy living we might dream about, but in the tension and conflict between characters and/or their own desires. The power of deep POV is inviting the reader into the character’s lived experience of that internal and external conflict, and explore the emotional toll they overcome, grow through, or push through.

5 Truths About A Traumatic Past Writers Need To Remember

Trauma Requires Writing Secondary Emotions

Traumatic events, current or historical, are the equivalent of an emotional tsunami. Primary emotions are the raw, knee-jerk emotional reactions to stimuli we all experience and are the most common emotions given to characters. Some primary emotions that could be triggered by trauma would be: fear, frustration, guilt, self-doubt, hopelessness, loss (physical or psychological), powerlessness, loathing, denial, sad, etc.

When someone is hit by a tidal wave of primary emotions like that, secondary emotions are triggered. Secondary emotions are our thinking reactions to primary emotions. Some of the secondary emotions that could be triggered because of trauma might be: anger, shame, anxiety, bitterness, resentment, numbness, rage, and grief.

Writers need to dive deep into these secondary emotions and layer the primary emotions so the reader can experience the loss, anxiety and trauma with your character. Writers Helping Writers has a great entry on overcoming abuse here that walks through trauma and character motivation.

Historical Trauma Needs Authenticity In the Present

For someone who’s experienced past trauma, (emotional, physical, sexual, verbal) each time the anxiety is triggered doesn’t mean that the actual events are recalled with any amount of detail. For someone with PTSD, the body reacts to the past trauma as though it’s happening all over again but they might not necessarily actively recall the event. 

Physiological symptoms are one way to signal to a reader that the character (or at least their body) is reliving a traumatic event even if they won’t think about it. A woman who was abused as a child will not want to relive the abuse in her mind every time a man larger than her walks into a room.

What she won’t be able to control are the anxiety symptoms such as her heart rate, she might begin to sweat or blush for what feels like no reason. She may maneuver herself to make sure she can make a quick exit if needed or insist on sitting at the end of the row or table. 

With backstory, you want to answer one question and leave the reader with two more. Ready to go even deeper with backstory in deep POV – check out this post in the deep POV mastery series.

Past Trauma Has Four Main Lasting Reactions: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Or Fawn

Most people have heard of the fight or flight survival instinct – you either try to get away or escape somehow, or you come out fighting. Sometimes fighting looks like getting angry (at themselves or others) – it’s just not flying fists.

Freeze looks more like learned compliance, going numb, denial, fatigue, or even dissociation. If we can’t get away or fight our way out, our brain has this incredible ability to escape within itself. Fawn is like the possum playing dead. Sometimes this is done consciously, complying but looking for an escape or sometimes it’s unconscious. They take a beating knowing the abuser will pass out and they can be safe or flee.

Read more about Fight, Flight or Freeze and how they overlap here.

Emotional Triggers Caused By Past Trauma Have A Desire At Their Foundation

When anxiety is triggered, an immediate flood of primary emotions and secondary emotions come to the front almost instantly. That’s why much of the time, we aren’t aware of the primary emotions causing the secondary emotion. It’s your job to capture this shift so the reader can lean in and figure out what’s going on.

Emotional triggers can be incredibly powerful for readers because it’s generated within the character, it’s a look at their inner sanctum. These are where the festering wounds that just won’t heal live. I call this process emotional context – read more about that here.

There’s a lot of room in these situations for character arc. Let these characters learn as they go through the story. If they begin the story having already overcome the trauma, make sure there’s real justification for giving them the trauma to begin with. 

Causes of Historical Trauma

The thing about PTSD and anxiety is that the effects and consequences are very individual. It can be a result of feeling powerless (having no voice or ability to flee/escape), and hopelessness at being unable to change the situation or outcome. Two people can experience the exact same trauma and one person can walk away with PTSD and the other not, they both might, neither of them could have PTSD. They could both have PTSD to differing degrees or have different triggers.

Read more about healing from emotional and psychological trauma here.

As a writer, you don’t need your character to experience some kind of catastrophic attack (rape, kidnapping, torture) to experience anxiety. Being locked in a pitch-black room as a child just once can cause lifelong anxiety. The degree to which the adult allows this anxiety to define them, or shape their thinking (often trauma leads to shame), the more the consequences will become evident in day to day life.

Remember that whatever sort of trauma is given to a character, to layer the emotions the event caused. Make sure to realistically portray how the character thinks or remembers the traumatic event. However, don’t be afraid to make that character uncomfortable, to throw them head first into whatever their worst fear is and let them become stronger because of it. Those are the characters readers cheer for!

What kind of historic trauma have you given your characters?