Tessa Smith, in fulfilling the requirements for a PysD in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University’s New England campus, has written and published a dissertation titled Autistic Authors’ Narratives of Trauma and Resilience: A Qualitative Analysis.
This dissertation investigates autistic individuals’ experience of trauma and resilience in the face of adversity. It conceptualizes trauma and resilience through a neurodiverse lens, identifying themes in memoirs written by five autistic authors related to trauma, potentially traumatic events, resiliency, and posttraumatic growth.
Through Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, Smith identified individual, interpersonal, and societal factors impacting the memoirists’ experiences of trauma. At the contextual level, sensory processing and uncertainty coincided with experiences of trauma. At the interpersonal level, memoirists describe interpersonal traumas, including mutual misunderstanding between themselves and others. This research advocates for systemic-level changes, community, contextual, and individual interventions to support the resiliency of autistic individuals.
Read and download Smith’s dissertation, Autistic Authors’ Narratives of Trauma and Resilience: A Qualitative Analysis, here.
