Coherence of child maltreatment narratives by emerging adults: How does child maltreatment affect how we share our story?

Abstract

Individuals narrate stories to explain how they became who they are, forming their own narrative identity. Highly disruptive experiences such as child maltreatment (CM) may be challenging to integrate into the life story and even to narrate coherently just by themselves. To test these potential effects, we divided a total of 171 students at an English-speaking university in Egypt into two groups, those with a history of CM and those who experienced none. We compared narratives of four different types of emotional childhood experiences. Narratives of CM were no less coherent than narratives of most stressful childhood experiences in the control group, but were more integrated into the life story, which in turn predicted symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The present study contributes to the literature by confirming that there is no evidence for a lack of coherence among adults' CM narratives, and by highlighting the association between the centrality of the traumatic event in one's life and PTSD symptoms.