Discovering embodiment: A poetic method

This paper explores how trauma enabled embodiment to be forcefully felt and later usefully used in doctoral research. The shocking murder of my sister by her husband created intense physical reactions within me (Caldwell, 1997 Caldwell, C. 1997. “The somatic umbrella”. In Getting in touch, Edited by: Caldwell, C. 7–28. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books. [Google Scholar]; Sidoli, 2000 Sidoli, M. 2000. When the body speaks, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Previous years of teaching enabled observation of the body as a source of information but nothing prepared me for the shock and impact of murder. Although a client in therapy at the time, I wrote poetry to manage such intense reactions. I felt the horror of containing murder while also wanting freedom from it (Bracegirdle, 2007 Bracegirdle, CE. (2007). Beauty and the beast: Clients’ experience of counselling within a narrative framework, considering concepts of containment and freedom (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2299/2550 [Google Scholar], 2011). Writing poetry brought opposing aspects of myself together (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006) and eventually enabled the conception of research to discover if other clients experienced such opposition between containment and freedom. During the research process, embodiment, experienced and used through trauma, helped analyse participants’ journals. Trauma's impact created a learning process which seems to demonstrate how such personal learning may influence qualitative research.