“You Kind of Find Yourself Helpless”: Teens’ Identity Constructions and Responses to Childhood Trauma

Abstract

Innovations in the trauma-informed care (TIC) field have promised to transform youth-serving institutions by asking practitioners to pay attention to the developmental needs of young people facing maltreatment. Despite notable TIC innovations, our knowledge about childhood trauma tends to be adult-centric, presenting youth as passive recipients of (rather than active agents responding to) harm. How 27 high school students made sense of childhood trauma emerged during an 11-year ethnographic study of students in a school-based counseling program in Oahu, Hawai‘i. To overcome hardships, the teens constructed what they believed to be strong, resilient, and respectable identities, although teens’ identity performances differed. Adolescents’ narratives highlight sociological understandings of trauma survival whereby youth creatively negotiated their sense of self and drew from ideologies embedded in larger institutional contexts.