“Is that you traumatised now?” deconstructing trauma,journalism,and psychological resilience on the journey from storyteller to soldier and back

Abstract

This reflective autoethnography examines the intersection of personal trauma, journalism and military service. The author, drawing from more than two decades of journalism experience, explores the impact of prolonged exposure to conflict, violence and trauma on identity, psychological resilience and professional ethics. Through personal reflection and narrative analysis of past journalistic work, the study delves into the complexities of being both a journalist and a soldier, emphasising the profound effect of traumatic experiences on perception and ethical decision-making. Major findings include the lack of sufficient institutional support within both the military and journalistic sectors and the critical role of trauma awareness and ethics education. The study also highlights the disconnect between academic teachings and real-world practices in journalism. The research underscores the importance of reflexivity in trauma journalism and calls for better mental health support systems for journalists, revealing the necessity of addressing vicarious trauma (Jenkins and Baird, 2002).

Introduction

Journalism saved my life. It nearly ended it too.

Words were a salvation. After the loss of three close family members just months apart, journalism was a mission, a vocation.

This higher aim transformed my life - taking me across the world into unimaginable extremes: interviewing mass murderers in Rwanda, war reporting from Afghanistan and even joining the British Army to experience the frontline firsthand.

Through it all, I kept writing. A pen and notebook are never far away.

During my formative years, I never considered journalism as a career. The loss of my mother, father and grandfather in the space of just a few months in 1998 however led me to reevaluate my life’s direction. After considering my skills and goals, journalism felt like the only choice. I could never face the strictures of a ‘normal’ office job.

I’ve been at the forefront of the transformations wrought by the rise of the internet, social media and AI on journalism. When I started out in journalism, there were still copytakers who took down stories over the phone if a reporter was out in the field and green screen computers were considered de rigeur. I have seen people on fire, watched grown men shoot at children, been threatened, abused and attacked while carrying out journalistic enquiries. So, here I want to examine the questions - how does this prolonged exposure to conflict, violence and trauma shape the personal identity, psychological resilience and professional ethics of a journalist? Also what does this reveal about the adequacy of institutional support systems in journalism and indeed the military?

My trauma manifested in different ways and I never received, or indeed sought, any official diagnosis or therapy. The clinical schemata however currently draws a distinction between PTSD – initiated by a single stressor event – and Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) which is caused by sustained trauma such as sexual or domestic abuse. Herman first wrote about complex trauma which she defined as prolonged and repeated trauma (Beckord et al., 2025; Bertin et al., 2025; Billings and Nicholls, 2025; Herman, 1997; Howlett et al., 2025). This study presents my reflective autoethnography on more than two decades of experience as a reporter covering crime and violence across the UK and conflicts in Afghanistan, the Congo and Rwanda. Autoethnography has blossomed as a form of qualitative research in recent years as part of a wider academic trend which values creativity, subjectivity, reflexivity and personal narrative particularly in disciplines interrogating issues intersecting with identity, culture and emotion (Poulos, 2002, 2006, 2021). Marshall & Rossman tell us that: “Through self-observation and analysis of various personal artifacts, autoethnographers seek to produce personal stories and narratives that depict their lives, based on the assumption that these aspects of their lives resonate with the experiences of others” (Marshall and Rossman, 2014: 24).

I put my positionality in context before examining my own experiences - as a soldier as well as a journalist in Afghanistan – through the lens of my own writing including published news stories from my time on the frontline to reassess my mediatised experiences. These are stories I have not looked at since they were written in 2013 and 2014. My return from military service to the newsroom on Remembrance Day – Nov 11, 2013 – was not only poignant but gave me insight into the importance of trauma anniversaries for news publishers and the traumatised themselves. Autoethnography seemed a particularly salient way to interrogate my own experiences as it draws upon existentialism, phenomenology and symbolic interactionism – all areas that have influenced my PhD research into news reporting of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) encompassing both psychology and journalism studies. It also draws upon traditions I am familiar with from my eclectic academic background including history and creative writing.

Using what Poulos termed an autoethnographic “hybrid form of confessional-impressionist tale”, I will seek to deconstruct my personal experiences and writings, placing them in wider context with the creation of “striking stories” being the fundamental goal (Poulos, 2021: 8). Therefore, this work will not stick rigidly to the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) format but will instead aim to create a “compelling, striking or startling tale of self-revelation” (Ibid, p. 17). I will explore how exposure to conflict and both personal and vicarious trauma have shaped my identity as a journalist and as an individual. First, I will contextualise my journalistic and traumatic experiences, showcasing the multifaceted nature of my existence.

My positionality in context

“Is that you traumatised now?” Those were the first words of my partner as she met me when I arrived back in Scotland after a 6-month tour of duty in Afghanistan. She was convinced my experiences meant I must have suffered life altering trauma. The irony was that my life changing trauma came much earlier. My life has been shaped by trauma. My intimately personal, life changing experience of traumatic bereavement in my early 20s altered the course of my life and inevitably triggered my interest in journalism, trauma and its aftermath. The experience of witnessing the illness and loss of close family members during my formative years, though profoundly painful, has arguably heightened my sensitivity to the suffering of others and fostered a deeper capacity for empathy and relational understanding.

I have worked as a journalist since 2000. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, I worked for a local newspaper in central Scotland. I can vividly remember sitting in a supermarket car park listening to the shocking accounts of the atrocity come over the pool car radio after I had done a tour of our patch collecting news of gala days, jumble sales and dance classes. Afghanistan became the war of our generation. I was mesmerised by the news stories coming out of the nation, ominously called the ‘graveyard of empires’. I was desperate to get there to report from the frontline. I jumped at the first chance that came along to go there as an embedded reporter. By this time, I was a senior reporter at The Daily Record, The Daily Mirror’s Scottish sister newspaper. My wish was granted in 2009 when I was deployed to Kandahar with the British Army. I would report on the airborne operations of a famous Scottish unit – the Black Watch. I had to lie about my journalistic mission to my grandmother Grace who was well into her nineties. She could well remember the agony of World War Two. I concocted a tale for her about how I was going to Turkey to work on a news story. Then when I was reporting from Afghanistan, my uncle had to hide the newspaper from her lest she see my frontline reports. For her, war meant families split apart, telegrams bearing bad news from distant shores and trauma better left unspoken.

My epiphany came in a tiny hamlet called Malmand Chinah, a difficult place to locate on most maps. In the bleary eyed, pre-dawn hours, while carefully following in the footsteps of a soldier in front as I walked through a poppy field dotted with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) – boobytrap bombs in popular parlance – I considered joining the Army to get the full lived experience of soldiering in Afghanistan so that I could write a book on what it was like to be there. After my return to Scotland, I felt a mounting unease that despite deploying alongside the troops, I had not experienced the ‘full story’. After immersing myself in the literature of immersion journalism, a double immersion, which featured authors such as George Orwell, Ted Conover and Barbara Ehrenreich, I made the life changing decision to join the Army (Conover, 2011, 2016; Ehrenreich, 2001; Orwell, 2021a, 2021b; Wilson, 2019). The news was not well received by my family. Hundreds of British troops had already been killed in action by this time. When I told my uncle, he looked aghast, asking: “Why would you want to do that?”

I started my basic training with the Army in my late 30 s. I was horrified to realise I was old enough to be the dad of most of my fellow trainee soldiers. After passing out in the top third of my cadre (the prized position), I volunteered for an operational tour of duty which meant a year away from the newsroom after my call up in 2013. I deployed to Afghanistan in March of that year for a six-and-a-half-month combat tour. Prior to deploying, we wrote our wills, penned a ‘death letter’ and had a photograph taken – a ‘death picture’ - to be released to the press should the worst happen. My close friend – who I shall call B - died in an IED explosion 1 month into the tour. We had been through basic training and felt like kindred spirits. He too had signed up for the full immersive experience to understand what it was really like. He was tall, well-built and his personality could fill a room – warm, funny and generous although he could be standoffish if he didn’t know you well enough. His loss meant I felt first-hand the stressors and risks associated with war reporting and indeed military service. I also felt that sickening sense of what has been inadequately termed ‘survivors’ guilt’. B’s loss was like an existential blow, a physical pain registering somewhere in my abdomen. I couldn’t help the shameful feeling that I was glad it wasn’t me.

My unit engaged in multiple operations where the likelihood of psychological distress was very high. We worked in a tiny Observation Post (OP) overlooking hamlets and villages dominated by the Taliban. Mortar attacks, small arms fire, IEDs and the threat of being over-run were all ever present daily occurrences. Exposure to potentially traumatic events, high-alert conditions and moral dilemmas gave me a rich understanding of phenomena such as PTSD and Moral Injury (MI) – a psychological phenomenon which occurs when a person experiences a profound violation of their moral or ethical code during a high-stakes situation (Griffin et al., 2025; Papadopoulos, 2020; Shay, 1994, 2014). I believe I have undergone a process of Post Traumatic Growth (PTG) - evident through the textual artifacts - with a renewed commitment to controlling my own narrative and helping myself and others through education and creative self-expression. The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory, a methodological tool for assessing positive outcomes reported by people who have experienced traumatic events, has a 21-item scale includes factors of New Possibilities, Relating to Others, Personal Strength and Appreciation of Life – some of which make up my post trauma lifeworld (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 1996, 2004).

At the time, stress was regarded as ‘part of the job’ as a soldier and a journalist (Jamieson et al., 2020; Phelps et al., 2024; Richardson et al., 2020; Shay, 2014). One scene serves to illustrate the twisted norms of a war zone. I was on guard duty in a sangar – a fortified bunker - overlooking the Green Zone, a fertile area characterised by lush greenery and agricultural land contrasting sharply with the surrounding arid landscape. A younger soldier prepared to light the burns pit – an area where rubbish was burned as there was obviously no sanitation or refuse collection. Normally, a kerosene-soaked rag was used to light the waste – which included bags of human excrement as there was no running water or toilets. On this day, despite my warnings, this younger soldier used petrol in a plastic water bottle which had been cut in half. When he ignited the petrol in the bottle with a burning rag, it erupted into a fireball, engulfing him in flames and molten plastic. I will always remember his screams of extreme pain juxtaposed with the laughter of the soldier I was on duty with. I’m ashamed to say I also remember laughing at the surreal nature of the drama in front of me. In normal life, you don’t equate serious injuries with uncontrollable laughter but in the Twilight Zone of an ancient hill in Helmand that was exactly what happened.

The burned soldier was cas-evaced – military jargon for casualty evacuation – to Camp Bastion for emergency treatment. He was left with severe, life changing injuries which saw him eventually leave the military. This personal familiarity with combat related stress can be seen as an insider status in relation to the veteran community, potentially enhancing rapport and empathy with participants who share such backgrounds (Ademolu, 2024; Fleming, 2019; Georgescu et al., 2023; Murphy and Busuttil, 2015; Yip, 2024). However, it also brings the risk of projecting my own military experiences or concepts of ‘duty’ and ‘camaraderie’ onto participants who may have had entirely different contexts and reactions.

I returned to the newsroom on the most ironic of dates – Monday, November 11, 2013 - Remembrance Day when the nation stops to remember the fallen. An occasion that had just become even more poignant for me following B’s death. I couldn’t help but feel that his death alongside two comrades was preventable. What was the point of sending troops along a road to find IEDs when the higher command knew that the road was heavily boobytrapped? The futility and pointlessness weighed on me.

My transition from journalist to soldier back to journalist led me to a period of personal reflection on how trauma narratives were constructed and disseminated. Reporting on various crises and conflicts, interviewing traumatised individuals and writing their stories gave me substantial insight into the power dynamics inherent in journalism. Journalists often set the tone and frame for how stories of trauma are told (Dahlheimer, 2022; Jukes et al., 2022; Mesmer, 2022; Papadopoulou et al., 2022; Tumber and Prentoulis 2005). As I also covered stories of veterans and civilians dealing with PTSD, I recognised more clearly the tensions around “using” people’s lived experiences for broader public consumption. A significant number of my journalistic assignments over 20 years involved trauma – from covering gang violence, sectarian attacks and hooliganism to suicides and carrying out the infamous ‘death knock’ – often considered a journalistic rite of passage (Duncan and Newton, 2010; Knowlton and Fox, 2023; Watson, 2022, 2024).

Collective resilience refers to the capacity of groups or communities to recover, adapt, and thrive in the face of adversity such as armed conflicts, disasters or systemic injustices. It is rooted in shared social identity, which emerges from a sense of common fate or shared experiences, fostering solidarity, cooperation and mutual support (Penić et al., 2021). However, it is difficult to see any such collective resilience in my experiences. National newspaper journalism has always been a fiercely individualistic profession however my exposure to conflict, violence and trauma has shaped my personal resilience and professional ethics as a journalist. Trauma theory provides an essential conceptual framework for looking at this work as it highlights how overwhelming experiences of violence, bereavement or threat disrupt memory, identity and narrative coherence (Herman, 1997; Van der Kolk, 2014).

Method

This study adopts an analytic autoethnographic approach (Anderson, 2006) situated within the broader qualitative traditions of journalism studies and phenomenology which focuses on the lived, embodied experiences of individuals, building on the philosophy of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau Ponty (Heidegger, 1962; Husserl, 1989; Merleau-Ponty, 1962). This approach is beneficial when the research goal is to understand the essence of a particular experience from the perspective of those who have lived it (Alase, 2017; Denovan and Macaskill, 2013; Smith et al., 2009; Smith and Nizza, 2022). Autoethnography is particularly suited to this research because it foregrounds lived experience as both data and analytic lens, allowing for an exploration of the intersection between personal narratives and institutional practices, professional norms and broader cultural meanings (Ellis et al., 2011). The method enables critical interrogation of my own journalistic texts as artifacts produced within overlapping fields of military service, journalism and public communication. This approach is particularly appropriate given the dual hermeneutic at the heart of the study: soldier and journalist, subject and analyst.

As both researcher and primary subject of the research, I hold a deeply embedded positionality. When writing the articles analysed in this study, I was serving as a frontline soldier at OP Dara in Afghanistan while recording my own experiences in notes and diaries and later as a professional journalist reporting on my own experiences. This dual role shaped not only what I observed and recorded, but also what I could safely disclose, ethically justify and professionally frame for a civilian readership.

The identities of journalist and soldier share some commonalities such as potential exposure to trauma and personal danger. However, there are significant differences. My identity as a serving soldier, imposed constraints related to operational security, personal safety, military discipline and emotional self-regulation while my identity as a journalist involved professional norms of objectivity, clarity and audience expectation. Reflexivity is therefore central to the research design with ongoing attention paid to how my interpretations have shifted.

Data procedure

The primary data for this study consists of three newspaper articles written by me during my deployment to Afghanistan. These texts were identified using Nexis, the journalism industry’s standard newspaper archive. Searches were conducted using my byline in combination with the keyword “Dara” to isolate articles specifically related to my time at OP Dara. Duplicate articles were removed and pieces lacking direct relevance to my embodied experience or frontline service were excluded. This ensured the dataset remained tightly focused on moments where personal experience, professional reporting and military context converged.

These news articles were written under the constraints of real-time reporting, editorial oversight and institutional gatekeeping. They function not only as personal narratives but also as mediated texts shaped by newsroom conventions, military censorship and public discourse. In this sense, the data can be understood as constructed narratives reflecting both lived experience and professional performance.

Analysis was conducted through manual coding using a thematic narrative analysis, combining inductive close reading with theoretically informed interpretation. The articles were reviewed chronologically, beginning with the earliest publication and concluding with the most recent. The analytic process unfolded in several stages. First, repeated close readings were undertaken to familiarise myself with the texts as both author and analyst, noting moments of emphasis, omission and narrative tension. Initial codes were generated inductively, focusing on recurring patterns such as emotion, representations of danger, constructions of normality and the negotiation of soldier - journalist identity. These codes were then refined and grouped into broader thematic categories through iterative comparison across texts.

Meaning was derived through reflexive engagement with the data, informed by relevant literature on trauma journalism, military culture and narrative identity. Analytic decisions were documented through memo writing, allowing for transparency in how interpretations developed and how my own positionality shaped those interpretations. Rather than treating the texts as transparent reflections of experience, the analysis attends to how experience was narrativized, framed and constrained at the time of writing. Theoretical triangulation is employed by situating personal narratives within existing scholarship on journalism, trauma and psychology allowing individual experience to be read in dialogue with broader cultural and institutional frameworks. Now, I will explore my own writings from my time as a soldier in Afghanistan to discover the themes and meanings which I may have missed at the time.

News stories, news artifacts

The first piece from June 7, 2013, filed while I was still out in the desert, boasts the stoic headline: “We honour our fallen comrades then return in silence to our duties. Life must go on in Helmand.” A subheading says: ‘Record Reporter Serves As Soldier On Frontline’. This story is my first-person account of life at the base where I served my tour of duty - OP Dara. As a reporter, I wrote the main text or copy as it’s known but I didn’t write the headline – that’s a job for sub editors. The ‘life goes on’ part annoys me. It certainly doesn’t go on for everyone. Lives snubbed out in an instant, families thrown into grief and chaos. The line feels way too glib.

The text covers a ceremony to honour the lives of three of our dead comrades who had been killed in an armoured vehicle earlier that day. It covers themes such as remembrance, grief, adversity and identity. It starts on the evening of April 30 in our camp. I can vividly remember the half-light mentioned in the story: “As dusk gathered, troops donned headtorches to read prayers in honour of their fallen friends”. Night falls fast in Afghanistan – 1 minute, you have broad sunshine then the darkness falls like a guillotine, cutting you off from your visual bearings and bringing a sense of foreboding.

Of course, none of this is related in the article. I wrote it in my bed space in the camp, emailed it up to the chain of command who approved it and allowed it to be sent onto the news desk. The piece begins with the ceremony before taking a discursive look at camp conditions – no running water, doing the toilet in Sani-bags which later have to be burned – a fact omitted in the story. I contrast the arduous conditions with press trips to the Waldorf Astoria and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. It ends on an incongruous note saying: “It is a far cry from the Waldorf Astoria but for the next 6 months, it’s my compact but comfy home.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Reading the piece now, I am struck by how odd it feels. The story is overwhelmingly positive despite being about the death of three young men including my friend in Afghanistan. The deaths are mentioned in the first four paragraphs then never revisited during the rest of the 757 word, two-page story. It now feels disjointed and bizarrely upbeat although I must remind myself it was effectively censored by the MoD before publication. I was careful when writing it to avoid rousing the ire of the ‘top brass’ who insisted on reading the piece before it was submitted to the Daily Record, a routine occurrence in Afghanistan or indeed any warzone. While there as a journalist in 2009, I had to sign the so-called Green Book which spells out the rules of being an embedded journalist which prioritises operational security over editorial independence.

The notion of continuity is writ large: “life must go on”. The sense of sacrifice, the solemn tribute to fallen comrades, the emotional weight of loss and the deep respect soldiers display for each other is all there. It is minimised and underplayed though. A sense of Stoicism comes through but it is displayed more through the troops’ adaptation to the harshest conditions, most of which are only hinted at. Several other soldiers are namechecked, detailing how they cope with cooking in desert heat, enjoying a chess game by torchlight or trying to find out the St Mirren FC result.

Emails, Skype calls and welfare parcels are mentioned to show how despite being thousands of miles away, we maintained strong ties to our loved ones at home. What is never mentioned is how when I was asked to give B’s eulogy, I choked, overcome by emotion and unable to speak. The piece was written only a month into the tour, the lowest point, when I fully grasped how any one of us could pay the ultimate price for being here. B had been a great soldier. If life or death were purely down to ‘skills and drills’, he would have survived. It was all pure chance.

“Try to imagine your own death” is the opening line of the second article, another two-page spread. Dated September 2, 2014, the piece is headlined: ‘Day I penned the letter of my death. HARROWING AS DAY OF LEAVING GREW NEAR I HAD TOUGH TASK.’ The clunkiness of the headline annoys me immediately.

Putting subediting sins aside, this is my deeply personal account of being a journalist turned soldier and the realities of deployment for both myself and my loved ones. It explores themes of mortality, emotional conflict, the futility of war, my motivations, the psychological toll of going to a warzone and the broader social and familial implications of military action. The central theme of this story is my act of writing a letter to my family to be opened if I was killed in action. By this time, I had left the Army. I was recollecting a time in early 2013 when I wrote my ‘death letter’ – a strange concept perhaps in the civilian world but an all too familiar phenomenon in military circles and a very old one at that (Price, 2011). The article moves between my home, Army barracks and the emotional no man’s land between myself and my partner Lynda who never understood my motivation to go to Afghanistan as a soldier (and still doesn’t).

I explain how I delayed writing the letter for weeks, struggled with the emotional weight of the task, posed for so-called ‘death pictures’ to be released to the media in the event of my demise and got measured for a specific uniform to be worn by me in my coffin or if I had to carry a comrade’s coffin. Eventually, I find the fortitude to write the letter, expressing love, regret and reiterating again my reasons for going. I write how I hide the letter somewhere safe, telling her later about the existence of the letter in case the worst should happen.

The story reads: “‘Dear Lynda, If you are reading this, I am so sorry that things have not turned out the way I planned.’ This was the first line of my death letter to my girlfriend of 14 years, to be opened only if I was killed in action in Afghanistan. Those 21 opening words took me weeks to write. We had been advised to leave a sealed letter to our families to help them come to terms with their loss if we weren’t lucky enough to come back from the tour.”

I also explore the issue of motivation and patriotism. Even at the time, I was fully aware that my motives for going to Afghanistan were unorthodox. It was hard to explain to people that I wanted to see, hear, taste, touch, smell what it was like to be a soldier there – nothing else would do. My reasons were not noble but personal, contrasting sharply with traditional narratives of valour, patriotism and ongoing media heroization of the military (Allison, 2024; Ben-Shalom et al., 2024; Stanley and Kay, 2024; Stanley et al., 2023). I wrote: “I wanted to fully experience a war which I had only previously sampled.”

I feel now I have captured the emotional intensity of the time. I am clearly conflicted, as clearly many of my comrades would have been at the time as we prepare for deployment. There is also a strong sense of guilt which has never left me. I feel raw to this day about putting Lynda and my family through all this fear and uncertainty.

I wrote: “During my tour, Lynda would be at home waiting for a visit from Army officers to say that I wouldn’t be coming home. As I headed into the barracks it was daunting to think this could be the last time I ever saw her.”

Reading this now, 12 years after the event, I can still feel the growing tense feeling in the small of my back, the depressive anxiety manifesting as a pain in my abdomen, a knot in the stomach. The story ends on a poignant note: “I came back. Some people would not be so lucky.” I find it ironic that the piece is a meta-analysis of writing, a pastime, a career, a vocation, a life which has saved me but also nearly ended me. I still have the letter, sealed, unread, yellowing in a bedroom drawer under a lifetime’s detritus.

The final story, dated September 3, 2014, explores my reaction to the news of my pal B’s death in Afghanistan as I stood on guard duty at our tiny outpost. A first-person account of trauma and grief, a vivid retelling of the moments when we learned of his death in a roadside bomb attack as we carried out our duties at OP Dara. It explores the emotional impact of loss in war, the randomness of survival and the enduring memory of fallen comrades.

The opening line reads: “My knees turn to water, ready to pitch me face first on to the wooden planks on the floor of the sangar”. That’s not hyperbole or journalistic licence, I can remember my legs going from under me when I was told he was dead.

For me, this news was very personal. I had been one of the millions of people who watched the news, viewing footage from Helmand, seeing the sterile head and shoulders pictures of soldiers who had made the ultimate sacrifice but not being directly affected by it. This was different. I knew this person very well. I relate how B and I had a shared journey through training and deployment. We had many similarities – this was our first tour of duty; we both wanted to get the Afghanistan soldiering experience; we completed basic training, pre-deployment training and battle camps together.

The news story relates an anecdote about how soldiers, such as myself and B, developed a dark, fatalistic gallows humour perhaps as a coping mechanism. Before deploying, we sat through lectures covering everything from how to fit body armour together to how to spot a boobytrap bomb. The section, which now feels oddly ominous and prophetic, is worth quoting here at length. I wrote: “During one PowerPoint presentation about the effects of IEDs, images of soldiers with horrific injuries flashed up on the screen. One poor soul was missing half his face after pens, scissors and other tools attached to the front panel of his body armour became deadly projectiles after a blast. He always had a dark sense of humour but he started cracking jokes about getting hit in an IED strike. He would make a buzzing noise “Zzzzzzz” before saying: ‘That’s the last sound you hear when you get whacked as the metal rods in the pressure plate connect just before the IED goes off.’ It was funny at first but after a while I stopped laughing. It sounded too real.” He would be killed in an IED strike just a few months later.

The story does not shirk its responsibility to inform readers of the brutal realities of modern war – boobytrap bombs, horrific injuries and the randomness of death. I relate how quickly lives can be lost or altered forever in a heartbeat. I saw B as I passed through another camp. I watched him in the distance, nipping to a Portaloo before he went out on a patrol. I never saw him again. A missed moment becomes a lifetime regret. The random nature of war makes every hello, every goodbye, every nod or smile potentially final.

Reflective discussion

Van der Kolk says “most research is me-search” – and he’s right (Van der Kolk, 2014: 109). The loss of my immediate family had more of a formative effect on me than any other, sparking my lifelong interest in trauma, communications and the search for meaning. My traumatic bereavement gave me the gift of empathy, the ability to fully grasp something of what others may be going through when they suffer the greatest losses. It allowed me to see that each trauma is individual and idiosyncratic. Having my family and life ripped apart gave me the resilience and robustness to go to Afghanistan, the Congo and a myriad of other places where danger was more mundane – an Old Firm stabbing or doorstepping a gun toting neo-Nazi in Clackmannanshire. My own experiences have trigged an interest not only in PTSD but also in PTG – a concept which resonated with me and my own narrative of transformation, identity reconstruction and existential introspection. PTG acknowledges that traumatic stressors can produce negative physical and psychological effects but suggests these events can also produce beneficial, life changing consequences. This includes the most extreme forms of trauma involving rape, incest, bereavement, cancer, HIV infection, heart attacks, disasters, combat and even historical events such as the Holocaust. These benefits have been categorised into changes in self-perception, changes in interpersonal relationships and a changed philosophy of life (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 1996, 2004).

A growing body of work has scrutinised the impact of trauma journalism on journalists themselves (Bradley and Heywood, 2024; Radoli, 2024; Xiong and Liao, 2024). Research has also increasingly focused on understanding the emotional and psychological toll of working with traumatic content on researchers themselves with the phenomenon even gaining its own designation as Researcher Vicarious Trauma (RVT) (Berger, 2021; Dickson-Swift et al., 2008; Lee, 2024) but we are some way off from establishing Journalist Vicarious Trauma (JVT) although perhaps we should. Recent work has highlighted how working with traumatic content can adversely impact diverse groups including social workers, mental health professionals, therapists, students and choral teachers (Flaherty et al., 2024; Mettler, 2024; Ryan, 2024; Sterna, 2025). Journalists can be added to that list.

Conclusion

My lifeworld means I’m both an insider and outsider when it comes to researching and reporting trauma. The emotive nature of trauma stories makes it challenging to maintain a purely observational stance (Morris, 2015; Tewolde, 2023; Warden, 2013). My identities as a former soldier, former journalist, trauma survivor and now a doctoral researcher combine to create both insider and outsider stances that shift and overlap depending on the context. This fluid positionality can provide a powerful conduit for empathy, trust and depth and richness of data (Bayeck, 2022). However, it can also introduce personal biases, assumptions and emotionally charged reactions that may colour data interpretation if not managed through thorough reflexive safeguards.

While listening to accounts of moral injury or guilt from former military personnel, I sometimes feel echoes of my own armed forces memories. Similarly, hearing stories of bereavement remind me of my own personal losses. During my own doctoral research, when I listened to participants describe intense interactions with journalists who pursued them for stories reminded me of my own past professional conduct - moments perhaps where I pressed an interviewee to yield quotable material without fully grasping the potential emotional fallout for them. Taking reflective breaks, journalling and seeking supervision or mental health support ensure I now approach participants’ narratives ethically while staying mindful of the biases my emotional reactions could introduce (Cutcliffe, 2003; Tufford and Newman, 2012). My experiences also emphasised the importance of activity and exercise while conducting research to maintain physical and mental health especially while working with such sensitive and traumatic data (Chen et al., 2022; Hill et al., 2022; Mahindru et al., 2023).

Greater awareness of the risks of working with harmful content has triggered calls for better mental health provision for journalists in the newsroom and the university classroom (Becker and Shontz, 2022; Feinstein et al., 2002). The military arguably invested early in mental health research due to its high-profile impact on readiness and centralised resources while journalism - fragmented and culturally resistant - only recently acted amid growing awareness of trauma and burnout (Dart Center, 2021). Mind suggests media organisations could offer a buddy system for journalists to share their experiences (Mind, 2025). Some large news publishers have engaged in ‘carewashing’ defined as “contemporary practices in which companies try to cleanse themselves from the connotations of corporate exploitation, and instead cathect their brand to a mood, an affect, an ethos, an idea of care” (Chatzidakis and Littler, 2022: 269) I have seen companies set up helplines for stressed journalists, take on mental health ambassadors or establish spaces on the intranet where people can chat about their concerns but this leads to no real change. To openly talk about emotional problems resulting from conflict reporting could make them look ‘too weak’ for the job with the result that the next assignment goes to another colleague” (Obermaier et al., 2023: 1414). One potential improvement in the newsroom would be a period of ‘decompression’ after covering traumatic events – time off without penalisation or stigma. Self-care was my secret weapon. Running, reading, reflecting kept me sane.

My return to the newsroom on Remembrance Day was not only poignant but taught me the huge significance of trauma anniversary reactions (ARs) (Pollock, 1970). For journalists, anniversaries – the upcoming 30^th anniversary of the Dunblane massacre, for example – are ways to mark a significant news event and retell a story. For people with lived experience of the trauma, they are times that are “burned in their brain” with a huge potential for retraumatisation (Bruce and Matsuo, 2022).

My trauma was not just military or singular - it was ordinary, layered, multidimensional.

Journalism changed my life and nearly ended it - but I’d do it all again.