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Conceptualizing Sexual Trauma and PTSD
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Challenges of Teaching with Sexual Trauma as a Graduate Student Instructor
Integrating Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, Critical Disability Theory, and Networks of Care
Introduction
Content warning: This article contains explicit discussion of sexual assault, trauma, and related mental health impacts. Please engage with care.
On January 1, 2020, I was sexually assaulted by a man I’d never met. I emerged from the experience with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), derailing my last semester of doctoral coursework. Now, as a dissertating student in my fourth year of teaching First Year Composition, I navigate those same effects daily. When first teaching, I frequently lost my train of thought. I was easily fatigued. I couldn’t look at my computer screen for more than two hours without igniting a debilitating migraine. I grieved my former mind and body. While I have made extensive progress—both psychologically and physically—I am still working through functional freeze (a phenomenon I shall further explore), which impacts both my teaching and studies. Logically (and bolstered by #MeToo), I know I’m hardly alone in my experiences, yet still I struggle with lingering shame that breeds a sense of isolation from my colleagues. Nevertheless, trauma has shaped who I am as a student and instructor. While I will never conceptualize my rape as beneficial, I do understand more intimately my students’ experiences with trauma.
I recognize the prevalence of mental health struggles, of which trauma is but one source. The year I was raped, in this very journal, Miller (2020) advocated networks of care to support graduate students’ mental health by forging collaborations and strengthening the bonds we students feel towards one another. Building on Miller’s (2020) ideas, I explore here an understudied facet of that mental health: the challenges of teaching with sexual assault trauma, which over 20% of individuals will at some point experience (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2022), and the PTSD that often proves its companion (Dworkin, 2020). Rhetoric and composition scholarship certainly recognizes the reality of sexual violence. Yet, we have not fully interrogated its connection to graduate student writing instructors, who must cope with the effects of trauma while navigating a complex role within the university (Adams, 2020; Moore, 2021; Sharp, 2022).
My purpose here is to articulate common challenges faced by sexual assault survivors who teach and study writing (namely, retraumatization, increased depression and anxiety, functional freeze, and shame), underscoring how these challenges shape our academic lives and our relationships with students who have undergone similar events. By exploring the impacts of sexual trauma and engaging trauma-informed pedagogy to support graduate student instructors, I seek to validate their experiences and offer evidence-based practices to improve them, focusing especially on classroom assessment strategies designed to accommodate the effects of trauma. With this article, I also endeavor to offer graduate program instructors and administrators insight that will help them support their student instructors.