Teaching With Trauma and PTSD: Navigating the Aftermath of Sexual Assault as a Graduate Student Instructor

Challenges of Teaching with Sexual Trauma as a Graduate Student Instructor

The burdens of sexual trauma and PTSD are exacerbated by graduate student instructors’ unique position within the university. Life as a graduate student is often marked by financial stress; job insecurity (since our teaching load is dependent on funding and administrative changes); and competing priorities as we navigate the competing priorities of classes, teaching, and scholarship. If assaulted during or even between semesters, “taking a break” to heal often does not feel like a viable option beneath the pressure of student loans and time-to-degree. Recovery time may feel too indulgent when confronted by the reality that we may lose our teaching appointments. We may also feel that taking time off is allowing our assaulters yet one more violation.

The only recommendation I am qualified to assert is that everyone should work with their mental health providers to determine the best plan of action for themselves. Regardless, it is likely that, whether or not we take a break from our teaching and studies, the same issues will plague us upon our return. While challenges are vast and individualized, I’ve surfaced four common ones that affect teaching: retraumatization, increased depression and anxiety, functional freeze, and shame.

Retraumatization

The concept of triggers has become a loaded one (Boysen et al., 2021; Bryce et al., 2023; Grayson, 2022; Kouri-Towe, 2023; Moore, 2021); ergo, I shall avoid that language and focus instead on the regurgitative nature of assault. PTSD is perhaps best known for the first two diagnostic criteria mentioned earlier: intrusive symptoms and avoidance of stimuli. As cliché as they may seem, flashbacks are both real and debilitating. A debilitating response to stimuli (which can also occur with trauma sans PTSD) might manifest as dizziness, nausea, and an overwhelming sense of panic (APA, 2022). Even when no stimuli are encountered, the fear of encountering them is often immobilizing (APA, 2022).

If a traumatized instructor chooses to reenter the classroom, avoiding all negative stimuli will likely prove impossible. Beyond the sights, sounds, and smells that could materialize anywhere, literature and composition instruction demands emotional labor unique in the intimate connections between student and teacher (Hynes, 2019; Moore, 2021; Sharp, 2022; Waldbuesser et al., 2021; Yu et al., 2021). Writing tends to elicit traumatic histories: Humans possess the desire to share, and the chance to do so in a safe space is alluring, especially in writing classes with open-ended prompts (Diaz, 2022; Hynes, 2019; Moore, 2021; Sharp, 2022). For example, in personal essays such as the literacy narrative, students commonly disclose trauma (sexual or otherwise). It is not a stretch to surmise that the more approachable we are as teachers, the more likely they are to entrust us with their stories, especially if they believe our shared student status forges a bond absent in their other teacher-student relationships. Our subject matter, too, requires openness to trauma. For instance, commonly taught theoretical lenses such as Feminist Criticism, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Theory all scrutinize social and individual traumas, and trauma often arises in class discussions (Adams, 2020; Graphenreed & Poe, 2022; Grayson, 2022).

Retraumatization occurs when we encounter something that makes us relive our traumatic experiences (APA, 2022; Moore, 2021; Sharp, 2022). This could happen when:

• Student traumas remind us of our own
• We must respond to and assess essays that discuss trauma
• Sexual assault arises in class discussions
• We hear negative responses to sexual violence in the academy (for instance, denial of rape culture or criticism of a famous sexual assault survivor)
• We must make the difficult decision to report a student’s experience to Title IX

Retraumatization can slow the healing process and also contribute to depression and anxiety.

Increased Depression and Anxiety

The more time I spend on Instagram, the more it seems that everyone has depression and anxiety, a thought both comforting and gloomy. It is certainly true that these two negative states of mood and cognition are common and often comorbid, and trauma and PTSD tend to exacerbate them (APA, 2022; Groen et al., 2020; Oshodi et al., 2016). For my purposes, distinguishing between depression vs. Major Depressive Disorder and anxiety vs. Generalized Anxiety Disorder is not particularly material, save in the sense to underscore (at risk of regurgitation) that two of the four are disabilities with increased severity. My interest lies, rather, in exposing the cyclical nature of depression, anxiety, and difficulty teaching.

Depression and anxiety affect cognition, meaning they change the way you process and respond–not simply how you feel (APA, 2022). They may arise individually or simultaneously, or one might ignite the other. I offer an example of the latter: When I think about being raped, I start to struggle with my depression, which makes me not want to get out of bed, which makes me fall behind on grading, which makes me anxious, which makes me shut down and allow emails to gather dust in my inbox, which makes me more anxious, which makes me depressed, and so the cycle continues.

The effects of depression (e.g., hopelessness, emptiness, and hypersomnia [APA, 2022]) and those of anxiety (e.g., excessive worry, restlessness, irritability, and trouble focusing [APA, 2022]) leave little room for studying, writing, teaching, or healing, all of which present enormous challenges without the added emotional and cognitive burdens. It is also worth stressing how depression and anxiety contribute to chronic fatigue (already a trauma symptom) (Afari et al., 2014; De Venter et al., 2017). With all this combined, sometimes grading one discussion board might feel like too much labor to comprehend.

Functional Freeze

While we might be tempted to discredit freeze as a Gen-Z buzzword, it does exist (Dhawan & Haggard, 2023). I’m not sure where personal ignorance intersects with the ignorance of society. Still, until therapy following my rape, I thought “fight or flight” was the full phrase rather than what are correctly known as the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn trauma responses. Fight and flight are obvious; fawn is a series of people-pleasing behaviors that often accompanies abusive relationships (Dhawan & Haggard, 2023; Merlon & Sugden, 2023). While all four trauma responses play into sexual assault, I focus here on freeze as a major challenge to graduate student instructors.

Many people report freezing during a sexual assault. Like both fight and flight, freeze is a physiological safety mechanism designed for protection: It is an “involuntary neural response to threat that blocks the brain circuits that provide voluntary control over body movement” (Dhawan & Haggard, 2023, p. 835). We can reductively equate this to a possum playing dead. While freeze protects the person during the assault, the body can become locked in freeze mode. When this happens, common stressors as well as negative stimuli provoke a freeze response, which includes brain fog, numbness, dissociation, inability to take action, difficulty concentrating, trouble expressing thoughts, increased anxiety, and feeling “stuck” or “shutdown” (APA, 2022; Dhawan & Haggard, 2023; Dworkin, 2020).

Popular culture, led less by empirical research and more by mental health blogs, often refers to this state as “functional freeze” (Gifford, 2024; Khiron Clinics, 2024; Thurrott, 2024). While not truly a technical term, the adjective is helpful: It acknowledges the survivor’s efforts to remain operative while underscoring the limits to which they can perform. With or without the adjective, freeze combats an instructor’s efforts to keep pace with the logistics of teaching, creating a semester precariously balanced on “let me just get to winter break, and then I can fall apart.”

Shame

I’ve chosen to discuss shame last because it is all-encompassing, intensifying retraumatization, depression and anxiety, and freeze. To feel shame is to feel humiliated and unworthy, to believe that you have done something profoundly wrong (Bhuptani & Messman, 2023; Martingano, 2020; Robinson et al., 2024). After my rape, I was ashamed that I wore a mini skirt to a club, that I ignored every safety lesson I’ve been taught, and that I didn’t even scream for help. When the cops demanded to know why I didn’t just climb off the mattress, they emphasized my weakness and incompetence, features I then wove into my self-image. I wasn’t ashamed of being raped so much as that I hadn’t done anything to stop it, especially because I’d always forecasted myself as a fighter or at least a flighter. Perhaps most of all, though, I was ashamed that for two years after, I simply fell to pieces. I don’t know if I’m thankful or saddened that these feelings are not unique to me but shared by many survivors, including other academics, although everyone’s shame is of a different hue (Bhuptani & Messman, 2023; Bhuptani & Messman, 2022; Robinson et al., 2024).

Shame doesn’t stay behind in the exam room, police station, or courtroom. It follows you to your desk, where memories of your rape exam photos displayed on a projector in front of a judge, lawyers, and your rapist make you wonder who you think you are to write a dissertation. It follows you to your classroom, where you feel small, imagining your students laughing at the V for Victim branded on your forehead. Relationships with colleagues and supervisors may grow strained if you fear (often justifiably) that your image will suffer if they learn of your trauma and the ways it has affected you (Martingano, 2020; Robinson et al., 2024;). Despite #MeToo’s best efforts, sexual assault remains stigmatized, and no one wishes to be seen as damaged (Bhuptani & Messman, 2023; Hansen, 2020; Martingano, 2020; Robinson et al., 2024). These factors increase shame and further isolate its owner, who seeks to hide the ugliest parts of themselves.