Trauma-Informed Care in Oral History

As in any profession or role, oral historians have the power and ability to foster both healing and harm through their work. 

• How can we promote healing through oral history interviews?
  • By offering validation, support, and empathy.
  • By encouraging narrators to tell their story in various ways that empower healing and empathy for their younger selves.
  • By celebrating the power of storytelling in the healing process. 
  • By understanding the roles and responsibilities of an oral historian and committing to practices that are trauma-informed.

• What are the ways that we can create harm in oral histories (that we try to avoid)?
  • Re-traumatization 
  • Judgment and stigma 
  • Feeling alone or without adequate support 
  • Vicarious or secondary trauma

Part of an oral historian’s work is to gather information. There are other roles that involve significant information gathering, including therapists, the press, law enforcement, medical professionals, and spiritual elders (ex, pastors, rabbis, imams, shīfus). However, each role has slightly different goals, obligations, and approaches.

Think about the following professions listed below and compare how each approach to gathering information is similar or different.

• Oral Historian’s Role: Gathering information is the center of the oral historian’s role: they record a narrator’s recounting of their first-person experiences. This information can be used for a variety of purposes, but the goal is typically related to documenting historical and contemporary memories, especially from perspectives that are under-represented in traditional archives. Best practices, at NPHM and elsewhere, includes providing the narrator with the oral historian’s specific purpose(s) for the interview, building trusting relationships, and empowering them to make decisions about if and how their stories will be used.

• Therapist’s Role: Gathering information is used exclusively to inform client treatment. Therapists outline the parameters of their obligations to confidentiality and reporting prior to treatment. The extent of information shared is generally up to the client, and a therapist’s goals are to support the client, to help them make sense of their experiences and heal from pain, and to minimize future emotional and physical harm. Most often, clients choose to attend therapy (there are limited instances of mandated therapy). 

• Reporter/Journalist’s Role:  Gathering information is used to write a publication (text or audio-visual) with the goal of informing the general public about something impactful that has happened. Press ethics are extensive and considered necessary in order to limit the bias of the reporter/journalist and their publications. These ethics include not compensating sources, protecting the identity of a source when asked (though there is no legal obligation to do so), fact-checking everything they print, and being sparing in the personal relationship-building with sources.

• Detective/Law Enforcement’s Role: Gathering information is typically used to solve a crime and incriminate suspects. This process is considered to be time sensitive, and the information gathered is assumed to be factual. Power dynamics may be (and often are) used to the advantage of law enforcement to gain greater and faster access to information.

• Medical Professional’s Role: Gathering information is used exclusively to inform client treatment. Medical professionals follow strict laws about patient confidentiality and reporting, which vary by country and state. “Western” medical professionals focus on determining the scientific facts about what is occurring with each patient’s physical health so that they can create a treatment plan that will address the cause of dis-ease or illness. Medical professionals typically have a very limited amount of time to devote to any one patient.

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Reflect on the following questions: 

• Is gaining information optional or necessary for each professional?

• What is the necessity for the full story vs. what the narrator chooses to share?

• What is each role’s priority and opinion about facts vs. perspectives?

• How could information gathered by each role potentially incriminate or otherwise endanger the narrator?

• What is each profession’s commitment to protect and care for the narrator and their well-being?

• What power dynamics exist between the narrator and the professional?

• What other professions come to mind that include information gathering as a significant part of their role? What are their goals, obligations, and approaches? How do those differ from an oral historian’s? You can practice this with the example of spiritual elders.

• Build Trust with the Narrator: Prioritize safety in the space by ensuring the narrator feels respected and empowered. Outline the process of an oral history interview so that the narrator knows what to expect, and explain resources and support available to the narrator before, during and after the interview.

• Consent and Choice: Provide transparency to the narrator on how their interview is intended to be used and archived. Center the narrator’s power within the collaboration—they have the final say over their interview contents and if/how it is used.

• Sensitivity and Empathy: Be mindful of trauma-informed best practices and potentially triggering topics. Review grounding tips and tools before the interview so that you can offer support as needed (see above). 

• Flexibility: Recognize the diversity of people, experiences and needs and offer responsive adaptations and accommodations when needed

• Resources & Community: Offer resources to support the narrator before, during and after the interview as well as follow information to maintain connected to the NPHM community

• Continuous Training & Improvement: Commitment to continually learning and improving trauma informed practices.

• Interview from a place of abundance: Bring and offer snacks, water, fidget toys (for the narrator and yourself!), and any other supplies that might be useful during the interview. Be comfortable with silence and follow your narrator’s lead in setting the rhythm of the interview—including whether to change topics, take a break, or continue with the trauma-related story. 

• Personal boundaries and care: Evaluate your own needs, triggers, and boundaries before the interview (pages 18-20 in the BTA 2023 workbook can be particularly helpful for this). Make a contingency plan for how you might tend to your own needs if you get activated.

Below are additional resources about practicing oral history from a place of trauma-informed care. In addition to reviewing these process-related resources, we also strongly suggest reviewing the “narrator resources” above as tools to ground yourself when you feel activated—and to offer your narrator. For further online and print resources, see this resource sheet.

BTA Workbook Checklist

Videos:

Books:

• Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others, by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky with Connie Burk
• Help for the Helper: Self-Care Strategies for Managing Burnout and Stress, by Babette Rothschild with Marjorie Rand
• My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel Van Der Kolk

Websites:

• The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma 
• Interviewing with Care: Documenting Stories of State Violence – Library
• WITNESS Library