Reauthoring: The lived experience of cumulative harm and its influence on career choice

Reauthoring: The lived experience of cumulative harm and its influence on career choice

People’s career choices are not necessarily the unfolding of normative experiences. Instead, trauma experienced as cumulate harm throughout childhood affects developmental trajectories and career choices. There is, however, a dearth of research into the influences of cumulative harm on career development. The present research addresses that gap in the literature by an investigation into helping professionals’ recollections of their lived experiences of cumulative harm and how they construct its meaningfulness with regard to their work as a helping professional. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was applied to the transcripts of interviews with N = 12 helping professionals. Findings of the analysis reveal consistent themes pertaining to the meaningfulness ascribed to their experiences of cumulative harm and re-authoring of trauma narratives. Participants sought to reauthor through the themes of meaning, value, adaptability, and unintentional motivations. However, remedial motivations, especially those met through professional learning and utilisation of trauma to help others, highlighted the dominance of meaning-making and value making as motivations for entering helping professions. This reflected a journey for all participants from identity conclusions formed through childhood trauma to new territories of identity, achieved through a reconstruction of life narratives by integrating career narratives to reframe and make sense of their cumulative harm experiences.

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