The Trauma Time Line

Abstract

Working with trauma is a process of bringing split emotional material to the level of

consciousness and placing it into both the framework of the client’s personality and the

context of his or her life. Trauma-related memories may be indistinct, vague, confused, and

fragmented. Relational trauma often has an ongoing aspect to it, as it is laced into

relational dynamics that wax and wane over time. This makes it difficult to have a sense of a

beginning, middle, or endpoint; thus clients may carry a feeling of having suffered year

after year without breaks. The Trauma Time Line allows clients to get a basic sense of how

trauma may have clustered in their lives and which parts of their lives may have been

relatively free of trauma. The Trauma Time Line can also reveal how early trauma patterns

may have affected further psychological and emotional development and how they may

have continued to be recreated throughout clients’ lives. The Trauma Time Line may be

done as a paper-and-pencil activity, put into sociometrically aligned group processes, or

serve as a warm-up for focused vignettes and psychodramas. I developed the Trauma Time

Line in the 1980s and first published it in The Living Stage.