Abstract
This chapter investigates children’s accounts of ordinariness when they talk about trauma and trauma recovery. We were struck by the fact that children when they were invited to talk about their experience with trauma would say things like ‘It was just a coincidence’ or ‘I just started to forget it’. Our first thoughts were that the particle ‘just’ seemed so ‘ill-fitted’ to the description of these serious, painful events, as they seemed to construct what happened as ‘nothing out of the ordinary’. Why would children describe potentially lifealtering occurrences like losing a sibling or a parent in ways that suggested it had only had a minor impact on their lives? These initial questions prompted us to explore what these mentions of ‘just’ do in children’s tellings of trauma and trauma recovery.
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Recommended reading
• Peräkylä, A., & Vehviläinen, S. (2003). Conversation analysis and the professional stocks of interactional knowledge. Discourse & Society, 14(6), 727–750.
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• Brom, D., Pat-Horenczyk, R., & Ford, J. D. (Eds.) (2009). Treating traumatized children: Risk, resilience and recovery. East Sussex: Routledge.
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© 2015 Joyce Lamerichs, Eva Alisic, and Marca Schasfoort
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Lamerichs, J., Alisic, E., Schasfoort, M. (2015). ‘You Just Have to Be Cheerful Really’: Children’s Accounts of Ordinariness in Trauma Recovery Talk. In: O’Reilly, M., Lester, J.N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Child Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428318_33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428318_33
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