Narrating Trauma and Re-establishing Self-Coherence: A Conceptual Review of Autobiographical Memory, Narrative Coherence, and Psychotherapy

Traumatic memories are often described as fragmented, sensory, cue-dependent, or difficult to place within an autobiographical context. Such descriptions have encouraged the view that narrating trauma restores self-coherence by converting poorly integrated experience into a coherent autobiographical memory. This theoretical/conceptual review evaluates that proposition across developmental narrative research, autobiographical memory theory, contemporary posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) models, linguistic research, and psychotherapy. The review argues that trauma-related memories may be disorganized or weakly contextualized, but they are not invariably non-narrative or impossible to integrate. Narrative coherence is therefore best treated as a multidimensional feature of autobiographical representation rather than a direct index of psychological integration or clinical recovery. Orientation, referential sequencing, evaluation, temporal organization, and narrative density can provide useful descriptive information, but their clinical meaning depends on task, language, culture, arousal, and treatment context. Recent evidence supports associations between some forms of narrative disorganization and PTSD while also showing substantial heterogeneity across studies and measurement methods. Clinically, narrativization is central in some interventions, such as narrative exposure approaches, but is only one pathway among cognitive, exposure-based, relational, embodied, and non-verbal processes used across trauma therapies. A research agenda is proposed that separates narrative form from symptom change, tests within-person mechanisms longitudinally, and combines linguistic analysis with clinical, cognitive, cultural, and embodied measures.