Abstract
Keywords
Prologue
I awoke at 6 am one weekend morning – sat up in bed and out it poured. Back Inside the Stories “arrived” almost fully formed, a reminder of how the subconscious continues to work on us as we sleep.
The 1st phase of my doctoral research explored the experiences of older women living with the impact of intimate partner violence. I am a victim-survivor myself. The poem that follows emerged as a result of doing this research and what this research has done to me and for me. I wanted to include a reflective section at the end of my thesis, to share something of this journey; to turn my research diary scribbles into something more coherent and meaningful. I didn’t want them to be lost in time, hidden away, marginalised as something, somehow, academically illegitimate, only to be found in my later years, dusty and forgotten.
As part of my fieldwork, I used narrative interviewing as a means of capturing stories of abuse. I listened. Outwardly, I acknowledged this listening, using body language and supportive utterances, as you do. Inwardly, I empathised. I felt it. Actual bodily sensations. Emotional resonance, denied in the moment. Why? Because we were not friends, sitting and sharing stories. I was there to do a job. I am a researcher. Though this may sound mercenary, it was the reality. This was their time to tell their story, for one woman, this was for the very 1st time. A deeply personal and humbling experience. I tried to bracket my own lived experience so as not to distract from this active listening. This of course was never going to be possible. Morally, I needed to do these stories justice and for that I needed to really listen. I felt the weight of responsibility. I carried this emotional weight through the transcription process, the repeated listening of audio, the analysis, the re-storying. I was “in deep”. Immerse yourself in the data - that’s what “good” narrative analysis demands, after all. But at what emotional cost?
Through this writing, I realised that I had, in Moraga and Anzaldúa’s words (1983), “come in through the backdoor” (p. 263), led by my feelings, the emotion of the work and my lived experience. I entered the work bodily and affectively, long before I began theorising it. Reflexivity, I realised, is not only an intentional act but an ongoing, embodied process - one that moves quietly beneath awareness until it finds its expression and form.
In the poem that follows, I wanted to describe both the physicality and emotionality of doing this research (Faulkner, 2005). An inward turn prompted by immersion in the stories of the women. It captures what Faulkner (2018) describes as the “reflexive turn” in poetic inquiry - when creating poems from participants’ experiences reawakens awareness of one’s own positioning, emotions, and moral commitments. Other scholars have described how poetic forms can give voice to embodied and often silenced dimensions of trauma work (Gildea, 2021a, 2021b; Keedle and Willo, 2022). This is me giving voice to my own work. Embodiment is an important concept in feminist theory, research, and praxis and feminist poetry offers a means of doing, showing, and teaching embodied inquiry (Faulkner, 2018). Within qualitative research, and more specifically, health and social care research, there is a growing conversation around how lived experience (LE) might shape and enrich knowledge production and how our own histories, vulnerabilities, and moral imperatives inhabit the research encounter. This poem extends this conversation by making visible the subtle yet ineluctable ways in which working with stories of abuse might impact and reverberate on the life of the LE researcher.
Still - I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Back inside the stories
I sit at my desk
I light my candle
This is symbolic
This will protect me
As if
I have finished for the day
I blow out the candle
The voices are contained,
In the space between me and my desk
As if
I go about my business
It’s my time for mothering
I cook dinner
I hear about Homer’s “The Odyssey”
From my youngest
I feel grateful
But for a moment
This resonates
Uncharted territories
Perseverance and resilience
All of this
The women
Me
All of us
Odysseus faces mythical creatures
Monsters
These are the traumatic stories
These are the perpetrators
I think to myself
Whoops
I am back there
Inside the stories
I am finding comfort
In everyday mothering
Is this how the women felt
As they went about their mothering
Whoops
I am back there again
Inside the stories
This was me
13 years ago
I was inside this story
Once upon a time
I mothered
I persevered
In uncharted territories
The warmth of my kitchen
The smells and sounds of safety
Juxtapose
The darkness of the stories
And on it goes
The flip-flopping
Of thinking
And writing
On trauma
As researcher
Victim-survivor
Mother
Epilogue
These women’s stories stayed with me, echoing beyond the confines of my desk into the “everydayness” of my life as I went about the business of mothering. Back Inside the Stories was written in response to that emotional residue - the “back and forth” between the stories and my life, between witnessing others’ stories of abuse and managing its quiet intrusion into my own world.
Just last year, I had spent time crafting poetic representations of my participants’ life stories. I condensed the emic stories that I had created into poems, as part of my narrative analysis, using only the participant’s words and allowing the data itself to determine the structure of the poem. The idea was to use their words to represent the rhythm and spatial components of poetry, such as line and stanza breaks, and as such give “my” data form and substance (Furman et al., 2012). I used spatial layout on the page to mirror the movement between the smaller nested stories of vulnerability and resilience, resistance and survivance, the rhythm of their everyday living, in this context of abuse.
My poem emerged unexpectedly, as already said. I woke up feeling frustrated…”I don’t want to write yet another thesis section, same old, same old (she metaphorically stamps her feet!). This is becoming mundane, dare I say. The lack of creativity is stifling me. Yet I have a lot to say about my research journey. A lightbulb moment. I will stand in solidarity with the women in this research. If their stories can be captured in poetic form, so can mine – and out it poured.
Stanzas were strategically arranged on alternating sides of the page, as I wanted to make the reader move their gaze back and forth across this space. This “form” was intended to evoke the embodied “flip-flopping” between worlds that I inhabited, the living inside and outside the stories. This movement from emotion to reflection, from embodiment to analysis, mirrors the rhythm of poetic inquiry, what Faulkner (2019) calls both process and product.
Poetic inquiry allowed me to dwell in that space, to feel, and reflect from within the embodied realities of these trauma stories, mine and theirs. The candle that I light in the poem became a ritual of care and containment, a reminder of what is carried between this work and the everydayness of my life as a mother, woman and victim-survivor.
Poetry, in both research and praxis, has been viewed as an act of ethical witnessing within social work, a space where empathy, vulnerability, and critical reflection converge (Furman et al., 2012). In crafting this poem, I found resonance with social workers (Clark et al., 2025; Moran, 2020) health practitioners (Rapport and Hartill, 2016; Tarbi and Morgan, 2022; Tuppal et al., 2025), and other scholars (Gildea, 2021b; Gildea, 2021a; Goldberg and O'Connor, 2022; Cutts and Sankofa Waters, 2019; Brady, 2004), who use poetic and autoethnographic forms to bridge the personal and the socio-political, to resist the silencing of lived experience under academic hierarchies of legitimacy. For me, it was an act of reclaiming voice and visibility. For social work more broadly, it is an invitation to honour the wisdom that emerges from lived experience, and to speak up for the emotional truth of our work. All that said, I must add a cautionary note. Yes - this work invites a broader recognition of how emotional and ethical labour might shape research and practice in social work. Poetic inquiry offers a way to remain present with the inherent complexity of social work. However, such poetic reflexivity demands supervision and support and should be considered as an integral part of practitioner-researcher well-being, not an ad-hoc luxury to be had only “if there’s time”. Consider this Sage advice.
Through writing this poem, I learned that vulnerability is not antithetical to rigour but rather, it is integral to a more humane and trauma-informed scholarship, one that honours both the stories we hear and the selves that we bring to the listening. This powerful quote by Sandra Faulkner really captures what writing this poetry did for me: Poetry can help us see our relationships bleeding out, haemorrhaging from the invisible inside, spilling outside the neat axioms of theory. Poetry is theory. Poetry can have us experience the social structures and ruptures in situ as we read, as we listen, as we hold our breath waiting for the next line. Poetry is bandage and salve. Poetry lets me goodwill my secure cloak of citations, argue in verse that there is space for critical work and personal experience in the study of close relationships. (Faulkner, 2017, cited in Faulkner 2018: p3)
Writing this poem was cathartic. It was a political act. I wanted to agitate. I wanted to make visible the emotional weight of this work as a researcher with LE. I wanted my poetic writing to be conspicuous and to “flag itself in place” (Jakobson et al., 1987: p69) to fellow researchers, practitioners, other women who research that which they have experienced. I wanted the poem to refuse the illusion of neutrality and instead embrace my presence and visibility as a lived experience researcher. This is my way of using creativity “for meaningful effects in an effort to say new things, old things in new ways of Being-in-the-World” (Brady 2004: p. 628).