Fast and Slow Thinking in Narrative Recovery: Pluralistic Trauma Processing during Covid-19

How can writing about the collective cultural trauma of Covid-19 pandemic help in an autobiographical illness narrative coming to terms with pre-existing Dissociative Identity Disorder? This disorder is characterised by inner plurality, amnesia, and difficulties discerning past from present times. Thinking how recall let alone organise such a life story might appear, at first, be impossible challenge. Might slow-thinking (coined Kahneman 2011) through critical reading comparisons between personal experiences resolution? lived experience account shares triggered fast-thinking dissociative symptoms but so doing, gave me pieces start forming my earlier childhood trauma. Through slow, comparative readings this classic literary historical traumas, co-produced emerges. As result, instead therapeutic creative modes that are gaining much traction third sector mental health programmes wellbeing forums (such as therapy journals, expressive or drama role play, see for instance Sampson 2007), focus here on auto-ethnographic self-therapy also provide new directions recovery pluralistic processing.