Complex PTSD and Complex Trauma.

The Research Focus

People living with complex PTSD often describe a particular difficulty with verbal narrative. They can recount what happened, sometimes with considerable precision, while remaining strangely untouched by their own account. This is not a failure of insight or motivation. Dissociation, shaped by prolonged relational trauma, works partly by severing experience from language, leaving the felt sense of what happened inaccessible to the story being told about it.

Samantha’s research explores whether structured writing can reach experience that speech has difficulty accessing, and if so, how. Of particular interest is the way writing can reveal the shape of inner experience before the writer consciously understands it. The rhythm, form, and imagery that emerge in expressive writing often trace emotional and relational patterns that have not yet found their way into explicit narrative. In this sense, writing may function not simply as expression, but as a form of discovery.

Approach and Method

The research uses a structured Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP) intervention with adult participants who identify with experiences of dissociation. Narrative Inquiry provides the methodological frame, with attention to how participants construct and reconstruct meaning through written and spoken accounts of their experience. The study is informed by a relational psychodynamic interpretive lens, situating individual accounts within the relational and developmental contexts from which they emerged.

Broader Interests

Alongside the doctoral work, Samantha holds a longstanding interest in the theoretical relationship between psychoanalytic ideas and expressive writing practice. She is particularly interested in the tradition within psychoanalysis that attends to the conditions under which experience becomes available, rather than moving immediately to interpretation, and how this tradition informs the clinical use of writing with dissociative presentations.

A central figure in this interest is the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900–1998), whose autobiographical books, particularly A Life of One’s Own (1934) and On Not Being Able to Paint (1950), developed an extended argument for writing and mark-making as therapeutic in their own right. Milner proposed that free writing could provide what she called an “answering activity,” a reflective, containing function comparable to what object relations theory understands the analyst as providing, but located in the relationship between writer and medium rather than between patient and clinician. Her thinking anticipates many of the questions Samantha’s doctoral research addresses directly: what writing can make available that speech cannot, and how the form of what someone writes may reveal the structure of inner experience before it can be articulated.

This interest has historical as well as clinical roots. The writing of Mary Barnes, whose experience of therapeutic regression at Kingsley Hall in the late 1960s was documented in her co-authored account Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness, offers a related and striking example of writing functioning in this way. Barnes’ own texts reveal the structure of her dissociative and relational experience through image and form, tracing what she could not yet speak directly. Her writing knew things her spoken account was still finding its way toward. That gap between what writing surfaces and what verbal narrative can access remains a central preoccupation of Samantha’s research.

She sits on the ESTD-UK steering committee, has completed SCID-D training, and serves as a Trustee of ACT Mental Health.

Clinicians or researchers with an interest in therapeutic writing, dissociation, or complex trauma are welcome to make contact via the contact page.