Multilayered trauma during democratic transition: A woman’s first-person narrative.

Abstract

This article is a first-person narrative about my journey through more than 40 years of political trauma and recovery. I use a multilayered frame, showing how an activist's psychological sufferings and healing are embedded in a rapidly changing democratizing state. My research strategy is one of analytic autoethnography, as self-examinations are done in the context of systemic changes. Data sources that elucidate the experience of trauma include my poetry, dream-journal entries, and my son's drawings during Philippine martial law (1972)(1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986), the tumultuous years of power shift (1986 -1995), and relative political stability (1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014). My story ends with reflections on the meaning of gendered violence and personal trauma in the context of active nonviolence during democratic transitions.

Manilaner’s Holocaust Meets Manileños’ Colonisation: Cross-Traumatic Affiliations and Postcolonial Considerations in Trauma Studies

“…Considered as a "true trauma" by writers such as Pantoja-Hidalgo [34] and Montiel [35], the Martial Law years of Ferdinand Marcos, are a second favourite theme among fictionists. Gina Apostol's Gun Dealer's Daughter, for example, can certainly be read as trauma fiction-even on Western aesthetic standards of fragmentation, non-linearity and aporia.…”

Peace psychologists and social transformation: A Global South perspective.

“…The Global South peace scientist may free up historically shaped features of political engagement in her person, in the process of her growing reflexivity as a peace academic. For example, when I think and write about my own traumas during democratic transitions (Montiel, 2000, 2015), I scrutinize my traumas as research objects, distance myself from them, and in the process, free myself from their psychological clutches. The power of political trauma is so strong, that it is difficult for political survivors to talk about them.…”

Editorial.

“…Individual therapists and mental health patients are not able to escape the larger conflicts pervading their societies, even when at the individual level they have the best of intentions to collaborate with one another. The second article in this group (Montiel, 2015) describes a personal 40-year journey by a highly insightful psychologist and prodemocracy activist living in the Philippines. Using the method of analytic autoethnography, the author examines the different layers of her experiences during the slow and painful transition out of dictatorship, moving toward a more open Philippine society.…”