An Autoethnographic Study of the Self-Recovery Experiences of a Social Worker with High-Risk Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs): Implications for Trauma-Informed Care

Abstract

This study explored the self-recovery experiences of a social worker with high-risk Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) through autoethnography, examining implications for Trauma-Informed Care (TIC). The researcher analyzed diaries, poems, reading records, transcription notes, and blog posts from childhood to adulthood, using Chang’s (2008) autoethnographic principles and Saldaña’s (2009) coding methods. Four findings emerged. First, the researcher experienced repeated abuse, neglect, sexual violence, and failures of protection, reflecting complex trauma. Second, parentification became either a resource or a vulnerability depending on capacity building and mutual emotional support. Third, writing, study, and practice functioned as mechanisms of self-recovery through expressing, understanding, and reinterpreting experience. Fourth, TIC principles were deficits in childhood but became self-reconstructed goals in adulthood — safety, collaboration, peer support, empowerment, and cultural sensitivity — though trustworthiness and transparency remained unclear given historical gaps in public protection. This study conceptualizes self-recovery as a nonlinear process distinct from resilience and posttraumatic growth, highlighting the need to understand behavior within lived experience in social work practice.