However, instead of suggesting that writing about one’s own traumatic events can be healing, my research suggests the opposite can occur: narrating the story of a traumatic event does not, in itself, reduce or eliminate psychological pain associated with the event, and moreover, can instead re-activate distress symptoms thought long resolved—distress which I argue is outside the scope of a composition instructor’s expertise to assist in healing or mitigating.

This potential for writing about personal trauma to harm the individual writer has been under-theorized by compositionists from the biologically based perspectives explored within this essay. Rather, writers exploring potential risks of memoir or personal writing for CCC and College English have restricted their analyses to the realm of the sociopolitical impact as brought into existence and countered through language. Lynn Bloom (2003) writes of the ethical issues of writing about others who people memoirs, such as relatives, former lovers, or coworkers. Bronwyn Williams (2003) argues against the dangers of the memoir assignment for non-native speakers of English through the perspective of postcolonial theory. Even Anne Ruggles Gere (2001) who makes the strong argument that all students, particularly students from groups underrepresented in higher education, should be taught the strategic use of silence to avoid “colonization of their writing” (p. 219) by, among others, their teachers, fails to advert to the biologically situated nature of writing about subjects the students are uncomfortable revealing.