Fiction Therapy for Identity Trauma

Fiction Therapy is a way to explore and process your own experiences by creating stories or scenarios that reflect your feelings and struggles. Instead of writing directly about yourself, you invent characters, worlds, or situations that represent what you’ve gone through.

Because experiencing harm for an identity society labels “privileged” is such a charged and often politicized topic, portraying it in writing can be met with disbelief, ridicule, or dismissal, even by the writer themselves. Even affirmations such as “it’s okay to be white” have become jokes or associated with reactionary politics. This makes it difficult to engage with your own pain or feel empathy for yourself. One way to work around this is to create fictional categories, such as a fantasy race, a sci-fi caste, or another invented social group. By framing experiences through these imaginative lenses, you can explore your feelings honestly and deeply, without the automatic judgment or invalidation that often arises in real-world discussions. Fiction becomes a safe space to process, validate, and express your emotional reality.

How to Start

  1. Identify the Core Experience

Determine what you are trying to process. Identify the emotional experiences you have gone through, the social systems you have been put into, and what you have been told about yourself.

  1. Recreate the Structure in a Fictional Setting

Create a scenario that mirrors your position structurally, not literally. The key is to preserve the social, cultural, or institutional dynamics you experienced, while removing real-world labels that trigger immediate political reactions.

  1. Design a Sympathetic Protagonist

Give your character depth, humanity, and ordinary virtues. Show their thoughts, intentions, fears, and limitations. Let readers see their inner world. Avoid portraying them as exaggerated or caricatured. The goal is to make the character recognizably human so that harm done to them feels meaningful rather than abstract.

  1. Depict the Harm Clearly and Seriously

Write the scenes where the character experiences exclusion, humiliation, or moral condemnation. Describe what it feels like internally: confusion, shame, helplessness, anger, grief. Present the harm as something that matters.

  1. Allow Yourself to Feel Empathy

After writing, notice whether you feel compassion for the character. If you do, recognize that the character represents you. The empathy you feel for them is empathy you are capable of extending to yourself.

  1. Revisit the story

You can use the same character and world to process different traumatic moments in your life, and help you see things in a different light.

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