Making Sense of Origins and Felt Safety after Repeated Interpersonal Victimization: A Qualitative Single-Participant Study
Abstract
Repeated interpersonal victimization can shape posttraumatic distress and young people’s understandings of safety, family belonging, and identity. Yet these processes are often examined separately, particularly among young people raised in informal nonbiological caregiving arrangements. This qualitative single-case study explored how an 18-year-old Indonesian woman made sense of repeated victimization, her nonbiological origins, posttraumatic stress experiences, and efforts to rebuild safety. Data comprised five semi-structured interviews with the participant and two contextual interviews with her caregiving mother. The data were analyzed primarily inductively using experiential, contextualist reflexive thematic analysis. Four themes were developed: (1) safety repeatedly collapsed across relationships and settings; (2) learning about her origins changed how she interpreted herself and her past; (3) the past remained present as an everyday threat; and (4) safety was rebuilt without erasing earlier harm. The findings show that posttraumatic distress was embedded in relational expectations, embodied vigilance, selective disclosure, family belonging, and narrative reconstruction. The study contributes an idiographic account in which felt safety connects repeated victimization, origin-related self-understanding, and recovery. Trauma-informed practice should therefore address symptoms alongside relational safety, agency, boundaries, belonging, and meaning-making. These analytically generalizable findings require further examination across diverse caregiving and cultural contexts using larger, more diverse samples.