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The chapter focuses on the use of the lived experience when teaching trauma to students who are studying mental health. In order to provide a context for what follows the chapter begins with an overview of how trauma is defined and understood in the research and literature.This is followed by a brief exploration of how ‘ story telling’ and lived experiences of trauma can be used to provide authenticity and increase understanding to students, without it being stressful for them or counterproductive in relation to their learning and learning experiences. Advocating a ‘psychoeducational’ approach to teaching and practice that is informed by the needs of the facilitator, the needs of students, sensitivity, attunement, and transformative learning experiences informs the latter part of the chapter.The chapter concludes with a short, critically reflective examination of practice and makes recommendations for the reader (based on experiential learning) to consider when teaching about trauma in your practice.

The work connects classic theories of selfing to the COVID-19 pandemic to make fresh connections between pandemic-induced trauma to the self and digital resources. This research introduces the concept of the “traumatized self” emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to digital disadvantage and digital hyperconnectivity. From Cooley’s original “looking glass self” to Wellman’s “hyperconnected” individualist self, social theories of identity work, and production of the self have a long and interdisciplinary history. In documenting this history, the discussion outlines key foci in the theorizing of the digital self by mapping how digital selfing and identity work have been treated from the inception of the internet to the epoch of the pandemic. The work charts the evolution of the digital selfing project from key theoretical perspectives, including postmodernism, symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. Putting these approaches in dialogue with the traumatized self, this research makes a novel contribution by introducing the concept of digitally differentiated trauma, which scholars can employ to better understand selfing processes in such circumstances and times.