"The world is not a safe place": Representations of emotional distress, coping, and survival among young adults in South Africa.

Résumé

In contexts of extreme adversity and oppression, trauma exists as an open-ended ongoing threat, requiring us to recognise the ways people cope as adaptive survival mechanisms shaped by external hardship. Through a Black feminist lens, we explored the narratives of 17 young people in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, detailing their day-to-day experiences navigating hardship and potentially traumatic events, collected as part of a co-produced community-based initiative. Using grounded thematic network analysis, we offer an understanding of the young people's emotional experiences and the spectrum of strategies they use to cope. Feeling through Survival consists of five themes representing emotion experience of trauma, ranging from heaviness and fear to joy and pride. Coping as an Act of Resistance encompasses eight themes depicting young people's efforts and subtle agentic acts to persevere; including collective patterns, sacrifices, adaptive efforts to create a sense of safety, escapism, breaking free and boundary-setting, support systems, sense-making, and for some, meaning-making. Our analyses provide insight into the complex experience of trauma and survival, where multiple, at times, seemingly conflicting, realities co-exist. By adopting a non-judgemental approach to coping, we move beyond simplistic dichotomies of risk or resilience, deepening our understanding of what it means to live and cope amidst persistent adversity. Our findings highlight the importance of contextualising individuals' emotional and behavioural functioning within the circumstances that drive their efforts to cope. This understanding necessitates a shift in approaches to therapeutic interventions with individuals and communities facing open-ended trauma, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Recognising the risks of assuming safety or closure from trauma, interventions should be re-oriented towards supporting navigation of ongoing traumatic contexts, addressing barriers to accessing safety, and facilitating community empowerment.