Things happen in diving. Sometimes they go just slightly wrong. Sometimes they go horribly wrong. How do you share the story for learning or to help others without also spreading the trauma?

If you have ever spoken to someone immediately after a highly distressing event, you may know what I mean by their story being “raw”. The words tumble out quickly, or not at all. The order is disjointed and may not make sense. Parts of the experience are repeated, as if not yet spoken, because the person has not yet registered what happened. Most listeners will also feel the emotional pain of the account.

That is not a story. There is a difference between sharing a coherent tale of an event, and the immediate discharging of experience.

Listening at this point can be really helpful. By talking about what happened, people are often beginning to sort out the memories, let go of the initial emotional charge and build a narrative that make sense of what happened. Talking through a painful experience is one of the ways we make a useful story.

However, there are also risks to both parties. For example, if the listener is not able to cope themselves they may react in a way that is problematic, such as dismissing the severity, encouraging positivity or expressing a need to move on before the person is ready. That can make it even harder for the person to process what happened. Also, under some conditions, a person who has just been through a potentially traumatic event may even unintentionally traumatise themselves; because talking about what happened may mean reliving it.

We can also share post-traumatic stress. It is possible for loved-ones to be left with ongoing issues arising from absorbing the account of an event that happened to someone they care about.

And yet, talking about what happened is our greatest source of both healing and sharing learning. We retain them readily. Our ability to learn and bond through stories is set within our cognitive architecture.

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Fractions of stories:

When I work with people with post-traumatic stress, there are usually stuck thoughts: often running in a loop. Sometimes these show up as recurrent nightmares or flashbacks. These are self-sustaining loops of electrical activity in the brain that replay the experience. Verbally, these loops tend to take the shape of linear descriptions of events, stripped of complexity, focused on themes like vulnerability, responsibility, control, or self-worth. A simple: I am or They are a bad person. I should have done X. They should have done Y. But those phrases so the mind naturally runs to the next thought, as it tries to make a better outcome.

Often people will say things like, I’m a bad person. I should have done more. I should have known. Or, They failed me. They let it happen. These kinds of stuck statements are usually attempts to explain something painful, but in doing so, they narrow the narrative down to something simple, often centred on blame: either of self or others. They might also be frozen in helplessness, a sense of being overwhelmed or unable to act. These are not integrated reflections. They don’t resolve what happened, they don’t remove the pain. They’re fragments trying to make sense of what happened in a way that is less painful than it actually was, but each time the mind does this, it hits the wall of reality, and has to loop around again.

When a story is shared too soon, or in an unhelpful place, it can pass on these inherited fears, negative beliefs about self, other, or world; it can seed rigid, rule-based behaviours that are hard to sustain, and leave behind anxiety or held stress. Maybe you can think of someone who is clearly tense around a particular activity, and has developed protections that actually make things more risky? Or having to do something in a certain, and odd, way because of that one time someone got hurt? Sometimes the changes are really useful, but often the changes that come from avoidance of distress are not fully formed. The opportunity to really learn is missed when we don’t process the experience.

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Sharing stories of traumatic events and near misses can heal the person it happened to. It can also raise awareness that prevents others from facing similar experiences. But if stories are shared too soon and too widely without boundaries, they can hurt. And they can perpetuate unhelpful processes that generate future risk.

So stories can heal, and stories can harm.

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I once found myself involved in a diving incident, as a first-aider/bystander, where we were rescuing a diver unknown to me. It was a severe event. The diver did not survive. Afterwards, I had the kinds of reactions you’d expect: vivid images from the incident returning unbidden, feelings of self-doubt, and a sadness for the diver’s family.

I wrote that story up for a Divers Alert Network blog. I didn’t pour the content of my experience onto the reader. I didn’t describe the graphic details of what I saw. Instead, I waited. I let those experiences settle. When I felt I had processed enough to extract the learning, I wrote a long piece that gave enough context and clarity for others to understand what had happened, and hopefully to learn from it, without inheriting the pain. That is what it means to heal the wound before sharing the scar.

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The distinction here is important. In the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model (developed within EMDR therapy) problems occur when a potentially traumatic experience is not fully processed and integrated. Instead of being filed away in the brain’s broader memory networks, it remains isolated, vivid, and raw, often disconnected from time and meaning. When we process a difficult event, we’re not forgetting it. We’re linking it to the rest of our understanding: placing it within context, so that it no longer feels like it’s still happening. A processed experience can be shared. An unprocessed one tends to spread pain, blame, hate and shame.

Context-rich stories are essential to healthy processing. They allow the brain to link events through circumstance, cause, and culture: connecting what happened with why it happened, and how similar or different situations might arise. These stories tap into adaptive networks in the brain and are more likely to promote learning and resilience. In contrast, context-poor stories are typical of trauma, because they’re missing the clear and necessary connections. They offer raw data, but no scaffolding. A person might say, “It was chaos,” or “I couldn’t stop it,” but without the surrounding frame, the listener can’t see what went wrong or how to prevent it. And worse, they may internalise the emotional charge without understanding the mechanics.

And the charge can move, like electricity.

Sharing a fresh wound too soon sets of a cascade of suffering. In diving, our community is small, but its global. As the pain travels, via the internet, thousands are pushed into defending themselves from being touched by it.

Early social media posts after a diving incident reflect these psychological defenses. Brains sense the threat to ourselves and our identity scramble to distance and put up the wall of how “this would not happen to me”. We do this with language, a cognitive barrier to protect our egos. Common stories revolve around blame, because if we can place the fault somewhere cleanly, then it feels like its under control, the pain has been contained: over “there”, not “here”.

The first story is a barrier to the hurt. But once you put up a wall, you lose contact with what is on the other side, and so the first story also becomes a barrier collective healing, … to learning.

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So how do you share the story without spreading the trauma?

You share it in psychologically safe environments: i.e. spaces where the people listening are resourced, grounded, and able to receive it.
Where there are boundaries around what’s being shared.
With consideration of what the listener might need to know, and what they don’t. With space to share only what is ready to be shared.

This is sharing for the purpose of healing.

Psychological safety here means that people feel safe to engage, ask questions, and reflect, without fear of judgement or retribution. It also means being mindful of how much distress the story may carry, and whether the listener has the capacity to hold it.

For a minor disturbance, a near-miss on a dive perhaps or an embarrassing communication error, then the routine debrief can be the place that sharing is done. For a more impactful diving accident, where people are hurt, then that more formal structures are needed to hold that space.

In high-risk domains like diving, Gareth Lock’s work* on safety and storytelling has highlighted how blame cultures, legal fears, and poor communication systems make story-sharing even harder. He argues for a Just Culture: where stories can be shared for learning, not blame allocation; and for creating environments that support openness, not silence.

Because stories don’t just live inside us. Once shared, they travel. They can teach others. They can shift cultures. But only when they’re ready.

Movement through pain into meaning, when navigated well, enables the story to live beyond the individual without transmitting the raw distress. It’s a cycle of stuckness to integration, from private pain to shared insight.

The cycle of experience, pain, processing, and meaning doesn’t have to end within the individual. It can be stretched across a community. But only if what we pass on is the scar, not the open wound.

*This article was inspired by the title of Gareth Lock’s thesis, “Storytelling to Learn: What happens underwater, stays underwater”.