: First off: Since you exclude rape from the possible sources of trauma for your heroine, I don't think any other trauma is exclusively female, unless you go for the death of an unborn child.

@Karen856

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First off: Since you exclude rape from the possible sources of trauma for your heroine, I don't think any other trauma is exclusively female, unless you go for the death of an unborn child. a.k.a. miscarriage. (Which, in my opinion, is even more of a cliché than rape. I'm a woman, and I get seriously annoyed whenever women in fiction are reduced to the mother role.)

However, when I wrote the comment above I thought: What is rape really about? It's not about sex. Wounds heal, but the reason rape victims are traumatized by their experience is the feeling of utter help- and powerlessness. When being raped, you are deprived of all the power you thought you had over your body and hence your life. You are reduced to a mere object without will, and possibly without a right to feelings. In the last consequence, rape shatters the identity between your will and your personality.

I hope you can agree that such an experience would be apt to scar your heroine very effectively and would also win her the sympathies of your readers.

However: Since you reject rape, let's think of something that is not rape but creates a similiar feeling of powerlessness. What else is there that instills us with help- and hopelessness? War: Feeling like a worthless pawn on a chess bord. Natural disasters: Just think of hurricane Katrina and Linkin Park's "The little Things give you away". Disease: Alzheimer's for example destroys your personality and there's nothing you can do about it. So if you want to go with the notion of a powerless heroine, you could just pick the situation that fits your story best, or simply is most interesting and engaing tou you.

Lastly: The symbol. Once you have identified the experience that scared your heroine, it should be straight forward to find a symbol that can represent this experience. War: A pair of worn boots, the sound of gunfire, a certain smell of dust, a posture in another person that hints at former military service, a phrase uttered in a foreign language. Natural disasters: A certain color of the sky, another shade of smell. Disease: Pretty straight-forward, but: a scar, a limp, a tiny stutter or another kind of speech impair that never quite left your heroine. What I try to point out is: Unless you have very good reasons for your symbol to be objective (and why would it be, to throw it away at some point? Nice idea, but then you can't just throw away memories, can you?), consider making it not objective.

For me, for example, there's nothing as much a symbol of Norway but a certain type of weather that brings out the full fresh smell of conifer forests. It's not something I can see or something I can touch, but it's there nevertheless, it's personal, and it's strong.

Hope that helped.

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