"This House Really Sucks Right Now:" Analyzing the Discourse of Adolescent Chronic Stress

Abstract

As more and more attention is paid both by researchers and the public to emotional trauma and its lasting psychological and somatic effects, people are beginning to engage with past experiences and ask themselves: did I experience trauma? This emergent study was borne out of that question, and through discourse analysis of a participant’s online blog, wherein she documented life as an adolescent in a household that was chronically stressful due in part to her sibling’s mounting behavioral issues and her parents’ fracturing marriage, this study initially sought to center questions of trauma. Through a grounded approach to the data analysis, questions of the family instead became central. Framed by Gubirum and Holstein’s (1990) theory of family discourse, which states that family is a social object constructed through interlocutors’ descriptive practice, the mundane ways in which they construct and negotiate realities through language, this study identifies the participant’s tacit cultural expectations of family and its functions, and where those were violated. Themes of metonymy, minimization, parentification, self-silencing, and secret keeping are analyzed, and inform each other in a reciprocal relationship as the participant constructs herself as a "good daughter” and her family as a dysfunctional object by means of her descriptive practice.