ICPR Abstracts: Session 41

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Session 41: Symposium

Relationships as Stories

To Tell or Not to Tell Our Stories 
of Past Relationship Losses

John H. Harvey, Julia Omarzu, and Mike Uematsu
University of Iowa

This paper will focus on people's telling of relationship 
stories of loss to others with whom they are forming new 
close relationships. This topic will be approached from the 
framework of 'minding,' account-making, and confiding, 
and how people use such stories in the processes of 
acquaintance, personal grieving, and interpersonal 
influence. Confiding about past relationship losses will be 
discussed as a crucial self-disclosure in the courtship 
phase of relating. Factors that lead to more or less 
confiding will be noted, including discussion of: What 
happens when too little confiding about such matters 
occurs in courtship? Can too much be confided? How 
critical is the reciprocal nature of such confiding?


Writing Emotionally and Evocatively About Our 
Relationship Losses

Carolyn S. Ellis
University of South Florida

This paper will discuss the writing of Final Negotiations: 
A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness as a personal 
loss narrative. This book details my nine-year relationship 
with a chronically-ill partner, who died in 1985 from 
emphysema. The central story focuses on the interplay of 
chronic illness relationships and brings the reader into the 
day-to-day reality of coping with progressive disease and 
negotiating a shifting relationship. I will discuss how 
writing evocatively, emotionally, and candidly about our 
own relationship losses provides for authors a method of 
inquiry, understanding, and restorying ourselves. For 
readers, personal loss narratives provide companionship in 
coping with situations of loss, and the stories stimulate 
moral imagination, relational insight, and emotional 
understanding.


Becoming a Parent: Meaning and 
Psychological Well-Being

Terri L. Orbuch
University of Michigan

Bruner (1986) argues that stories represent ways in which 
people organize views of themselves, of others, and of the 
world around them. Asking people to give 
accounts/narratives of their relationships or other 
significant events in their life is a major avenue for 
depicting these meanings. In the present study, I analyze 
stories that married couples tell about the experience of 
becoming a parent. I argue that the particular meaning 
couples attach to the experience of becoming a parent 
provides insight into the psychological aspects of their 
ongoing marital and parental experiences.
        The data for this study were collected from a 
representative sample of Black and White first marriages 
in an urban county. Findings indicate that there are 
patterns of meaning for the overall sample. There are also 
significant differences between Black couples and White 
couples in the ways in which they construct meaning about 
the parental experience. The results demonstrate that 
specific dimensions of the stories relate to overall well-
being in the marriage and in the parental role.


The Storied Experience of Dividing Families: Raw 
Data and Reflective Renderings

Pam L. Secklin
Northeast Louisiana University

This paper explores personal narratives from adolescent 
and preadolescent children of divorce. In the effort to 
engage outside interpreters of the story, I invite the reader 
and/or listener to enter into the children's experiences of 
parental divorce by offering a mosaic of voices that 
integrates children's narrative truths with researcher 
reflections and emotions. Thus, the "storied relationship" 
is between participant and researcher. Presented here in 
dialogue, the voices represent a merging and blending of 
the storied interview experiences with my own immediate 
responses and later reflections and feelings for my 
participants.

Discussant
Arthur Bochner
University of South Florida