7 - Managing one's self

Summary

Many examples so far show how when people are trying to make sense of a situation, they run an intrapersonal dialogue. So far the dialogues have been between a person's inner self and their perceptions of events external to them. This chapter covers the final two types of situation movement states that participants described. It examines those situations when people were focusing on parts of their inner self – their bodily needs, emotions and perceptions and how to interpret these. This final group of situation movement states is therefore labelled “self-relating-to-self”. Under this heading, we look at the patternings of communicative behaviours described by participants whose main situational focus was developing a sense of personal identity. As Dervin (1993: 114) says, “here the individual is thinking, creating, observing, arriving at personal sense and understandings of self”. Two situation movement states shared this focus: Drifting and Tightrope.

Following the procedure used in Chapters 5 and 6, I will present a reading of each situation movement state identifying how people's actions and reactions reflected the Catholic gender regime, each followed by a summary description of that type of power relation. As before, the summaries are structured using the five-dimensional model to account for each aspect of experiencing: body; feelings and sensations; perceptions; dispositions; and motivations/volitions. This chapter marks the end of Part II of this book, analysing participants' narratives about their experiences and identifying the processes they negotiated in order to move through conflicted situations.