You're always in a dream : an ethnographic study of womens' experiences of marriage to alcoholic husbands

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dc.contributor.authorBanister, Betty Marieen_US
dc.date.accessioned2024-08-13T00:07:00Z
dc.date.available2024-08-13T00:07:00Z
dc.date.copyright1991en_US
dc.date.issued1991
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of Psychological Foundations in Education
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies
dc.degree.levelMaster of Arts M.A.en
dc.description.abstractThe purpose of this ethnographic study was to develop knowledge about how alcoholics' wives live out, interpret, and express the experience of living with an alcoholic husband. My intent was to remain as close as possible to the lived experience of five alcoholics' wives--all at mid­life. In this endeavor, I employed the vocabulary used by five women as they described the structure of their experience to me. I wanted to broaden the lens of co-dependency, an explanatory theme used in alcohol treatment programs and recent pop' literature to define the wives' difficulties. The stories told to me by five informants were analyzed and presented in three common recurring themes: constantly being on guard; being in a pit; and push and pull. The themes refer to the inner and outer forms of experience that comprise the women's existence. They reflect emotionality, temporality, autonomy, trust, self­-blame, weakening of self, dependency, powerlessness, female inferiority, isolation, separation, loss, and insulation. I chose Spradley's (1979) ethnographic interviewing methodology to search for thought and behavior as interwoven strands of meaning. The ethnographic method allowed me to explore the experience of marriage to an alcoholic by examining the culture of five alcoholics' wives. Culture in this sense refers to the shared context of five women's life worlds. Meaning embedded in the language of the five informants was interpreted for an intended audience of counsellors. Suggestions for counsellors include consideration of how internalization of cultural norms and the interactional dynamics of the marital relationship seriously affect the wives' experience. Entrapment in an alcohol-dependent marriage fosters a lived experience of fear--particularly fear of change. Counsellors need to be cognizant of and respect alcoholics' (i.e. suppressed beliefs, weakened could be employed wives' immense barriers against change emotions, social pressures, cultural self). Further, therapeutically ethnographic questions to understand clients' meaning systems. Finally, ethnographic questioning could be integrated into counsellor training programs to raise trainees' awareness of the significance of clients' use of language. What stood out from this study is evidence of a complex interaction in the experience of the alcoholic's wives involving internalization of cultural expectations, weakening of self, and embeddedness in an alcohol-dependent marriage.
dc.format.extent159 pages
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/17148
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Weben_US
dc.titleYou're always in a dream : an ethnographic study of womens' experiences of marriage to alcoholic husbandsen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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