Recovering from Silence. Composing Self in Time, Spaces, and Friendships: A Narrative Inquiry with Four Mothers Supporting Adolescent Children through Long-Term Addictions Treatment

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2015-08-26
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Abstract
Addiction is a complex and growing phenomenon that affects many people in many different contexts. Mothering a child through long-term addiction treatment is an under-researched context. This study is a narrative inquiry into the experiences of four mothers parenting children through long-term addiction treatment. Narrative inquirers explore experience by attending to features of temporality, sociality, and place as they feature in stories that are both lived and told. During 12 months of narrative inquiry fieldwork, four participants and myself inquired into their experiences as mothers of children with addictions. Four narrative accounts of these experiences are presented. These co-composed accounts speak powerfully to participants’ experiences on complex personal, familial, social, and addiction landscapes. The narrative accounts provide a basis for theorizing four narrative threads: navigating complexities; loud silences; living within one another’s stories, and; places, spaces, and the in-between. This dissertation concludes in the midst of participants’ lives. Recommendations for practice, research, and narrative inquiry fieldwork are made.
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Nursing
Citation
Smith, J. (2015). Recovering from Silence. Composing Self in Time, Spaces, and Friendships: A Narrative Inquiry with Four Mothers Supporting Adolescent Children through Long-Term Addictions Treatment (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27562