The Body, Identity, and Self: Adapting To Impairment

TLDR

Chronic illness disrupts the unity between body and self, forcing individuals to continually adapt by altering life, accepting bodily losses, and confronting ongoing challenges. The article aims to explain how body, identity, and self intersect during illness by detailing the process of adapting. The authors analyze 115 interviews and 25 focused interviews using grounded theory, outlining a three‑stage adapting process: defining impairment, making bodily assessments and identity trade‑offs, and surrendering to the sick self. The study finds that adapting is a repeated, ongoing process rather than a single event.

Abstract

Serious chronic illness undermines the unity between body and self and forces identity changes. To explicate how the body, identity, and self intersect in illness, one mode of living with impairment, adapting, is explicated in this article. Adapting means altering life and self to accommodate to bodily losses and limits and resolving the lost unity between body and self. It means struggling with rather than against illness. The process of adapting consists of three major stages: (1) experiencing and defining impairment, (2) making bodily assessments and, subsequently, identity trade-offs, as ill people weigh their losses and gains and revise their identity goals, and (3) surrendering to the sick self by relinquishing control over illness and by flowing with the experience of it. Adapting seldom occurs only once. Rather chronically ill people are forced to adapt repeatedly as they experience new losses. The data consist of 115 interviews about experiencing chronic illness and 25 more focused interviews about the body in chronic illness. The strategies of grounded theory provided the methods for completing the analysis.