Empowering Narratives: Making Sense of the Experience of Growing Up with Chronic Illness or Disability

Abstract

Persons growing up with chronic illness or physical disability face critical and often stigmatizing physical, psychological, and social challenges that persist into adulthood and result in their experiencing themselves as different from others. The communication surrounding those with chronic health conditions has a major impact on this experience of difference and on holistic health and well-being. A grounded theory analysis of eight autobiographical narratives of persons with chronic conditions revealed four themes characterizing the experience of difference in reference to the communication that surrounded it, and demonstrated that their authors, in and through their communication, were active agents in reconstructing and redefining their own and others' understandings of different selves. A grounded theory of shifting reconstructions of different self emerged from this analysis.