Recoveries in Language

After my interview with the nutritionist, I thought of some new questions regarding the recovery process. There must be a difference between someone who is fully recovered and someone who is on their way to recovery, or even someone who believes they’re recovered but really aren’t. It was my good fortune when I came across the article “Narrating Anorexia: ‘Full’ and ‘Struggling’ Genres of Recovery” by Merav Shohet which, through a narrative process, explores how “women treated for anorexia reframe their illness and recovery experiences.”

In the case of the Full Recovery Genre, Shohet explains, there is a process by which one must transform their debilitated self into a self more capable of overcoming life’s unforeseen events. Alternatively, the Struggling Recovery genre tells of a past, present, and imagined future self continuously in conflict with each other, where no stage experiences true progress toward a new self. Sometimes, the person considers herself an agent or driving force to become healthy, but other times remains an experiencing patient unable to free herself from the disease and transcend into a new self.

Although full and struggling recoveries represent different aspects of the process as a whole, both suggest that recovery is equally an individual and social process. In these processes, I recognized that language plays a leading role in determining, from an outsiders perspective, what recovery stage the person is at. While the full recovery patients spoke with certainty and affiliation with institutional narratives, the struggling recovery patients spoke with weak cognitive verbs and without certainty. A few examples of their speech are as follows:

Struggling Recovery: So like whenever I feel like the expectations[…]
And(.) and… that was my way of sort of…getting out of it.
So that was my way our, I think.

Full Recovery: But I know the nature of my…being, being… obsessive compulsive
disorder, perfectionist nature, divorced family, alcoholism, addiction, all that… I was a prime candidate.

As you can see, there is a direct difference between the language the full recoverer uses and the struggling recoverer uses, which enables us to see a difference in the stages of their lives.


Citations

Shohet, Merav. "Narrating Anorexia: 'Full' and 'Struggling' Genres of Recovery"
ETHOS Vol. 35, Issue 3, pp. 344–382, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association.