Abstract
The present study explores how personal network members manage information related to hurtful experiences. The study uses communication privacy management (CPM) theory as the theoretical framework for a theme analysis of responses of disclosers of hurtful experiences and confidants regarding how they manage information related to a hurtful experience. Results of the thematic analysis provide insight into the process by which people disclose a hurtful experience with a personal network member, establish rules for sharing information, manage privacy boundaries, and deal with privacy turbulence. Findings illuminate the unique challenges and circumstances present in the context of hurtful experiences. The implications for coping with a hurtful experience and extending CPM theory are discussed.
Keywords
When people experience hurtful events, such as betrayal, criticism, or rejection, they likely talk to others about these events to help make sense of them (Goldsmith & Parks, 1990). Sharing information about hurtful experiences presents a unique challenge because individuals could be distressed and uncomfortable when talking about the incident and yet they are in need of support and encouragement (Eaton & Sanders, 2011). Furthermore, individuals might consider information about hurtful experiences to be private because they may be embarrassed by the experience, they do not want to be judged about their feelings, or they simply do not want others to know that the experience occurred (Caughlin, Afifi, Carpenter-Theune, & Miller, 2005). There has been much work on understanding hurtful events but less about how people confide in others and manage private information about the event. Examining this process has the potential to contribute to the scholarly knowledge on hurtful experiences and privacy management as well as provide practical guidance for these situations.
Accordingly, we utilize communication privacy management (CPM) theory (Petronio, 1991, 2002, 2013) as a theoretical framework to address the processes by which people negotiate and manage personal and collective boundaries around private information. There is a large body of literature on how people manage private information related to postmarital dating (Miller, 2009), financial family caregiving (Plander, 2013), same-sex marriage (Lannutti, 2013), and emotions during privacy turbulence (McLaren & Steuber, 2013). Understanding how personal network members manage information related to hurtful experiences is important to effectively addressing the stress, emotions, and relational difficulties that often accompany such experiences. In this article, we explore how people who experienced a hurtful event or message (hereafter referred to as disclosers), or were a confidant to someone who experienced a hurtful event, manage information within their personal networks.
Hurtful experiences
The potential for hurtful communication exists in nearly every relationship, but especially within close relationships, as people report feeling hurt most frequently by people closest to them (Miller, 1997). Hurt is a distinct emotional experience marked by psychological injury or pain (Leary & Leder, 2009). The causes of hurt feelings are diverse, and people report feeling hurt by rejection, betrayal, criticism, personal attacks, and humiliation (Vangelisti, Young, Carpenter-Theune, & Alexander 2005). Research also shows that people respond to hurt feelings in a number of ways (e.g., Vangelisti & Crumley, 1998), ranging from processing their emotions in private to confronting the offender (e.g., Miller & Roloff, 2005). Since hurtful incidents are emotionally painful, it is likely that individuals cope with hurt by disclosing information about their experience with people close to them (Metts, Braithwaite, & Fine, 2009), but research has not examined this process. Confiding in others about hurtful events might pose a disclosure dilemma, and people might desire support but also want to keep information about these experiences private. For example, if someone was being teased for being overweight that individual might be hesitant to let others know the reason for feeling hurt because it could cause embarrassment. Thus, the main goal of this article is to examine the communicative processes and challenges surrounding the management of information related to hurtful experiences.
CPM theory
CPM (Petronio, 1991, 2002, 2013) provides an appropriate theoretical framework for studying how individuals share and manage information related to hurtful experiences with personal network members. As a communicatively enacted rule-based system, CPM uses a boundary metaphor to explain how individuals separate the private information they hold and the public information they share with others (Petronio, 2002). The theory has recently been streamlined to include three main components (Petronio, 2013). The first component of CPM is privacy ownership, which refers to the boundaries around individuals’ private information. Information is viewed as a commodity and people feel they have a right to own and regulate their private information. People regulate their private information through privacy control, which involves making decisions to reveal or conceal information based on criteria and conditions that they perceive as salient in a given circumstance (Petronio, 2002). In this way, people’s boundaries around their private information can vary in permeability. When people share information, they make others co-owners of the information. They might also choose to establish privacy rules to mark the boundaries of the information and their preferences for how the co-owner should handle the private information. The third component is privacy turbulence, which occurs when boundaries become asynchronous or people mishandle private information. Privacy turbulence can encourage corrective action to return a sense of order to boundary coordination (Petronio, 2002). The concepts of privacy control and privacy turbulence are of particular importance in the present study.
Personal network members as confidants
The empirical work on CPM is vast, as the theory has been applied to a number of contexts utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods. One area of scholarly research has focused on disclosure decisions, referring to the factors that people consider when deciding whether to disclose information and who they want to tell (Caughlin et al., 2005). Disclosing private information can be risky for individuals, so disclosers often possess multiple goals for what, how, when, and to whom they want to disclose information (e.g., Afifi & Steuber, 2009; Petronio, 2002). Coates and Winston (1987) note that sharing information about high stress experiences often creates a dilemma of “how to disclose enough of one’s misery to gain the benefits such revelations can provide, without disclosing in such a way or to such an extent that it will drive others away” (p. 230). Such dilemmas encompass what information to share as well as challenges about who can know personal information. For example, children who were sexually abused explained that a lack of trust, responsiveness, and understanding in potential confidants caused them to further protect the boundaries surrounding information related to the abuse (Petronio, Flores, & Hecht, 1997).
Hurtful experiences might motivate disclosers to seek people whom they trust to provide the type of support they desire (Burleson & Goldsmith, 1998). Support from personal network members might be particularly salient and valuable for emerging adults, the population involved in our study (Azmitia, Syed, & Radmacher, 2013). However, some confidants might be better than others at providing the necessary support to deal with the information related to a person’s hurtful experience. McBride and Bergen (2008) found that even after receiving information they did not want to hear, some confidants were able to comfort, support, and give advice to their friends. Described by Petronio (2000) as coping behaviors, confidants enact these behaviors for various reasons, but they ultimately fulfill expectations for how friends should provide social support. Accordingly, our first research question refers to how people make confidants co-owners of information related to their hurtful experience:
Coordinating information related to hurtful experiences
After individuals disclose private information related to a hurtful experience, they have opened their boundary and allowed access to the information. It is likely that after the initial revealing, disclosers and confidants engage in subsequent interactions concerning emotions and outcomes related to the hurtful experience. For example, disclosers and confidants might discuss how the discloser is feeling, what has changed since the experience, or how the discloser should interact with the offender. According to CPM, these subsequent interactions would involve, either explicitly or implicitly, coordination of boundaries surrounding information related to the hurtful experience.
One way to manage boundaries is through managing the permeability of a personal or a collective boundary (Petronio, 2002). First, people might decide not to disclose all of the information related to their hurtful experience and maintain relatively thick personal boundaries. Plander (2013) found that adult children perceived their parents to have thick boundaries and high control goals for their financial information, until they got to a point of needing care or assistance from their adult children. Just like feeling vulnerable when revealing personal finances, people experiencing hurt might face disclosure dilemmas because they do not want to appear weak or in the wrong. For managing the collective boundaries, people often rely on either explicit or implicit privacy rules (Petronio, 2002). Explicit rules provide direct and clear expectations for handling the private information and can include information about who the information can be shared with, how much of the information can be revealed, and time conditions surrounding the information, such as whether it is okay to reveal information at a later date (Petronio, 1991). People also rely on implicit rules for managing information, which might mean that disclosers only use hints or vague references to their expectations (Petronio, 1991). Research suggests that if owners perceive their information to be more negatively valenced and of greater importance, then there is a greater use of more explicit and implicit privacy rules (Venetis et al., 2012). However, recent research has shown that people often rely on implicit understandings or assumptions about how to handle information (Steuber & McLaren, 2015). Given the emotionally sensitive nature of hurtful experiences and the ambiguity surrounding the use of explicit and implicit privacy rules, we propose the following research question.
Privacy turbulence
Privacy turbulence might occur as disclosers and confidants wade through the complex processes of responding to hurtful experiences. For example, a discloser might assume that his or her confidant will not share the information, but due to rule ambiguity, the confidant shares the discloser’s hurtful experience with a third party. This is especially likely to occur in the context of the social sharing of emotion. For example, Christophe and Rimé (1997) found that when people shared emotional stories with others, the story induced emotions in the confidants as well, which prompted them to share the information with someone else. This secondary social sharing was more likely to be repetitive and with a number of different targets when confidants heard highly intense emotional experiences (Christophe & Rimé, 1997). In the language of CPM, these would be incidents of privacy turbulence. Thus far, the work on CPM has not explicitly considered how hearing private information that is emotionally charged might contribute to privacy breaches. In addition to emotional reasons for privacy turbulence, other possibilities are that confidants might not recognize that the hurtful incident is private information. Alternatively, they might seek outside help in an effort to assist the discloser with the problem. This breakdown in the management system requires that the co-owners address the issue in order to facilitate successful coordination in the future.
In the next section, we describe a study designed to answer the research questions and give insight into the process of managing private information related to hurtful experiences.
Method
Participants completed an online questionnaire with closed-ended and open-ended questions pertaining to managing information related to a hurtful event they experienced in the past or an event that someone else confided in them about.
Participants
Participants were 190 undergraduate students recruited from communication courses at a large Midwestern university. Participants included 49 males (25.8%) and 135 females (71.1%), while 6 participants (3.2%) did not specify their sex. The average age of participants was 20.98 years (SD = 1.47). A majority of the participants reported a single ethnicity within categories including European American (n = 157, 82.6%), Asian American (n = 10, 5.3%), Hispanic (n = 7, 3.7%), African American (n = 2, 1.5%), and “other” (n = 2, 1.5%). A smaller number of participants reported more than one ethnicity (n = 12, 6.3%). Participants received a nominal amount of extra credit for participating in the study.
Procedures
At the beginning of the survey, participants chose whether they wanted to respond to questions about a hurtful event that happened to them (disclosers, n = 124, 65.2%) or a hurtful event of a close personal network member (confidants, n = 66, 34.7%). Thus, disclosers and confidants were not paired in this study, but all participants described a hurtful experience and the subsequent way that the information related to that experience was handled. Disclosers reported being hurt most often by a romantic partner (39.3%) or friend (31.1%). The next most frequently reported offender was the “other” category (13.1%), with some examples including “roommate” and “friend with benefits.” Most disclosers shared information about these hurtful experiences with a friend (59.7%), followed by a parent (15.3%) or a romantic partner (6.5%). Confidants reported that the people who disclosed the hurtful experience were mostly friends (75.8%) or romantic partners (13.8%).
Measures
Participants responded to open-ended questions about how information about a hurtful experience was disclosed, what rules developed concerning the information, and how they managed the information with their personal network member. Specifically, the questionnaire was designed to answer the research questions about co-owning information, boundary coordination, and privacy turbulence. For example, to explore how disclosers shared information about their hurtful experience, we asked the following question: What specifically occurred during the interaction when you first told your confidant about this hurtful event or situation? Describe how the conversation came about. What did you and your confidant say?
The relevant closed-ended measure for this study was 1 item used to assess possible privacy turbulence. Disclosers responded “yes” or “no” to a screening question asking whether the confidant mishandled information about the hurtful experience. Most disclosers (n = 97, 79.5%) reported “no” that they could not recall a time when their confidant handled information not as they expected, while a smaller number of disclosers (n = 25, 20.5%) answered “yes”. Confidants responded to a similar question with only four confidants (6.3%) answering “yes” and the remaining answering “no” (93.7%).
Analysis
To analyze the data pertaining to the research questions, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Adopting a similar approach to researchers using CPM as a sensitizing theory (e.g., Plander, 2013; Thompson, Petronio, & Braithwaite, 2012), we utilized an inductive approach in order to “identify, analyze, and report patterns (themes) within data” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 83). The framework of CPM and our specific research questions helped guide the analysis process. First, both authors gained familiarity with the data by reading through all of the responses. The unit of analysis was each participant’s response to each question. Working independently, we began the process of open coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to find concepts that worked to illuminate the research question at hand by attending to the recurrence, repetition, and forcefulness found in the responses (Owen, 1984). In the next phase, we continued to refine our set of coding categories by constantly comparing them to the existing categories to see which concepts fit together and which ones required new themes to be created. We continued with this process of making higher level (primary themes) and lower level (secondary themes) categories until the point of theoretical saturation in which no new categories emerged (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). After the individual analysis, we convened to compare themes and revise the primary or secondary themes based on their heuristic value and theoretical importance to explaining the research questions. We engaged in several peer-debriefing sessions, one tool used to establish trustworthiness in qualitative research (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), including manuscript readings with colleagues familiar with CPM and thematic analysis in order to verify our interpretation of the data.
Findings and interpretation
The goal for this study was to explore how disclosers of hurtful experiences develop co-ownership with personal network members, how co-owners manage privacy boundaries surrounding this information, and how privacy turbulence occurs, if at all, when managing information related to the hurtful experience. Our analysis revealed a total of 6 primary themes about ownership, managing boundaries, and manifestations of turbulence and 13 secondary themes that provided further detail and richness to the primary themes.
RQ1: Developing co-ownership
The first research question focused on how disclosers of hurtful experiences make personal network members co-owners of information related their hurtful experience. Two primary themes emerged from the data, criteria for disclosure and characteristics of disclosure, with each containing secondary themes.
Criteria for disclosure
This theme captured the criteria that disclosers used to develop privacy rules about what to reveal, how to reveal, and to whom to reveal. Participants revealed in various channels including face-to-face, over the phone, and other mediated technologies, such as Skype. There were two secondary themes that further characterize the criteria people used for making rules about disclosing: emotional motivations and characteristics of the confidant. These factors are not mutually exclusive and participants indicated multiple criteria that motivated them to disclose.
One prominent reason that disclosers of hurtful experiences revealed information was because of emotional motivations. Disclosers described feeling intense emotions such as hurt, anger, and sadness. Disclosers described feeling so distraught that they felt they had to talk to someone else in order to cope. For example, one participant said, “I couldn’t keep my feelings inside anymore. I had been crying a lot” and another said, “Because I felt hurt and lost, and needed someone to talk to who would understand and help me through it, hopefully giving me some encouragement.” They disclosed to help them feel better, gain reassurance, or legitimize their feelings. As one discloser stated, “Venting about my problems and feelings helped me justify what was happening and made me feel better about the situation.” Using emotional states as a criterion allowed participants to develop a rule that if emotional distress reached a certain threshold then they would share their experience of hurt. Emotionally charged experiences fit into Petronio’s (2002) contextual criteria for privacy rule development in that traumatic events often shift one’s privacy rules toward more openness as a way to cope with distress.
The next secondary theme in criteria for disclosure captures how disclosers considered characteristics of the confidant in making privacy rules for disclosure. These qualities included being supportive, trustworthy, honest, a good listener, and saying the right things. For example, one participant stated that the confidant, “normally knows what to say to bring me back to reality, calm me down, and tell me what I should do to try and make it better.” Additionally, disclosers noted that the confidant’s relational role, such as being a mother or a best friend, made them a good target for disclosure. Participants said things such as, “She is my mom, so I can always know she will be there to offer advice and comfort me. No matter whether the situation is trivial or massive, I know she’ll be there to help me overcome the struggle or hurt” and “Because she [confidant] knows my entire relationship with this person and she is my best friend.” Therefore, based on the character and role of the confidant, disclosers are motivated to tell particular members of their personal network over others. This finding adds nuance to Petronio’s (2002) motivational criteria for privacy rule development and it supports research indicating the importance of confidant characteristics when making disclosure decisions (e.g., Derlega, Winstead, Matthews, & Braitman, 2008). Overall, the theme of criteria for disclosing provides depth of understanding about reasons why individuals choose to disclose, specifically in the context of experiencing hurt. This contributes to the established body of work surrounding disclosure decisions, secret keeping, and information management (e.g., Caughlin et al., 2005).
Characteristics of disclosure
The second primary theme captures characteristics of disclosure involved in the first time a single owner of information reveals any part of the information to another person, which marks a critical moment in how the management of the information will proceed. As theorized by Petronio (2002), one way to cope with traumatic experiences is to disclose information about the experience to someone else. The fever model of disclosure (Stiles, 1987) suggests that the cure for distress is catharsis and self-understanding that occurs through disclosure. Three secondary themes emerged from these data highlighting the importance of the disclosure timing, disclosure formality, and disclosure depth.
The disclosure timing included immediate disclosure, gradual disclosure, and copresence. A prominent theme was the need for immediate disclosure. Participants seemed compelled to talk about the hurtful experience right after it happened. As one participant wrote, “I immediately called her after the experience took place. I was crying hysterically and hyperventilating at the time, unable to catch my breath.” As evidenced in this quote, the immediacy of disclosing was usually coupled with emotional distress. A less prominent theme was the decision to reveal information about the hurt through gradual disclosure over a series of interactions. For example, one discloser describes slowly revealing her breakup to her mom by saying, “It took me awhile to slowly open up to my mom about my feelings and hurt, but I eventually shared everything with her from e-mails to texts, to actual conversations.” The final way that participants talked about disclosure timing was through copresence, meaning that disclosers and confidants were both present when the hurtful experience occurred. For example, one discloser said she told her friend about the hurtful experience “Because she was there with me and saw/heard everything.” Another discloser described that the confidant witnessed the event and thus was a co-owner: “My friend was there when the situation went down so she was there to comfort me right away after I had found out he had cheated after his poor treatment from previous weeks.” Rather than choosing to disclose information, these types of situations illuminate that co-ownership sometimes occurred merely because a person was present when the hurtful event happened.
Another manifestation of co-presence occurred when confidants noticed that the discloser was upset and asked questions. Petronio and Reierson (2009) refer to people who request information as deliberate confidants. Certain nonverbal cues often prompted confidants to ask questions, as seen in this quote: I just happened to run into her and she looked very upset so I asked her what was wrong and at first she said nothing but then she teared up so I gave her a hug and she began sobbing and asking “Why he would do this to me?” and “Why her?” she expressed feeling of betrayal and most of all confusion.
In addition to disclosure timing, people initiated co-ownership in ways that showed variation in the disclosure formality. Individuals described bringing up the experience casually, in everyday conversations. For example, one discloser stated, “I tell them everything so in a typical conversation over lunch I shared the troubles I have been having with my roommates and explained what happened that day.” Other disclosers planned out their disclosure more formally by setting up a particular time, location, or environment to share the experience with their confidant. For example, one confidant stated: A few days prior she said that she needed to meet up with me randomly one evening and then took it back and said she would tell me later and that she was going to bed. Then a couple days later she pulled me aside and started to cry and told me the story and that she needed to confide in someone or she was going to break down all the time. I glossed over some of the more damning aspects of my side of the conversation I had with my friend that terminated our friendship. Honestly, in my angry haze I couldn’t remember everything exactly, but I probably played down how rude and obstinate I was when my friend and I had our confrontation.
Ultimately, the way disclosers and confidants became co-owners of information related to hurtful experiences is captured by the two primary themes of motivations for disclosure and characteristics of disclosure. Each of the secondary themes highlights factors that either opened or constrained disclosures, similar to the dialectic present in decisions to reveal or conceal information (Petronio, 2002). Once disclosers of hurtful experiences and their confidants become co-owners of information, they enter a process of coordinating and managing personal and collective boundaries.
RQ2: Coordinating boundaries
The second research question focused on how disclosers and confidants manage personal and collective boundaries concerning information related to hurtful experiences. Two primary themes emerged from our analysis: use of privacy rules and rules are not needed.
Use of privacy rules
This theme captures how disclosers managed collective boundaries with confidants by expressing preferences or rules for handling information. There were two secondary themes: motivations for rule usage and explicitness of privacy rules.
Disclosers described many different motivations for rule usage, such as saving face and avoiding judgment. Specifically, disclosers said they used rules “to save my image” because “I did not want to be judged or any of our other family members to know details about what was going on” and “I didn’t want to come off as foolish to other people who didn’t know the whole story or how I was handling it.” Although people were seeking comfort and support, they were concerned about being perceived in negative ways by others, such as seeming “pathetic.” Many of the motivations for using rules when disclosing fit Petronio’s (2002) category of risk criteria. Making rules for personal and collective boundaries allowed disclosers to protect not only the information but also their identity as an emotionally stable and resilient individual.
Both disclosers and confidants reported about privacy rules, which ranged from vague to explicit. Some disclosers gave ambiguous instructions to the confidant. One discloser desired “That she did not share the information with a lot of people,” while another said, “keep it on the low.” Another discloser explains the rules she used: “Don’t bring it up. And try not talk too much about it with others, I wasn’t too strict on that.” Although some people used vague rules, other disclosers and confidants recalled rules that were explicit, such as “do not tell anyone” or “he told me to keep my mouth shut.” One discloser describes how she communicated her preferences by saying, “I wanted her advice, but I did not want her to gossip about the experience with outside parties so I told her not to say anything to anyone.” It is likely that disclosers used multiple criteria, especially ones previously discussed, for determining the amount of clarity and directness to use when coordinating collective boundaries.
Rules are not needed
The second primary theme about coordinating boundaries is evidenced by both confidants and disclosers reporting that for close relational partners rules are not needed to manage information about hurtful experiences. There were two secondary themes: reliance on relational norms and confidants as protective agents. The most prominent and repeated theme was that people did not use rules when talking about their hurtful experience. Participants reported that they did not need to state rules because rules are inherently connected to the concept of the relationship. Thus, a reliance on relational norms helped to guide the way they handled the private information. Many participants thought that if people are genuinely close, then they should know what to do in these situations without needing rules. One discloser responded to why she did not make rules by saying, “because she’s my best friend so rules shouldn’t have to be made. She should know how to make me feel better without them.” Another discloser expressed this sentiment about her sister, saying, “We are siblings, there are no rules.” As evidenced below, disclosers also reported that they had established rules over time with their confidants, especially when talking about sensitive matters. Me and DB already have a shared understanding about when we are talking that we won’t just share information with other people, so we don’t feel like it is necessary to establish rules every time we talk. There is a set of “unwritten rules” that we go by.
A related theme that surfaced in confidants’ responses reflected their belief that rules were unnecessary because they saw themselves as protective agents. Based on their role as confidants, they described taking an active role in protecting information. Disclosers often expect that co-owners will act as information guardians (Petronio, 2010), and our data showed that confidants take that role seriously. Even when disclosers’ preferences for privacy were implicit, ambiguous, or unknown, confidants guarded the private information. Confidants were quite perceptive when discerning how to handle the private information in the absence of rules from the discloser. One confidant evidenced this theme by stating: Although she [the discloser] did not express any preferences, the nature of the event made me prioritize privacy and protecting her feelings. I respected that she trusted me enough to confide in me and telling me not to tell anyone was completely unnecessary. I believe that she took it for granted that I would not repeat what she told me.
Confidants reported using many strategies to protect information including avoiding conversations, acting evasively, and sometimes lying. One confidant reported, “I always avoided any conversation where her information was brought up, shrugged my shoulders, or said ‘I don’t know’ about everything.” Another confidant described her role in helping keep the information private: “I promised that I would not tell others around us and just be there and act like things were ok with her and help her cover things up if needed.” As we have shown with the above exemplars, confidants often worked to maintain the collective boundary by taking responsibility for boundary protection even without explicit direction about how to do so.
RQ3: Privacy turbulence
In our third research question, we wanted to know how privacy turbulence occurs between disclosers of hurtful experiences and their confidants when managing information related to hurtful experiences. As we noted earlier, in response to a closed-ended question, most participants reported that no privacy turbulence occurred (about 85%). To answer RQ3, we focused on the responses of the disclosers and confidants that indicated the information was mishandled in some way. Their responses illuminate the challenges of boundary coordination and the burden that some confidants feel when they are entrusted with information and are unsure of how to handle it. The two primary themes are privacy breaches and ambiguity about privacy boundaries, and there were two secondary themes for each primary theme.
Privacy breaches
This theme illustrates how privacy turbulence occurred due to discrepancies in perceptions of the privacy boundaries. The explanations of these situations differed based on participants’ perspective as either a discloser or a confident, meaning that most disclosers tended to blame confidants for the privacy breach, whereas confidants tended to feel they were justified in the independent decisions they made about handling the information. Accordingly, the two secondary themes were confidants did not follow rules/preferences and greater permeability was warranted. Disclosers perceived privacy breaches when confidants did not match their preferences or follow their rules for managing information. For example, one discloser stated, “She told my sister something I had preferred her not to say.” Even when disclosers did not explicitly state their rules or preferences, the confidant was still held responsible for the breach. For example, one discloser seemed surprised by the confidant’s behavior, even though no explicit rules were stated: “She told other people because I didn’t tell her not to tell anyone but I assumed she wouldn’t tell even if I didn’t say those words.” These reports show the influence of implicit rule development and assumed rule adherence that close relational partners often take for granted.
The next secondary theme captures confidants’ perceptions that greater permeability was warranted in the collective privacy boundary. Even though these confidants admitted to breaking privacy rules, they felt it was justified because the discloser would not know, would not care, or would be benefited by the increased permeability. One confidant expressed how violating a boundary rule would not matter by saying: I did tell one person. I felt like it didn’t matter if I told my boyfriend because he does not know her very well, he doesn’t know anyone she is friends with or is close to, he is very trustworthy of information.
Ambiguity of privacy boundaries
The second primary theme points to situations where privacy turbulence occurred because of the ambiguity of privacy boundaries. This is different than when confidants intentionally committed a privacy breach for some reason they believe was justified. This theme was seen only in confidants’ responses, as it captures their feelings of uncertainty about the discloser’s information preferences, including the permeability of boundaries and who was already included in the boundary. There were two secondary themes showing the effects of the ambiguous privacy boundaries: confidant uncertainty and burden to confidant.
First, many of the responses revealed that the boundary ambiguity lead to confidant uncertainty about the discloser’s expectation for handling privacy boundaries. Confidants reported this doubt by stating: “I was uncertain of who I could share the information with. While it was personal, it was probably known to several other people in his life, I just wasn’t sure who.” Some confidants were confused about how to be an appropriate co-owner of the information, illustrated when one confidant said, “I was just treading carefully because I didn’t want to overstep a boundary or break a rule that she hadn’t told me about.” This uncertainty resulted in a lack of confidence about how to properly protect the privacy boundary and ultimately led to turbulence.
Finally, the ambiguity of the privacy boundaries also resulted in the information being a burden to confidants. For example, one confidant described how the discloser’s behavior put him in an awkward position to point of damaging the relationship: Of the experience as a whole, it eventually destroyed the friendship in the way he dealt with the whole situation. Like I had mentioned, I felt insulted, used, uncomfortable by his placing me in the middle of the whole breakup. Even when I would tell him that, he would still put me in the middle.
Discussion
The goal for the present study was to explore how personal network members manage information related to hurtful experiences. Using CPM theory (Petronio, 2002) as the theoretical framework, we conducted a thematic analysis to understand how people who experience a hurtful event disclose their experience to a third-party member in their personal network, manage privacy boundaries, and deal with privacy turbulence. These findings illuminate and extend the tenets of CPM, specifically highlighting what it means to manage private information related to hurtful experiences. In the following section, we discuss the relevance of our findings and the implications for hurtful experiences, CPM, and supportive communication.
Implications for hurt feelings and the urgency of disclosure
First, our findings imply that emotions play a crucial role in motivating people to talk to others about their hurtful experiences. Previous research on hurt has mainly focused on individual responses to hurt (Vangelisti & Crumley, 1998), or the victim–perpetrator differences in perceptions of the event (Feeney & Hill, 2006), and has paid considerably less attention the role that third parties play in supporting people when they are hurt. In this study, disclosers reported feeling intense emotions of hurt, anger, and sadness, which prompted them to seek out a confidant quickly. Similarly, work on the social sharing of emotion shows that people tend to share emotional experiences with others about 96% of the time and often very soon after the emotion-eliciting incident happened (Christophe & Rimé, 1997). Compared to events eliciting anger or sadness, hurtful events tend to be particularly surprising and difficult to understand (Fitness & Warburton, 2009), so confiding in others is important to facilitate sensemaking about the experience. Future research could delve more deeply into the emotional palette that people are feeling and how different combinations of emotions might result in differences in the way people cope or talk to others about the event. For example, perhaps other events, even if they are not hurtful, might be surprising enough to motivate people to disclose the information.
Our findings also point to the influence of emotions in the process of linking boundaries, which speaks to Petronio’s (2013) call to examine the role of emotions in privacy rule development and management. Perhaps due to the acute pain they were feeling, individuals in distress seemed to prioritize seeking support, with secondary concerns being related to privacy. Although some were hesitant initially or did withhold information that might be particularly face threatening, the emotional distress seemed to warrant sharing despite these risks. Disclosers sought out personal network members that they believed would be supportive and helpful in processing through their upsetting event. We contrast these findings with other work about disclosing secrets, where people emphasize the risk–benefit ratio in making disclosure decisions (e.g., Afifi & Steuber, 2009). Disclosers of hurtful experiences seemed more motivated by emotional management rather than weighing the costs and benefits of revealing information.
Implications for preferences for social support
Although preferences for social support were not the focus of this study, it is worth noting that participants mentioned several preferences for how they would like to be supported when disclosing information about their hurtful experience. They expressed a desire for the confidant to take their side, be honest, give them space, provide comfort, or affirm their perspective of the situation. They also expressed things that they wanted the confidant to avoid, including not judging, not meddling, not interrupting, and not bringing up the incident all the time. Finally, disclosers expressed dissatisfaction with some of the ways that confidants provided support, saying the confidant “just blew it over” or “She took his side on everything” or “I wish she would have been a little more understanding of how hurt I was.”
Although these remarks did not pertain to the research questions and thus were not part of the theme analysis, they illustrate important avenues for future research on the social sharing of emotion (Christophe & Rimé, 1997) and preferences for social support. Work on support inadequacy points to the gap between the support people desire and receive as being important for understanding whether support is effective or perceived as high quality (e.g., High & Steuber, 2014). Future research could examine what types of social support people wish to receive, depending on the underlying reasons for their hurt. For example, people might feel hurt due to being criticized and want esteem support, whereas others might feel hurt due to betrayal and want emotional support. This aligns with the optimal matching hypothesis, which states that support is more effective when it matches up with the stressor people are experiencing (Cutrona, 1990). Furthermore, research could examine the challenges for confidants in providing adequate support. As Radzik (2011) stated, “A virtuous bystander must strike the balance between moral laxity and vindictiveness, between compassion for the wrongdoer and solidarity with the victim, and between a concerned involvement with other people and respect for their privacy” (p. 202). Crafting a supportive response that addresses all those needs can be quite a challenge for confidants. We see many fruitful avenues for future research related to preferences for social support, including support adequacy and optimal matching, in the context of hurt.
Implications for CPM
Our findings confirm and expand theoretical components of CPM theory. It is evident that creating co-ownership, coordinating boundaries, and managing turbulence, especially in the context of information related to hurtful experiences, is a complex process that unfolds over time. Our findings suggest that disclosers of hurtful experiences and their confidants navigate a continual process of appraisal and calibration in order to manage private information. The initial decision to disclose a hurtful experience might be based on a careful evaluation of criteria for developing privacy rules or those criteria might be superseded by a desire to relieve emotional distress. Much of the privacy rule development about what and to whom to disclose might already been solidified as disclosers go to trusted confidants (indicated by the lack of explicit rules). However, as the coordination process continues, both disclosers and confidants likely appraise boundary permeability and coordination based on various criteria and recalibrate rules, boundaries, and roles if the appraisal does not meet expectations. Although the connection between the criteria for developing privacy rules and how those rules get implemented requires further research, our findings point to several related implications for characteristics of confidants, immediate linkages, boundary coordination, and privacy turbulence.
Confidant characteristics
This study implies that confidant characteristics are significant factors affecting disclosers’ decision to reveal information, which is consistent with CPM (Petronio, 2002). For example, Kelly (2002) found that appropriate confidants are ones who are trustworthy, nonjudgmental, and do not reject the discloser. Similarly, participants in the current study disclosed based on positive qualities of the confidant, such as being supportive, trustworthy, and being a good listener. Disclosers also selected confidants based on relational roles, such as close family members or friends. These confidants fit Petronio’s (2002) classification of inferential confidants, meaning that they are expected to receive disclosures of this nature, or should be comfortable enough to solicit them, based on their relational role. These inferential confidants also seemed to bring expectations about privacy management with them, as disclosers reported relying on the relational history with confidants to guide the expectations surrounding the private information.
Immediate linkages
Our findings also highlight an interesting potential disclosure dilemma that occurs when a confidant is present during the hurtful event, opening up possibilities for extending CPM theory. Some disclosers in our study described situations where the confidant was immediately a co-owner of the information because he or she was a witness to the hurtful event. Such findings expose a need for further theorizing about navigating co-ownership when the discloser and confidant are both present when the private event happens. We propose that these “immediate linkages” are possible sites of boundary confusion that require additional coordination strategies not previously discussed in CPM theory. First, immediate linkages pose challenges to the agency of discloser, who might not have shared the information with the person if he or she was not copresent during the event. We propose a new theoretical term of “coincidental disclosure,” meaning private information is revealed suddenly and without choice or agency from the primary owner. Second, immediate linkages create potential for adding complexity to the concept of reluctant confidants. A person involved in an immediate linkage not only might not want to own the information but also might feel pressured into providing support because she or he witnessed the private experience firsthand. Future research could explore other contexts where immediate linkages happen and consider the issues related to coincidental disclosure, reluctant confidants, and the challenges to effectively managing privacy boundaries under these conditions.
Managing personal and collective boundaries
Findings yielded insight into the process of managing both personal and collective boundaries. Disclosers described using thin and permeable boundaries with the confidant. They shared their hurtful experience in great depth and detail, which aligns with previous research showing that people disclose traumatic events to help cope with their distress (Stiles, 1987) rather than trying to protect information. Although sharing “the whole story” was a prominent theme, other disclosers decided to withhold information that they perceived as embarrassing or implicated their fault in the hurtful experience (i.e., face risks as described by Petronio, 2002). It appears that people coping with hurtful experiences struggle with a dialectic of support seeking and face-saving. The risks of losing face were often overcome with the need to reduce distress, thus creating permeable personal boundaries with the confidant.
In order to manage the collective boundary surrounding the discloser and confidant, a prominent theme was the use of implicit privacy rules based on the relational history and understanding between the discloser and confidant. As Petronio (1991) states, implicit rules can often come in the form of hints or unstated assumptions. Disclosers reported that rules were unnecessary either because friends should not have rules or that the confidant implicitly understood how to handle the information. Others conveyed that stating rules could be offensive to a confidant because it signals distrust. This corroborates Venetis and colleagues’ (2012) belief that disclosers use implicit rules when confiding in close others in an effort to avoid troubling the relationship. Disclosers in this study relied on relational history or cultural norms of what it means to be a good friend (e.g., McBride & Bergen, 2008) to make decisions about whether to explicitly state rules. Future research should continue to investigate the dialectic of explicit versus implicit collective boundary rules.
Although close relational partners generally worked to maintain the implicit rules based in social constructions of what it means to be a “good friend,” sometimes the use of implicit rules resulted in privacy turbulence. Confidants violated the discloser’s expectations, perhaps without even realizing it. Other studies have shown that even when using implicit rules, disclosers still blame the confidant the majority of the time for privacy breaches, stating that the confidant should have known better (Steuber & McLaren, 2015). Implicit rules also resulted in confidants feeling uncertain about the discloser’s expectations for handling the information. Despite feeling uncertain, confidants reported working hard to protect boundaries on the discloser’s behalf. Our analysis highlights that confidants take their role seriously and use a variety of strategies to protect the discloser’s information. Future research could continue to examine the effects of implicit rules on confidants’ boundary coordination behavior.
When explicit rules were used, our findings show that they were rather simplistic and not complete guidelines. Petronio (1991) states that explicit rules can take a variety of forms, including direct guidelines about all who to tell, how much of the information can be told, or the timing of the revelation. When explicit rules were rather one-dimensional, such as “don’t tell anyone,” confidants struggled with whether it was okay to talk to others who they thought already knew the information. In the following section, we discuss how the lack of explicit rules can pose privacy dilemmas and cause turbulence.
Privacy turbulence and boundary disruptions
Our findings contribute to understanding about how turbulence occurs as a result of differing perceptions of boundary permeability and a result of ambiguity or uncertainty about how to manage information. Recent research has examined communicative responses to privacy turbulence but only from a discloser’s perspective (e.g., McLaren & Steuber, 2013). In the present study, we analyzed confidant perspectives of turbulence to highlight the importance of seeing turbulence as a relationally negotiated phenomenon that does not exist in the mind of the discloser, but instead occurs in the struggle of coordinating privacy boundaries. As noted earlier in our analysis, privacy turbulence likely occurred as a result of differing perceptions of boundary permeability, mostly stemming from reliance on implicit, taken-for-granted rules about managing private information. Even when confidants admitted that they did violate some of the rules or expectations of the discloser, confidants tended to justify their privacy “violations” as exceptions to the rules or as a means to help the discloser in the long run. Future research should continue to investigate the relational implications of differing perceptions of boundary permeability based on people’s role as a discloser or confidant.
The results also imply that privacy turbulence occurred when confidants were confused about their role or became burdened by managing the information and supporting the discloser (e.g., Kessler, McLeod, & Wethington, 1985). For example, some confidants felt used or upset by how the discloser was handing the situation and became reluctant to provide support or abide by the rules. In one case, the burdens of being a confidant resulted in a participant ending his friendship with the discloser. Over time, these confidants might be unwilling to provide high quality support or listen to more information related to the discloser’s hurtful experience, similar to the stance of reluctant confidants in other contexts (McBride & Bergen, 2008; Petronio, 2000). Future research should continue to examine privacy turbulence from a confidant’s perspective and explore relational implications of feigned support from confidants who perceive a relational obligation to provide support but do so in a reluctant manner.
Overall, these findings have practical implications as well. For disclosers wanting to effectively coordinate information, they should be aware of the challenges inherent in sharing this private information. First, they might be motivated by their strong emotions to talk to someone immediately after a hurtful event occurs. They should still choose their confidant carefully, and our results show that disclosers consider the confidant’s characteristics when making disclosure decisions. And yet, sometimes confidants are present during the experience of a hurtful event. Disclosers should be especially careful in these situations because these immediate linkages mean that the discloser was not able to select the confidant. Disclosers can decide how much to continue talking to the confidant about the event but might want to air on the side of directness when laying out expectations for handling the private information.
Limitations
The present study should be interpreted in light of its limitations. First, we used a cross-sectional survey design and disclosers and confidants were not paired. Using paired data would allow researchers to investigate discrepancies in how personal network members perceive rules, turbulence, and boundary management dyadically. Yet the inclusion of confidants and disclosers still provided different points of view regarding privacy management. Second, participants answered the questionnaire by focusing on a single incident where they talked to a confidant about the hurtful event. In the future, researchers could use longitudinal studies to examine how people handle information over time, from the initial disclosure until the issue is resolved. It is also possible that people’s preferences for handling the information change over time, as new issues and concerns emerge. Third, because participants were allowed to decide whether they wanted to respond to the questionnaire about a recipient of hurt or a confidant, the data may have been skewed in some ways. For example, perhaps people who experienced something deeply hurtful chose to respond about being a confidant to avoid experiencing intense emotions. Finally, the sample included more females than males, so our findings provide more insight into the experience of females. Future research should include a more inclusive sample because support seeking, hurt, and privacy management are all gendered behaviors.
Conclusion
The present study provides understanding about managing private information in an underexplored context of hurtful experiences. People facing hurtful experiences consider characteristics of a confidant relationship when disclosing, but emotional challenges often prompt quick and full disclosures. Our findings illuminate the potential for new theoretical territory in immediate linkages, coincidental disclosure, and turbulence surrounding support provision. Researchers can explore these developments in other contexts by continuing to understand the complexities and challenges of communicating private information and subsequently offering practical guidance for individuals and networks alike.
Footnotes
Authors’ note
A previous version of this article was presented at the 2013 Conference of the National Communication Association, Washington, DC
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.