Out of the blue and into it: Autoethnography,emotions and complicated grief

Abstract

Autoethnography can be an appropriate method for researching complex emotional experiences. However, the highly self-reflexive processes involved in mining personal data are subject to a set of cultural feeling and display rules, which obscure and interfere with emotional engagement. To illustrate this, we present one author’s account of using autoethnography to research traumatic bereavement. We critically revisit three myths about the method: one negative (autoethnography is narcissistically self-indulgent) and two positive (autoethnographic techniques are therapeutic and autoethnographic writing is authentic). Observing some parallels between topic and method, we suggest that both are complicated and non-linear, following convoluted paths. Autoethnographic tales may defy the social rules of verbal tellability, failing to reveal personal insights or offer moral lessons. We conclude that, while we can admire the autoethnographic endeavour towards ‘heartfelt’ scholarship, this should be tempered by a cautiousness about the costs of digging deep.

Keywords

autoethnography grief traumatic bereavement emotions narrative

Introduction

Once marginalised as a biased, unreliable method, autoethnography now has an established place within qualitative inquiry. Scholarship in the field is burgeoning, with a new specialist journal, edited collection (Holman-Jones et al., 2016) and speculation on its future (Allen, 2020). The alternative writing styles that characterise the approach, such as poetry, fiction and song, are accepted as valid (Chang, 2016, Patti and Arnold, 2021) and new sub-genres, such as critical and cultural autoethnographies (Boylorn and Orbe, 2021; Hughes and Pennington, 2017) have joined the evocative and analytical branches (Ellis and Bochner, 2010). Nevertheless, autoethnography remains an unusual choice of method. Foregrounding one’s own subjectivity and reflecting upon sensitive and emotional personal experiences demands deep honesty and vulnerability that, for many, remains unappealing (Brennan and Letherby, 2017). Yet for some research topics, autoethnography may be an appropriate choice, with the potential to contribute more than it costs.

We illustrate this with a discussion of traumatic bereavement, viewed through the theoretical lens of the sociology of emotions. One of the authors, Georgie Akehurst, reflects on the loss of her grandmother, who was killed in a road traffic collision with an intoxicated driver. In this case study, we observe some conceptual parallels between substantive topic and reflexive method, arguing that both follow a ‘complicated’ course. Traumatic bereavement is an unusual form of grief that does not fit conventional psychological stage models. Its process is messy, chaotic and non-linear, involving unpredictable movements between varied emotional states. Likewise, autoethnographic research is characterised by a spontaneous, unsystematic and disorderly process of moving between lived experience and analytical reflection. This choice of method therefore promised to offer a more direct and authentic understanding of the subject matter. However, it also took the researcher close to the edge of her private emotional world, risking unwanted insights and troubling self-discoveries.

Our discussion revisits three myths that are associated with autoethnographic research: one that is negative and critical (autoethnography is narcissistically self-indulgent) and two that are positive and romantic (the autoethnographic process is therapeutic and autoethnographic writing is authentic). Only the first of these myths is recognised as such, having been widely debated and largely debunked. The second two myths are subtler and more persistent, informing contemporary accounts of autoethnography as a heroic endeavour. We assert that all three myths are problematic and should be held open to scrutiny.

The negative myth was popular in the past. Critics argued that the highly subjective epistemology was both an obstacle to scientific rigour and embarrassingly self-absorbed (Ellis et al., 2011). Autoethnographers were scathingly described as narrating the ‘minutiae’ of their usually uninteresting lives (Delamont, 2009: 59–60) with ‘self-importance’ and 'egocentricity’ (Watson 1995: 310), while the hyper-reflexivity of meditating on inner knowledge did not help us understand the external real world (Parry and Johnson, 2007). Defenders of the method countered that introspection does not preclude intersubjectivity (Bochner and Ellis, 1996) as relational constructions of selfhood inevitably include the perspectives of others (Ellis, 2009, cf. Stanley, 1993). Autoethnography can also be political, by using self-awareness as a springboard onto wider social and political understanding (Anderson, 2006); for example, some recent critical autoethnographies have taken a postcolonial perspective (Merriweather, 2015, Pathak, 2016).

Armed with this awareness, Georgie entered the field with ‘bright faith’ (Delamont, 2002: 113) and naïve optimism (Rossing and Scott, 2016). Autoethnography appeared not just as an acceptable method for this topic, but as an ideal, even healing solution. Unfortunately, Georgie gradually became disillusioned of the two constituent positive myths, which prescribed how good she ought to feel about her research. Positive Myth 1 alleges the therapeutic benefit of introspective rumination as an opportunity to process raw unmediated feeling; in fact, the researcher found that the dramaturgical display rules of the social settings in which data collection took place interfered with her attempts to ‘just feel’. Positive Myth 2 suggests that writing autoethnographically should come naturally and produce a freely flowing narrative; instead, the researcher struggled to contain her story within the neat, clean mould of social tellability and reach a satisfying ending.

It is a troubling paradox that the research process may obscure the data and become a focus of inquiry in itself. To an extent, this problem plagues all ethnographic research in which the self is positioned as a reflexive insider (Coffey, 1999). However, the effect may be heightened with autoethnography because it demands deep emotional investment in a ‘sincere’ (Goffman, 1959) identity performance. The methodological role cannot be acted with rational detachment, but rather must be lived, felt and embodied. The dual process of experiencing events while reflecting on that experiencing can iteratively generate endless amounts of data. More importantly, however, it is an intensely demanding form of emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983), which can take its toll on researcher well-being. Before we discuss how this happened with respect to the two positive myths, let us exhibit a parallel form that we observed in both topic and method.

The complicated course of grief

Traumatic bereavement refers to experiences of sudden loss through unforeseen, violent or accidental circumstances (Raphael and Martinek, 1997). It is argued that those who suffer this type of bereavement are affected in differing ways to those who experience bereavement as a result of ‘anticipated’ or ‘natural’ deaths (Lehman et al., 1989). Traumatic bereavement can challenge current spiritual beliefs or established senses of meaning (Green, 2000), evoking emotions of anger, fear, powerlessness, blame, guilt and rage (Doka, 1996) as well as behavioural symptoms, such as recurrent nightmares (Miller, 2009). Traumatic bereavement can require liaison with the criminal justice system, sometimes involving a public trial and media attention (Bandes, 2009), which may cause additional distress (Amick-McMullan et al., 1989).

Within the medical model, symptoms of grief are mapped onto a normal-pathological binary (Walter, 2000), contrasting expected and deviant patterns of emotion. A famous example is Kubler-Ross’s (1969) five-stage model, which charts a trajectory through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although stage models have been criticised for being overly simplistic and deterministic (Craib, 1998, Kastenbaum, 2008), they are still tacitly applied in lay understandings of grief as a time-limited process: ‘going through’ bereavement and ‘coming to terms with’ loss. Meanwhile, the clinical term ‘complicated grief’ is used to describe pathological deviations from the norm. This happens when some aspect of the death poses an obstacle or interruption to the usual course of grief, leading to an individual process that is deemed inappropriate, disorderly, unusual or inexplicable (Worden, 2018).

Traumatic bereavement does not fit into conventional, linear stage models. As noted above, it often takes a form that is messy, chaotic and unpredictable, involving erratic, inconsistent movements between different emotional states. Consequently, it tends to be categorised as a form of complicated grief and treated as a deviant exception to the norm. Within the sociology of mental health, such processes of labelling and classification have been criticised for imposing social judgements according to cultural norms and values (Pilgrim and Rogers, 2005).

We suggest that traumatic bereavement also challenges more informal social rules: lay understandings about how grievers should conduct themselves in the routines of everyday life. It transgresses culturally prescribed feeling and display rules (Hochschild, 1983) concerning notions of appropriateness, ritual, etiquette and situational propriety (Goffman, 1963). For example, a person experiencing traumatic bereavement may cry at sudden, inopportune moments, or conversely, appear strangely calm. As with any micro-sociological analysis of interactional processes, it is important to study the social reactions of others as much as the acts of the individual subject. Friends and family may respond with surprise, irritation and mild indignation that the interaction order (Goffman, 1983) has been disturbed. Thus, as well as being clinically ‘complicated’, traumatic bereavement may unfold socially as a process of ‘disenfranchised’ grief: that which is 'not openly acknowledged, publicly mourned or socially supported’ (Doka, 1989: 4).

The sociology of emotions provides a useful framework with which to explore these ideas. Grief is an inescapable human experience (Walter, 2000) as well as a social emotion, which ‘emerges from relationships, attachments, expectations, and obligations’ (Jakoby, 2012: 680, citing Gharmaz and Milligan, 2006: 525). The bereaved are required to perform an emotional role in line with socially and culturally charged scripts (Jakoby, 2012). This resonates with Hochschild’s (1983) concept of emotion work: the sustained efforts individuals make to cultivate emotional responses that fit the feeling rules of roles or situations, and then demonstrate these in ways that honour localised display rules. Emotion work may be performed either positively, by showing false sentiments that one does not sincerely feel, or negatively, by denying or suppressing feelings that are subjectively true (Scott, 2019). In the case of bereavement, this might mean, respectively, smiling to imply a state of calm composure, or crying in private to hide one’s emotional pain.

Feeling and display rules for bereavement are co-defined, interactively negotiated and applied in a relational context. This can unfold in a dialogical process as a symbolic conversation of gestures (Mead, 1934). For example, when an individual feels concern about burdening others with the intensity of their grief, they are thinking simultaneously about their own emotions and those of others (Goodrum, 2011: 124). In response, the audience may sanction a rule violation, signpost the norms of appropriate conduct or alert the griever of their breach of grief conduct (Sabra, 2017) by avoiding the topic of the bereavement, crying at the news, being overly sympathetic or encouraging the griever to ‘move on’ (Goodrum, 2011). Consequently, grievers might attempt to manage their expressions to minimise such discomfort, usually by restraining or hiding their grief. At work, for example, they might allow extreme emotions to emerge only in ‘safe spaces’ to avoid perceived judgement from colleagues (Pitimson, 2020),

Traumatic bereavement can be socially deviant by breaking these normative feeling and display rules. The nature of the circumstances generates a level of shock not always present in other types of bereavement (Maple et al., 2017). As such, grievers may be unable positively to sustain a cheerful demeanour, or negatively to prevent anguished distress from leaking through. When an individual suddenly loses a loved one, they may struggle to remain 'emotionally obedient’ (Goodrum, 2008: 423). Their reactions may seem to come ‘out of the blue’ and feel strange to the person themselves, as much as to onlooking bystanders. When this happens in social situations, whether encounters with strangers in public spaces (Goffman, 1961) or intimate meetings with close relational others, it often evokes pressurising audience reactions. Those around the bereaved expect and encourage them to return to normality (Sawicka, 2016) as if grief is something to be resolved with haste (Paxton, 2018).

Emotional expression may also be subject to regulation: for example, women who had experienced perinatal loss or stillbirth recalled being told by other mothers that their feelings of jealousy, envy and anger were wrong (Sawicka, 2016). Conversely, when a traumatic death is caused by a criminal act, mourners are encouraged to show anger and a desire for revenge (Chapple et al., 2015: 620). This happens especially when the media depict the event as a cultural tragedy (Doka, 2003), turning a private pain into a public concern (cf. Mills, 1959; Giaxoglou, 2019). Finally, when a death is considered random, others are more likely to empathically identify with the victim, as the incident serves as a reminder of shared risk (Chapple et al., 2015). Georgie recalls how encountering these rules in social interaction made her aware of her emotional deviance:

Everyone other than myself expected anger from me, but I could not give it to them. . . I sometimes think it is because I am above anger, but maybe I believe that to make myself feel better about not being able to feel it. When I have opened up to others about my lack of anger, their responses range from ‘everybody grieves in their own way’, ‘but she was my Mum’, 'I can’t understand how you’re feeling’ to ‘I’m so proud of you for reacting in this way’. In hindsight, all of these sentiments were alerting me of my rule violations, in that I did not hate the person that killed my Nan. Worse, I felt sorry for him. Which took the rule violation to a new level. I wasn’t just not feeling something, I was insulting anger by actively choosing its apparent opposite (sympathy).

Reflecting on these processes of informal sanctioning and regulation, Georgie felt as if her own traumatic grief had been disenfranchised. Her bereavement experience was poached from her individual, subjective lifeworld and recast as a shared problem to be socially managed. This informed the design of the study, as an exploration of the interactional processes through which emotional narratives about grief unfold in interaction. It also defined Georgie’s insider position, as a griever navigating conflicts between feelings and social experiences (Paxton, 2018). Autoethnography therefore seemed like an appropriate choice of method. It had been used in previous accounts of loss and grief (see Ellis, 1993, 1995; Jago, 2002; Adams, 2006; Campesino, 2007; Reilly, 2011; Patti, 2012; Letherby, 2015; Alshammari, 2020) and even traumatic bereavement (Kottenstette, 2020; McKenzie, 2015; Tilley-Lubbs, 2011) but had not yet been applied to understanding social processes of informal emotion work.

Methodology

Within qualitative research, autoethnography occupies a peripheral, ambiguous position. In two ways, its methodological status parallels the topical status of traumatic bereavement within theories of grief and mourning. Firstly, autoethnography is procedurally ‘complicated’, insofar as it does not follow the stages, guides and practices of conventional research involving other participants (sampling, recruitment, interviewing, etc). Epistemologically, it stands outside the mainstream, refusing to adhere to normative standards of objectivism, representativeness and data reliability. Secondly, autoethnography has historically been ‘disenfranchised’ by the aforementioned criticisms of self-indulgence. Georgie designed her study with this context in mind, hoping further to dispel that negative myth. However, as we will show, the same dilemmas arose again in the process of doing the research. This suggests that it is not only the practical procedures but also the emotional experience of autoethnography that may follow an unruly, complicated course.

Georgie addressed the myth of narcissistic self-indulgence by including other voices alongside her own. She combined her diary entries and notes with an interview and focus group with five friends (Ellis, 1998), exploring their recollections of her bereavement and interactions with her at the time. One participant, whom Georgie had met at university, was recruited for an individual interview and four other participants, whom Georgie had known since secondary school, were recruited for the focus group. Therefore, there were six participants in total, including Georgie. The interview and focus group were held face-to-face in a friend’s home and followed an unstructured, conversational format. Georgie also kept a fieldwork diary to record notes on the methodological and ethical processes of doing autoethnography (Ellis, 1998: 50–51). Both the diary entries/notes and the interview/focus group discussions were temporally expansive: reliving the past, accounting for the present and mulling over the future. The study lasted for three months, from June to August 2019.

Positive myth 1: The personal rewards of therapeutic insight

. . .the presenter keeps drumming, we return to closing our eyes, and take in the magic that is autoethnography.

(Pensoneau-Conway et al., 2017: 1)

Am I doing this right? Why am I not producing heartfelt and emotionally satisfying epiphanies? [I told myself] You should be feeling enlightened and positive – why are you feeling exhausted and ‘sick of it’?

(Georgie’s fieldnotes)

Autoethnographers have defended the approach as being therapeutic and potentially healing (McMillan and Ramirez, 2016; Johnson, 2021). This refers to both the process of reflecting on substantive content and the performative act of reporting (cf. Denzin, 2009). Autoethnographic data analysis may lead to epiphanic breakthroughs of meaning-making, insight and awakening (DeGloma, 2014) resulting from meticulous self-examination or mourning the deceased (Paxton, 2016, 2018). For example, it has been argued that embodied writing can assist in recovery from domestic violence (Metts, 2016) while mindfulness and meditation techniques may be helpful to survivors of rape (Van de Voorde, 2020). Creative and expressive writing is used in psychotherapy for trauma (Pennebaker and Evans, 2014), because of its biographical sense-making function (Barak and Leichtentritt, 2017; Kiesinger, 2002; McKenzie, 2015).

Georgie entered the field with such hopeful intentions of discovering insights into her emotional self. However, she became increasingly troubled as the practical and psychological difficulties of mining trauma interfered with this exploratory process. Perhaps she was performing a ‘re-membering’ ritual (Paxton, 2018): continuing her relationship with her grandmother beyond her death, telling stories with friends and family and re-imagining her grandmother’s lived moments. The tension between the professional purpose of the autoethnography and the painful familial and social focus of the research meant that feeling rules and norms engulfed the memory of her grandmother, causing autoethnographic fatigue. This manifested in three main ways.

First, non-work spaces began to be 'invaded by thoughts of theory and intellectual matters’ (Rossing and Scott, 2016: 625). As she tried to keep a fieldwork diary, Georgie felt obligated to 'discover something exciting or new every night, or at least to come away with something noteworthy to record’ (Rossing and Scott, 2016: 625). As a result of this encroachment, Georgie grew resentful towards her own research. The setting lost its sense of separateness and became overfamiliar (Delamont and Atkinson, 1995), merging in with her everyday life. She felt reluctant to maintain her diary and distanced herself from the research.

Second, Georgie struggled with writing ‘abrupt fieldnotes’ as and when thoughts and feelings arose (Rossing and Scott, 2016). The benefit of this technique was that the process felt unforced, spontaneous and quite organic. However, the disadvantage was that these sporadic, unpredictable opportunities often emerged in unforgiving spaces and at inappropriate moments. Consequently, Georgie found herself violating feeling and display rules, particularly when she could not indulge in full expression of the emotions that arose but instead had to show restraint. She performed techniques of emotion work to manage this dramaturgical tension. For example, on the occasion below, she first removed the surface residue of sadness by wiping away her tears. Then, she engaged in deep acting (Hochschild, 1983) by diverting her mind towards other things and chastising herself with embarrassment:

I probably think about what happened on average four times a day. But that doesn’t mean to say I experience sadness or feelings of loss four times a day. I just think about it. I remember his face. I remember Nanny. . . Oh god now I cry while I’m on the bus trying to write.

Reflection, 27/06/2019

Here, Georgie recognised the inappropriateness of her emotional expression to the situation of riding on the bus. Her awareness of her rule violation came not as a result of direct responses from other people, but rather an internalised understanding of wider cultural feeling and display rules. Anticipating that displaying strong emotions in the presence of strangers might cause them discomfort, Georgie attempted to conceal her feelings. However, this self-regulatory monitoring impeded her ability to access and deeply engage with those very emotional experiences.

Third, Georgie began consciously managing her emotions to produce useful data for the study – at times almost coercing painful memories and emotions out onto paper. These instances usually occurred as a result of attempting to write fieldnotes at convenient times of the day and in private spaces where her grief would not impact on others (Goodrum, 2008; Pitimson, 2020). She found it impossible to generate such complex emotions on cue, let alone to reflect upon them with analytical detachment. Instead, grief emotions were triggered and rose up sporadically, at times when she felt unprepared, or in spaces where affect display was dramaturgically disruptive (cf. Goffman, 1959).

Positive myth 2: The social rewards of tellability

A good story is essential and it can carry a great deal of weight.

(Doty, 2010: 1050)

Autoethnography requires the researcher to honestly and comfortably expose their experiences as testimony (Raab 2013). The storytelling format (Ellis, 1998) promises social rewards of reception, acceptance and validation as it 'affords us the chance to connect with our readers in ways that may make them care’ (Doty, 2010: 1050). For example, Townsend and Gay (2021) used autoethnography to highlight the precarious employment situation of adjunct professors to colleagues within the academy, and Paxton (2018) used the method to suggest alternative ways of remembering the deceased that could challenge the death taboo. However, this communicative purpose depends upon authors creating a shared set of meanings by drawing upon interpretive repertoires (Wetherell, 1998) and vocabularies of motive (Mills, 1940). The extent to which writers employ these conventional devices and frameworks affects the social ‘tellability’ of a story from the perspective of its audience (Smith and Sparkes, 2008; Tamas, 2009). This influenced Georgie’s reporting of her research, both verbally and in writing.

Verbal accountability

Georgie was aware of certain culturally shared scripts about traumatic bereavement. From conversations with family, friends and observing media representations of crime, she had become aware of two main discursively constituted subject positions: the forgiving victim (who is compassionate and peace-seeking) and the vengeful victim (who is angry and pursues retaliatory justice). This reminds us of McAdams’ (1993) fairytale framework for analysing identity stories, featuring heroes, villains, moral themes and tense dramatic episodes. When an individual becomes a victim at the hands of another individual, it is thought they have ‘two paths’ of emotional action – 'one involves sustaining anger and resentment (i.e. holding a grudge) toward the perpetrator. . . the other involves forgiving, which entails an effort to bring such feelings to an end and replace them with positive thoughts, feelings and actions’ (Baumeister et al., 1999: 80).

However, Georgie realised that her own personal experience of traumatic bereavement did not align with either of the two available scripted storylines. She felt neither benign nor hostile, but something else more complex and harder to define. This was a mixture of instantaneous grief, guilt and intense sadness, but also sympathy towards the offender, whom she did not perceive as a villain. Layered on top of this was a discomfiting awareness that one of the incongruent scripts was being applied to her by default, conferring undeserved advantage. Georgie was concerned that her peers had assigned her the ‘forgiving victim’ role and were responding to her as such, even though she did not feel this way inside. They admired her for being ‘brave’ and praised her generous, magnanimous maturity. However, Georgie felt a sense of disquietude that her private sentiments did not match the publicly imposed script. She felt as if she were unfairly benefiting from a victim role that she did not genuinely deserve.

Moreover, Georgie noticed that when she did not conform to this assigned role, she faced informal social sanctioning. Family and friends reacted with surprise when she declined to endorse the moral value of forgiveness and show a determination to ‘move on’. She deviated from both the psychological models of linear grief and the Goffmanian (1961) moral career: a sequence of stages by which an individual’s character is socially evaluated. The informal sanctions she received for her emotional deviance (Thoits, 1985) included comments alerting her to her role violations and questioning her account. Friends disenfranchised her grief story by suggesting revisions and rewriting her moral character to fit a familiar, digestible script:

Did you find that the conclusion you came to was. . . how you think he’s irresponsible and so you could never respond like that, or do you think it was more to put yourself at ease? Because I know a lot of people when they say stuff like ‘I forgive you’, say people who someone’s murdered their child. . . it was more about coming to terms with, like coming to peace with themselves and like feeling okay within themselves. . . almost like taking the high road.

Friend A: participant in focus group

Georgie then faced a dramaturgical dilemma of whether or not to disclose her true feelings. In his account of stigma, Goffman (1963) explains how actors manage the risk of their identity claims being discredited by using strategies of ‘information control’: selectively revealing or concealing different aspects of character. Discreditable stigmas – those that can be hidden but might yet be exposed – make the actor highly self-conscious and evoke dramaturgical stress (Freund, 1990). Georgie was concerned that if she confessed how she really felt, others might perceive her as taking advantage of the victim role and exploiting their sympathy. This threatened to undermine her image of vulnerability and the social benefits of being a recognised, legitimate mourner. Doka (1989) identifies such ‘enfranchised grievers’ as those who fit within the bounds of cultural scripts: in this case, a morally-attuned, forgiving and emotionally mature victim.

Writing outside of the template

When writing her research report for an academic audience, Georgie encountered further problems of disputed tellability. Social science writing has a conventional style and format, involving discursive devices that imply neutral detachment. Metaphors of war and battle, problem-solving, interrogation and enlightenment lend an air of authority and credibility to the text (Richardson, 1990). Autoethnography already stands outside of this, using the narrative rather than logico-scientific mode of reasoning (Bruner, 1991) to emphasise alternative epistemological values. Writing ‘heartfully’ draws the reader’s attention to contextually embedded meanings, local and situational truths, and authentic, subjective impressions of personal experience. As such, autoethnographic writing defies the display rules of most other qualitative methods, presenting first-person storied accounts of emotional life.

However, this simply creates another template, which seems equally rigid and restrictive. Some topics that would lend themselves to autoethnographic enquiry – such as traumatic bereavement – do not fit easily within this alternate framework. Thus, the autoethnographic template generates another set of feeling and display rules about the ‘right’ way to narrate personal experience. It offers tacit guidelines and assumptions for how to make one’s story tellable within this niche subfield. As Plummer (1995, 2019) argues, the most evocative and resonant personal testimonies convey heroic tropes within a storytelling arc: for example, the trajectory of ‘suffering, surviving and surpassing’ troubles with sexual identity (Plummer, 1995: 50). Journeys of lesson-learning, self-discovery and linear progression hold more narrative power (Plummer, 2019) because they both sound credible and satisfy the reader’s desire for neatly contained endings. The fairy tale format (McAdams, 1993) offers this narrative appeal, by portraying heroes, villains, dramatic episodes, turning points and moral lessons learned.

Layered on top of this is another set of prescriptions about the emotional process of writing itself. Writing is a performance of self (Ivanič, 1998, 2005), yet it paradoxically makes claims to authenticity. The supposed therapeutic benefits of autoethnographic enquiry extend to the writing stage, wherein ‘sorting through the rubble’ and ‘rebuilding’ broken selves (Spinazola, 2018) is believed to have a healing effect. While mining personal trauma may be extremely painful (Raab, 2013), it holds the promise of opening pathways to insightful meaning (Custer, 2014; McKenzie, 2015). Autoethnographers ‘write to understand’ not only what happened but also themselves, as a project that stretches beyond the academic sphere. This process is framed as being raw and authentic, providing direct, unmediated access to subjective inner truths. One particularly romantically infused feeling rule implies that by surrendering to sentiment, writers can express themselves more freely, allowing the natural, honest truth to flow effortlessly out.

However, authentic personal truth cannot always be sanitised by conciseness and order (Tamas, 2009). Individual experiences of complex emotions tend to be messy, indecipherable, maundering and disorganised, directly at odds with the premise of ‘clean and reasonable’ (Tamas, 2009: 18) research writing. Neither do they necessarily match the romanticised ideal of ‘heartful’ writing. As Jensen (2019: 116) notes, ‘When posttraumatic autobiographical texts draw on the imagination of the writer as well as the facts of their lives, that self-reading sets off in a new direction’, which takes an unpredictable course. Consequently, Georgie struggled to align her story with the rules of autoethnographic tellability. Her traumatic bereavement refused to conform to the emotional template of epiphanies, awakenings, insight and self-understanding, instead remaining stubbornly unique in places outside the box. It defied accountability and the urge for making sense.

Georgie’s writing fell out in lumps: odd phrases, sentence fragments and disjointed paragraphs appeared in no particular order and rearranged themselves each day. There was no sense of linear, flowing progress towards an emergent, discoverable truth, but rather messy, ugly and frustrating circumambulation around an ever-moving target. If there was a neat, definitive conclusion to be ultimately reached, this endpoint remained elusive and confusingly concealed. Georgie did not enact the purifying processes of rubble-sorting, mining and retrieving, nor get to experience the satisfaction of cleaning off the dirt. She never found the ultimate, ‘true meaning’ of her trauma, and still feels that it makes no sense. In place of certainty and closure, she has resigned herself to doubt and disappointment (Craib, 1994). Thus, the writing process mirrored that of complicated grief, being untameable, untellable, unreasonable and forever unresolved:

I don’t know what my experience is. I know what happened. I know it a million times over. But I don’t know everything else around it. I can’t place this in relation to everything else – I can’t explain it any other way other than it’s just a huge grey confusing space. And even then that doesn’t satisfy what I’m trying to say. I still feel like I’m waiting for something, a feeling, something to happen. I don’t know what. Maybe it’s just that this is over and I don’t want it to be. I’m not finished yet. I’m not finished understanding it, but as much as I try to feel closer to it, it’s slipping away from me. The ‘bubble’ of grief is slowly deflating, and I’m still confused. Maybe it’s that I will never understand in the way everyone thinks you’re supposed to.

(Diary reflection, 26 July 2019)

Once again, Georgie was aware of her deviation from emotional display rules (Hochschild, 1983) and felt a sense of guilt at failing to make herself understood. She experienced a vicarious discomfort on behalf of her potential readers, to whom she could not hand over a neat, tellable tale. She was aware that her abrupt, fragmented writing disrupted the expectation of internal coherence that audiences use when listening to stories (Wetherell, 1998). She wanted to be able to tie up all the loose ends, evaluate their meaning and offer a summarising coda (Labov and Waletsky, 1967), but the tale’s narrative complexity defied such imposed order. As Tamas (2009) explains, this often happens in cases of traumatic loss, and leads to meta-cognitive reflection on one’s own status as an author:

. . .if we are sitting in the gore and confusion of our own suffering, my sane, readable account of loss may reinforce the expectation that our trauma ought to make sense, and if it doesn’t we must be somehow inadequate or failing.

Tamas (2009: 17)

Georgie twisted, warped and contorted her experiences, trying to force the words to fit the mould. However, her efforts were unsuccessful and the mission was futile. This added a second layer of disenfranchisement, as not only the underlying story but also its telling fell short of culturally prescribed standards. In the end, rather than succumbing to the self-image of a failed author, Georgie resigned herself to the frustration of epistemological uncertainty. Nevertheless, this meant that her story’s conclusion remains to be written and may yet uncover new truths. As Spinelli (2005) argues, by adopting the phenomenological stance of ‘unknowing’, we can leave ourselves open to potential discoveries that might otherwise have been left untouched.

A non-conclusion

Autoethnography can be an appropriate methodology for researching complex emotional experiences, such as traumatic bereavement. It is an honest and wholehearted approach to understanding subjective phenomena from the inside, while giving due recognition of the social and cultural scaffolding around them. Yet the method is not without its problems and limitations. In this paper, we have critically examined three myths about autoethnography. We reported how one researcher attempted to debunk the negative myth about narcissistic self-indulgence by engaging with two other, positive myths about therapeutic benefit and writing with feeling. However, in the process of doing and reporting her research, Georgie found that social, conventional rules about affect display interfered with the aim of authentic self-exploration.

In this respect, we have argued that autoethnography and complicated grief share some common characteristics. They are both multi-dimensional in how they are experienced, featuring layers of feeling that rise to the surface at different times and produce emotional turbulence. The process of both is non-linear: circling, looping and moving erratically as it takes an unpredictable course. Like complicated grief, autoethnography cannot be tied to a storyline, depicted in neat and linear comic strips of events, with satisfying endings based on varying levels of predication. There may be no reader-friendly, digestible story of emotions transformed into transcendence, awakening and new meaning. Autoethnographic researcher identities, like those of grievers, unfold clumsily, following multiple and simultaneous routes, expansions and entanglements of self, and knowing and unknowing epistemological stances. Attempts to unwind this continual maze with clarity, stages or sequential scenes disturbs the telling of the experience itself. Yet deviating from the expected written conventions of social research limits the local tellability and acceptability of such experiences within communities of practice.

Consequently, and in congruent alignment with the view outlined above, we decline to provide a definitive ending to this piece. Just like the experiences it seeks to narrate, the composition must remain messy, complicated and stubbornly unresolved. Such convoluted and turbulent experiences as self-examined grief cannot be neatly tied up and contained within the boundaries of a discursive account. Thus, tempting though it is to observe academic display rules, teach moral lessons and offer takeaway messages, we resist the temptation to succumb to the tellable urge. Instead, we ask readers to consider the different views that we have outlined and imagine how they would themselves approach this mode of qualitative inquiry.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Susie Scott

Author biographies

Georgie Akehurst is a SeNSS-funded doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Sussex. Her research interests are the sociology of emotions, grief and bereavement, symbolic interactionist and dramaturgical theories, autoethnography and qualitative methodology.

Susie Scott is professor of sociology at the University of Sussex. She specialises in the micro-sociological theoretical perspectives of symbolic interactionism Goffman’s dramaturgy and phenomenology, applied to questions of self-identity. She has conducted studies of shyness, swimming, asexuality, performance art and total institutions. Susie is the author of Shyness and Society (Palgrave, 2007), Making Sense of Everyday Life (Polity, 2009), Total Institutions and Reinvented Identities (Palgrave, 2011), Negotiating Identity (Polity, 2015) and The Social Life of Nothing: Silence, Invisibility and Emptiness in Tales of Lost Experience (Routledge, 2019).

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