A Pain Halved; A Joy Doubled: How We Share with Those Who Matter

In this dissertation I will present disclosure strategies that are used to communicate experiences of pain and joy, as well as their implications for people’s concepts of the self and interpersonal relationships. I conducted 58 semi-structured interviews where I collected information about my participants’ confidants and disclosure practices to explain how people share pain and joy within their networks. In the first half of the dissertation, I present descriptive statistics and general patterns. For instance, my participants discussed a wide array of topics with an average of 5 people, and yet tended to compartmentalize to some extent, mostly sharing health matters with family and relationship matters with friends. Mothers are the go-to person (especially for young women), but people also tell personal news to strangers and others who just happen to be nearby. Most of the times like chooses like, but when emotions are involved, men will seek out women. In the second half of the dissertation analyze my respondents’ experience with sharing, as well as responding to pain and joy. I identify four strategies that were used when disclosing emotions: moderation (altering the intensity or amount of emotion shared), concealment (hiding the emotion), matching (reaching out to people with similar experiences), and branching out (disclosing to people outside of one’s network of confidants). Strategies are not chosen rationally, with a clear end in mind. Instead, they are sets of adaptations that allowed my study participants to navigate their networks and changing selves. Occasionally the strategies succeed in maintaining homeostasis within relationships, but just as often they do more harm than good and contribute to resentment and misunderstanding. In conclusion I highlight the strengths of this study as a foray into meta-feelings and meta-thoughts that reveal fractured and sometimes incongruent attitudes around pain and joy. I also outline avenues for future work that can trace more precisely how disclosure is perceived by others and whether impressions match intents.