Women's Counter Narrative of Redemption

The purpose of this study was to explore how a group of women construct narratives of redemption in their recovery from long-term drug and alcohol abuse. While there has been a great deal of research on addiction, there has been relatively little research on recovery and virtually none that has made direct inquiry into the lived experiences of women. The narratives that constituted this research represented not only a silenced population but also an alternative narrative to the standard redemptive narrative and the cultural discourse that supports it. Understanding how these women developed and articulated this counter narrative can enhance the understanding of human development in general and the ways in which self-identity is negotiated in everyday life. The research was grounded in post-structural, deconstructive and dialogical theoretical perspectives.
Five women who had completed a comprehensive residential substance-abuse treatment program at the Santa Maria Hostel and were active at Mercy Street, a church for recovering addicts in Houston Texas, participated. The Santa Maria Hostel serves an ethnically diverse population of women with children and is known to be the “last chance” for many of these women before the penitentiary. The analysis for the project was based on four semi-structured interviews with each of the women. They were encouraged to talk about their life before recovery, what led to their recovery and how they maintain their recovery.
The core imperative with the redemptive master narrative necessitates an interpretive framework based upon Victor Frankl’s “tragic optimism” which creates a direct correspondence between wrongs suffered and the redemptive present. Yet these women’s stories did not conform to the prototypical redemptive construct, particularly in terms of how the past was held, languaged and integrated. They employed entirely different strategies which included holding certain segments of their past in a structure of meaninglessness. This is languaged through what is characterized as the poetics of “nevertheless”. Recovery and redemption is constructed in spite of the past; past suffering is not extolled for present redemption. Implications of this counter narrative in terms of the women’s lives, theory, power relations, and alternative social discourse are discussed.