‘They think we’re just in God’s waiting room’: A discursive study on identity aloneness in stroke survivors

This paper examines the rhetorical strategies used by stroke survivors to attend to identity aloneness, a phenomenon in which individuals experience a sense of disconnect from others as a consequence of identity change, for which stroke is known as an antecedent. Three stroke survivors, as well as their spouses, were interviewed about their stroke, social support, and experiences with loneliness and identity change. The data was transcribed using a simplified version of the Jeffersonian method and was analysed using a critical discursive psychological approach. This made it possible to examine the way in which the psychological business of identity aloneness was managed in participants’ talk via discursive devices such as metaphors and category entitlement, while also leaving room to consider how broader societal discourses were drawn upon. The analysis revealed two key ways in which participants attended to the issue of identity aloneness: by crafting and occupying a position of resilience, and by managing the impact of the post-stroke social world on their identities. These findings offer insight into how the issue of identity aloneness is made sense of by stroke survivors in the context of a discussion with an interviewer. Finally, findings informed future directions for research, including developing a comprehensive theory of identity aloneness using a grounded theory approach, conducting another discursive analysis in a naturalistic, non-interview setting, and developing and validating a psychometric measure of identity aloneness which would be applied in a rehabilitative setting.