SHARING THE SAME FATE

ABSTRACT

Peer support has become a growing source of consolation for individuals in contemporary social life. This article examines the social bond between selves and their fellow sufferers ‘sharing the same fate’ in support groups and personal networks. Analyzed fateful conditions include serious illness, premature loss of a spouse through death or abandonment, infertility and family disruptions. The results show that selves colonized by agonizing life experiences confront social isolation and turn to their fellow sufferers in order to find understanding. A distinct kind of social bond is proposed between fellow sufferers involving sharing at the level of generalized experiences. Further analysis of different states of the bonds and their consequences is drawn from Thomas Scheff's distinction of the social bond as one of three states: attuned, engulfed or isolated. When attuned to fellow sufferers, peer support can be genuinely self-empowering and healing, but also other consequences emerge. In engulfed bonds with fellow sufferers, the particular self stands at risk of being overpowered by others. Isolated bonds with fellow sufferers may not be capable of breaking the lonely state of suffering. This paper provides an elaborate empirical understanding of the interplay between fate, the social and the individual in the context of peer support. The data is made up of repeated in-depth interviews with 22 Finnish women and men that contain narrated life stories, accompanied by information about their network, of significant others and support contacts.

Keywords:

• peer support
• social bond
• self
• fate
• suffering
• other

Acknowledgements

I thank two reviewers, Riitta Jallinoja, Anna Bagnoli and Pamela Kaskinen for helpful comments and the Academy of Finland and Emil Aaltonen Foundation for funding the study.

Notes

¹Goffman (1990 [1963]) uses the term ‘fellow sufferers’ when referring to the bond between the stigmatized, but it is also used by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain together ‘fellow guests’ and ‘fellow patients’ (see also Damen et al. 2000).

²When discussing the self I use the feminine pronoun ‘she’, because the majority of the selves in the study are women.

³The configurational information of significant relationships operates as a micro context in which the narratives are placed, rather than as an actual research subject (see also Ketokivi 2008).