THERAPEUTIC DISCOURSE, POWER AND CHANGE - EMOTION AND NEGOTIATION IN MARITAL CONVERSATIONS

Cultural vends shape the experience of marriage by forming expectation s, entitlements and obligations. The self-development discourse genera ted by the therapeutic culture has been suggested as playing a part in such shaping. This paper examines how this particular discourse affec ts the way women experience their marital conversations and, more spec ifically, the extent to which they feel able to initiate change-direct ed negotiation within them. Twenty-eight professional women in England , selected to reflect different occupational exposures to the self-dev elopment discourse, were interviewed in order to examine their experie nces of the marital conversation and possible changes within it. The a nalysis shows that specific feeling rules limit the possibility of wom en's concerns entering the marital conversation, and that the self-dev elopment discourse can introduce alternative feeling rules with the po tential to overcome such limitations. It is shown that women who are i nfluenced by the ideological messages equating change with relationshi p improvement contained within this discourse are able to adopt its pr oposed feeling rules and to use them to introduce negotiation into the ir marital conversations. These women are able to use this increased n egotiability within the marital conversation to become more powerful i n shaping their marital experiences.