When Struggle Becomes Normalised

The research question my dissertation left me with and the inquiry it opened into breathing space, emotional authority and authorship.

Some research projects conclude by answering a question. Others leave us with better and more demanding questions.

My MA dissertation, Seeking a Breathing Space, began as an inquiry into women’s experiences of struggle. I wanted to understand not only the challenges women encountered, but also how prolonged struggle could become so familiar that it was no longer recognised as exceptional.

What happens when enduring difficulty is treated as evidence of strength? When self-sacrifice becomes an expectation rather than a choice? When survival is praised so consistently that a woman is given little permission to ask whether the conditions requiring her survival should exist at all?

These questions led me to develop the concept of struggle-centrism: the process through which struggle becomes normalised and gradually positioned at the centre of identity, relationships and everyday life.

This concept emerged from my completed dissertation research. It is not intended to suggest that every experience of difficulty is damaging or that resilience has no value. Resilience can be profoundly protective. However, there is an important difference between possessing the capacity to withstand adversity and being socially conditioned to accept adversity as one’s natural condition.

That distinction has continued to shape my thinking.

Beyond the Individual Woman

Women’s distress is frequently interpreted at the level of the individual. We ask whether she is coping, communicating effectively, regulating her emotions or making appropriate decisions.

Those questions may have value, but they can become dangerously incomplete when separated from context.

A biopsychosocial perspective asks us to look more widely. It considers the interaction between psychological experience, physical health, relationships, economic conditions, cultural expectations, caregiving responsibilities and institutional responses.

From this perspective, distress cannot always be understood as an isolated problem located inside an individual woman. It may also represent an intelligible response to prolonged pressure, coercive relationships, financial insecurity, cultural obligation, institutional disbelief or the cumulative exhaustion of carrying responsibility without sufficient safety or support.

This question does not remove personal agency. Instead, it creates the conditions for a more honest form of agency, informed by an understanding of the forces that have shaped a person’s available choices.

The Need for Breathing Space

The idea of “breathing space” became central to my research because reflection requires more than intelligence.

A woman may be highly educated, professionally accomplished and outwardly capable, yet still find it difficult to examine the expectations governing her life. This is particularly true when those expectations are reinforced simultaneously by family, faith, culture, gender, economics and institutions.

Before inherited or imposed expectations can be questioned, there must be sufficient emotional and psychological distance to observe them.

Breathing space does not necessarily mean leaving one’s family, culture, faith or community. Nor does it mean rejecting every obligation. It describes the space required to distinguish between what has been consciously chosen and what has simply been inherited, internalised or endured.

It is the space in which a woman can begin asking:

These are not comfortable questions, but they may be necessary ones.

From Endurance to Authorship

My dissertation did not complete this inquiry. It opened it.

Since completing the study, I have become increasingly interested in the movement from normalised struggle towards what I currently describe as emotional authorship.

Emotional authorship does not mean controlling every circumstance or acting without responsibility towards others. It refers to the developing capacity to recognise the forces shaping one’s emotional life, examine them critically and participate more consciously in determining what happens next.

My emerging thinking follows a possible movement:

We inherit beliefs, roles and expectations.

Some become internalised before we have the language or freedom to question them.

We adapt, often intelligently, to the environments in which we must function.

Breathing space allows us to observe those adaptations.

Interrogation helps us examine their origins, costs and continuing relevance.

Emotional re-authorisation describes the process of recovering permission to trust our perceptions, needs and considered judgement.

Authorship represents the growing capacity to make choices with greater awareness and emotional authority.

These ideas remain in development. I am not presenting them as a completed or empirically validated framework. They represent a developing research direction arising from my dissertation, professional experience and continuing engagement with questions concerning violence against women and girls, coercive control, mental health, culture and institutional responses.

Continuing the Inquiry

This publication will be a space for serious but accessible thinking about the forces that shape women’s lives.

I will explore questions concerning violence against women and girls, domestic abuse and coercive control, the normalisation of struggle, women’s mental health, caregiving, faith, culture, migration, institutional responses, trauma and recovery.

I am particularly interested in the space between surviving and consciously directing one’s life.

My purpose is not to provide effortless answers to complicated human experiences. It is to create a breathing space in which inherited assumptions can be examined, difficult questions can be held with care and new possibilities can become thinkable.

My dissertation may have ended.

The inquiry has only just begun.

Vida Lartey

Independent researcher and programme developer exploring VAWG, women’s wellbeing and emotional authorship through a biopsychosocial lens.