Everyday Troubles: The Micro-Politics of Interpersonal Conflict (Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries) by Robert M. Emerson

Author:Robert M. Emerson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780226238135
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-04-05T21:00:00+00:00

Troubles-Tellings and Alignment

Informal others may become involved in dyadic troubles on their own initiative: a friend may notice another’s upset and ask what is going on; a neighbor may hear arguing and banging in an adjacent apartment and knock on the door to see if everything is okay. But more commonly one or the other party to a trouble takes the initiative to reach out to involve someone outside of the troubled relationship. In many cases this outsider—a friend, a family member or intimate, a more distant acquaintance, or perhaps even a complete stranger—has no knowledge of or contact with the troubling party. In other cases the troubled party turns to someone previously uninvolved but who has some contact with the other party to the trouble—in-laws or children of couples, apartment or suite mates of a troubled roommate dyad, colleagues and peers in work settings.

Troubled parties rely on troubles-tellings to inform outsiders about the problematic situation (Sacks 1992; Jefferson and Lee 1981; Jefferson 1988). At the core of such troubles-tellings is a report or announcement of the trouble, shaped to reflect the third party’s familiarity with the trouble and/or the troubling other. At times the report presents the current issue in a nutshell, at other times it simply recounts the “latest incident,” and at still others it outlines the history of the problem leading up to some current crisis. This description of the trouble expresses the teller’s upset and discontent with the troubling party and highlights particular reasons why he or she feels this way, thereby delivering an indirect complaint about the troubling party to the outsider. The outsider in turn is put in the position of having to respond to the claims and implications of the troubled party’s report and complaint. The following sections will examine these processes, first looking at the contingencies of selecting an outsider to hear one’s troubles, then presenting a case study of the interactional features of one troubles-telling, and finally examining the problematics of aligning in troubles-tellings.

Selecting Others

Relating an interpersonal trouble to an outsider can be deeply revealing, exposing embarrassing or humiliating information both about oneself and about the intimacies of a troubled relationship (Heinemann and Traverso 2009:2381). Talking about a relational trouble, for example, may involve disclosing that one has not dealt effectively with recurrent frustrations and mistreatment, that one has suffered repeated humiliations or insults, that one’s marriage is less than ideal, or that an intimate is deeply faulted. Hence the self may be exposed in ways that are discrediting and disconcerting. As a result, at least early on, troubled parties are usually cautious in telling an outsider about a current trouble and careful in selecting another to confide in.

Troubled parties tend to seek out those they anticipate will be sympathetic to and apt to affiliate with their concerns about the trouble. In her analysis of uncoupling Vaughan (1986:34) found that the dissatisfied partner often turned to a “confidant” to share “in-depth disclosures about the partner and the relationship . . . [in working] through doubts, ambiguities, and disappointments aloud.

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