Part Of Self Research Articles

‘Me, The Sea, Feeling Good’: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Exploring the Experience of Looking Out to Sea

<i>Against the backdrop of increasing urbanization and subsequent disconnection from nature, there has been growing interest in the role that spending time in natural environments can play in promoting well-being. However, most research to date has focused on the health potential of green spaces and neglected the relationship between blue spaces (bodies of inland and coastal water) and well-being outcomes. Studies have shown that spending more time by the sea, or living in close proximity to the coast, is linked with better mental and general health, but have typically neglected to consider how individuals may uniquely experience different types of urban nature. Hence, this study aimed to explore, in-depth, the lived experience of looking out to sea and how it may play a role in well-being.  Four self-selected females, living and working in a coastal city, were interviewed using semi-structured techniques. Interviews were recorded and transcribed; and data was analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results revealed each had a strong and enduring bond with the sea as ‘part of self’, and as transcending the self. Looking out to sea was a multisensory, embodied experience that captivated them in the present, and was perceived to play an important role in the restoration and enhancement of their hedonic and eudemonic well-being.  As researchers and policy makers begin to understand potential links between loss of contact with nature and deteriorating public health, better understanding the relationship between the sea and well-being could have significant global value.</i>

Racial and Ethnic Identity of Transnational Adoptees: A Model Reflecting the Lived Experience of Adult Colombian Adoptees

International and transracial adoptions have been practiced by multiple developed countries since World War II, where transracial adoptees are removed from their country of origin and raised by parents of a completely different cultural and racial background. In the United States, adoption was institutionalized after the Korean War, making adoption across races a common practice. This demographic change brings different developmental challenges to the transracial adoptee, including the task of racial and ethnic identity. In this dissertation study, the authors dived into the narratives of six Colombian transracial adoptees raised in the United States by White parents to understand their stories regarding their racial and ethnic identity process. The authors’ findings include the development of a racial and ethnic identity model that emerged from the participants’ themes and common lived experiences, including five nonlinear stages: questioning and curiosity; action-seeking behaviors; judgment and expectations; reculturation and reclaiming; and wanting to embrace both identities. Adult Colombian adoptees highlighted the fluidity of their racial and ethnic identity process and the importance of reclaiming and reconnecting with their Colombian part of self as part of this process. The ethnic and racial identity model informs mental health professionals’ clinical and professional practice by offering a guide to comprehending the process and some of the common experiences around ethnic and racial identity among transracial adoptees.

Antibodies against endogenous retroviruses.

The human genome harbors hundreds of thousands of integrations of ancient retroviruses, amassed over millions of years of evolution. To reduce further amplification in the genome, the host prevents transcription of these now endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) through epigenetic repression and, with evolutionary time, ERVs are incapacitated by accumulating mutations and deletions. However, several members of recently endogenized ERV groups still retain the capacity to produce viral RNA, retroviral proteins, and higher order structures, including virions. The retention of viral characteristics, combined with the reversible nature of epigenetic repression, particularly as seen in cancer, allow for immunologically unanticipated ERV expression, perceived by the adaptive immune system as a genuine retroviral infection, to which it has to respond. Accordingly, antibodies reactive with ERV antigens have been detected in diverse disorders and, occasionally, in healthy individuals. Although they are part of self, the retroviral legacy of ERV antigens, and association with and, possibly, causation of disease states may set them apart from typical self-antigens. Consequently, the pathogenic or, indeed, host-protective capacity of antibodies targeting ERV antigens is likely to be context-dependent. Here, we review the immunogenicity of typical ERV proteins, with emphasis on the antibody response and its potential disease implications.

Polycultural Identity Experiences: A Qualitative Exploration in Australia

Developing cultural identity can be a complex journey in culturally diverse spaces within Australia, where approximately half of the population is either born overseas or has one parent who was. We reflexively and thematically analyzed 45 semi-structured interviews with culturally and demographically diverse Australian residents to gain a deeper understanding of this complex process. Our approach was primarily inductive and data-driven. To explore how identity experiences are tied to societal assumptions about cultural diversity, we shared with participants the notions of multiculturalism and polyculturalism during interviews to facilitate discussion. Five themes were generated: (1) varied identification with heritage culture, (2) questioning Australian identity: what it means to be Australian, (3) being a product of many influences, (4) learning, bridging, and blending cultural influences, and (5) the importance of meaningful social group identities. These themes reflected an array of identity experiences concerning heritage and inclusivity but also appreciation and integration of diverse cultural influences as part of self, including values and worldviews shared within non-heritage social groups. Cultural identity experiences in a pluralistic society may be better seen as a process of active transformations where culture’s influence on the person is partial and plural, consistent with the polyculturalism paradigm rather than general and enduring, as seen in the multiculturalism paradigm.

Exploring the Interplay Between Reading Proficiency, the Dimensions of Adult Reading Motivation, and the Academic Achievement of a Diverse Cohort of EFL College Learners

This article investigates the role of reading proficiency and reading motivation in the academic achievement of a cohort of college students enrolled in a Middle Eastern university that follows the American model of liberal arts education. Forty-eight (n = 48) students from diverse academic majors completed the adults reading motivation scale, following which we tested their reading proficiency and determined their academic achievement as a composite score based on midterm and final examinations, a course project, and class participation. Results revealed that reading proficiency and overall reading motivation are positively linked to academic achievement. However, while the reading motivational dimension of self-efficacy emerged as a significant factor in academic achievement, the dimensions of reading as part of self, reading for recognition, and reading to do well in other realms did not reach statistical significance as determinants of academic achievement. The study implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.

Professional Authenticity in Student Affairs: Parts of Self We Keep Outside of Work

Professional Authenticity in Student Affairs: Parts of Self We Keep Outside of Work

The experience of hurt in the deepest part of self; a phenomenological study in young people with non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI)

PurposeWhat is happening in the perceived world of young people who have non-suicidal self-injury? The answer to this question explains many quantitative research findings in the field of NSSI. The current qualitative research design is Husserl's descriptive phenomenology.Design/methodology/approachThe participants included 17–29-year-old youths with self-injury and were selected with a targeted sampling approach and a conspicuous sampling method based on the theoretical saturation criterion of 21 people. Data were collected in a semi-structured interview and analyzed in the MAXQDA2022 software using the Attride-Stirling (2001) method. Validation of data was done by the method of simultaneous review of colleagues and simultaneous review of participants.FindingsThe themes emerging from the analysis of the findings are the three organizing themes of “vulnerable temperament” which includes height and head, high pain sensitivity threshold and desire for nothingness, “traumatic family” which includes disorganization, crisis and devaluation in the family and “developmental injuries” that are associated with physical, sexual and emotional abuse and neglect. The content of these themes seriously harms a person's self-perception through the emotions of fear, shame, anger and despair and is integrated into the overarching theme of “damaged self”.Originality/value“Damaged Self” provides causal explanations related to the formation of self-injurious behaviors and these behaviors are in harmony with the damage that a person observes in his perception of himself.

‘Gangsters by the Bioscope’: South African Indian Cinemas as Spaces of Becoming during Early Apartheid

ABSTRACT From the 1940s to the 1960s, South African Indians encountered new cinema spaces opening in their ghettoes in Durban and Johannesburg. Cinemas afforded working-class people an experience of luxury, a sense of a public, and a taste of opportunity and glamour. As part of the negotiation of new diasporic and hybrid identities during early apartheid, cinema played a constitutive role in the reshaping of selves. A balancing act of ‘traditional’ (Indian) and ‘modern’ (Western/South African) cultural elements was required in this reconstruction. Old parts of self had to be at least partially forgotten and new parts assimilated to deal with new conditions. Cinematic identification and the self-fashioning of identity facilitated a reimagining of identity formation as an ‘assemblage’ – a playing out or testing of various new ‘roles’ and positions alongside old ones. One of these new roles was an aggressive Indian ‘gangster’ masculinity, informed by prevailing national conditions and transnational cinematic gangster tropes. Not only did gangsters learn ‘moves’ from the movies, they were also energised by and profited from the movie houses themselves.

Affective Politics and Alliances in ‘Queering the Gypsy’ and Facing Antigypsyism in the LGBT Milieu

This essay engages with issues of homophobia, lesbophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in Romani/Gypsy/Traveller (RGT) communities. A lack of acceptance, marginalization, and at times expulsion of Queer people from RGT communities is a source of suffering for individuals and their families – with political consequences in terms of solidarity and alliances. Sexual minorities within marginalized ethnic and non-ethnic RGT minorities, when excluded, can be regarded as a threat to the social cohesion of the group and to internal social ties based on common struggles for economic and cultural justice. Acceptance for Queer people in RGT communities may also improve relations with social movements’ alliances, a sensible and necessary step –primarily in the anti-racist and feminist arenas, movements for social rights, i.e., jobs and housing.The paper discusses social (mis)representations of the ‘Gypsy Queer’ vs. self-representations emerging from activists’ experiences. In light of ‘affective politics’ – s conceptualized by Sara Ahmed – experiences of Homo-Lesbo-Bi-Trans-phobia in the RGT communities and ‘soft’ anti-gypsyism in Queer communities are addressed. In conclusion, affective politics are viewed in the frame suggested by Judith Okely around Roma-Gypsy-Traveller cultural identity “constructed through opposition, not isolation”; through the mirror of Jasbir Puar’s theory of identity created in the constant and aware, individual and collective, assemblage of parts of self; and as an element of ‘travelling activism’ – practice of “mobilizing hybrid forms of expertise and knowledge across space and difference” contesting both territorialization and ethnicization, as in Van Baar.

“Why Do We Have to Go Away?”: A Beginning Exploration into the Lived Experience of Three MotherScholars Imagining Possibilities in the Time of COVID-19

ABSTRACT In this time of COVID-19, our public and private spaces have come together in unprecedented ways, giving rise to unique challenges and new opportunities to synergize maternal and academic spaces. We use narrative inquiry to explore our lived experiences as LDS MotherScholars by conducting three story cycles, using prompts about the past, present, and imagined possibilities for the future. Specifically, we looked for ways the emerging COVID-19 pandemic provided opportunities for us to reimagine harmonizing our lives across home and workspaces. Stories revealed the logistical and emotional tensions inherent in MotherScholarship, pointing to an urgent high-stakes sense of potential failure in both arenas. Our analyses identified patterns of hiding/compartmentalizing parts of self, as well as similarities between motherhood and scholarship. Using Standpoint theory, we rejected the notion of ”balance” as not useful (or real) as we re-envisioned our future lives as MotherScholars being ”braided” across spaces that include both motherhood and scholarship. During COVID-19, moments of grace have emerged that illuminate new possibilities and opportunities to enter a third space in order to confront and challenge oppressive androcentric assumptions and re-envision our work as MotherScholars.

A Feminist Ethos of Point Zero

A Feminist Ethos of Point Zero

Sexual pleasure as forbidden secret: a single-case study into emotion-focused therapy with an emotionally avoidant client who committed sexual offences

ABSTRACT A major challenge in offender therapy is to facilitate clients’ emotional engagement, especially with clients who over-regulate their affect. It has been suggested that treatments that focus on improving clients’ affect regulation (AR) and deepen client’s emotional experience during treatment may enhance treatment outcomes. In this systematic mixed-methods case study the role of Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) to change clients’ problems with AR during inpatient treatment for individuals who committed sexual offences against children was investigated. It was observed that clients’ over-regulation of affect was coupled with a lack of connection to a part of the self that was deemed unacceptable. Over the course of treatment, this hidden part of self that had instigated the misbehaviour became more accepted and integrated. Verbatim clinical vignettes are included to illuminate key interventions, hindrances, and possible mechanisms of change. Quantitative analysis showed significant change in AR based on self-report and observation.

Religious Studies and Internal Family Systems Therapy

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a psychotherapy modality that combines elements of systems theory with an experiential approach that rests on distinctions between Self and parts of self. Unlike more cognitive approaches such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic ‘talk’ therapies, IFS challenges traditional divisions between mind and body that have endured in both the treatment of psychological trauma and in the study of religion. This essay provides a summary of IFS as it is conceptualized by Richard Schwartz, Martha Sweezy, and Frank Anderson, and then critically identifies several significant religious resonances in its approach to mediating between a stable ‘Self ’ and parts of self that are partitioned by traumatic or overwhelming experiences. I conclude with the suggestion that the IFS approach to therapy and the discipline of Religious Studies mutually illuminate and challenge each other in their overlapping approaches to the problems of value-neutrality and normativity.

‘And we are a human being’: Coproduced reflections on person‐centred psychotherapy in plural and dissociative identity

In this reflexive case-study, ‘Billie’, an integrative psychotherapist, and her therapist, Nicola, offer a coproduced account of Billie's lived experience of dissociative identity. Challenging the medicalised ‘fragmentation towards integration’ discourse, Billie, her parts, and Nicola coproduce a person-centred ‘exclusion towards inclusion’ approach. The authors propose the term ‘plural identity’, situating the experience less as a disorder, and more as a way of being human. They present verbatim extracts of their therapeutic work, with parallel commentary and postsession discussion, to illustrate their developing, person-centred and coproduced approach towards intrapsychic inclusion. They conclude that inclusion consists in unconditionally valuing three prevailing constituents in plural identity: the individual parts of self; the ecological system; and the differentiation between parts. This can result in growth for all parts, including parts that initially appear counter to growth, and allows the lived experience of the client to be honoured, not pathologised.

How Asthma Becomes a Part of Self: Illness and Treatment Narratives Based on Patients with Chronic Diseases

Increasing people turn the sufferings of illness into human “errors” and resort to medical science and technology for remedy instead of making meaningful moral responses to illness. This is not completely effective, and it will let them fall into the dilemma of humanitarian spirit. It is necessary to pay attention to the patient’s subjective world from the perspective of illness narratives. Based on the process of patient’s disease view, the writers explored the mutual influence of disease and the subject. In light with the life course of a patient with chronic disease and the daily experience, the writers started from three aspects: the social environment of disease, the social and cultural significance of disease pain and the process of interaction between patients and asthma, in order to reveal the social and cultural characteristics of chronic disease and how the disease becomes a part of their lives. Disease is interpreted as a kind of narrative reconstruction. By connecting different aspects of life, patients can repair the fracture among their bodies, themselves and the world. It is a kind of subjective treatment that patients give meaning to their personal experience in their own way, and then understand themselves and construct new identities and life scenes.

'Lonely in my head': The experiences of loneliness in individuals with brain injury.

This paper reports on the personal experiences of loneliness for individuals living with brain injury. This is a qualitative research design, employing semi-structured interviews and subsequent contextualist thematic analysis. Eleven clients (two female and nine male, aged between 27 and 63 years) with brain injury participated in semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was employed in the interpretation of the data. The interview data and subsequent analysis depicted three overarching themes in a healing process - 'Internal Loneliness', 'Healing the Cracks', and 'Visible with Cracks'. Participants described five factors which contribute to their feeling of loneliness: trauma, social isolation, concealment, rejection of part of self, and invisibility of their disability. The participants' accounts also detailed the necessity of a therapeutic intervention and relationship to deal with and address some of these issues. This study highlights that processing the trauma, developing dialectical thinking, self-compassion, and a degree of self-acceptance assist in the movement of participants towards allowing themselves to be 'Visible with Cracks'. This allowance of self to be fully seen appears to serve an important function for reconnection with self and others. These results may help to inform brain injury rehabilitative care, through developing their understanding of the internal loneliness factors that may be influencing an individual's social isolation or social withdrawal.

Loss and revival of visual identity: Inner work with clothing

Lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic meant an adieu to formal wear. ‘Oh no! How to be me?’ – I panicked, facing an identity crisis, as suits that visually defined me were irrelevant. I allowed clothes to lead the way through the crisis and here present a qualitative research, based on self-ethnography of wardrobe and inner, psychological work with clothing as per guidelines of processwork psychology, involving two ways of thinking: logical and experiential. The objects of the research are formal suits (defining pre-pandemic, ‘normal’ visual identity), sweatpants (a threat to the identity) and overalls (the lockdown outfit). Logical work uses interpretation, association, memory, intellectual understanding of individual, cultural and social perception of clothing and body. Experiential work notices body responses, examines posture, movement and sensory experiences, explores visual images, shapes, colours, textures, details and their appeal. The loss is approached as a death of a certain part of self (formal, official, busy), which gives way to a new, emerging way of being, as specific features of clothes provide a hint of continuity and a link to revival. Dissection of judgement (e.g. lazy) gives access to transformative qualities (idle, effortless). Integration of these qualities means making the unknown known and finally my own. The article remarks on changes in dressing practice, e.g. in styling, care, which reflect the transformative lockdown experience and their impact on social interactions.

Making Things Happen: Self- Leadership and Newcomers Socialisation

Organisational socialisation scholars endlessly call for investigations on individuals’ self-initiated activities during the transition into a new workplace. The current study aims to discover newcomers as active agents of their socialisation, through identifying the impact of newcomers’ self-leadership on their socialisation into a new workplace. The present study was conducted with hundred and nineteen newcomers (male = 68, female = 51) who have less than one-year work experience in the current organisation working in the banking sector of Sri Lanka. Hierarchical multiple regression was utilised to analyse the data. Results indicated that the three-component of self-leadership: behaviour-focused strategies, natural rewards strategies, and cognitive thought strategies had a significant impact on newcomers socialisation, and these three components of self-leadership explain 35.9% of the variance in newcomers socialisation. Newcomers’ profile variables (gender, marital status, age, and type of appointment) have no influence either on the three components of self-leadership or organisational socialisation. This study, by identifying the impact of the three parts of self- leadership on newcomers’ socialisation in Sri Lankan context extends the organisational socialisation literature and help both organisation and newcomers to understand individuals’ role in the socialisation process.

Understanding the role of self in auditory verbal hallucinations using a self-discrepancy paradigm.

ObjectiveNegative auditory verbal hallucination (AVH) content is a major predictor of distress and typically occurs more frequently than positive or neutral content. Recent research has found that negative views of self are associated with the negative content of AVHs. However, research investigating the role of self in AVH content is in its infancy and warrants further study.DesignThe current study examined correspondence between negative voice content and internalized representations of self, using a self‐discrepancy paradigm incorporating multiple domains of self (ideal, ought, and feared). It also considered the impact of depression and anxiety.MethodAn adapted self‐discrepancy questionnaire was administered to a transdiagnostic clinical sample of 86 current voice‐hearers. Participants rated how similar they believed themselves to be (actual self), and how similar their voices would say they are (voice self), to their ideal, ought, and feared self‐concepts.ResultsVoice content was related to how the person viewed themselves in relation to their ideal, ought, and feared self‐concepts. Additionally, voices reflected negative feared self‐concepts, particularly in people with anxiety.ConclusionsThese findings provide further insight into the phenomenon of hearing voices and have the potential to change the way we approach formulation and treatment of AVHs. In particular, treatment approaches that reduce discrepancies between how one views themselves and their positive and negative self‐concepts, or alter the relationship one has with their self‐concepts and negative voices, have the potential to reduce the impact of distressing voices.Practitioner points Voice experiences can be meaningfully related to how the person views themselves in relation to concepts of their ideal, ought, and feared selvesNegative voice content might be understood as reflecting discrepancies from these self‐representations, which may have a self‐regulatory function in relation to goal‐directed behaviour.Identifying how voice content relates to self could be useful in not only challenging the extent of perceived self‐discrepancies, but also considering how to enact valued parts of self.

The Intersectionality of Trauma and Activism: Narratives Constructed From a Qualitative Study

The literature on social action in the face of trauma, even while relatively sparse, indicates potential links between these domains of experience. Drawing on this literature, this article explores the meanings made by two mental health professionals who identify as being highly involved in social activism and who experienced past trauma that has significantly affected their lives. The personal narratives of these individuals were compiled from semistructured interviews that were selected for a qualitative thematic analysis. Meaningful recurrent themes indicated mutual influences of social action and trauma. Themes included (1) retraumatization and emotional pain associated with activism, (2) trauma and empathy, (3) healing and transformation through activism, (4) from powerlessness to action, (5) from alienation to validation, and (6) integration of parts of self. When applied within the psychoanalytic context of “witnessing,” data revealed three modes: (1) witnessing oneself, (2) communal witnessing, and (3) the language of activism as a witness. While excessive, overwhelming contact with trauma through activism may, in certain situations, engender risks of retraumatization and psychic stagnation, social activism may serve as a facilitator of intrapsychic movement and trauma transformation. Additionally, processing trauma through psychotherapy may contribute to an effective activism. Therefore, while trauma may involve devastating consequences, this article illustrates how people who experienced trauma may avert psychological states of helplessness and powerlessness, and processes and conditions by which individuals who endured trauma may develop a humane, compassionate view of self and others.