Pain, Shame, and Power: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Chronic Pain

In this autoethnographic study, I explore my lived experience of a chronic pain condition, the difficulty in writing about embodied experience, and the links between pain, shame, and power. Neglecting neither the complex emotional world of the individual nor the embedded cultural and social themes that continuously impact on the individual, at its best, autoethnography bridges the divide between personal writing and social influences. In this paper, I aim to combine my lived experience of a pain condition without any apparent biological cause, to the wider issue of how we conceive and attend to embodied experience, shame, and power in qualitative health research. The implications from the study include personal emancipation, challenging the mind/body split, and emphasizing the interconnections between emotion and embodied experience, and the need for a pluralistic approach to treatment. The autoethnographic approach aims to embrace situated subjectivity and to include the experience of being a pain sufferer in the research community.