Personal narratives tell the stories of people’s lives as well as provide
insight into the meaning of those experiences. They both reflect and are
influenced by the relationships within which an individual is embedded. In this
study, autobiographical narratives for two groups of women were compared: women
who had experienced habitual gender-based domestic violence in their couple
relationships and women who had not. The language of narratives was analyzed by
LIWC (Language Inquiry and Word Count procedure). Results showed that the
language and structure of narratives by women with a history of domestic
violence indicated greater stress and trauma, more incoherent space-time
organization, and poorer relationship quality. Women who experienced violence
wrote longer narratives that contained proportionately more negative emotion
words and more references to cognitions and physical/body issues, and indicated
more disorganized structure by means of incoherent use of verbal tense, more
impoverished use of connectives, and greater use of negative sentence syntax and
discrepancy words. They also included proportionately more pronoun references to
‘I’,‘You’,’ and ‘He’, indicating self vs. partner conflictual relationships.
However, women who had experienced relationship violence for longer decreased
their references to the emotions of fear and anxiety, suggesting adaptation to
violence over time.