A Voice of Travail from a Chronic Pain Patient: The Lived-Experience of a Withdrawn Disability Living Allowance

This study described the lifeworld of one ‘chronic pain patient’, Shelly whose disability living allowance (DLA) was withdrawn. The aim is to explicate the existential impact of this withdrawal when she presented her lived experience of this phenomenon in her narration. As I listened to Shelly’s problem soaked narratives through a relatively unstructured interview, an emerged behind the scene voice of travail became louder through the narratives. The existential phenomenological analysis reveals an experience of erosion of Shelly’s sense of identity, a daily toil and laborious lived body in the context of her life activities and relationships. The narratives also revealed the patriarchal approach of ‘the system that be’ that were compounding and even making the voice of travail louder, eroding autonomy, promoting feeling of helplessness and suffering. These findings were discussed in the context of previous studies. Following the discussion, a reflexive account of the research relationship and how the process of analysis has impacted on this researcher was provided to promote a more transparent accounting of the relational centred methodology and how I came to my interpretation. Findings from this research lend support to the idea of the ontology that fully embodied and integrate with our being in the world, bridging the gap and weaving together a new way of understanding the body-subject and how it experiences and copes with its vulnerability in the world.