ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the power of story trumps the power of the secret and that the ethical move for the researcher of human social life is to tell the story in ways that will move us toward healing. A family once beset by trauma and tragedy and deep, dark sadness can, gradually, emerge into the light of story and healing and joy. The family is afflicted because, try as they might, they cannot get the alcoholic to stop drinking. Along the way, they fall into the painful, tortured, and ultimately doomed task of managing the impressions of others so that those others will not learn of the alcoholic affliction. There is something that permeates this family structure, a sense of "dis-ease." In response to trauma, in moments of shame and pain and anguish, in times of anxiety and suffering, in loss and in grief, this family does not, perhaps cannot, turn outward for support.
