ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how formula stories shape the experiences of women who participate in support groups for those who have experienced violence at the hands of their male partners. In addition to providing compassion and understanding for their members, support groups are designed to promote particular ways of understanding experiences. In the process, they work to transform women's identities. While women often competently narrated the experience of extreme violence as the reason why they were "here", sometimes their initial stories didn't offer the formulaic depiction of violence. While violence forms the core of the story of "what he did to you", the plot of the formula story of wife abuse assigns responsibility for the violence to men and it assigns a motive for this violence: Men do violence in order to control women. The wife abuse narrative focuses exclusively on the experience of abuse; it leaves little space to include the complexities, indeterminancies, and situated nature of marital troubles.
