Living with domestic violence and abuse changes lives, whatever the material context. Discourses of domestic violence and abuse have enabled women living with violent partners to identify and name their experiences. Discourses of domestic violence have regulated the behaviours of women, violent men and the health, social care and law enforcement professionals across the areas circumscribed within the regulatory discourses.

A material-discursive approach exploits the perspectives of both discursive psychology and the constraints of materiality to describe and define experience. That is, researchers, practitioners, policy makers and those involved in abusive relationships all have access to the linguistic, ethical/moral and material resources to contextualize and act (e.g. as an ‘abusive man’ or as an ‘abused woman’ or as a psychologist working with abuse). However, from the extracts from the interviews with women survivors it becomes clear that there is a further dimension to be considered in understanding lived experience. The women draw on moral discourses and position themselves as carrying shame and blame for staying with and sleeping with a man, and judge themselves and perceive others as judging them harshly. They also position the man as ‘wanting’ in some way. For one respondent the man didn’t make the grade as the one she wanted to love. For another he was ‘evil’. One woman felt herself to be ‘spiritual’, while another positioned herself as ‘loving’ and fearful.