This chapter develops the argument that discourse analysis can add to understandings of difficulties in relationships by studying how they are constructed and communicated in talk. In many of the instances quoted here it is possible to identify the co-existence, and co-construction of both care and difficulties – thereby problematising the traditional polarisation within the literature between these two evaluations of relationships.

The chapter is organised in a series of subsections, each of which looks at how difficulties are constructed and embedded in talk about care relationships. The sections cover talk on time and space for oneself, (inter)dependency, identity, power and stress. I move the debate on from reporting the themes (apparent in much of the existing literature), to theorise a different substantive area: the impact and ideological role that this talk has within the interaction. There is some overlap between this and the previous chapter, since talk about difficulties is not accomplished in isolation from talk about care itself. However, the elements of care discussed here do constitute some distinct areas and shed new light on care exchanges.

The repertoires outlined here (and in previous chapters) do not exhaust the possibilities for analysis of the interview transcripts (or even the potential for analysis within the presented extracts). Rather, the analysis highlights some of the more pervasive ways that talk is arranged, and allows for a broader comparison of their uses across each of the interviews. The dominant repertoires that I pull out here may also provide practitioners with starting points for focusing on their own interactions with carers and carees. I outline the potential for further analysis and practical use in Chapter Seven.

It would have been possible to use the ‘abuse’ to frame the accounts of difficulties, but such a powerful term seems misplaced in this context. While talk within the extracts constructs problems within the relationship, applying the repertoire of ‘abuse’ initiates different figures of speech and metaphors that the interviewees themselves did not directly use. The repertoires that I outline in this chapter could perhaps be understood to combine to form a way of articulating abuse – but for participants this term is not explicitly referred to. Thus the analysis that follows has identified speakers’ constructions of difficulties without reference to this potentially damaging term.