‘I am Trying so Hard to Smile’: Ableism and Feeling Rules When Living with Traumatic Brain Injury

People who experience traumatic brain injury (TBI) may live with unpredictable and ongoing symptoms throughout their life, including cognitive, behavioural and emotional changes. These changes can impact how impacted individuals communicate, interpret and react in social situations. Drawing on semi-structured interview data and diaries from 30 people living with TBI across Australia, we explore how people living with TBI can feel pressure to regulate their emotions to match normative ‘feeling rules’. Using Hochschild (1983)’s emotional management framework, we argue that feeling rules are an additional burden for people living with TBI, who engage in surface and deep acting to align with ableist expectations about how they ‘should’ ‘behave’. Our findings reveal that relational acceptance and providing opportunities for people living with TBI to express their emotionality without judgement, allows them to feel supported, can minimise experiences of social isolation and help resist ableist social norms.